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Drawing on
his pastime
Andrew Feinstein '98BBA and his best buddy,
Justin Borus, are just a couple of twenty-five-year-olds who like girls
and sports. Their pastime became their work after they hatched the idea
for their syndicated comic strip named Girls & Sports at the University
of Copenhagen in 1997 during a semester abroad.
"I would start drawing these comics in class. Justin would write
the jokes, and we'd pass them around and everyone really laughed at them,"
says Feinstein. Back in their hometown of Denver for the summer, the friends
met with two cartoonists for the Rocky Mountain News, who suggested
they target college newspapers.
The team put together a packet of about twenty-four comics, which Feinstein
describes as "awful looking," and they self-syndicated to college
newspapers. Simultaneously, they submitted their work to all the national
syndicates and were rejected by all of them. Every year, they repeated
the pattern--"a college paper push and a packet for the syndicates."
Every year, they'd make it into about fifteen or twenty college papers
and receive rejections from the syndicates. By 1999, they'd about had
it.
"We were both working so hard. (Feinstein for Warner Brothers New
Media in Los Angeles and Borus for Bear, Stearns in London). We were so
slammed that we'd basically given it up," Feinstein recalls. "I
said, 'Hey, let's just send one more thing to the syndicates.'"
The fall 1999 submission resulted in a call in late spring 2000 from King
Features. They'd made it.
Today, they produce ten strips a week to wind up with the seven that the
editor accepts. This schedule finds them tossing jokes back and forth
across the Atlantic every day, and it means that Feinstein uses virtually
all of his free time to draw. It takes him anywhere from one to three
hours to draw a single strip.
At Warner Brothers, Feinstein is on the team that's creating brand new
Looney Tunes cartoons for looneytunes.com, which will launch this spring
with original cartoons appearing every other week.
Meanwhile, they labor to get Girls & Sports into more national newspapers
(they're in eight now) and hook readers for the long haul.
"The entertainment business is all about putting yourself in a position
to be lucky. Then, when the luck happens, you have to be smart enough
to know what to do with it," Feinstein figures. "I'm trying
to get Girls & Sports in front of the right kind of decision makers.
We'd like to see calendars and books and sponsorships of sports teams,
even a TV series. I have all those dreams, and at least we're taking the
right steps to get there."
To read the comic strip Girls & Sports, see www.girlsandsports.com/.
--Carol Carter
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