About Mixed Media

In 1993, after experiencing a long evening of listening to conversation about various pop cultural figures, I came up with the idea for Mixed Media. As I had watched cute animal strips and impossibly adorable family strips make millions, I decided to draw a strip that had virtually no licensing potential at all. Of course, this was a mistake, but I slept at night.

After four years of toil, enlisting various writers in the process, I decided to pass Mixed Media on to the very talented Scott Willis. While there were some days that I enjoyed drawing Mixed Media, mostly it became what Tom Lehrer once referred to as being "married to a nymphomaniac." When I handed it off to Scott, it had 170 clients. It was popular with younger readers, but getting editors to drop Beetle Bailey was a challenge, and to this day, many newspapers still run comics conceived in the 1920s and 1930s. These strips are now drawn by children and grandchildren of their creators, which is just...wrong. Would Seinfeld hold up until the 22nd century? Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I found that it was time for me to move on in 1999.