Here’s my buddy, Randy Enos , writing about more of his comic strips …
Over the span of my career, every now and then, I would suddenly get the urge to create and sell a syndicated comic strip. This would happen every 5 years or so. Nothing much came of it except for the Chicken Gutz strip which was a National Lampoon strip and the two strips for Playboy which I’ve written about recently.
I would really get that urge to dump the illustration work for a nice steady job of doing a syndicated daily comic strip. Here were some of my ideas:
“Mabel & Jones” – I used to see this older couple on the beach every summer in Westport. A little short stocky woman with her tallish, skinny, droopy shouldered constant escort. I don’t think they were married. The woman was always frowning and as they walked along the edge of the surf, down the length of the beach past all the young, tanned, pretty Westport bathers, she would be haranguing him about something or other. They were there all the time. When they weren’t walking, they would be sitting, quietly, sadly on one of the cement benches and before long she would start in on him again. He never said a word but would just gaze off into space looking over the vast expanse of Long Island Sound. He always had a droopy hat on. I decided that I should do a strip featuring them and I named them “Mabel” (I always liked the name Mabel. We had a Mabel’s Diner in Westport) and I picked the nice, very common name of “Jones” for my woebegone hero sufferer. I never sold this idea.
“As The Tears Jerk”- This was kind of a soap opera strip. I ran a few in the Lampoon.
“Magnificent Max and the Major”- This strip found publication in “The Electric Company” kids’ magazine.
But, the one strip that I thought was the most creative of my endeavors was:
“Specks-the smallest cartoon characters in the world”- I used it as a space filler below Chicken Gutz in the Lampoon a few times but I also submitted it to all the syndicates. The only one that responded was King Features. The comics editor said, “Wow, this is different for you, Randy. I like it a lot, but, I don’t know, I think newspaper editors would think we were nuts!”
I replied, “Oh, go ahead give it a try… think of it… it would be groundbreaking! Take a chance!”
But, of course… it never happened.
I had a lot of fun doing it though.
“Dux”- At one time, here on the horse farm, we accumulated a whole bunch of ducks. They lived in one of the horse stalls at night and swam on our pond during the day. It started out with two domestic ducks who ended up mating with some mallards and, first thing you know, we had about 15 ducks mixed wild and domestic. So, naturally I decided to do a strip featuring ducks. I named it “Dux”. I never sold this idea either.
Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:
Brought to You in Living Black and White
Art School Days in the Whorehouse
The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce
8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt
The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known
Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part One”
Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part Two”
Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School
I started illustrating for them, they instituted their Funny Pages. They asked me and a goodly number of other cartoonists to come up with some strips that would run every month. My contribution was Chicken Gutz. He was a little man who wore a tall black hat upon which stood a bird. The bird was never named and functioned as a spokesman (or spokesbird) commenting on and criticizing the various goings on that unfolded below him. The little man in the hat was totally unaware of the bird but the bird was certainly aware of the man.
I got a lot of fan mail on the strip even years and years after it had ceased publication. I also got presents from fans like a 16” high stained glass replica of Mr. Gutz. I got a little stuffed Chicken Gutz doll, an embroidered Gutz and also a denim shirt with a large Gutz embroidered on the back. I got an actual laboratory slide of chicken guts and some sort of a partial rubber face (medical?) and a big set of colorful Mexican cards that have pictures of animals, humans and objects with the Spanish names. I lined the doorway of my studio with them. My biggest fan was a girl named Snooki that wrote me voluminous tomes. She was very creative sometimes writing in mirror image. I never met Snooki but I was privy to every turn in her life from being a Black Oak Arkansas groupie to finally a married woman with a daughter. Snooki wrote to only three people, Charles Manson, David Bowie and me. She threatened to come to visit me a few times but never did. She phoned me once or twice. I actually heard from her a couple of years ago.
NBC was fiercely proud of their status as THE color network. They were still fairly new at this color thing when I came into their pantheon, but they had developed the system to be compatible with all the black and white sets across the nation which CBS had failed to do at that time. They tried to do as many color shows as they could. When a Movie of the Week was aired it was always a color movie –until A Hard Day’s Night came along. Imagine their embarrassment at having to air a black and white movie. The intro to their color presentations was always “NBC is proud to present the following program in living color”. The color logo of the peacock would appear on the screen and some rippled, burbly music would accompany the unfolding of the logo’s red, orange, yellow, blue and purple feathers.
Some cartoonists answered a recent call from Cartooning for Peace to submit more drawings in support of Musa. Go to #freemusakart or 
They asked me to think of an idea for a strip. They said I could even have a couple of strips if I wanted, so, I started working on some ideas. The first thing that appealed to me was the idea of maybe doing an “old fashioned” looking strip, perhaps modeled after some of my favorites like “
I decided that my “5 Cent Mary” would be a street hooker of the late 1800’s and that I would do it in linocut (the medium that I used for my illustrations) to give it a different look than all the other strips. Hefner loved it. Unbeknownst to me, his favorite cartoonist was 
At Toy Fair in February 1996, Hasbro built a big Arabian tent and hired a bunch of beautiful, young girls dressed like our genies (but a little older, and shapelier, looking more like the I Dream of Jeannie TV genie). Hasbro’s live genies frolicked around like our genies would, charming the crusty old toy buyers.
The Teenie Genies/My Magic Genies didn’t amount to much because they never got a TV show, but a doll line with Hasbro is still a big score for a little toy inventor –and a big non-refundable, advance against royalties made me feel secure enough that I could try some different things in my career. I did a newspaper comic, something that notoriously pays poorly, but that cartoonists love to do. In 1995 the genies gave me the financial freedom to draw a panel titled, TRUE! for Tribune Media Services (
By the time I rounded out my toy inventing career, the toy industry had changed. When I started in 1986, Toys R Us carried 35,000 SKUs (different products) in their stores. By the time I quit in 1995, Toy R Us carried only 13,000 SKUs. Now Toys R Us is gone completely. I used to license lots of small, unadvertised toys. I hit singles and not home runs, but I could make a fair living hitting singles. I don’t think that is possible anymore. The toy industry is only about big licensed products from big Hollywood properties now, and the days of the small, independent toy inventors are sadly gone.
The apartment building was above Dave Finn’s Irish Bar which had a garishly large green shamrock in the window. The bar and building were owned and operated by our landlord, Dave Finkelstein. Every night the bawdy sounds of music, drinking, fighting and other general ribaldry wafted up to our grand window and managed to deprive us of any quiet or sleep until the bar shut down around midnight.
We had an attractive youngish couple as landlords. The woman seemed delighted to have all these young men at her rooming house and she was a bit flirtatious. Eventually, she had an affair with one of the other art students that was living there.