Chuck Loves the World - by Kenten and Allan

About Chuck
a little bit of history

Beginning in 1998, Chuck Loves the World ran as a weekly, daily, or "occasionally" comic strip, and now has an archive of over three hundred strips. It's the story of a boy and his bizarre animal friends who are out to make his life more difficult, or so it seems, since the truth is Ratsputin, the Bug, and the worm are really just trying to keep themselves amused.

Evolution

I think it was in 1997, though, that Chuck began to evolve. Chuck himself first appeared in a three- or four-page comic that I drew very quickly one evening, featuring a long-haired, grunged-out Chuck fastasizing about killing a popular jock at school with a big knife. The comic was done in black and red ink. Very on-the-fly, I wrote the title "Chuck Loves the World." I thought this was amusing, considering how angry and bitter Chuck was.

Then it gets a little blurry. I did two strips, Chuck Loves the World (featuring the worm's real name S.O.B.), and Mad Rodent Dreams (with the as-yet unnamed Ratsputin, named, incidentally, after Al's hamster back in junior high school), both for the Dag, my university newspaper.

The Graphic Novel

Then on May 15th, 1998, in a news article on my old Evil Eye Entertainment site, I wrote:

"We felt like doing a graphic novel, 64 or 72 pages, and the most likely candidate to star was Chuck." But Evil Eye Comics discovered they had a problem. "We just have too many funny characters," Kenten said, "too many to ever do a comic or comic strip for. So I decided that the best way to deal with it is to stick them all in Chuck."

This required the premise of the strip to be overhauled to accommodate other Evil Eye characteres like the rodent from Mad Rodent Dreams, and many others.

"Chuck Loves the World was originally about a kid named Chuck and this six-foot-tall worm who was sort of a physical manifestation of that part of his personality. But now we've diversified it by introducing more characters to represent other negative sides of Chuck's personality. What resulted was a cast of characters that interact in wildly unpredicable ways with not only Chuck, but each other. It's been pure fun to write." (read the full article)

That graphic novel never came about, though it was fully written, and all of the major characters were designed. I spent a lot of time that summer cutting grass and writing Chuck. But then along came...

Chuck, the Comic Strip

Five weeks after announcing the graphic novel, I announced the Chuck Loves the World comic strip, which would run in a new local newspaper where I was working.

"But is the general public ready for something like that? I don't know. The whole premise of the project is that Chuck is this really nice guy who is haunted by these generally despicable characters (in a lovable kind of way). Maybe that's just too negative for the general public."

The other option was developing a new project altogether, "which is kinda hard to do, since I was only given five days to hand in the first strip."

Kenten has until Monday, June 29 to hand in his first strip, so obviously, being a down-to-the-last-second kind-of-guy, he won't decide for sure until Sunday night. (read the full article)

By Sunday I did decide to do Chuck, and when the debut issue of the newspaper appeared two weeks later (delayed), Chuck was in it.

A Good Run

At its peak, Chuck Loves the World was daily on the internet on seven different websites, and in two newspapers in Alberta, making us $55 a week. The graphic novel continued to develop but the art was never started. Eventiually, but the end of 2000, after three hundred strips, Chuck sputtered out because of my desire to move onto something more serious and ambitious.

But I'm sure that some day, Al and I will shift gears, and that Chuck graphic novel will be made. Then we'll finally get to see what's up with Chuck and all these weird animal creatures, and all the questions you didn't even know you had, will be answered.

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