I've enjoyed Tauhid Bondia's work
for several years, but I just realized that I've not mentioned him here. That is a massive oversight on my part!
I think I first noticed his "A Problem Like Jamal" strip shortly
after it started and was disappointed when he stopped it. I was thrilled when I saw him start up "Crabgrass" and have been following them steadily since then.
I was going to try to write up a solid background about him, but I came across
this interview with Bondia conducted by Stanford Carpenter during CXC 2023 and, frankly, does a better, more comprehensive job than I could. The video doesn't have many views, so I'll just share that with you all and hopefully will convince you to start regularly reading Crabgrass.
I just came across this interview with Wee Pals creator Morrie Turner from 1990.
He's being interviewed by a high school student for a general audience, so they don't get into anything too deep, but it's a rare, lengthy piece with him. I wouldn't be surprised if fewer than 1,000 people have ever seen this particular interview.
On Friday, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit The Washington Post. At issue was a cartoon she submitted (her sketch is at the right) that they flatly refused to run. Not suggested modifications, not edited, just flatly refused to run. Full stop. Telnaes relays what happened here. She doesn't say the specific reason(s) she was told they wouldn't run it, but believes that it was axed because it depicts Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Jeff Bezos, and Mickey Mouse supplicating themselves to Donald Trump. That it's making fun of several very powerful people, and the Post would rather be timid and not risk offending any of them for fear of reprisals.
The Washington Post editorial page editor, David Shipley, who axed the cartoon said in a statement that Telnaes' cartoon was rejected not because of the targets but because it was redundant relative to two columns on the same topic, one of which has not yet been published. This is gaslighting.
Shipley did not specifically point to the articles in question, but as near as I can tell, the one he claims was already published is this one from December 19, over two weeks before Telanes even submitted her idea. (Sorry, I can't find a non-paywalled version.) It's not an opinion piece, just some white-wash reporting on billionaries bending their knee at Mar-a-Lago. If you think two pieces over a three week period from which you can infer corruption of the wealthiest businessmen in the country at the behest of the President-elect is too much, that seems to me like Shipley, by his own admission, is doing precisely what Telnaes says he is doing. His claim that "the only bias was against repetition" is bullshit.
You don't need me to praise Telnaes holding to her ethics by quitting a newspaper that is 'obeying in advance' and undermining their "Democracy Dies in Darkness" tagline. Pretty much every account of this I've seen so far has already done that. What I haven't seen is anyone trying to fact-check Shipley's response to prove that his attempt to make it a "he said/she said" argument is disingenuous. Shipley is trying to portray Telnaes as an overly emotional woman whose actions are rash and irrational. I don't really know Telnaes well, but I have met her and I can tell you that Shipley is full of shit. Plain and simple. The issue is not one of "repetion" but of trying to avoid offending several immoral and insanely wealthy people. Telnaes' read on why her cartoon was axed is 100% correct and Shipley's explanation is gaslighting.
That Telnaes' cartoon was rejected should tell you about The Post's position on reporting the truth, regardless of who it offends or embarasses. That no other news organizations seemed to even try to fact-check Shipley's account should tell you what their positions are on the truth as well.
Today's Non-Sequitur by Wiley Miller...
The November 24, 2009 version of
Non-Sequitur by Wiley Miller...
I point this out not to call Miller out specifically; the daily grind of newspaper comics is relentless and re-visiting a joke that you already made is almost inevitable over a long-enough time span. And if you're going back 15 years, that isn't bad at all honestly. There've been more than a few instances where I've repurposed considerably more recent blog posts here;
I'd be a hypocrite if I lambasted Miller for doing what I've done plenty of times myself. Indeed, kudos to Miller for re-drawing the cartoon completely and refining the language; back in September, I pointed out when Peter Gallagher re-used some older Heathcliff comics and did nothing but change the date. (And, for the record if you don't click through to that, I wasn't complaining about Gallagher re-using old jokes there either!)
But I find it interesting that, upon seeing today's comic, I not only immediately recognized it as an old joke but it only took about ten seconds of Googling to track down the original. I have worked in marketing for decades, so it makes sense that a marketing-related joke would resonnate with me more than some other type of gag, but it's interesting that I recalled it so fully apparently a decade and a half after seeing it. Seems to me that if you're able to make a comic that sticks in somebody's head like that, you're doing something right!
One of the comic strips I enjoyed when I was a kid was Andy Capp by Reg Smythe. I don’t know if it was his inability to do work, or his non-chalant attitude about pretty much everything, or that he simply had a cool hat, but I enjoyed seeing what antics he got himself into. Frequently, the seemingly ubiquitous canal!
