Steve Nease talk attracts an audience

I'll post more later, but here's an interesting story about the name of the Pud comic strip. It was posted in response to this blog post, which questioned the reason Steve used the name:

As a kid, Steve loved the Lionel Barrymore movie "On Borrowed Time". When he had a child named Ben, he started calling him "Pud" (Bobs Watson as John "Pud" Northrup), after the child in the film.

In the 1980s, he did an editorial cartoon about how children flock to advertisements. The editorial was illustrated in two panels, and received great response from readers and newspaper co-workers.

He decided to do up some more samples, which he showed the editor. The editor decided he could use extra content to fill up the space on the editorial page, and the strip's been going strong since.

At the time the strip started Fleer had stopped putting their "Fleer Funnies starring Pud" strip in the Dubble Bubble gum packages. He decided he could safely name the strip after this character, without confusion. Four years later, the comics in the gum packages restarted.

He says he's considered renaming the strip, and has a title that he's batted around in his mind (which he didn't reveal to us), but he's just never got around to it.