(gasp!) Never Before Seen Maintaining Strips

Not infrequently, a devout fan of my now defunct comic strip Maintaining will approach me and ask, "Mr. Creekmore, was your multiple award winning nationally syndicated comic strip often censored and heavily edited because of its outrageously groundbreaking take on the absurdities of life?" and, in truth, for a comic strip that focused almost entirely on race, religion, and the (mystery of) ladies (with a smattering of political content thrown in from time to time for good measure), Maintaining was rarely ever censored.  I can think of only a handful of strips that were rejected during the years I spent toiling away as a comic stripper.  Here are a few examples:

When I look back on the strip, I wish I'd done more to round out Steve's character.  I shed some light on his more positive traits when I made him a youth basketball coach, but he was usually more of a symbol than a person.  In this one, I was attempting to point out that Steve is not actually an idiot.  He's just a bit more sincere than he ought to be, especially since he's conversing with Anton the most cynical character in the cast.

I don't actually remember why this one was rejected.  Maybe it was too wordy (I can be a bit of a rambler when I put pen to paper).

If the above strip had not been rejected, it would've been published around May or June of 2007 when the strip was just getting started.  The reference to the word f*ck was deemed inappropriate.  At any rate, it's a bad pun.  I had it up on my website for a while, so you might have seen it before.

No one has ever asked me, "Mr. Creekmore, Marcus was always chasing or gawking at some female or other, but did Anton, his best friend, ever have a girlfriend?"  But if someone did ask, I'd say "Yes.  If you'll recall, Anton briefly dated Frieda when they were both small children.  Aside from that, I once wrote a strip where Anton (briefly) had a girlfriend and it was never published.  Here it is..." and then I'd show the person this strip:

When I submitted the following strip, my editor was concerned that readers would have a hard time finding the humor in a situation where a male is beating a female...

He was probably right.

Here's  a color illustration of Marcus, Tavian, and Lepidus (the Halfrican-American imposter; he's the one on the right getting his wig pulled off) that will be in the Maintaining compilation (one of these days)...

Also, Happy New Year.