It's a Guy Thing

Jim Ryan, author of the new book "The '70s: Life in a Dumb Decade," is now launching a daily syndicated strip, Guy Stuff. Based on his earlier alternative strips Guy Culture and Lowlife Scum, the strip follows what Ryan calls "three kind of lowlife guys who live in crummy apartments, who have desperate social lives and dead-end jobs. It comments on the living and mating habits of guys." If this sounds vaguely familiar to a certain comic book, there's an explanation: "Buddy Bradley's pad in Hate was based on my pad, on characters Peter [Bagge] and I knew in Hoboken."

There's another tie between Ryan's strip and alternative comics: "Hank, the main character in the new strip, started in a strip I did in the L.A. Weekly in 1986 called Palooka-Ville. When Seth's Palooka-Ville comic came out, my first reaction was that I felt I had more of a right to use the name, since I was writing about people I knew here in Hoboken and that was where On the Waterfront, where the line about 'Palooka-Ville' came from, took place. But I like Seth's work, really."

Guy Stuff has a tentative launch date of April 6, if United Feature Syndicate can sell it to enough newspapers.

[It did launch on that date, and lasted nearly 2 years.]