Every Comic Strip Needs a Cute Funny Animal

Look what I wrote about Murphy's Manor strip #3 in Facebook just last February. If IJM continued to pretend they could syndicate my strip, I'd forgotten. By February 1982 I'd gotten a mailing list of gay newspapers from some place. And it may have been from IJM:

The first six Murphy's Manor comic strips were drawn in November 1981 for a solicitation by "International Justice Monthly," a tabloid digest from Toronto. It took several months to conclude that IJM was not true to its word, and had no publication opportunity to offer. 

But it struck me that there were other such papers all over the continent. All I needed was a mailing list -- somehow I scrounged one -- and I offered the cartoons for syndication the following spring. Initial response was great -- about 15 papers with a combined claimed circulation north of 100,000.

It wasn't that easy of course. A good half of those never got around to paying me. Throughout its run, Murphy's Manor would be plagued by deadbeat editors and publishers.
In this strip we get a laugh out of a sexually-transmitted malady. Then, only a nuisance. Laugh while you can! When you think about -- it's really kind of prophetic.