Written by Charles Brubaker / @bakertoons .
In 1995, a brand-new webcomic appeared in the CompuServe forums, Kevin and Kell. Created by Bill Holbrook, who was already nationally syndicated with two comic strips On the Fastrack and Safe Havens, the strip featured a married wolf-and-rabbit couple navigating a world that didn’t accept marriages between a herbivore and a carnivore. The strip gained dedicated readers, and is still being produced to this day.
One of those early readers was David Allen, based in Thomasville, North Carolina. Allen was surfing CompuServe in order to find a topic for a tech column he was writing, and stumbled upon Holbrook’s strip. He was hooked. “I was totally amazed that it was on CompuServe and wasn’t syndicated,” Allen told The Business Journal in 2000. He enjoyed the strip enough that he emailed Holbrook asking if there were any book collections. To his dismay, there were none. Since the comic was already on the web there was no commercial appeal with the established publishers.
It was then that Allen approached Holbrook with a proposition: what if he were to publish the books himself?
Read more on the Cartoonist Cooperative Journal.