One of the first things I'm always asked about in reference to my daily comic strip The Cynic is where did the name come from? Am I the cynic or is it just one of the characters or all of the characters? Is the comic strip supposed to be cynical or represent cynicism?

And I always reply by asking, "How did you get my AIM?"

I am a little cynical, yes, and actually when I put the strip into a daily rotation I was probably more cynical than I am now. I know a lot of people, including skeptics and optimists, who don't care much for the word since they equate it with pessimism. But cynicism primarily has to do with "not trusting". Not trusting who? Well, the government for starters. More than that I would say strangers you meet in downtown Seattle who come over to you and act like you're old friends--a sure sign that they're going to ask for money and or pull a scam. I once got off the bus after working a 20 hour shift at a gaming company (this is long before I started cartooning online) and was waiting for a ride home from my girlfriend when two guys suddenly walked up to me and pretended to be my friends, "Hey buddy, can I talk to you for a moment?" I replied in a sleepy stupor, "Sorry, not interested." I guess I must have sounded rude because before I could realize it one of the guys put out his cigarette in my chest and walked off. Friendly people indeed.

The Cynic comic strip itself is not focused on cynicism as a subject or is promoting any sort of cynical lifestyle. My view is that everything is good in moderation including a dose of cynicism. The main character of the feature, Kevin, is probably too cynical and with good reason. He is based on a friend of mine who I thought I had found again through email but then disappeared into Alaska. So don't blame me if you find Kevin hard to take, he really exists. That's not exactly fair, though, since I infuse some of my own opinions and ideas into Kevin. He's kind of a hybrid between the real person of Kevin and the ideas of cartoonist Jeff Swenson.

The real History of The Cynic starts a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far--well, in my room, in my parents house. That's where I seriously started to apply myself drawing a comic strip called Young Geezers. At the time I was devoutly religious so that strip was overly-evangelical (Reverend Fun is a wimp compared to the apologetics I put down on paper) but mixed with bad taste; even as someone who was religious I never had a problem with bad taste as long as the message was according to Christian morals. At the same time my dad had told me to get a job since I was a senior and would be graduating in couple of months. I was also going to have to pay rent for my bedroom if I planned to stick around. The rent was cheap and there was an open fridge so I took the deal.

The job I, er, chose was at Burgerville. This was in Oregon and Burgerville is a rip off combination of McDonald's, Wendy's and BurgerKing. They gave me the title of grill manager and my prestige was at an all time high as I served people up their obesity and heart attacks. Soon to be my grill mate was one Kevin Richey who gave off the impression that he was under sedation and might be manic depressive. Once you get to know Kevin though you realize he's not sedated, he's just quietly crazy.

And there was my inspiration for the cartoon Kevin, a real Kevin. He often talked about being teased as a kid for being overweight and we had an ongoing joke about saving "the fat boy". The fat boy was any poor kid with a weight problem who you knew was going to be picked on by his peers and grow up with psychological problems. I had been bullied and teased myself in school for having thick glasses so I understood how this process works. Thankfully, I take out all my aggressions out on paper which cleanses me of any psychotic behavior--except for yelling at people who play their bass too loud.

Kevin entered my current strip Young Geezers as the leader of The Fatboy Anti-Defamation League, a storyline I have since repeated in The Cynic. The original anti-defamation league storyline is not recommended moral reading because at the time I was homophobic--again I was devoutly religious and a Biblical literalist--and the storyline was intended as a vague metaphor against gay rights. This same storyline I repeated in The Cynic but with major changes could be construed as metaphor if you would like, but if anything were to be read into it it would be aimed at anti-defamation leagues that go too far and want to protect their minority group from any stereotype or perceived insult. Don't get me wrong, Anti-defamation Leagues are necessary but they can get overly excited at times and do more damage than good as far as public relations are concerned. Cartooning also indulges in stereotypes which means I'm in trouble as soon as I set pen to paper. I mean c'mon, I have 4 panels with very little text. Stereotypes are necessary.

