Dirty Duck is a comic strip character created by Bobby London in 1970. The character has been appearing regularly for over forty years now. But there has never been a book collection printed. Anyone know why?
London owns the character. He’s still making new strips so he presumably has no dislike for the character. He’s published other stuff he’s done.
I realize Dirty Duck isn’t the most famous characters in comic strips. But there are characters a lot less famous that have been collected in book form.
Probably a lack of popularity. I remember the strip from the National Lampoon days, but it didn’t get much notice back then and I don’t think Playboy Press is interested in compiling it.
I’m not 100% certain but I’m pretty sure London owns the rights. He certainly did when the character started out and he’s been able to move the strip between venues with no apparent problems.
If anything, the fact that there hasn’t been a collection published indicates London must hold the rights. National Lampoon and Playboy have both published collections of other comic strips from their magazine. It seems unusual they both would have decided to forego publishing a collection of one of their longest running strips. So a likely explanation is that London holds the republication rights.
All I can guess is that the strip doesn’t have a fan with either the decision making power in a publishing company or the tenacity to get it done.
Either that, or London is not interested in making a collection of something he is still working on. When he was married to Shary Flenniken, she seemed to be the real go-getter in that relationship.
The collection was only published in France. I don’t know if it was published in the original English or translated. It’s out of print but you can still find a few copies on Amazon France.
I saw an interview Flenniken did last October in which she said she’d like to release a Trots and Bonnie collection. But she admitted she’s been saying that for twenty years and it hasn’t happened.
But is it enough to support publication? There’s no way of knowing since there’s no way to gauge its popularity; it’s been published in venues where it had only to please two people: Bobby London and his editor.
