The Elf Squad
(La Elfa Roto)
I created the cartoon strip The Elf Squad
in the early 1970s. It first appeared in Montage,
the school newspaper for Meramec Community College in Kirkwood, Missouri.
The strip then moved with me to UMSL Current,
the school newspaper at the University of Missouri, St.Louis. The strip
survived for another year or two after I graduated when a group of
cartoonists (including me) formed a short lived company called
Polygraphics, which sold cartoons to college
newspapers around the country. Well, a few, anyway. The strip came back
professionally one more time when a company called
The Cartoon Factory, Ltd. picked it up. This
company sold cartoon strips to weekly community newspapers for about a
year before it folded.
The Elf Squad languished after that, until
I was commissioned to draw four more cartoons for the amazingly long-lived
science fiction fanzine Science Fiction
Five-Yearly. (It helped that I knew the publisher.)
The Elf Squad then appeared in
The Bear Facts, the school paper of Plainview
High School in Rainsville, Alabama for a few years.
So the strip pops up every now and then, never making it big, but refusing
to die altogether.
© 2021 Gary Ross Hoffman
E-mail Gary Ross Hoffman