What I didn’t realize at the time, though, was that it was actually an import from England. The dialogue was a little unusual to me, but I was then unfamiliar with British colloquialisms, so I chalked Andy’s pattern of speech up to just being part of the comedy. I also didn’t know anything about this “Reg Smythe” person whose byline accompanied each strip. I had no clue what he looked like, where he was from, how old he was… for that matter, I didn’t even know if “Reg” was short for Reginald or Regina! Even with the couple of mass market paperbacks I had, there was simply no information about him that I could find. (This was, of course, in the days before the internet.)
Lately, as I was going through my regular reading and checking out the latest installments of webcomics, I noticed that there were a number of posts that that did not contain any actual comics, but were mostly creators making some note about taking a break for the holidays, or plans for the new year, or whatever.
One of those posts I did actually stop to read, though, was from Runaway to the Stars. December coincidentally lined up with the end of a chapter, and they're spending the time in between talking with readers...
The interchapter lore page will go up next, then I'll be doing character AMAs again... I will probably do AMA responses for 2 weeks because I am hoping to finish chapter 6 pages by the end of this year. Those are what's currently going up on Patreon!
And I was reminded about Smythe. I had been reading Andy Capp for around a decade before I found out Smythe was from England. And that nugget I only discovered because I had written a fan letter to him via my local newspaper, which he very kindly responded to using Daily Mirror stationery. I should note, too, that it took about three months between when I mailed the letter, and when I received a response. I expect it was forwarded around a few times before it even got shipped overseas!
But today, readers can get much more easily engage with comic creators at any level they’re comfortable with. You can still read a webcomic, and be largely oblivious to who’s actually making it-- I dismiss a lot of the personal-type posts creators write if I'm especially engaged with their work. In some cases, I'm lucky to remeber a creator's name but in other cases, I’ve actually become quite good friends with the creators.
For as much or as little as a comic speaks to you, it’s generally not difficult to find that the creators speak just as much, or little, to you as well. If you like their work, hang out with them during a livestream, ask them process questions via Mastodon, discuss plot points on their own website. Or, if you just want a moment’s diversion with their comic, that’s all you need to worry about paying attention to.
"What the heck is in Crystal City, Texas," you may ask. The answer is the comic strip and cartoon classic, Popeye.Incorporated in 1910, Crystal City is the county seat of Zavala County, Texas and quickly found spinach-growing to be its dominant industry. The town (which even today is home to fewer than 10,000 people) openly wanted to tout its ability to grow spinach beyond simply citing itself as the "Spinach Capitol [sic] of the World." So in the mid-1930s, they held a contest to design an appropriate statue. A practicing architect originally from Lithuania, Max Sandfield had his design chosen (although it was modified somewhat from his original submission). The statue was given the blessing of Popeye's creator himself, E.C. Segar.
The original statue is safely ensconced in the City Hall to protect it from vandals. A fiberglass reproduction is what sits outside. I can't seem to find reference to what the original is actually made out itself. Sandfield had originally suggested Texas limestone, but that was evidently nixed.
There are also Popeye statues in Chester, IL (Segar's hometown); Alma, AR ("Spinach Capital of the World"); and Springdale, AR (home of the Allen Canning Company which produces "Popeye Spinach"). The statue in Crystal City, however, is the oldest, debuting less than ten years after Popeye's creation. It is also the only one officially endorsed by Segar himself, as he died a year after it had been erected.
This is the Heathcliff comic from Saturday...
I saw that over the weekend and thought, "I'm pretty sure Gallagher has used that joke before." So I did a quick search on Google for Heathcliff Kermit assuming that some Muppets fan would have had it documented. Sure enough, the Muppets Wiki has a Heathcliff page showcasing various Muppet-related cameos in the comic over the years. And right in the middle is this same drawing from September 9, 2021. (Albeit with a noteably darker color palette.)
But what struck me was that the date had been changed. It wasn't that the syndicate ran the same strip on the same day just a few years apart like they do with Peanuts; the Heathcliff strip had been re-dated. September 7, 2024 versus September 9, 2021.
And more curious, as I was looking down in the area of the comic anyway, I noticed that the copyright date was 2017. A little more digging later, and I came up with the strip from July 6, 2017...
Line-for-line, the exact same strip, down to Gallagher's signature. Except for the date, which seems to have been manually changed. On two separate occasins.
I don't fault Gallagher for reusing a strip like that -- reruns are nothing new in comics and neither is "repackaging" old material.
Deadlines are a bitch, especially when it's every single day for years on end. And hey, sometimes crap comes up that prevents you from working your normal schedule or your brain just isn't firing on all cylanders that day or something.
