CK Cartoon Number Two

I promised a CK cartoon today, and I will deliver.  But first, some background (which I also promised when I posted the first one).

Originally, CK was actually CM.  That is, Cookie Monster from the television show Sesame Street.  If you’re my age or so, don’t pretend you haven’t seen it.  My brother Ethan and I had a stuffed Cookie Monster that we played with/abused as little boys do.  I remember it was fun to have him fall down the stairs, get hit my toy cars, and yes he even went out the second-story window a number of times.  We even managed to get him stuck on the roof once or twice, which really irritated our parents.

Cookie Monster had the sort of dumb, fat-guy personality that the “real” Cookie Monster on the TV show did, but as we played with him more, we developed his personality further.  One day we decided that he was such a fatty that the term “Cookie Killer” more appropriately described him.  I’m not exactly sure how that came to pass, but to be fair, we were pretty little.  Since Cookie Killer takes a moment to say and we were lazy, we started calling him CK.  Eventually it replaced his actual name.

Then we lost the stuffed animal and he pretty much disappeared from our lives.

A number of years later, we located the toy.  Apparently he had been put under a sofa cushion and no, my family wasn’t big on the Martha-Stewart-type of clean, so he wasn’t discovered again until my brother and I were in early high school.  Naturally, he no longer occupied the same role for our free time, but that was about to change soon.

Ethan and I started a fictitious comedy newspaper called Skay Newsday (It Only Happens in Skay…) and we needed characters.  Naturally CK’s strong-arm, buffet-cleaning, take-no-crap attitude was a top candidate.  Moreover, though, we needed subjects for the pictures.  Because we didn’t have enough friends that lived nearby to photograph, we used stuffed animals, which ended up being a lot funnier than using real people would have been. 

Eventually CK received a last name (Kleen, because we implied in the beginning that he was a member of our family) and became the main character of Skay Newsday.  He and his friend Sugarbear (who was renamed Elbee for the comic strip) terrorized the poor city of Skay by robbing banks, mugging hot dog vendors, going on high-speed pursuits in their free time, but usually meeting their humorous comeuppance one way or another.  If this says anything, scientists soon developed Anti-CK spray and he got his own hate organizations such as the Madagascar CK Awareness Group.

CK was a hit.  We didn’t sell the newspaper or anything but every Friday for a few years we brought printed copies to school and our friends read them.  After a while we “published” two books of Skay Newsday collections and put the weekly publication online (they no longer are, but if I get enough requests they could be).  During the second year of Skay Newsday, I tried my hand at cartooning, and naturally CK was the perfect subject.

This wasn’t the first time I’d tried cartooning.  When I was younger, I had a comic called Sparky about a fat cat, a dog, and their owner, which was basically an unfunny and poorly-drawn rip-off of Garfield.  I only did maybe 50 cartoon strips before giving that up in 6^th grade.

CK’s Life was the name of the original series and it eventually got the tagline Between the Meals.  The current series by pretty much the same name took a lot of originals from the first one and basically redrew them, but a lot changed.  The first series was very silly and bore almost no resemblance to real life.  The current series actually has some “downer” strips and CK has a much more subordinate role in his fictitious little world.  That means no more bank-robbing or staying at his apartment for the low monthly rate of “not blowing the building up.”

I think that the current strip is the way it is because I (re)started it when I was much older, a junior in college.  It had been around four years since the last published issue of Skay Newsday.  The original strip had fallen by the wayside because our scanner broke, so I still had unused ideas, but being the highly motivated teenager I was, I never got back around to drawing CK.

Currently, I make a strip approximately “whenever I feel like it,” to borrow a phrase from Dilbert’s Scott Adams.  I don’t expect it to become a daily thing again at this point, mainly because school + work = not a lot of free time, but I miss it a lot.

In another CK blog, I’ll tell you more about CK the character as opposed to CK the “franchise.”  For now, enjoy strip # 2 of CK’s Life:  Between the Meals.

CK is actually visiting a psychologist in this strip.  I never went right out and said it, but CK actually suffers from minor depression in the new series, just one of the many more "adult" qualities of it.