A Life In Comics
Part One: In which I learn that I am often my own worst enemy
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In 1992 I decided I wanted to be the next Bill Watterson.
Like most people, I’d been reading comics for years, but knew nothing about the industry. I got a book from the library and a copy of the Comics Journal. Hell, I thought. I can do that. Nothing to it. I bought some Rotring ink pens, a few hundred sheets of bristol board and got to it.
I immediately fell in love with the medium. My methodology was to sketch out a general framework in blue pencil, then go back over it with the black ink. Something about the way the ink flowed out onto the crisp white surface really pleased me.
I made many many mistakes, but learned the power of correction tape (which takes ink way better than Liquid Paper). I learned how to draw and how to letter, and most importantly how to create things that could still be legible at postage-stamp sizes.
I worked for a solid year developing Raf, a semi-autobiographical strip about a teenager and his sadistic brother living with their divorced mom. Even though it was the 1990s, the idea of a divorced character was almost unknown in the conservative world of syndicated cartoon strips.
The art was less important, since newspapers determined the format and minuscule size. The comics had to be funny and there had to be a new one every single day. I looked at Watterson and sighed. He was so DAMNED GOOD. The art was amazing, the stories funny and poignant, the characters vivid. Oh well, I thought. Aim high.
As the book recommended, I drew up thirty days’ worth of cartoons (including four laboriously hand-colored Sunday strips that had the breakaway disposable top row) and sent them in. I was rejected. I did some more and sent them in. I was rejected again, but this time by an actual editor. He said something like “The new RAF isn’t much better. Thanks but no thanks.”
The editor was Lee Salem of Universal Press Syndicate, the same man who’d been so encouraging to Bill Watterson when he was starting out. Lee Salem was famous for discovering new talent, and he had actually read my strip.
But I didn’t know how big a deal this was. I had no idea the five syndicates received hundreds of submissions a week, and to even be read by one of the editors was a minor triumph. I’d made it to the top of the slush pile…and all I could see was rejection.
I now know that it was standard practice to reject a new artist for at least a year because they were looking for somebody who had that rare gift of a newspaper cartoonist: the ability to keep on drawing strips, day after day after goddamned day regardless of the situation.
I was ignorant of the biggest obstacle facing me: new strips rarely survived in newspapers because to add one means to remove one, and in that conservative environment, all change is bad. This explains why you still see strips like Nancy or Blondie where the creators have been dead for decades. People still like these strips and still read them every single day for the sake of habit.
Another thing I didn’t know was that the syndicate owns the strip and all the rights to it (which is one of the reasons Bill Watterson quit when he did). The creator of the strip is paid a portion of the the royalties that is entirely dependent on how many newspapers run the strip. I later learned that a comic would need to be in at least a hundred newspapers for more than a year before I could even start to think about quitting my day job.
But I didn’t know that then.
Also, crawling around in the ashes of failure was a creature with a different yearning, which was to tell longer stories.
And I didn’t want to give up.
I decided to try again with a new idea. This one would be a strip about a crusty old guy, Floyd Barnes, who inherits a hotel from his hated brother. The letter reads “Dear Floyd. This place has been the death of me. Hope it does the same for you. Love, Errol.”
I introduced a cast of characters that included an incompetent handyman, an old black man who lived there only because the property values had fallen so much, and several kooky tenants. I had discovered how fun it is to create complex stories. I did two months of strips and was really getting into the groove, but more rejection followed, this time in form letters.
And then I moved to Portland.
At the time, Portland had a huge amount of alternative papers, and I thought I’d like to do a Sunday-style weekly strip about a house full of twenty-somethings living in a house together. This was right before Friends was on NBC, so I think there was something rattling around the Gen-X hive mind. I tried to get this published in Portland’s Willamette Week, but they already had a full roster of comics that included Groening’s Life in Hell, Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek, and Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug. In other words, good fucking luck.
Still I kept at it. The title is unfortunate, but I enjoyed drawing this. Unlike Friends, these guys actually worked crappy jobs and openly mocked one another. I was starting to loosen the tie a bit as I began exploring the art form.
I was still hankering to tell longer stories, but I didn’t know how.
One rainy Portland night I walked home from the bus stop past the cheerful restaurants of NW 23rd and caught a glimpse of my menacing reflection in the glass. The image haunted me, and when I got home I grabbed a sheet of typing paper and drew a pair of stark one-page comics:
1994 Portland boasted several alternative newspapers. Three that I liked were Anodyne (published occasionally), Snipehunt (published semi-monthly) and PDXS(which came out every other Friday and was the first newspaper on the US to break the Clinton / Lewinsky story.
I pitched the idea of a political strip to the PDXS editor/publisher/writer/king Jim Redden. He liked what he saw and started running RAIL as a regular feature. He even paid me 20 bucks a strip, the first money I’d ever received for my art.
I had a blast. Six panels where I could be as irreverent and smarmy as I wanted. I was working as a liquor rep at the time, so my typical MO was to secret myself in a the little cafe that was above Jazz de Opus in Old Town. I’d get a coffee and sit down to draw whatever came to mind.
Some of the stuff is still relevant today.
I was working on some longer pieces, too. I stopped by Kathy Molloy’s shambling house that served as Snipehunt’s de facto offices. I was bowled over by the creative vibe. I found Kathy in the back room doing layout with X-Acto and hot wax. I handed her a short stack of comics. She looked them over and said she’d find some room for them.
Some of them were pretty disturbing, which means they were a fair depiction of my mindset as I turned 30. This one is pretty much the oddest of the bunch, so strange that it scared everyone who knew me. And Kathy actually PUBLISHED THIS.
Thus began my foray into longer form comics. Tune in soon for Part 2, in which I become really fucking weird.
I laughed HARD after reading Barnes (above). Still laughing...
It was a good comic, of course I printed it.