But I do find it interesting that these reruns appear to be one-offs (as opposed to rerunning an entire week's worth of strips or something) and that Gallagher bothered re-dating them. I don't think he's really trying to pass them off as brand new -- on both occasions, he left the 2017 copyright date in place after all -- so why change the date? Just as a way to check that the syndicate knows they're sending out the correct strip that day? Color me curious.
Rina Piccolo -- formerly of Six Chix and Tina's Grove, currently working on Rhymes with Orange -- recently announced that she'll be returning to an idea that she ran as a webcomic a little over a decade ago: Velia, Dear. With the characters notably older,
Velia Comic Stories will probably show up from an "alternative comics publisher" instead of online but I'm reminded of an interview I conducted with Piccolo way back in 2011 shortly after she launched Velia, Dear.
Since this interview was for the now-dead-buried-dug-up-and-then-incinerated MTV Geek, I thought I re-run it here for posterity.
Sean Kleefeld: It's been noted in several places (including on your own site) that your first published comic was in 1989. But your "big break" was about a decade later when you took up the Wednesday slot for Six Chix. I understand that, in the past, you've noted that decade was filled with "trillions of rejections" but how did the strip come about? Was that something you and the others took to King Features yourselves after doing a lot of individual submissions, or did the idea come from one of the editors there, or...?
Rina Piccolo: Six Chix was Jay Kennedy's idea. Jay was the comics editor at King Features Syndicate and he was well known as a promoter of women's comics. He saw that the newspaper comics page was lacking humor from a woman's perspective, and decided to increase the percentage of women cartoonists on the page in one shot. He had a pretty good idea from the beginning who he'd choose to be in the strip, and I was one of the names on his list. Like any good editor, he had his finger on the pulse of the cartoon industry, and so it wasn't too difficult for him to find us.
Kleefeld: At least from my seat, it would seem that Six Chix provided you with a great opportunity to work closely with King editors, who could help get Tina's Groove started. Was Tina something you already had already been working on prior to 2000, or was that a matter of wanting to expand on some ideas that didn't fit into the Chix format?
Piccolo: Tina's Groove (although it didn't have a title at the time) was underway before 2000 and long before Six Chix was born. (I realize that, on the surface, it's logical to assume that it was the other way around.) Jay called me sometime in the early 90s to ask if I'd like to develop my own strip. It took years for me to actually do it! Anyway, we'd go back and forth with work, and ideas, and different premisses, and then sometime around 1998 he asked if I wanted to be in Six Chix. He told me it would demand only one gag a week and that it totally left room for me to continue working with him in developing my own strip. By the way, the reason Jay was aware of my work in the early 90s is because I was selling gag cartoons to a feature King was running called The New Breed. The New Breed was a daily single panel gag cartoon that hosted a different cartoonist every day of the week. It no longer runs.
Kleefeld: What was the process of getting Tina syndicated like, compared to Chix?
Piccolo: The administrative/contract process was basically the same. The creative process was different -- for one, it took me YEARS to get things right with Tina, and no time at all for the Six Chix gags! The reason behind that had a lot to do with the fact that, at the time, my strengths leaned toward gag cartooning, which I had been doing for years. And so, I really had to work hard to learn new tricks and figure out how to write for a comic strip. I had never before worked with characters, and I'll be honest with you, doing a strip forced me to learn new tricks, and it didn't come easy at first.
Kleefeld: Unlike many, if not most, newspaper strips currently running, yours have come about after the internet became fairly well-known. It was around that same time, too, that I think people started realizing that a business model that might work in print might not work online. There was a fair amount of experimentation going on, at all levels of the process, from creators to syndicates to newspapers. I'm curious, first, what your take on things were since you were first getting into syndication right when a lot of this was happening and, second, what types of things were you hearing coming from the syndicate back then. Were you, for example, being told and/or offered different types of agreements than a cartoonist who may have been in the business even just a few years longer because of what was happening online? Was anyone thinking they'd have to change their business models or marketing plans at that point?
Piccolo: Six Chix launched in 2000, and Tina's Groove launched in 2002. At the expense of looking like a total cavewoman I have to be really honest with you here -- I didn't even own a computer back then! I think I got my first email address in late 2002, or 2003! The internet, at least to ignorant me, had absolutely no bearing on what I was doing with my comics. That said, I'm well aware now in retrospect, that King Features was a bit more on top of things than its cartoonists were (thank God!). Anyway, my contract for Tina's Groove was the standard contract that King had been offering for years. (Here's a good place to dispel a myth common amongst some cartoonists: I want to make it clear that I own Tina's Groove. Those days of syndicates owning cartoonist's strips are long gone. I don't know of any contemporary syndicated cartoonist who doesn't own their strip. Syndicates just do not own peoples' strips anymore. People should know this.)
