From The Archives: "Oh, No! It's Nutsy Monkey!" (Nick Mag #69, March '01) (Patreon)

Working for Nickelodeon Magazine/Nick Mag was one of my favorite freelancing gigs back in the day. We did a decent amount of work for the magazine over the course of its existence, over two dozen assignments ranging from gag panels to illustration to comics. Some of the comics were based on then-popular Nickelodeon characters such as Jimmy Neutron and The Fairly Oddparents, others were original comics which we owned the rights to after they were originally published. Owning the rights to the original work was another reason that everyone enjoyed working for them. MAD was a great experience, paid well and pushed me as a cartoonist (it was also pretty amazing to be working on a magazine that I loved as a kid, and which influenced me as an artist), but Nick was special because I love doing comics for younger readers, and I love owning what I create. We all should.

The 2-page Nutsy Monkey comic was originally published in color, but is here owing to my scanning the original art. Which is why Nutsy Monkey is missing from the logo. Sarah digitally colored and assembled/cleaned the comic, I don't have access to wherever the color files are on one of the old hard drives gathering dust in the house. One of these days I will crack these little treasure chests of comics and illustration. And scripts. 

In the meantime, here's the black and white version of the comic as it basically appeared is our one-shot SLG comic from 2007, Biff-Bam-Pow! (which also reprinted a one-page color comic we retained the rights to, “Billy vs. Super-Rad", originally published in Riot Magazine, Oct, 2005. Riot was sparsely distributed and I don't believe there was ever a second issue of the start-up publication).

If Nick Mag was around today you can bet I'd be pitching a Winky the Pirate Cat strip to them. I still want to make Winky comics some day, if life ever gets out of the way.