One comic I read on a daily basis is Monty by Jim Meddick. Monty has a very interesting history. It started out as a strip called “Robotman” and featured the main character – Robotman – in a suburban setting with a suburban family. It was actually supposed to be tied into some existing merchandise. As Jim puts it himself in an interview:

“He started out in the licensing department — as a character that came to the syndicate from England as a toy. United wanted to have a strip featuring him — the design of the character was already established but the family setting (The Milde Family) and the other characters in the strip had to be created here.”

Meddick was hired to write the strip. It mainly revolved around Robotman’s quirky interactions with earthly life and customs and the family reacting to stuff he did. It was a pretty good strip. At some point, Monty enters the scene not as a main character but as just someone coming on the scene. Meddick explains most of it here. Eventually the Milde family gets dropped and we have Monty and Robotman living together with Moondog as Monty’s close friend.

At this point, I’m totally digging the strip. The dynamic between Monty and Robotman – the quirky inventor and the smartly adapted and more socially adept Robotman have a great rapport. The stories are interesting and funny. At some point around this time the strip was renamed “Robotman and Monty”.

Over time though, Monty’s stories start to come more to the forefront, and somehow Meddick wanted to make a clean break from the past. Robotman was the last vestige of the strip he had signed on to do as a “hired hand” and he wanted to finally be free from that. So there was one last story arc where Robotman basically gets abducted by aliens, wins a great battle, falls in love and finally leaves earth – and the strip – for good (full story here).

At this point the strip is renamed “Monty” and now the strip is fully Meddick’s own creations, which was his intention at that point in his career – to be putting his efforts into his own creation instead of someone else’s.

I still like the strip and I think it’s mostly funny and well done. The humor is still the same for the most part, Monty is a really funny character. But I do miss Robotman and his interaction with Monty.

The strip is interesting in that it has survived massive character changes. Meddick has taken some heat for rotating in new fairly major characters (a monkey, an alien character “Mr. Pi”) and then losing them – not to mention the Milde family and Robotman. Yet because of his excellent writing skills and appealing artwork he has maintained a strong following. I’m not sure how many papers his strip is in but it seems to be doing well.

There are still those of us who pine away for the Robotman days, though. And trying to get your hands on the few strip collections that exist is tough – the stuff is seriously expensive. I foolishly sold my “Primary Crullers” book a few years ago when I needed some cash. I was lucky enough to grab the second book on e-Bay for steal price and read strips I had never seen before. The first two books generally sell for well over $100 dollars.

Anyway, check the strip out you might enjoy it. Meddick’s work is a testament to hard work and creative thinking on the part of a cartoonist. He took something that was not ideal in his mind and worked it into something that holds the seeds of the original but is truly his own creation, and he did it on his own terms.

Below: One of my prized cartoon possessions – Robotman Book Two: The Untold Story

Update: I just found out that Jim won the Best Newspaper Strip award from the NCS this May – congrats to him!