Whoops, I'm off on a tangent. Let's skip forward to art school. I bailed on Bible College (another long story) and headed for Seattle to the Art Institute Of Seattle, a place where the school recruiters are more talented than a good percentage of the teachers. I'm not saying I received a bad education there--well, yes, actually I am saying that. I've heard now that they are accredited and got rid of all of their old teachers to meet the new standards. Anyways, I kept working on comic strips. I started a new one called Sandbill's Beach about life on a beach with seagulls, crabs, and a fat beachcomber named Kevin. Every few months or so when I had finished 24 strips I submitted them to all of the big shot editors at the syndicates. A syndicate sounds like it's part of the mob but what they do is represent a feature so it can be marketed to newspapers. I never was accepted but the editor for King's Features who distributes Popeye and other well known features wrote some notes on my xerox copies that the beach idea was too constraining and to try putting the human character in a more realistic setting. I did and called it "Kevin's Muse" about a writer who never has time to write because he's too busy paying the bills. When I sent that one in I made the mistake of including a storyline about threatening to give the landlord's dog a vasectomy. Apparently the King's Features editor was not amused and simply wrote "mean" on my submission and returned it. He never replied again.

After finishing art school and landing a really swell job--at the local movie theater--I didn't do much cartooning work. It wasn't until almost a year later that I, by pure luck, was able to get a 3 month contract at a children's gaming company where over half of the employees smoked pot, swore, talked about their first sexual experiences and swore vociferously. And through one of the artists there I attended an open house thrown by an artist's co-op consisting of comicbook writers and artists. One thing led to another and I started volunteering there to work on layouts and page designs for their upcoming anthology--which never made it to print. Because of office politics, the current art director resigned and lucky me, I got the job. A job I was completely unsuited for. What the hell did I know about art directing? I was barely a cartoonist.

Eventually this Artist Co-op did put out their comics in print, in the form of a free tabloid distributed throughout Seattle. And that's where Kevin's Muse was briefly resurrected. The tabloid died after 3 issues due to lack of advertising even though there was plenty of interest. My art directing job was also gone after the 1st issue because we were trying to put everything we had behind the publication. I hit the want ads and found a customer service job at a hellhole called BCT, a wholesale printery servicing Kinko's, Copymax and independent printers that never got the same discounted pricing. As I tend to thrive in hellholes I kept that job and at night I begin to mess around with trying to create a website and send my cartoons out by email. Eventually I was able to digest enough HTML to make a site and started drawing Kevin's Muse again, however, I renamed it "The Cynic". Why? Because I had lost an art directing job, my cartooning career was going nowhere, and I was working in a hellhole with a family-owned business filled with angry bosses. This was a time to be cynical about my future and I really didn't care what people thought. The name was also catchier than "Kevin's Muse". In this illiterate society how many people know what a "muse" is?

Originally, the strip was not going to be a daily. I was already drawing a gag cartoon series that was daily and a kids' feature that was daily so I'd be crazy to do another daily. My intention was to post storylines of The Cynic on my main site SwensonFunnies.com whenever they got done. But then a webmaster for a now defunct website asked me if he could post The Cynic and then someone else wanted to use the strips and so forth and so I gave in and set up yet another rotating daily strip. I was able to start grabbing freelance work after a couple of months online and eventually got enough work that I could ditch my hellhole job. The Cynic has been running ever since.

And there you have it. From 2000 and on The Cynic has been an outlet for anything and everything that I'm thinking about or want to parody or explore or just think is funny. There aren't any rules or prohibitions for the strip except that I don't do explicit nudity or anything like that. Really what I try to do with the feature is allow the characters to speak their own minds and argue about politics or social issues without a final consensus. Ultimately, I want the strip to be character driven and not ideologically driven.

In the end, and in the year 2006 when I'm typing this out, I have to say that my level of cynicism has probably dropped somewhat. You might say I'm a cynical optimist. The key being knowing who and what to trust based on experience. We all have some cynicism in us and maybe we're not all Kevins but I think it's healthy to have a wise ass retort to institutions and individuals trying to pull a fast one in their favor.