Bill Bettwy works on “The Tinkersons” on his Microsoft Surface in his Altoona home. Mirror photo by Patrick Waksmunski

Bill Bettwy works on The Tinkersons on his Microsoft Surface in his Altoona home.

It’s been 10 years since Altoona native Bill Bettwy brought Take It From the Tinkersons to the comics section of newspapers across the country and he shows no sign of slowing down.

Bettwy’s passion for comics and drawing started young, with his original goal being to get into animation.

Entirely self-taught, he began character and production design for animated projects.

“Nothing that ever got, you know, the green light,” Bettwy said. “I also did some character design for Sony and Mattel Interactive, a couple different places like that.”

In the background, however, Bettwy was always drawing, creating different comic strips and submitting them to various publications.

Comic years in the making

It took about 10 years of persistent submissions for a company to finally bite, Bettwy said.

“I don’t even know how many they take on now, but back then, I mean, it was one a year,” Bettwy said. “They would take out of thousands of submissions. So yeah, I lucked out.”

It was Tea Fougner, then a junior editor at Hearst’s King Features Syndicate managing the submissions pile, that pulled Bettwy’s Take it From the Tinkersons from the stack.

“For my first 10 years at King Features, Take it from the Tinkersons was the only comic we brought to syndication through the slush pile, a pretty incredible accomplishment in a very competitive field,” Fougner, now the comics department’s editorial director, said.

Bettwy said that the funny thing about that submission was that, before, he had used “really cool envelopes” and put them in a box covered in drawings, trying to get people’s attention. The submission that Fougner selected however, was plain with only a sticky note on it with Bettwy’s name and phone number on it.

“I was almost at the point where I was probably going to quit doing it because I was just like this — it’s impossible,” Bettwy said. “And then I decided I’m just gonna throw these in an envelope, put my name and phone number in it and if they call, they call.”

Fougner described Bettwy’s comic “the perfect modern take on the quintessential family comic strip” and that “watching Bill’s tone and characters develop over the years has been a joy.”

“Bill balances enthusiasm and angst so deftly to capture the voice of the average American family in the early 21st century,” Fougner said.

Looking back on his previous submissions, Bettwy says he understands why they weren’t picked up like the Tinkersons.

“They were so bad,” Bettwy said, laughing.

The next step for the Tinkersons was three years of development and then waiting to be in the queue for an official launch, Bettwy said, as King already had a few comics in place that hadn’t launched yet.

“So even when in development, it just felt like there were a couple of times it was just gonna fall through,” Bettwy said. “Because I’ve been so close before with the animation thing.”

Tinkersons not an autobiography

While things that happen in the Bettwy family’s lives might make their way into a Tinkersons comic, Bettwy said that the Tinkersons are not the Bettwys.

“My wife, she loves it,” Bettwy said. “She has like a dog walking group, and in the mornings, everyone that she talks to says something about the Tinkersons and they always think that whatever they’re reading in the Tinkersons is happening to us.”

The premise of the Tinkersons comics are largely situational, Bettwy said, centering around things that can happen to anyone — from someone leaving the refrigerator door open to trying to use an old copier at the office to a hot water tank going bad.

“People will find it funny just because ‘oh my god, that’s exactly what happened to us,'” Bettwy said. “And I do get a lot of those comments that you’ll see online like ‘it’s like he’s looking in our house or something.'”

Along with the married couple Ted and Tiff Tinkerson, the comic features their two children, son Tillman and daughter Tweetie, as well as two dogs Tubby and Lily.

“Lily is actually the name of our one dog,” Bettwy said. “So that’s actually legit.”

Featuring Altoona

The Tinkersons may not be the Bettwys, but in their comic world the Tinkersons frequently visit Altoona and its local hotspots.

The Tinkersons have been shown with Al at Al’s Tavern on Eighth Avenue, picking up pizza from Mama Randazzo’s on Broadway, Zac’s on Sixth Avenue and Mike’s Court on Fifth Street, Bettwy said.

Bettwy has even done weeklong promotions with DelGrosso’s, having the Tinkersons riding and eating at the Tipton-based amusement and water park.

Bettwy, and the Tinkersons, are also well-known at the Mirror, with Managing Editor Neil Rudel congratulating Bettwy on his comic’s 10-year anniversary.

“He’s got a great sense of humor, mixes in local flavor, and his artwork has really evolved during his tenure,” Rudel said. “We look forward to another 10 years of the Tinkersons and Bill’s work.”

Changing with the times

When Bettwy started out drawing comics, he would do it by hand before scanning them to his computer to trace and color them. Now, he does all his work on a tablet, which he says has cut time spent working on the Tinkersons in half.

However, creating a comic strip and preparing it for national newspapers, both online and in print, is still time consuming, Bettwy said. Every Friday, he sends King six daily comic strips and a Sunday strip to run in six and eight weeks time, respectively.

“So that’s how far ahead I am or so far ahead they need them,” Bettwy said.

The comics also have to be in different formats like black and white, color, black and white strip, black and white stack and dot strip color stacked, Bettwy said.

That’s about 20-30 hours of work on top of his full time job as the vice president of marketing and recruiting at Ward Transport and Logistics.

“I usually have a direction by Monday morning of … where I’m heading,” Bettwy said. “And then I gotta lay it out throughout the week, but then drawing it — that’s the time consuming part.”

National syndication

Since King Features took on his Tinkersons comic, it has been nationally syndicated, appearing in between 600 and 700 print and digital newspapers, Bettwy said. The Tinkersons have appeared in newspapers in places like Denver, Chicago, St. Louis, Portland, Salt Lake City, Miami, Albuquerque and Las Vegas, as well as up and down the California coast.

A co-worker of Bettwy’s frequently travels to Connecticut to visit family and, while there, sends Bettwy photos of the Tinkersons in the New Haven Register, Bettwy said.

“It’s just neat when someone that I know goes somewhere and then they see it somewhere,” Bettwy said.

His experience with writing the Tinkersons has even landed Bettwy gigs writing for Dennis the Menace, another King Features comic, and Archie Comics.

“I emailed the editor of Archie for 10 years,” Bettwy said. “That’s not a joke — I think they finally replied after I had some street cred.”

While creating comics doesn’t bring in enough money that Bettwy could quit his day job, he said he loves the work so he plans on sticking with it as long as he can.

“I still love to do it,” Bettwy said. “It’d be really weird to not like to not have to think of something for a comic.”

Mirror Staff Writer Rachel Foor is at 814-946-7458.