Ever wonder what it’s like to make people laugh for a living? For cartoonist and UCSD alumnus Dave Kellett, this question is no longer a wonder but a daily reality. Seven years ago, Kellett was a struggling, albeit happy, student pursuing his masters degree at UCSD. Today he is on the brink of national syndication with United Media.
How did he come this far? It all started with his personal motivation and his acceptance into UCSD.
As a San Diego native, Kellett was always aware of UCSD as “”this university on a hill.”” After obtaining his undergraduate degree at the University of Notre Dame, he returned to his home base to earn a graduate degree in literature at UCSD. His professors let him craft a master’s degree that allowed him to research how literature and cartoons intersected in 18th-century Britain.
“”They let me marry my two loves, which were literature and cartooning,”” Kellett said. “”Cartooners are essentially writers first and artists second. Nothing brings me more joy than a well-turned phrase, especially one that brings a laugh from the reader. When they’re at their best, cartoons can change opinions in a way that no essay, editorial or novel ever could.””
While at UCSD, Kellett produced three editorial cartoons a week: one for the Guardian and two for the San Diego Union-Tribune, where he interned.
“”For a 21-year-old kid, that’s fantastic!”” Kellett said of the experience. “”Both of the newspapers had a large audience; they gained me publicity and taught me real-world lessons about cartooning. It made me aware that I could work as a cartoonist ‹ that not only did I want to do it, I could do it.””
Following his internship, Kellett knew that he had to pursue his love of comic strips. While at UCSD, he won a Rotary Foundation scholarship for $22,000, affording him the opportunity to stay at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, to study World War II cartoons and their use in propaganda. In possibly the most exciting year of his life, Kellett met still-living cartoonists from World War II and fervently dug through cartoon archives at the British Records Office and the British War Museum.
As a sort of Œletter home,’ Kellett wanted to share the comic strips he had produced with friends and family in the United States. The most efficient way to do this, he found, was through the World Wide Web. For the first time in his life, he assembled a Web site showcasing his comic strip “”Sheldon”” on a regular basis.
The comic’s plot revolves around ten-year-old Sheldon, who develops a type of software that not only enhances Internet speed but launches the creation of his own software company, Sheldonsoft, second only to Microsoft in size. Ironically, Sheldon is raised by his grandfather, who is technologically inept and lost to the world’s advances. As a strictly personal experiment, Sheldon creates a companion, Duck, by downloading speech recognition software and the Encyclopedia Britannica into the brain of an average pond-dwelling fowl. After Sheldon is through with him, Duck can talk and hold conversations as well as any other human being.
However, Sheldon is not your typical billionaire, boy genius ‹ he still prefers to spend his time hanging out at the local swimming hole with Duck or watching television, making only occasional appearances at the office. His best friend Dante represents “”the dumber friend we’ve all had”” who compensates for intellectual lackluster with his social magnetism and athletic ability. Sheldon’s relationship with Dante explores pure friendship in a world that views Sheldon as simply a billionaire and child oddity.
As with any artist, Kellett’s creations reflect parts of his own personality.
“”Sheldon is the nerdier side of you that you hope succeeds in life,”” Kellett said. “”Duck is that sarcastic voice in the back of your mind.””
Each long-standing character contains aspects of “”hopefully everyone’s character,”” as the ability of an audience to relate to the cartoons is a cartoonist’s greatest triumph, according to Kellett.
Of his Website wonder, Kellett said, “”At first it was just for family, but the audience grew to a few thousand by the time of my return to the States.””
Kellett was getting closer to his ultimate goal of publishing a strip in U.S. newspapers, but he was not there yet.
“”Newspapers are a shrinking market,”” he said. “”Very few cities now have more than one newspaper per town. For example, the San Diego Union-Tribune is a conglomerate of the San Diego Union and the San Diego Tribune. What this means for cartooning is that it’s a much harder industry to break into than it was years ago.””
According to Kellet, the key in overcoming these obstacles lies in finding a syndicate, which acts as an agent, manager, distributor and accountant for cartoon artists. Each syndicate provides a gateway into the 1,500 newspapers in the United States. Kellett attempted to get syndicate recognition by regularly submitting batches of samples to be Œpicked up’ for distribution while simultaneously maintaining his Web site, where the readership doubled every few months. For a while, his attempts appeared to be fruitless.
“”Every year, each syndicate receives on average 5,000 applicants, and they only choose one or two out of that pool,”” Kellett said of the fierce competition. “”You almost have to wait for someone to quit or die because there are so few slots. Once people become attached to a comic strip, they never want to give it up. You may recall that the cartoonist for ŒPeanuts,’ Charles Schultz, passed away, but his strip is still being published.””
It turns out that his submissions weren’t what gained Kellett his recognition after all ‹ rather, it was the Web site that had initially begun as a letter home to his family. United Media, the largest syndicate in the nation, happened upon his web site and approached Kellett about his work.
“”At that point my heart really dropped down into my stomach,”” he said.
United Media liked Kellett’s comic strip so much that they offered to bring Sheldon onto their Web site and see how readers reacted to it over time ‹ basically establishing an online testing ground.
United Media distributes over eighty comic strips in total, including “”Peanuts,”” “”Get Fuzzy,”” “”For Better or For Worse,”” “”Luann,”” and “”Rose Is Rose.”” United Media has instituted Kellett’s strip at http://www.sheldoncomics.com. In fact, “”Sheldon”” is appearing in print in Norway through a publishing company called Bladkompaniet and is on its eve of publication in South Korea, where it will be used as a tool in English language courses to illustrate to non-native speakers how American culture and language function.
“”The hope now on my part is that enough readers will visit the site and like the strip so that I can appear in U.S. newspapers,”” Kellett said.
Kellett’s sudden realization of his dream is by no means unattainable. What may seem like an overnight rise to fame was really a lifelong passion.
With this in mind, he said, “”If you can somehow marry your career with what you love to do, then you’ll have many happy years. Keep plugging along … go into it with the awareness that it will take you years to get to a success level you’re happy with. You have to know deep down that it’s going to be well worth it. And in the meantime, you’re making people laugh.””
