This WHOLE deal was filmed and aired for the show. Along the way Nuts & Bolts was given a weekly spot in the San Francisco Examiner. On February 12th 1993, he moved into a house on Russian Hill and they began filming. 6 months and 6 'levels' later, Judd was in. The 'Audition process,' was everything from doing a video, to filling out a 15 page application, to in-person interviews with the producers, to being followed around and filmed for a day. You get free rent, free moving costs, you get to live in San Francisco, and get to be a famous pig on television. For those who may not know, The Real World is a real-life documentary soap opera, where 7 strangers from around the country are put up in a house and filmed for six months. In August of 1993 he saw an ad on MTV for The Real World III, San Francisco. At one point he even turned the human characters into mice (Young Urban Mice and Rat Race were the working titles). Getting by doing spot illustration jobs, Judd actually had Nuts & Bolts in development with Nickelodeon as an animated series. The bottom dropped out when the syndicate decided that they were not going to pursue Nuts and Bolts for syndication and were terminating his development contract.Ĭrushed and almost broke, he moved back in with his parents in July 1993. Judd spent the next year living in Boston, and developing his strip. They act as an agent or broker and sell comic strips to newspapers). They sold out in about 2 weeks and there are no plans to republish it.īefore graduation he accepted a development deal with a major syndicate (syndicates are the major league baseball of comic strips.

Watching the Spin-Cycle: the Nuts & Bolts collection had a small run of a thousand books a couple of months before graduation.

Nuts & Bolts ran in The Michigan Daily 5 days a week from my freshman year (freshperson, or first-year student, as they liked to say at U of M), until graduation in the spring of 1992.Ī collection of those college years Nuts & Bolts was published in Ann Arbor. In August of 1988, Judd began attending the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor bringing Nuts & Bolts with him, but turning it into a four-panel strip and creating a cast of characters to tell his tales. This ran weekly through Anton Publications, a newspaper publisher that produced town papers in the Tri state area. Born February 12th, 1970 and raised on Long Island in New York, Judd began cartooning professionally at 16 with a single-paneled strip called Nuts & Bolts.

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