I’ve mentioned before that originally, this comic strip was pitched as ‘Because It’s There’, an altogether too-long title.
Here’s the cover letter from the original big package of cartoons sent around to all the syndicates, you know, the way they tell you to do it.
You can tell how old the letter is because ‘$14.4 Billion’ sounds like chump change these days. The last time I tried to check this number (you can’t really- the figures are all different and depend only on who’s compiling them) everyone’s figures seemed to loom around $200 Billion a year.
I got a little interest in Because It’s There. Amy Lago, first with United Media, then with Washington Post Writer’s Group was the most encouraging and helpful. In the end, though, I had to quit working on Because It’s There to concentrate on The Buckets and other money-makers. I couldn’t give up, though. And even though editors (the ones who, at the time, honked on and on about ‘bringing in young readers’, but really just wanted a few hundred thousand older readers instead) couldn’t risk a comic strip that had skateboards and kayaks in it, the web eventually solved that problem for all of us.
And so, there’s Hubris. I’m glad to get to do the feature I would have done from day one, and I’m glad you’re here to read it.
