"get fuzzy" celebrates five years in the comics
Linda D'Angelo Kuczwaj
Mary Anne Grimes
NEW YORK, August 27 - Get Fuzzy, the extraordinarily successful comic strip by Darby Conley, will celebrate its fifth anniversary on comics pages on September 6. Available daily and Sunday to newspapers and on the Web at comics.com, this wry portrait of singlelife, with pets, appears in 500 newspapers worldwide, including the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Daily News, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Atlanta Journal & Constitution, Los Angeles Times and Houston Chronicle.
Bitingly hilarious, clever and extremely popular, Get Fuzzy stars Bucky, a temperamental cat with an attitude, and sweet and sensitive dog Satchel, who tries to remain neutral but frequently ends up on the receiving end of Bucky's mischief. Rob Wilco, their mild-mannered human guardian, rounds out this unconventional "family" of funny characters.
More than 650,000 Get Fuzzy books have been sold to date. Conley's first Get Fuzzy compilation, The Dog Is Not a Toy (House Rule #4) (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2001),boasts sales of more than 165,000 copies and appeared on amazon.com's top 100 sellers list for six consecutive weeks. The much-anticipated second cartoon collection, Get Fuzzy 2:Fuzzy Logic (AMP, 2002), has sold more than 115,000 copies. The Get Fuzzy Experience: Are You Bucksperienced was published by AMP in 2003 and has sold more than 80,000 copies,reaching #9 on The New York Times' Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous Best Seller List.Blueprint for Disaster, released by AMP in October 2003, peaked at #5 on The New YorkTimes' list, and has sold more than 118,000 copies. Groovitude: A Get Fuzzy Treasurycombines color Sunday strips with dailies from the earlier collections, and has sold more than 150,000 copies since its 2002 release. The most recent Get Fuzzy book, Bucky Katt's BigBook of Fun: A Get Fuzzy Treasury, was published by AMP in April 2004 and appeared at #7 on The New York Times Best Seller List. More than 240,000 Get Fuzzy 2003 wall and page-a-day box calendars were sold, and AMP has added engagement calendars to its lineup.
The National Cartoonists Society honored Get Fuzzy with a Reuben Division Award, naming it the Best Newspaper Comic Strip of 2002. In 2004, the Humane Society's Genesis Awards committee recognized Get Fuzzy with a commendation for the strip's contribution toward making the world a more humane place for animals.
Get Fuzzy is created by Darby Conley, an illustrator and former elementary school teacher. He grew up with Richard Scarry, Peanuts, and Tintin books (in that order), and always wanted to be a cartoonist. Born in Concord, Mass., he spent most of his childhood in Knoxville, Tenn. He came north again to attend Amherst College, where he earned a Fine Arts degree. At Amherst, he sang in an a cappella group, played rugby, and drew cartoons for the newspaper, the Amherst Student. He is grateful that, of all the bones he broke playing rugby, none of them were in his right hand.
Conley was the only male teacher (i.e., "human jungle gym") at an elementary school where he taught fourth and second grades. He was also the art director for a museum. His first real job was putting boats and mountain bikes together at an outdoor sports store, work that he says shredded his hands. The best job he's held to date (except cartoonist, of course) was his stint as a lifeguard at a pool where no one ever actually swam, so he could draw to his heart's content.BACK TO TOP