Ollie and Quentin

Last updated
Ollie and Quentin
Author(s) Piers Baker
Current status / schedule Concluded
Launch date 2002; 2008 (syndication)
End date 2011
Syndicate(s) King Features Syndicate
Genre(s) Humor, gag-a-day

Ollie and Quentin is a British comic strip created by the British cartoonist Piers Baker in 2002 and later distributed by King Features Syndicate.

Comic strip short serialized comics

A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, these have been published in newspapers and magazines, with horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in daily newspapers, while Sunday newspapers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections. With the development of the internet, they began to appear online as webcomics. There were more than 200 different comic strips and daily cartoon panels in South Korea alone each day for most of the 20th century, for a total of at least 7,300,000 episodes.

Cartoonist visual artist who makes cartoons

A cartoonist is a visual artist who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is often created for entertainment, political commentary, or advertising. Cartoonists may work in many formats, such as booklets, comic strips, comic books, editorial cartoons, graphic novels, manuals, gag cartoons, graphic design, illustrations, storyboards, posters, shirts, books, advertisements, greeting cards, magazines, newspapers, and video game packaging.

Piers Hans-Peter Baker is a British cartoonist best known for his comic strip Ollie and Quentin, distributed by King Features Syndicate, about the curious activities of a seagull and a lugworm.

Contents

Characters and story

The buddy storyline follows the friendship of seagull Ollie and lugworm Quentin. King Features offers a detailed description of the setting and characters:

Gull seabirds of the family Laridae

Gulls or seagulls are seabirds of the family Laridae in the suborder Lari. They are most closely related to the terns and only distantly related to auks, skimmers, and more distantly to the waders. Until the 21st century, most gulls were placed in the genus Larus, but this arrangement is now considered polyphyletic, leading to the resurrection of several genera. An older name for gulls is mews, cognate with German Möwe, Danish måge, Dutch meeuw, and French mouette; this term can still be found in certain regional dialects.

Lugworm marine worm

The lugworm or sandworm is a large marine worm of the phylum Annelida. Its coiled castings are a familiar sight on a beach at low tide but the animal itself is rarely seen except by those who, from curiosity or to use as fishing bait, dig the worm out of the sand.

Ollie and Quentin is a buddy strip about the unlikely friendship between a seagull named Ollie and an accident-prone lugworm named Quentin. They are best friends despite the obvious food chain disparity that suggests Ollie should be interested in Quentin more as a snack than as a friend. They live in a coastal town with Nobby, an affable single guy who serves as both foil and witness to their silly, mischievous high jinks. During their adventurous romps together, Ollie is somewhat oblivious to the dangers that Quentin's small size presents. Despite Ollie's protective brotherly nature, Quentin endures many hysterical, albeit, unfortunate accidents, such as getting sucked into a vacuum cleaner, being blown up as a party balloon and even requiring brief hospitalization after Nobby mistakes him for a piece of chewing gum. [1]

Origin

The strip originated in the United Kingdom in 2002, with King Features introducing it to international syndication in early 2008. Baker considers the strip "an homage to all the poor lugworms that he used as bait while sea fishing in his youth." [2]

United Kingdom Country in Europe

The United Kingdom (UK), officially the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is a sovereign country located off the north-western coast of the European mainland. The United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom that shares a land border with another sovereign state, the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border, the United Kingdom is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to the east, the English Channel to the south and the Celtic Sea to the south-west, giving it the 12th-longest coastline in the world. The Irish Sea lies between Great Britain and Ireland. With an area of 242,500 square kilometres (93,600 sq mi), the United Kingdom is the 78th-largest sovereign state in the world. It is also the 22nd-most populous country, with an estimated 66.0 million inhabitants in 2017.

Print syndication distributes news articles, columns, comic strips and other features to newspapers, magazines and websites

Print syndication distributes news articles, columns, political cartoons, comic strips and other features to newspapers, magazines and websites. The syndicates offer reprint rights and grant permissions to other parties for republishing content of which they own and/or represent copyrights. Other terms for the service include a newspaper syndicate, a press syndicate, and a feature syndicate.

On December 19, 2011, Baker announced that the lack of newspaper interest had brought the syndicated strip to an end:

Ollie and Quentin simply isn’t attracting newspaper readers, so King Features and I have reluctantly decided to end that part of our relationship at the end of the year. This is painfully sad but not unexpected. Ollie and Quentin is a gem of a comic, but that just hasn’t translated into newspaper sales which are so vital to the success of any comic... I have never worked harder or longer, never sacrificed more and have never earned less in my whole cartoon career. That said I wouldn’t have missed the last four years for anything. My ambition in life was to be a newspaper syndicated cartoonist and for four wonderful years I lived that dream. . . I won’t miss hearing that my comic has been dropped from a newspaper or reading my depressing monthly sales reports. I won’t miss comic polls, I won’t miss despairing at the decisions of newspapers (a fight that can never be won), and I won’t miss staying up too late, never reading books, rarely traveling and being poor. [3]

The same day, King Features announced that the strip would begin online reruns in January 2012, [4] and the strip relaunch began January 9 as Ollie and Quentin Revisited. [1]

The strips were collected in the book Ollie and Quentin, published December 2011. [5]

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References

  1. 1 2 DailyINK
  2. ↑ "Introducing Ollie and Quentin", January 7, 2008.
  3. ↑ "Ollie and Quentin to end in newspapers"
  4. ↑ Burford, Brendan. "Piers Baker's Ollie and Quentin Fly Away", December 19, 2011.
  5. ↑ CreateSpace
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