DUSTIN

Dustin, the new strip about a boomerang kid who returns home after college to live with his parents while he tries unsuccessfully to find a job, has been signed on by 100 newspapers, a benchmark that will assure  the strip’s continuation for the time being. The strip is produced by two cartoonists whose day jobs are political cartooning — New Orleans Times-Picayune’s Steve Kelley, who writes Dustin, and Florida Today’s Jeff Parker, who draws it (and also assists on Mike Peters’ Mother Goose and Grimm). Quoted in Editor & Publisher, George Haeberlein, King Features' vice president for worldwide syndication sales, called the strip “the most successful new comic to be introduced into syndication in recent years,” adding that signing up 100 papers was the syndicate’s first sales target.