In 1910 after Pep Shepard’s twin brother Alva died at the age of 8 in an avalanche, Pep began to draw recollections of his brother in the woods of Wyoming where his family cabin was situated and where his father worked in the forestry service. This informed Pep’s artistic style from an early age. In and out of parochial schools and reform schools all through childhood due to tubercular knees and a penchant for fighting priests, Shepard struggled academically. But his art lived on—never formally trained—even as he apprenticed in his 20’s with newspaper strip legend Irvin Batch in Pittsburgh, guest inking on several Sunday strips in the final years of Batch’s famed “How ‘Bout That?” But once “How ‘Bout That?” was canceled (after the apocryphal “Let’s poison Tommy” story), Shepard found himself without work and enlisted in the Merchant Marines. A dishonorable discharge in ‘39 for public intoxication left Pep out of active service during the war effort and without a job. Shepard soon found himself working for the printing press of the Baltimore Companion in the early 40’s. There in the later hours before the morning edition ran off the slate, Pep began crafting a child detective character loosely inspired by his memories of his brother Alva, but also informed by his growing bitterness toward government services, urban planning in general, and the entire American Idea itself, but also paradoxically, his own paranoid delusions regarding communism. An editorial tour of the printing press in 1944 led to the discovery of a few of Shepard’s artworks and sketches for what would eventually come to be known as "Kid Maroon." But the talent was raw and unpolished, and laden with misspellings and profanity in the lettering. Still, Shepard was made an assistant in the Funnies Department of the Companion, working under Hal Furtcher and Matthias Lieb as they labored over such forgettable works as “Corn in the Morning” and “Two Way Meat.” Shepard married at this time to Beth Ann Gansolitz, a Presbyterian lay woman from Cabbage Town. Shepard at this point was increasingly moody and mercurial at home due to Furtcher & Lieb’s all-hours demands and hazing, and Beth’s growing desire to have a family, which Pep believed he would screw up just as his alcoholic forestry service father had in Wyoming, ultimately by burning the family cabin down in the midst of a midnight bear attack. 

 

Finally in 1948 after Furtcher & Lieb’s partnership ended when Furtcher shot Lieb in the face (by accident) during a card game, Shepard was given the rush go ahead for his own strip, “Kid Maroon,” which drew on Shepard’s nihilistic outlook, failures as a father (two sons born in '45 and '46, Grover and Tris), his brother Alva now long lost, and his obsessive need to prove that a slingshot could be a lethal weapon in the wrong (or right) hands. He introduced a slew of iconic villains in his six month run, including Blockhead, Ratfuck (printed as Ratfink at the time), Shit Cop (printed as Crap Cop at the time), Egghead, Woody Gunk, Freddie Flames, and the less-used Mister Knife. One character reflected Pep himself—that of Billy Beans, the hapless but guileless orphan who saw the world in an almost beatific way, much like how Pep aspired to be, despite his growing addiction to codene and “bathtub laudanum."

 

The Kid Maroon strip ran daily, written, drawn, and lettered (with copy corrections) by Pep, who took to working six days a week at his drawing board, further neglecting his family, which they would later argue was better for them in the long run, given his predilections for loud opera records, corporal punishment, and sudden outbursts of tears (it is considered by historians and critics alike that Shepard may have been undiagnosed bipolar). All in all this incessant work totaled 216 Kid Maroon strips printed in the Baltimore Companion from the spring to fall of 1948. Ignored at the time save for reader complaints about its depictions of violence (Shepard kept an anatomy book by his work desk to make sure injuries were correctly depicted down to organs and viscera and muscular tissue shown), Shepard grew disenchanted with the work quickly. Not helping matters was his employers refusing to pay out invoices for 90+ days at a time. The Shepard family struggled to provide food at home, and the children were forced into paper route jobs, even as Beth went to work in a textile shop.