Green Monkeys

Green Monkeys has been running in Dan's Papers since that day in 1999, my mother, Betty, decided that Junior Kroll was done. Junior, a weekly story-poem, had been running since June 8th, 1990. Junior had an amazing run. Every week, without a break my mother would bang out a 28 or 32 line poem about Junior's crazy life and family.

But that day, when I asked her where this week's episode was, surprised me. She told me she had said just enough of Junior, Honey Duff, Father Kroll, Mother, Grandfather, Crazy Max, Artie the Parrot and countless relatives.

The Green Monkeys had been sitting around in development for ages at Disney as an animated series. Before the mess at Disney Animation, our beloved monkeys were two characters in a feature film that had been optioned to Fox Animation. Spider and Flytrap were the two monkey bellhops that worked at the Royal Flush Hotel. It was a rats and cats movie called Leo "Spats" Ratcatcher.

So here we were with Junior Kroll finished and a weekly empty page in Dan's Papers to deal with. I never wanted to work on a weekly or daily comic but there they were, Spider and Flytrap, with their smiling faces and gung-ho way of dealing with life. We both wrote the comic. Sometimes I would start them and Betty would add the punch line and other times it was reversed. In 2010 after my mother passed away I took over the comic.

I had some wonderful writing work from my wife Maria. She's very funny. She thinks more visually than Betty did. Mom was more of a wordsmith.

So here for better or worse is The Green Monkeys. It's now been running on a weekly basis longer than Junior Kroll. We're still working on that animated TV idea. It's like rolling a rock up a hill. Dream Big I always say.