Today's Guest: Mark Tatulli, daily cartoonist and creator of "LIO" and "Heart of the City." Order 'Lio: Happiness Is a Squishy Cephalopod' by Mark Tatulli from Amazon.com by clicking on the book cover above! (EDITOR'S NOTE: This was the very first Mr. Media® Interviews podcast, recorded January 19, 2007. We've improved the sound a bit and hope you'll enjoy discovering it!) "LIO" is the creation of Mark Tatulli, and he’s a fresh brand of weird and wonderful now appearing in more than 250 newspapers, with more adding the strip daily. If Far Side creator Gary Larson and "Calvin" creator Bill Watterson had mated, LIO is the character they would have produced. Tatulli’s brainchild, LIO, and that’s spelled L-I-O, is a young boy who combines elements of mad scientist, comic strips, science fiction, and the Adams family, and get this, LIO never speaks. MARK TATULLI audio excerpt: "It’s really a basic concept. It’s just LIO who lives with his father, and that’s basically it, and whatever I come up with. I set no parameters because I didn’t want to lock myself in. I mean, having no dialogue means that there is going to be no dialogue-driven gags, so I have to leave myself as open as possible to any kind of thing, so anything basically can happen."  BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Has LIO ever spoken in the strip? MARK TATULLI: No. ANDELMAN: Will he? TATULLI: He never will. ANDELMAN: And he never will. LIO by Mark Tatulli TATULLI: I mean, others around him may speak, and he may get visitations from other comic strip characters, but he will never actually talk. ANDELMAN: I was talking to a friend whose history of comics goes back even further than mine, and we both came to the same connection. We remembered a character called Henry. TATULLI: Sure. ANDELMAN: Is that close to "LIO"’s lineage in some way? TATULLI: Well, they are both pantomime strips, what’s called a pantomime strip, and those area basically strips that are driven by pictures in it instead of dialogue, so characters revealed by action rather than by words. I used to love pantomime strips when I was a kid. Henry is one, as you mentioned, and there was also Ferd’nand, which was, I believe that was not produced in the United States, but it did get circulation here. ANDELMAN: So Henry was certainly a strip that you were aware of. TATULLI: Oh yes. ANDELMAN: There really hasn’t been another one like that in some time. TATULLI: No, no, not since like the 1950s, and I just thought that with the space that they dial down to, that they actually allot to comic strips, I thought that it would be fun to do a comic strip that didn’t have any dialogue and any word balloons taking up any of that space, so I could utilize the entire space for illustration. It’s great fun on Sunday. ANDELMAN: Is LIO mute, or is it he just doesn’t speak in the strip? TATULLI: Yeah, he doesn’t speak, his father doesn’t speak, none of the characters really speak. Somebody might show up that you would expect to speak, like say Cathy from the "Cathy" comic strip or maybe Calvin and Hobbes or something like that, and you would expect them to speak because they speak within their world, but within LIO’s world, pretty much nobody speaks. There are sound effects, and there are billboards and so forth, but there is no actual dialogue. ANDELMAN: Have you ever in the time you have been doing this strip, have you had an idea, you woke up in the morning or in the middle of the night or you are in the shower, wherever you get your ideas, you had an idea for the strip that would have required him to say something, and then you went, oh, and you slap yourself on the head and go, ah, that’s right, he doesn’t talk, it’s not going to work? TATULLI: No, no, because I don’t think that way when I do these strips. It’s all visual, and so my brain is just switched in that mode. It’s odd, because I do have another comic strip called "Heart of the City," and it is dialogue-driven or script-driven, and I hear their voices. I put them in...