Wiley Miller

I began my career in art illustrating educational films. But my interest was always in print and cartooning, so in 1977 I moved from film in Southern California to work as a staff artist and editorial cartoonist for the Greensboro Daily News and the Greensboro Record (they were the morning and evening papers at the time and have since merged into one). In 1979 I moved on to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Ca.), as doing the staff art for one paper instead of two gave me more time to do editorial cartoons. My editorial cartoons then went into syndication with Copley News Service in 1980. Unfortunately, I was laid off in the recession of 1981, which, fortunately, led me to create my first comic strip, "Fenton", which was syndicated by Field Syndicate. It had moderate success, but my love was still with editorial cartooning. When the position came open at the San Francisco Examiner in 1984, I went for it and somehow got it. I enjoyed a good run there until the recession of 1991 hit in the wake of the Gulf War. Learning from my previous experience with recessions and the lack of job security for anyone in art, I decided to make my way out before the ax fell and created Non Sequitur, which went into syndication with the Washington Post Writers Group in 1992. It was met with immediate success, but it's growth with a small syndicate was limited. When I reached that limit, I moved over to Universal Press Syndicate in 2000, where the strip now appears in 800 papers world wide.Now, of course, I taken a new turn in my career, taking a story I did in the Sunday editions in 2005 called "Ordinary Basil" and made it into my first children's book with Blue Sky Press (a Scholastic imprint). The second book in the series, "Attack of the Volcano Monkeys", came out a year later, with a third book now in the works.