[Absolute Fiction]
Lightly-bearded and handsome freehand artist Max Littlefoot (32), a concept visualizer for a Sydney advertising agency, continues his first love of suppling a daily comic strip to a suburban newspaper company, publisher of four rags (err community newspapers).
The newspapers are sold and delivered to home letterboxes by subscription with an audited collective average daily net circulation of 677,578 copies.
The comic strip tells the daily adventures of a spaniel-wolf hound-cross dog with floppy ears called McMutt, who also shares philosophical thoughts when preparing to chew a bone.
The newspapers circulate five days a week within more than sixty suburbs or localities and since the introduction of McMutt by a schoolboy with a drawing bent into his father's newspapers 17 years ago, the strip has become something of a local institution.
These days, it appears on the bottom half of the back page of each tabloid. Advertisers pay 1.5 times the full-page rate for the half-page space above English-speaking (on paper) McMutt.
That premium back-page advertising space currently is solidly booked for the next 33 months.
And who is this creative genius of the beloved McMutt?
Just someone who sketches McMutt, who is relatively unknown apart from people within Max Littlefoot's tiny social and employment circles.
But that was on the cusp of changing dramatically.
On TV news on Channel 008 that evening, Max was denounced as a 'bearded F-lout who hates cats and probably doesn't even have a dog.'
The accuser who vilified and publicly defamed him was one of Australia's legendary champion female tennis players, the highly respected socialite and divorcee, Baroness Lusk.
Lexi was interviewed by Gwen Smith (24), an inexperienced newly employed media degree graduate who was given the seemingly straightforward task of interviewing her Ladyship about her missing cat.
Unexpectedly, media commentators in the city collectively rated that sensationally volatile interview, with its breath-taking twists and turns on Australian network television, as one of the greatest nine minutes of screening in Australia's television history.
Several critics wrote that Lady Lusk's pragmatically emotive call for the return of her much-loved runaway pussy would rate as the greatest mind-blowing quote on television this century.
Executives and Channel 008 board members watching the broadcast in horror would have been temporarily paralysed in cerebral shock and thinking of law suits and disciplinary action by broadcasting authorities.
Those in charge of the interview production must have been too heavily seduced by the numbing thought they were involved in the screening of a huge moment in television history to have overlooked the need to pull the plug on the rambling interview.
Meanwhile, back to the interview.
Gwen:
Good evening, Lady Lusk. I'm your interview host, Gwen Smith.
Lexi:
Oh my, aren't you a cutie.
Gwen:
What?
Lexi:
You look so young, so sweet and so innocent.
Gwen:
Thank you. We actually are here to discuss you offer of an astonishing reward of $25,000 for the safe return of your cat that you caught homeless and hungry on your street.
Lexi:
