The truth about cats and dogs

In Darby Conley's comic strip Get Fuzzy, a single guy is ruled by his peculiar pets.

By JANET K. KEELER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 9, 2003

No cat actually steals its owner's credit cards to buy Barry Manilow CDs or cases of tuna fish over the phone. But many of us think they would if they could.

The personification of housebound animals is the charm of Darby Conley's Get Fuzzy, the slightly skewed adventures of a single guy ruled by his wily pets. Mild-mannered Rob Wilco is the guardian of Bucky, the temperamental cat, and Satchel, the pooch with the gentle soul. As one might expect, it's Bucky who keeps his housemates off-balance.

Aren't cats like that?

"I am fascinated with the three of them as a domestic, screwed-up dysfunctional family," says Conley, 32, a single guy who has no pets. His pet status is soon to change when he buys his own place in Boston. He's renting now in a no-pet building. Conley is on the hunt for a gray-and-white pound kitty to name Cosmo, a nod to the famously goofy Seinfeld character played by Michael Richards.

But Conley is really a dog guy. He grew up in Knoxville, Tenn., with a dog named Patch. All his friends had dogs, he says. In fact, the whole city was full of dogs.

"Dogs are my favorite things in the world," he says. But in Boston, a big city of apartment complexes and high-rises, Conley thinks dogs are hampered by the lack of space to run.

Get Fuzzy, born in 1999, runs in 325 newspapers, quite an accomplishment for a first-time cartoonist. Conley says he'd love Get Fuzzy to be in the St. Petersburg Times so that his father who lives in Tampa could read it in his own newspaper. Now, Conley sends him strips.

Conley is a former elementary school teacher and Get Fuzzy is imbued with the angst and high jinks of childhood. The kids in his strip, of course, are the animals.

In one episode, Bucky tangles with a store security guard for "beating the stuffing out of a Tickle Me Elmo doll." His excuse for getting into a fight with a toy? "It was laughing at me!" How many times must Conley have heard that in the classroom?

Get Fuzzy is Conley's first comic strip and the name was inspired by his brother's band called Fuzzy Sprouts, based in Athens, Ga.

"It was tough for me to come up with a strip, everything seemed forced," he says. "I just figured out what kind of characters I would like to draw for 10 to 15 years if I'm lucky. I'd be crying if I was doing a strip on relationships right now."

At Amherst College, where he earned a fine arts degree, he had a one-panel comic in the student newspaper. Basically, it was a Far Side rip-off, he says. He left that behind when he went into teaching but came back to his love of the absurd for Get Fuzzy.

Now he works a solitary job, often creating late into the night. He doesn't read the comics pages too much for fear of being influenced but he does like Dilbert, Monty and Pearls Before Swine. As a kid he read Richard Scarry, Peanuts and the classic Belgian comic Tintin.

The weirdest thing about being a successful cartoonist is getting fan mail. In fact, he says, it's strange to be a person who even gets fan mail. People tell him regularly that Bucky is just like their cat.

"Obviously, some of that is deduction," he says. "People think cats are calculating but they may just be thinking of nothing."

GUEST COMIC

Darby Conley

Garfield may choke on his anchovies, but our audition of new comic strips includes Get Fuzzy, the misadventures of an attitudinal house cat, by Darby Conley. Each contender for a spot on our funny pages is being introduced on a Sunday and running for a week in Floridian. After we've run all the contenders, we'll decide, with your help, which ones we want to keep. You can let us know your thoughts by writing to us: "Comics," St. Petersburg Times, c/o John Barry, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731. Or e-mail: floridian@sptimes.com with "Comics" in the subject line.

-- JOHN BARRY, deputy Floridian editor

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