E&P reports
that longtime Rocky Mountain News
cartoonist Drew Litton, one of the last two sports cartoonists still published,
announced in early July that he is considering debuting a Web comic that would
combine "the Man from U.N.C.L.E. with the Big Easy meets Lethal
Weapon." When the News died in
February, Litton closed the door on a 26-year career with the paper and then
started his own Web site, drewlitton.com, as well as a freelance business, Littoonz
Studios. His sports cartoons are still in syndication with United Media. About
his latest plan, Litton wrote in the INDenver
Times website on July 3: "There is a whole new model for doing a comic
strip outside of print media these days, one that I find very exciting and a
bit freeing. Cartoonists who are syndicated are often kept on very tight
leashes by editors and publishers who get a bit paranoid when they get a single
phone call about something that has upset a reader. ... On the internet there are
no such restrictions. The problem is monetizing the strip."
His new
project, tentatively entitled S.W.A.M.P.
Squad, will be set in the Louisiana
bayou, he said, "since I love the setting and the landscape." The
chief characters are an alligator named Grubbs and an armadillo named Hicks.
Preliminary sketches can be found at Litton’s website: look for
CreatorsIncubator and scroll down to July 5. And if you scroll around the blog,
you can find Litton quoting from a new book, Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity, by cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, 
who writes: “Everyone is
given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty, they take
the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra,
history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a
wee voice telling you, ‘I’d like my crayons back please.’” To which Litton
adds: “I remember early on in my career as a staff artist at the El Paso Times, my cousin dropped by so
we could head out to the movies after work. I was just cleaning up my drawing
board, picking up scraps of paper and paste and scissors and cartoons, and he
just stood there, shaking his head. ‘Kindergarten,’ he said, ‘ — you never left
kindergarten.’ He was right, and I want you to know I’m quite proud of that
fact!”
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