In the late 1990’s I met an interesting man while I was in college in southern Mississippi. His name was Rick London who later founded the Internet icon, the offbeat Londons Times Cartoons. I had worked in several places. Rick was the first boss that had any substance as to my marketing degree. I think it is safe to say he was and is a genius. He was not educated, but learned through life’s hard knocks. I was about twenty or so. Rick was in his early forties.

When I decided to go to work for Rick he had just lost his mother to cancer and also lost his job in sales at a local tv station. I did minor secretarial and organizational work, filing things, and helping keep Rick organized which was not his strong point. On the other hand, I was trying to learn marketing, and that was his strong point. It was a win-win situation even though the pay was low. The information I got from that man remains invaluable a decade later. He is as close to a hero as they come.

When I say Rick started with nothing, I mean nothing. He had an awful computer that was slower than a typewriter, a few books on how to work the Internet (he knew nothing about it or computers), and he slept on a cold concrete floor in a sleeping bag in a metal warehouse outside of town that a friend let him use. It had a phone line. He learned the Internet and how to use a computer, of course, a little with my help, but he read constantly. When he wasn’t reading, he was writing cartoons, or playing with his stray dog. He got on the floor with the mutt and played like a child. His love for animals was uncanny.

The two of us labored in that run-down building just outside of his hometown of Hattiesburg, Ms., where he had been ignored most of his life for being labeld “mentally ill”. One would never know it; he was the kindest most gentle loving soul I’d ever met. I once told him I would have married him if he had been twenty-five years younger. He later moved away from Ms and finding advanced medical care, he discovered he did not have depression at all but something called TRD (Treatment Resistant Depression). He received a vagus nerve implant (We stayed in touch and he improved dramatically), even finishing three years of college and starting up major online stores from his cartoon venture.

He worked every day out of that abandoned tin warehouse for a year, he lived in it as well. It had a phone line and electricity. He bathed in the sink (it had no bath). He ate what food he could find and what friends brought him. He didn’t get to eat every day. He was obsessed with starting what he said would be “the biggest offbeat cartoon venture ever”, as he was a very big fan of Gary Larson and The Far Side. Of course nobody believed him and, in that part of the world, simply deemed him “possessed”. But I knew him better. I knew he had it in him. I’d never met anyone even close to being that creative. My beliefs turned out to be facts. I am writing this ten years later.

Rick London owns the biggest and most visited offbeat cartoon site on the Internet. He began counting visitors in 2005 and has close to ten million now. He owns about ten peripheral gift and collectible stores bearing his cartoon images. He does not draw them. In an incredible move, he recruited a team of some of the best cartoon illustrators I’ve ever seen, and asked them to simply work on speculation. If nothing sold, nobody made a penny. If they sold, they split the keep. In any case, Rick offered these artists what was becoming a very visited website after a few years and a place to showcase their work and link back to their own site. But at first, if Londons Times Cartoons received fifteen visitors a day, it was a very good day. Today it receives about 4000 per hour.

Rick is a tremendous animal lover; he took in a beautiful stray, “Thor” who recently passed away at about age 21, or so the veterinarian thinks, and this wonderful dog stayed with him through his entire venture. I spoke to Rick last week and he is still grieving. Rick gives a percentage of all pet-related cartoon gift sales to various animal causes. He never fails to. I think he should have been a vet and sometimes he agrees but says “At age 53, I will consider it in the next life, if there is one”.

Rick couldn’t even afford a domain for a website when he started and had to settle for a free one with interrupting pop up ads. He had one illustrator and less than fifty cartoons. Today, in 2008, as I write this, his site has over 8500 Londons Times Cartoons and stores featuring almost 100,000 cartoon items. Rick London is Horatio Alger incarnate. No doubt.