kartooner

I’ve been an avid reader of the online comic, Mel­on­pool. The comic fol­lows the adven­tures of “two aliens, a tele­pathic dog and a 220-lb. ham­ster” and the inter­ac­tions of the char­ac­ters are as hilar­i­ous as they are intriguing.

When I stum­bled upon Mel­on­pool 5 years ago it was the result of a ran­dom Yahoo! search. Typ­ing feve­ri­ously (65 WPM and chicken peckin’) at my key­board I came up with some­thing along the lines of “aliens and hamp­sters.” Why I linked these two together I’ll never know, but lo and behold the first link on the list was Mel­on­pool. I sat there for a cou­ple min­utes won­der­ing what a Mel­on­pool was and decided it would be best to inves­ti­gate the mat­ter by click­ing the link.

Upon enter­ing the site I noticed a blue back­ground with a white swirl and a hand­ful of car­toon char­ac­ters star­ring back at me. Imme­di­at­edly I read through the archives and was hooked from there on. I entered my email into the form and every Sun­day received the comic strip in my Inbox. Believe me, I couldn’t wait to see what was in store for May­berry Mel­on­pool and the gang. Which brings me to what the comic is about; pop cul­ture. You would think Steve Troop (the cre­ator of Mel­on­pool) would have gone with the cliché plot where aliens land on Earth and destroy every­thing in their path, includ­ing that lone flower. Rather, Troop decides to write the sto­ry­lines around the sub­ject of the aliens’ inter­est with Earth’s culture.

May­berry (the Cap­tain) is a Star Trek fan because in space they receive our television/satellite sig­nals many light years after the series has gone off the air. To the alien, he’s impressed by the char­ac­ters and ulti­mately gets to meet his heroes in a Time Travel plot that is immensely hard to explain with­out read­ing the archives. Which brings me to the key to this suc­cess­ful comic, the inter­ac­tions of its char­ac­ters and their curi­ousity of pop cul­ture. Troop even elab­o­rates on the fact that his comic was viewed by an exec­u­tive at NBC and coin­ci­den­tally the pop­u­lar tele­vi­sion show, Third Rock from the Sun, sprung into the lineup.

I had the oppor­tu­nity to inter­view Steve Troop in 1999 for a col­lege course I was tak­ing. The course, Intro­duc­tion to Mass Media, called for a paper that described a “media fig­ure” and their “suc­cess­ful ven­tures”. The twist to this paper was that you had to inter­view the media mogul (in per­son) and write a 5-page paper about the inter­view. I chose Steve Troop for the same rea­sons his strip is suc­cess­ful among its fans; for the money.

I recieved an A+ on the paper and was indeed richer, but not with the great green­back. The wealth came from what I found out about a young boy’s dream in San Diego, Cal­i­for­nia. To sim­ply draw car­toons. Indeed, I was richer with the notion that he is in fact liv­ing his dreams come true.

Sure, there might not be the suc­cess of news­pa­per syn­di­ca­tion (a goal Troop has envi­sioned for years) but the real suc­cess lies in the fans that sup­port the comic strip through its com­pi­la­tion books and the com­mu­nity within the Mel­on­pool mes­sage boards. At the moment, there are 5 books and con­tained within each book are sev­eral per­sonal nota­tions and reflec­tions from Troop while cre­at­ing each strip, some­thing he cre­ated while in col­lege, and other extras that you won’t see on the web site.

Do your­self a favor today and go read Mel­on­pool. Enjoy the 1,000+ strips con­tained within the archive and grow with the characters.

If you’d rather read the strips offline, buy a book.

Pat your­self on the back because you’ll be sup­port­ing the con­tin­u­a­tion of a won­der­ful comic strip.