Scott Underwood has been living his childhood dream. He contributes the art and colour for the Sunday pages of Slylock Fox, a comic strip aimed at kids.
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Scott Underwood fell in love with comic strips in the pages of his dad’s The Province newspaper.
“I just devoured the comics daily,” said the 47-year-old East Van cartoonist. “And then on Sunday there were the colour comics. On Saturdays I would make the trek to the corner store to get The Vancouver Sun for their colour comics.”
For the last four years, Underwood has been living his childhood dream. He contributes the art and colour for the Sunday pages of Slylock Fox, a long-running comic strip aimed at kids. The strip is filled with word puzzles, spot-the-difference challenges, nature facts, and how-to-draw lessons.
“Reading those daily strips in The Province was integral to my development as an artist, and during those formative years I developed the desire to one day contribute to the world of the comic strips,” Underwood said.
He began contributing to the strip four years ago after Bob Weber Jr., the Arizona-based son of the strip’s creator and today the main writer and artist, reached out after seeing some of Underwood’s fan art on Instagram.
“He liked my work and asked if I wanted to ink something. And from there I did a bunch of inking for him, and then I became what’s known in the comic strip world as a ‘ghost artist,’ which is very common in the industry, where I would draw some strips for Bob without credit. And then as I got more involved, he said, ‘You know what, let’s just put your name on it, because you’re contributing now.’”
Prior to his involvement with Slylock Fox, Underwood worked in animation, including the TV show Ed, Edd n Eddy. The show ran on the Cartoon Network for six seasons between 1999 and 2009.
“It was unique in that it was made here in Canada, but it didn’t air here, so not a lot of my Canadian counterparts actually knew know about it.”
As a Canadian newspaper comic strip artist, Underwood is part of a very small club. North Vancouver’s Lynn Johnson, whose For Better or Worse is perhaps the most successful comic strip to ever come out of the country, is retired from the daily gag grind. Chubb and Chauncey, which ran from 1988 until the early 2000s and appeared in Canadian and European newspapers, was created by Alberta-based editorial cartoonist Vance Rodewalt.
These days, cartoonists are more likely to put up their work on the internet. For example, Vancouver artist Theresa Henry posts a weekly four-panel strip on Instagram called Hot Flashes and Handovers.
Along with Chubb and Chauncey, which Underwood calls “a big inspiration,” he cites Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes and Hägar the Horrible as favourites. “Those would be my go-tos,” he said.
Unfortunately, Province and Sun readers will have to search to find Slylock Fox. Although the King Features Syndicate strip is in over 300 newspapers worldwide with a combined readership of over 20 million weekly, Underwood’s hometown papers aren’t among them. Owner Postmedia sources its comics and puzzles via a third party.
Among the Slylock Fox spinoffs are two books, Slylock Fox Mystery Puzzles and Spot Six Differences. Since 2022, King Features has been pitching a movie version of the character and sidekick Max Mouse to Hollywood.
Such initiatives are necessary to keep the medium and the characters, whether they are once-household names like Beetle Bailey and Blondie or Slylock Fox, alive in an age of physical media attrition, digital distraction and rapidly diminishing attention spans.
“At this point people are looking elsewhere because we have these legacy characters – and new characters; people still are desirous to create new strips. But as it stands now the medium is not a lucrative place to be. The people who are in it are definitely here because they are passionate about the art form.”