Rip Haywire by Dan Thompson

Here’s some sketches…I am swamped with work…I’m surprised I posted today…Lee Nordling told me a quote once ” If you’re too busy, you’re not charging enough.”  I think about that a lot…back to work.

Hump day! Love Wednesdays! Me and the family usually do something fun on Wednesday nights to break up the monotony until the weekend. It’s cold out, but we might trek out to a restaurant with our gift cards from my sister’s family (nothing says awesome like gift cards for Christmas to your favorite place of choice.) I’m also excited about Apple announcing a new tablet  that could possibly be a game changer for newspapers and magazines…If you have seen the Sports Illustrated video on youtube you’d think so too. If this tablet shifts the demographic of newspaper readers out of the hands of the 45 and older crowd and into the tablets of the 17 to 40 crowd I’m all for it! Hopefully, it will also shift the comics tastes, value of comics, and size restrictions with it! Here’s to hoping…I’m an optimist.

Chester Gould said in an interview about comics something like: If you write your comics for the 7 to 17 year old market, they will sell the parents on it. The parents will never sell the kids on it. If the comics shift back to entertaining the future generation of readers of newspapers, then comics will keep that foot hold in the daily news and comic books. I truly believe that if newspapers were to give cartoonists a half page Sunday comics like they did a half a century ago…Kids would gravitate to the comics and also comic books. Not this postage stamp 10 Sunday cartoons on each page thing nobody enjoys now. But again, I’m an optimist.

Here’s some sketches from the old doodle pad…I love to just fill pages of these things…last night I must have drawn from 2 pm until 8 and actually the only reason I stopped was I ran out of pencil lead…I use that soft “B” stuff, and it goes quick! I love  the thick line compared to a light thin line.

Been Super busy these past couple weeks. So, I haven’t been posting a lot. Today, We’ve got to go get the minivan serviced—the one bad thing about owning one car is you have to wait around for it to be worked on. I hate getting cars serviced— I always end up paying a ton of cash—it’s always the cars breaks, or the wheels, or something important—Once, I’d like them to say—your windshield wiper fluid was low, so we topped it off, other than that you’re good to go—don’t come back for at least 10 years—it’s always SOMETHING that takes large sums of money out of my pocket—and they know they’re talking to someone who hasn’t a clue about cars, and doesn’t like cars—they might as well be speaking another language or like the adults in those Charlie Brown Specials. The conversations I hear is exactly like this “Mr. Thompson, wah-wah-blah-blah wah…blah-blah-wah-blah-wah…that’ll be $600, Mr. Thompson”….and I hand them my card and say thank you. That’s life, you take the good, the bad, the boring, the time consuming—you whine and moan about it, dump it on your readers, and poof! you feel better! Wish me luck!

OK, on to the Sketches!

The awesome Tom Racine invited me to be on his radio show “Tall Tale Radio” one evening last week to talk about Rip Haywire, and we had a lot of fun talking about Rip, Indiana Jones, Bond and a whole bunch of fun things for the hour long show…Tom is a really great guy, and his hour long radio shows are always entertaining and engaging! Thanks, Tom, I really enjoyed talking with you!

Here’s a quote from Tom’s site.

Episode 68 - Dan Thompson of “Rip Haywire”

“It’s time for adventure! Join me and Dan Thompson of Rip Haywire,the hilarious throwback strip starring the mercenary adventurer Rip Haywire, his on-again-off-again double crossing sexy love interest Cobra, and his loyal yet somewhat courage-lacking collie, TNT.  Dan’s got a great style and has just celebrated one year of syndication in papers.  We talk “Indiana Jones,” “James Bond,” the history of adventure strips, and Dan’s route to getting into the papers. “Rip Haywire” is a great strip, and it was a pleasure to talk to it’s brilliant creator!”

Check the radio show out here!!!

I’ve been so busy, I missed Rip Haywire’s 1st year Anniversary. It Launched on January, 5th 2009! It’s come a long way since I first created it in 2007…here’s a look back at how it morphed into today’s Rip haywire.

Here’s what Rip and TNT originally looked like…Way cartoon-ish, and Steve Canyon-ish. And as my wife put it “wow, they were ugly.”

Here is Cobra and TNT…Cobra was a cartoon-ish blonde.

And then after a year of playing around with the strip, I changed Rip, Cobra, and TNT into a style closer to what we have today. United Feature syndicate picked up the strip and we made some more changes. Rip while square jawed had a round profiled chin, Cobra wore her hair in a pony tail, and TNT was a Pomeranian…The Syndicate had the brilliant idea to make me change Cobra to always have her look like a model with flowing hair… so I fixed her, and as for TNT they told me “Anything but a pomeranian” so I made him a collie.

I learned the new Rip Haywire style as fast as I could, and I’m still learning …this was the sales kit from September 2008.

This year flew by for Rip Haywire, and I’ve enjoyed every bit of it.  Thanks for reading! On to year two!

Here’s some more sketches from my sketch book for Wed!

Mondays are always rough, so why not have roughs on Monday…Hello 2010 ! A decade gone but not forgotten…A lot happened between 2000 and 2010, some good, some bad, but that’s life. Like Rocky Balboa says “nuthin’ is gonna hit you harder than life, and it will beat you to your knees if you let it.”  Like Rocky, let’s keep pushing forward, and enjoy the New Year and it’s hopes dreams and possibilities.

Here’s some roughs from the first couple weeks of Dec. 09

I’d like to announce the birth of Rip Haywire Jr. —He came into the world on December 28th 2009 and  is somewhere around 8 to 10 years old!  Rip Jr. or “RJ” as he will be called in the strip, is a hat tip to the great tradition of adventure strip kids. From Chester Gould’s street smart, “Dick Tracy Junior”, to probably the greatest of all, “Terry Lee”, from Terry and the Pirates and of course, we can’t forget, “Annie”, from Little Orphan Annie.  Rip Jr. is a street smart kid, an orphan, and is pretty much Rip Haywire in a 8-10 year old frame.

I thought it would be fun to add a kid to the Rip Haywire comic strip so kids of Rip Jr’s age might find the comic strip appealing. Newspapers need young readers and the comics are a great way to get them interested.