Dexter Cartoon for July 30, 2004

I had some nice feedback following last week's "Dexter" cartoon, so I've decided to make my old cartoons a regular Friday feature. I don't have many cartoons to choose from, but I should be able to keep this going for a few months. I actually drew "Dexter" five days a week for a couple of years so you'd think I'd have hundreds to pick from, but I have just a handful scanned in, many of which are too dated to reprint (they were all drawn between 1989 and 1991).

The ones I have scanned are my "safe" cartoons which I sent to syndicates. See, the majority of my Dexter comics talked about race, religion, politics and sex, and they used language that would make Garfield and Beetle Bailey run screaming into the hills. I knew I'd never get into the newspapers with that stuff, so I created a number of strips which tackled less sensitive subjects, hoping to use them to sneak into the papers. I figured once I was syndicated I could push the boundaries. Sounded like a great plan to me, but it hit a rather large roadblock: no syndicate was interested in distributing my work.

I spent a year or two slumming around trying to get my comics published, but had little luck. Then in 1995 I discovered the Web and realized I could do my own publishing - cheap. So, off I went to build my first Web site. At that time the tools for building sites were really bad, so I decided to build my own. On my Dexter site a few months later, I announced my new HTML editor - which, of course, was HomeSite 1.0. The end of the story is that HomeSite turned out be far more successful than my comics, and I followed HomeSite into a career as a computer programmer.

Anyway...that's the background story. Now here's this week's Dexter cartoon:

Comments

[JD]

Wow, That's pretty interesting history!

And I would love to see all the Dexter cartoons on your site as there is no censorship here! :)

JD

[Russ]

Nick,

Never thought that HomeSite was written to publish your comics. Thanks for the story!

[Tony]

That is easily one of the most interesting "how I became a computer programmer" stories I've ever heard.
Usually they include references to 80's hardware, not risque comic strips ;-)

[pp]

Good to see a koala bear in action...

[Dan]

I am quite fond of this particular cartoon. One of my standard replies at work when asked why I did not proact to a particular situation refers to the dearth of telephone calls from psychic hotline recruiters.

[CW]

This brings to mind fond memories of a story I heard on CBC radio one morning as I was driving up Vancouver Island.

"Taken completely by surprise, numerous employees arriving for work this morning were shocked to discover the doors to their workplace padlocked, with a sign in the window announcing that their employer, JoJo's Psychic Alliance Hotline, had gone bankrupt."