To date, Chicken Strips has been my most popular comic strip.  In its four year run in The Delta Collegiate, the comic has accumulated more positive feedback from students and professors alike than anything else I've created before or since.  Many friends of mine who'd only read Mother's Goofs or Waste Products have flipped through my old Chicken Strips comics and have become immediate fans, often preferring it over my current cartoon endeavors.  Peck, the star of the strip, was my response to editorial cartoons.  At the time I despised them, yet part of the stipulation to my employment on the Collegiate was that one of my comics had to be editorial.  I gave it a shot for a year with my Cartoon Ruckus strip (which, in retrospect, was about as editorial as The family Circus), but by 1997 I knew it wasn't working out.

I devised a new comic around a little chicken I'd been drawing in notebooks and on placemats.  The name Peck just fit, and the title Chicken Strips was derived from a popular entrée from Tony's Restaurant in Saginaw (an oasis for my creative and digestive sustentation for most of my youth).  I falsely promoted Chicken Strips to my editor as an experimental editorial cartoon.  It was experimental for sure, but by no means editorial.  I basically used the comic to do whatever I wanted, and what I wanted was fart jokes, light sexual innuendo and cheap laughs.

The ironic thing is, as I allowed myself to play and be crazy with Chicken Strips, I found personal opinions and thoughts forming and seeping into the comic.  Ultimately, Chicken Strips became, occasionally, editorial.  So through farts and sex I found my political voice.  It's oddly fitting, really.

Peck would go on to (temporarily) co-star in Gunk's second comic strip, Hodge Podge.  In the middle of my first year at CMU, lack of response to Mother's Goofs caused me to shelve the strip for the rest of the year in favor of reinstating Chicken Strips.  By year two, however, I felt that Goofs deserved a second chance, and Chicken Strips was officially retired.

The world's not through with Peck yet, however.  He'll be a featured character in a new comic book I'm creating.  The inclusion of poop jokes has yet to be determined.