So, in short, I really didn't become aware of the whole digital vs print thing until I was well into my 5th or 6th year of Tina's Groove. (And to tell you the honest truth, although I realize the business models have changed, I'm still waiting for the sky -- that everyone's saying is falling -- to fall.) Who knows, maybe it'll fall next week, and everyone can point to this interview and say "She had no idea it was just around the corner"! What I'm saying is this: if the syndicates were thinking of changing their business models as early as 2000, then I certainly wasn't aware of it. As for my contract, it was a smart one. There's a clause that covers any future technologies and platforms that will come into existence during the duration of the contract. So, yeah, they had the whole digital thing covered -- right from the beginning -- in the language of the legalese. Now that's a contract with foresight!
Kleefeld: I'd like to fast-forward a bit to shortly before you started work on Velia, Dear. When Velia first launched, you expressed an interest in having more creative freedom than in traditional venues. What was it that prompted thinking along those lines? Were you just really energized by seeing what other webcomic creators were doing, or were you running into issues with either Chix or Tina, or...?
Piccolo: I started it because I have a lot of ideas. And I think it's good to have a lot of ideas. The thing is, not all of your ideas are going to work well in the available markets. Some ideas are transferable, but not all. So I created a project for myself to have complete creative freedom in. I had no idea about web comics -- I only knew that I could write and draw strips with paper and ink, and scan them into a computer, and load them up onto the internet for people to see. A couple of months into it, I started leaning toward telling stories, and I began to look at the whole thing as an experimental learning process (I still do). It isn't simply a case of having issues with the syndication markets -- sure, I get frustrated now and then when I'm forced to behave in a family-friendly manner, but it doesn't happen too often, and I really can't complain. I just wanted to learn some new tricks, and exercise my funny bone in a fantastic new way. As a creator what makes me happy is to be creating a bunch of different things -- not just one or two things. And since I've gotten really fast and efficient with drawing and writing, it takes me less time to do one job, leaving more time for new projects.
Kleefeld: Being a bit behind the curve on computers -- at least prior to getting an email account! -- did you have any technical challenges on starting Velia, Dear? I'm guessing you'd already been submitting Tina's Groove to King electronically by then, so how new/different was getting Velia started for you just from a technology perspective?
Piccolo: Oh, boy did I have technical challenges with Velia, Dear. Although I knew the basics from scanning and emailing my Tina's Groove strips, there were a lot of things I had to learn in order to get the strips on the web. I hired a friend of mine (Tea Fougner, a cartoonist/editor/website wiz) to develop the Velia website, and to tutor me on how to get the images from the drawing board to the site, and how to manage the pages, and all that. So, yes -- I had to learn all that stuff. I'm not going to say that I like doing it, but it's a necessary step in the process of doing a web comic.
Kleefeld: In reading Velia, it's obvious to me at least that it couldn't run as a syndicated newspaper strip. While I expect the occassional swear word or sexual reference could be tweaked for a more "family friendly" audience, I also note that Velia has some dark undercurrents to it that would probably make it a hard sell in newspapers. Has the difference in tone, do you think, brought in a new type of audience to your work, or does it seem like there's a lot of overlap with Chix and Tina?
Piccolo: Yes, you're right -- Velia, Dear has a tone, and undercurrents, that would make it a tough sell for today's newspaper market. From the feedback I'm getting, I think it's safe to say that the readership of Velia, Dear is culled from both Tina's Groove readers, and those readers who are new to my stuff in general. So I would say, yes, there is a bit of an overlap there.
Kleefeld: How does your creation process compare across the three strips? I know you've noted Velia gets planned out months in advance, in part because you're working with longer storylines, but in terms of laying out a page or trying to figure out the pacing or anything. With the different styles and tones across the strips, do you have set aside blocks of days to work on one versus another, or are you able to switch gears fairly easily?
Piccolo: The creation process, and how it differs between Tina's Groove, Velia, Dear, and Six Chix…… wow, now that's a question I can write a book on! I'll try to be brief. Let me start out by saying that Tina's Groove has been part of my repertoire for so long that the strip's characters have become an intimate part of me. I can put those guys on the stage and make them do anything. There's a level of comfort in writing Tina's Groove that I really enjoy and have fun with. I block out one day to write a week (or more) of strips, and then schedule one and a half days to draw 6 dailies, and 1 sunday. Sometimes, when I'm in the mood, I'll write dialogs for Tina in the evenings, and use the material later on, when I need it.
