Hello again to My Cage’s growing ‘Army of the night’!

So, where were we? Oh right. The Censor Sheep.

I gotta say, when we ran the Censor Sheep strip I didn’t expect the guesses of what happened would be so much more exciting than the actual story.

First, I want to say that the strip in question was rejected by the syndicate and not the individual papers.

I also want to say the strip wasn’t rejected because the good people at King Features Syndicate are uptight. I know must people picture a syndicate as a bunch of ‘Men in Black’ types in suits using buzz words and having no understanding about comics. That’s fun to picture, but the truth is everyone at King Features Syndicate loves comics! If you walk around the offices, their book shelves are packed with classic comic strip compilation books.

In short, their work book shelves look like my home book shelves.

In fact, my editor is a 29 years old Colin Hanks look-a-like who self-publishes his own graphic novel anthology series, ‘Syncopated Comics’ (Check it out. It’s good).

Anyway…

Usually strips are rejected on one basis: To prevent negative letters from being written to the newspapers. Negative letters are death to new strips. Especially with the newspaper biz in the condition it’s in today sadly, where the papers need more than ever to keep readers happy and coming back.

All of that said, here is the rejected strip:

My plan was to introduce ‘Stumper the parapelgic bunny’ and have him become a regular. His personality was going to be that he was optimistic to the point of ridiculousness. I wanted to give Norm and the crew a ‘Linus’ and thought it be funny to see Norm whining to a character with an actual problem and watch ‘Stumper’ slowly lose it with Norm over time.

But the decision was made that it wasn’t funny enough to take the risk of it being misconstrued.

So what’s the deal with today’s strip? Well, contractually I can’t post today’s strip here today, but the last line is “Hope. The Carrot on the stick for the hopeless” or something. The original line was supposed to be “Hope. Crack for the hopeless”, but that was rejected itself.

My editor said ““Crack” is a little harsh for the comics pages”, which is odd since we used it at least 3 times that I can rememeber in our first year:

Aw well. Maybe people are more uptight these days. Or maybe I do work for an evil corporation and the pople I’ve met are just actors pretending to be the people I work with.

Hmmm…

Anyway, tune in next week and I’ll have the next part of ‘The Secret Origin of My Cage’ which will explain how I met Melissa (Hint: It involves prison! ).

Until then…Keep on Cagin’!

-Ed Power, Cage Writer.