Comics authorship, credited as literature

1955–PRESENT · THE STRIP WRITTEN FROM A PAPER ROUTE — THE ROUTE GRADED

The comics test names Jerry Scott (born May 2, 1955, in South Bend), and the paper-route story at the checklist's heart verifies — with its geography graded in the open. Scott's own account, given to the Juneau Empire in 2018 and carried in his King Features / GoComics biography, is that he “got a paper route in South Bend, Indiana,” delivering the South Bend Tribune by bicycle at eleven, and read the Sunday funnies by flashlight from the bundle before anyone else saw them. The route was a city-of-South-Bend route; no source reached places it in the townships, and this build does not move it east. The authorship that grew from it is credited here as literature, as the checklist requires, with the writer's share stated exactly: Scott writes and Rick Kirkman draws Baby Blues (first published January 7, 1990; Creators Syndicate, later King Features); Scott writes and Jim Borgman draws Zits (King Features, from July 7, 1997); Scott also wrote and modernised Nancy from 1983 into the 1990s, and won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 2001. He is one of only four cartoonists with two daily strips each syndicated in over a thousand newspapers. At CDP strength, the comics class is a tested negative: the syndicate and Tribune comics-file searches returned no strip authored from this ground.

Sources: Juneau Empire, July 3, 2018, Scott interview (the paper route, in his own words); King Features Syndicate cartoonist record and GoComics' Baby Blues author page (syndicates, launch dates, the Reuben Award, the writer/artist division of labour).