Friday, March 25, 2022
Obscurity of the Day: Cheeverwood
When Doonesbury became a big hit and then went on its at the time unheard of hiatus in 1983-84, the floodgates were opened for features to replace it. Bloom County started in 1980, well before this shake-up to the comics page, but it was this event that propelled it to center stage. Although I reject the common refrain of the time that Breathed's strip was some sort of Doonesbury rip-off, it can certainly be agreed that the two strips appealed to the same demographics.
But if Bloom County was in some way a copy of Doonesbury, then strips like Cheeverwood bear the ignominious mantle of being outright copies of the copy. And in the case of Cheeverwood, the resemblance is not just the intended audience demographic but in just about any aspect of the strip you care to name. Everything about the strip is similar: the setting, the characters, the snarky humor, the pop culture references ... they both even offer birds as characters! The art style, while nowhere near as competent as Breathed's, is certainly cut from the same cloth. In short, Cheeverwood is the Bloom County your paper could buy if the competition already had Bloom County.
I generally try to be as positive as I can about features of living creators, but my hope is that since Michael Fry has gone on to significantly bigger, better and more original things that he's probably not apt to have his feelings hurt about this early outing. He can certainly be very proud of When I Was Short, a wonderful feature that didn't quite click enough to make the bigtime, and the juggernaut Over The Hedge has become a lasting favourite, and deservedly so.
Cheeverwood debuted on July 1 1985* through the prestigious auspices of the Washington Post Writers Group. It was based on Fry's earlier strip Scotty, which was a local feature of the Houston Post starting in 1984. Cheeverwood seems to have been cancelled as of July 26 1987** after failing to take hold with many papers. The local Scotty apparently continued through sometime in 1989. If anyone here has access to NewsBank, which has the Houston Post archives, I'd be delighted if you can supply definitive start and end dates for that strip.
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* Source: Editor & Publisher, June 29 1985 ... but the earliest I can find it actually appearing is July 8 in San Antonio Light.
** Source: Orlando Sentinel.
Labels: Obscurities
