Razzle Dazzle Unicorn: Another Phoebe and Her Unicorn Adventure
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INTRODUCTION Sometimes a unicorn shows up in your life and makes everything better I wasn’t really expecting one A few years ago I had nearly realized an ambition I’ve had since age twelve I had scored a contract to develop a comic strip for newspaper syndication I won that contract in the Comic Strip Superstar contest which was sort of an American Idol for aspiring comic strip artists without the surrounding glamour I won with a comic strip called Girl which starred a little girl who would eventually acquire the name Phoebe Howell She ran around in the woods behind her house and hung out with talking animals I thought I’d just draw a bunch of Girl strips and that would be that and I’d be syndicated and happy forever What happened instead was I sent my required thirty strips in every month and I got back a lot of notes explaining to me why the work I was doing wasn’t good enough to launch in syndication My editor at the time John Glynn was blunt The work you’re doing is better than some currently syndicated strips he told me but in a market this tight your work needs to be transcendent I was as far as I could tell doing my best If it wasn’t transcendent already I didn’t have the faintest idea how to make it transcendent I wasn’t even sure what I was being asked to do A year of my two-year development contract had passed Despair began to set in And that’s when the unicorn made her appearance
One day I wrote a strip with a unicorn in it It was a one-off joke riffing on a theme that was looming large in my life at the time knowing what counts as a reasonable expectation Phoebe was conversing with a voice off camera about whether her ideas about her life were realistic Final panel pan out and look she’s talking about this to a unicorn And then the unicorn wouldn’t leave Once she was there she was there She more or less announced herself as the second main character in the strip Being a unicorn she wanted attention She needed to shine in front of an admiring audience This dovetailed nicely with my own goals I named her Marigold Heavenly Nostrils a name I got by typing my own name into an online unicorn-name generator The strip must at last have transcended because it launched in over a hundred newspapers The books have done pretty well too as evidenced by the fact that this one is the fourth Every year I’ve spent in the company of Marigold Heavenly Nostrils has had more magic in it than the last Unicorns are around The one I found was the best thing that ever happened to me Dana Simpson September 2016
