The Origin of Edgar, Pt IV

I pinned my hopes of publishing gold on the big comic strip syndicates, sending out submission packets with the clutch of Blood Culture strips I had been able to wrestle from my partner, Gerry. The syndicates didn't bite, forcing me to admit that Blood Culture didn't have mainstream appeal. So I set my sights on the world of alternative weeklies. After all, alt weeklies run some wacky comics, including one of my favorites, Life in Hell, the strip by the Simpsons creator Matt Groening. Alt weeklies were definitely more Blood Culture's audience.

I combed the Internet for names of alt weeklies and mailed out around 40 submissions simultaneously. As great as it would be for Blood Culture to be picked up by one of these papers, it wasn't going to make us rich. There would be no syndication, only publication in individual papers across the country. But my bruised ego was hungry for approval and I would have gladly accepted any offer if it meant that someone like Blood Culture.

Over the next few weeks, rejection after rejection arrived in the SASEs I included with the submissions. I heard from only a few papers, though; most hadn't even bothered to use the SASE. It looked like I would never catch a break.

I was wrong about that.

My wife loved Blood Culture and had shown the panels to some of her coworkers when they were first drawn. One of coworkers remembered the strip and said he knew a guy named Francis who was starting a humor zine--this was still 1999 after all--called Cripple and that he was looking for cartoons. I got in touch with Francis and sent him the panels used for the syndicate submission. He loved them and wanted to run a few. I gave him permission to run as many of the panels he wanted.

Cripple ran two Blood Cultures in each of its first two issues. I was elated. Francis was the first total stranger who had read and appreciated Blood Culture based purely on the strip itself. Francis didn't know me and had no vested interest in stroking my fragile ego. Blood Culture made him laugh and so he used it. It remains one of the greatest compliments I've ever received. And another was on the way.

After the second issue of Cripple came out, another friend of a friend had heard that a new web site called Indie Planet was looking for comic strips. With my confidence restored, I sent the editor of Indie Planet some samples. He loved them. Everyone in the office loved them. And best of all, they were willing to pay $150 a panel. 150! A panel! In American dollars!

I signed on with Indie Planet in December of 1999 and immediately registered bloodculture.com. If Blood Culture became a hit on Indie Planet--and how could it not?--I wanted to be ready to capitalize on it.

In January of 2000, Blood Culture was the first of four weekly comic strips to appear on the site. It was the only one to appear twice.

After five weeks, the site went bankrupt, one of the first casualties of the bursting dot com bubble.

So there I was, in February 2000, $300 richer but with no prospects for publication and still no new comics. By this time both Gerry and I had left the company where we had worked together, and my emails hectoring him for new panels--and his replies--became less frequent. I did the only thing I could think of to keep the momentum going: I created the first version of the Blood Culture web site.

Here's something you should know about me: I hate to read instruction manuals. I prefer to just dive right into a project--whether it's putting together an Ikea bookcase of building a Web site--without all that useless preparation and forethought. One look at the many small home improvements I've attempted will tell you that. So I downloaded an old copy of Adobe PageMill and poked around a little. The result was the Web site that was active until just a month ago. (Just for kicks, you can see most of those early panels on the Blood Culture pages at Internet Archive). It was utilitarian. I posted the panels, wrote some stupid copy, included my email address. No one paid much attention to it.

As 1999 ended, I was disappointed that there hadn't been a new panel drawn in two years. I had invested more time and energy into Blood Culture than in previous artistic endeavor and I wanted it to be successful. I still believed in Gerry, though. I felt I owed him more time to draw new panels. Without him I wouldn't have had the little success I had had. Still, my patience was wearing out.

The next year would bring big changes for me and Blood Culture. In September of 2000 I got married; by early October my wife was pregnant; in February of 2001 my dad died; in April of 2001 I broke up with Gerry; and on September 11, 2001 David Sanders agreed to draw Blood Culture.