The Chelation Kid was created and written by Robert Tinell and drawn by me (Craig Taillefer). It ran for 27 weeks as a daily strip from July 2006 until early 2007 on Insight Studios Sunny Fundaysweb comics page as well as here and at Duck Duck Go.

It was nominated for a Harvey Award in 2007 in the Best Syndicated Comic Strip category. We lost out to Doonsbury!

The story is unfortunately unfinished and at this point I’m guessing it will remain that way. When taking on the project I agreed to do it if it ran for no longer than six months, which is the length of Robert’s previous Feast Of The Seven Fishes which I was in love with at the time.

As the six month mark approached I realized we were nowhere near the end and had to bow out as it was a full time endeavor and we were running it for free. There was talk of it getting picked up by a professional web comic publisher, but then the crash of 2008 happened and said publisher lost all it’s funding!

It’s a compelling strip, and well drawn if I do say so myself, but if you decide to read it I should warn you that it’s premise is that Thimerisol mercury in the MMR vaccine was the leading theory at the time for the cause of Autism.

That theory was disproved in 2013.

And my stance at the time was, and remains, pro vaccination. Thimerisol was removed from the MMR vaccine before we began this strip, so even if mercury poisoning had been proven true as a cause, the general anti-vax sentiment that creeps into the strip as we go along is wrong, and it was something I was growing uncomfortable with while drawing the strip.

I think it’s still a compelling look into what parents of an autistic child go through, including chasing after “cures”.

It is currently available here.