For the past several weeks, Scott Adams (the artist of the comic, Dilbert, no relation) has been hosting a sort-of contest looking for a new artist for the comic strip, Unfit. Unfit is an extremely funny comic written by Mike Belkin that doesn’t exactly have huge readership. Adams maintains that the artwork of the comic is holding it back somewhat.

I forwarded this information on to my brother who works with a guy who is an illustrator and also knows another guy who is a terrific artist. The guy my brother works with submitted his artwork and it was selected for the top 15. I was a real big fan of his version of the comic. I thought that it was clean and readable and the characters were very likable.

He didn’t win (if that’s what you want to call it…the selection was actually made by Belkin with input from his newspaper syndicate).

The results were posted today. This artwork isn’t final, but the artwork looks like this:

To me, it looks an awful lot like the old Blondie characters, with a little bit of Archie thrown in. It was a very popular submission, but for me, I just didn’t think that it was the right choice. I guess I was wrong.

If you’re wondering what I think should have won (and I’m a little biased, I know, but still…it was really good):

Lance’s was ranked #3 after the first vote and I really thought he had a decent shot. I liked his comic because it was clean and I thought that it captured the characters well. However, I would have liked to have seen a couple more strips, particularly one with Mike’s wife Stacey, who is probably one of the harder characters to draw in the comic. Her and the chicken. (Can you see why I read this comic?)

Anyway, I think that it was a pretty cool process. What I liked the most about it was how open and honest Scott Adams was about the whole process. I just wanted to say good job to Lance, too. I thought that his comics were successful and they certainly were deserving of recognition.