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Great April Fools Switcheroonie

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The Great April Fools Switcheroonie was masterminded by comic strip creators Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott, creators of the Baby Blues daily newspaper comic strip. A surprisingly massive undertaking, it involved contacting dozens of comic strip creators and had them drawing somebody else's strips for one day, April 1 1997, widely known as April Fool's Day.

This resulted in some very unlikely crossovers, such as Scott Adams drawing Bil Keane's Family Circus and Mike Peters' Mother Goose and Grimm making a cameo appearance in Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse. There were no "rules" so to speak, each artist permitted to do what they wanted. Kevin Fagan was one of the oddities -- to stand out, he merely drew his own comic strip Drabble with his left hand.

The one-day experiment proved to be a success of sorts, garnering some publicity and being a harmless yet amusing prank played on the newspapers, the readers, and the comic syndicates.

While characters making guest appearances in other comic strips is not a new phenomonenon (Dan Pirarro's Bizarro does this often), this was the largest of its scale.

Sadly, Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott have no plans to do this again. That didn't stop other creators from doing their own official and authorized crossovers, however — after the death of Peanuts creator Charles Schultz at age 77, many creators put in their own tributes in their own strips.

Comic strips and creators involved

This is an incomplete list — there were at least 40 cartoonists involved.

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