The story of how I got the idea for "Scandal Sheet"

[Chef Troy]

It was a little over eight years ago. I was working as a reading tutor, helping second and third graders improve their reading and writing skills. The job had little breaks scattered throughout the day, so I had these little Time McNuggets of 15 minutes or so to chew on whatever thought flitted through my head.

On this particular day (it would have been sometime in mid-April, 1994), I was musing about the oft-quoted list of similarities between the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations. The fact that "Lee Harvey Oswald" and "John Wilkes Booth" have the same number of letters, as do "Lincoln" and "Kennedy," struck me as mere coincidences - I thought it was stupid to attach any importance to it. After all, I mused, "Elvis" could be anagrammed to spell both "Lives" and "Levi's", but that didn't mean Elvis had been living at the Levi's corporate office all this time.

Suddenly I had a little "mental movie" of two tabloid guys having the same conversation, giving each other that "are you thinking what I'm thinking" look, and then showing the tabloid headline about Elvis hiding out at Levi-strauss, applying alien technology to jean design (how ELSE can 501s make peoples' butts look so amazing?).

I scribbled down the basic idea, developed concept and characters over the next couple of weeks... and then did nothing with it for seven years. I think I was afraid of being rejected by the syndicates and so was Mrs. Chef, who was originally going to do the artwork. It wasn't until last year, when I started reading Web comics, that I dusted the old idea off and really started thinking about doing it at last. Then it took another 8 months of procrastination before I actually launched.

Now it's a reality, and I am a happy man to be doing it.

[TruePisces]

I, for one, am glad you bit the bullet and started it. It's among my "read every morning and miss the train" group of comics.