Rand Carlson’s voice catches when he remembers one morning in the late 1980s. His father had opened the San Jose Mercury News, turned to the comics page, and found his son’s work staring back at him.
“He got on the phone and said, ‘Son, you’re in the paper,’” Carlson recalls. “It was a gift, a real thrill.”
That moment—seeing his work in “The New Breed,” a King Features Syndicate strip created to fill the void left by Gary Larson’s retirement from “The Far Side”—represented hard work and passion…