For Velia, Dear the process is a little different for two reasons: number one because there are longer story lines, and number two, because I'm just now learning about effective storytelling, and character arcs, and things of that nature. It's a lot like writing a screenplay in which there is a beginning, middle, and end, and there are scenes that make up the structure. I feel that writing and drawing Velia, Dear presents a bigger challenge for me right now. (That's not saying much. In 2002, Tina's Groove provided all the challenge I needed!) I guess that means I'm learning, right?
As for Six Chix -- As I've said before, gags were my first passion in cartooning, and after 24 years of writing these things, I think I've pretty much gotten to a point where it's so much a part of me that it just comes to me naturally. I don't want to say it's easy -- it's never easy. But I can say it comes naturally.
Unlike a decade ago, I now find it easy to switch gears between different jobs. I guess it all just comes with practice? You do this stuff for years and years, and after a while you're just kind of hardwired for it. Does that make sense?
Kleefeld: I wonder if you could elaborate a bit more on writing for Velia. Obviously, with the longer story arcs, there's more planning that goes into it, so I suspect writing a week's worth of strips probably can't be exclusive to one day a week for you. Or do you still handle the individual strips that way, but do the broader plotting separately?
Piccolo: When it became a continuity strip with story arcs, writing for Velia, Dear became radically different from writing for Tina's Groove. There is more planning that goes into writing a story. I work with a loose outline, and determine what's going to happen. Once I know what's going to happen in the story, I arrange those events into scenes. The trick is to have each strip carry the story and reward the reader with something at the end of it -- a joke, a funny situation, a cliffhanger, or insight into the story. On a good day, I can write 9 or 10 strips. I set aside a block of hours to write, and shut down the internet -- no distractions! The plotting or planning happens on the same day that I write the actual scripts for each strip. It's a long day, and the work is hard, but it's engaging and fun.
I should add that the story I'm working on right now is not as outlined as the previous stories. I wrote a blog post about it. This is pure experimentation on my part -- I want to see where the characters are going to go with it, and what happens when I work without a definite outline in mind. Kind of scary!
Kleefeld: What about differences between Chix, Tina and Velia in terms of execution at the drawing table? It looks like you're using less brush work and more pens in Velia, but then adding ink washes? I can see why the washes might not be something you could use effectively in a newspaper strip, but I'm curious about what your thinking was in using different tools.
Piccolo: Yes, I use different tools for different things, and I have to be honest here -- it's all to amuse myself! When you use a brush for years and years, picking up a nib feels refreshing, and new. I enjoy both the brush, and the pens, and I'm happy to have different projects in which to use them. So that was my thinking behind using pens for Velia, Dear is that I just wanted to try something new (it's drawn with a Nikko "G" nib). As for the wash -- I've always loved the look of washes. When done properly a wash enriches a simple line drawing and gives it tone. When I was younger I used to look at the cartoons in the New Yorker and I'd tell myself to learn how to do that.
It's true that ink washes don't translate very effectively on newsprint, and the only half-tones you can get with newspaper comics are with the old zipitone or ben day speckling, or cross-hatching -- and still the results are different. This being so, I couldn't exercise my "wash-muscle" in that venue. However, I've been using washes on my magazine gags over the years, and so I was well into using them by the time I started Velia, Dear. I love working with washes, and I really like the results -- so when I started drawing Velia I wanted the strip to have a certain look -- I wanted some of the panels to somehow float on the page, vignette style, when I wanted them to. I believe that how a comic strip "looks" contributes to the character of the strip as much as the content does.
Kleefeld: You're almost two years into Velia; how do feel it's been going? Has it been successful -- however you may define it? Has it changed your approach to your other strips?
Piccolo: Nearly two years in, Velia, Dear makes zero money, as I had imagined. For me, it's been a two-year graphic and fiction-writing course. How much would it have cost me to do that at a university? The plus side is that I get to show my work, and get feedback. In one way, I foresee an end for Velia, Dear, but seen in another way, this project will never be finished.
Kleefeld: By "this project will never be finished", are you suggesting that Velia will be haunted by Nancy's ghost after she passes?
Piccolo: Nancy's ghost -- ha! Nancy doesn't have to be a ghost to haunt people, especially family members! Anyway, I mentioned in my blog that "this project will never be finished" because, well, I've got some stock characters here that seem to work well with each other, and a world that is in a lot of ways close to my own (minus the flying nuns) and well, I really can't finish, can I? Although I don't want to say anything definite about the future of the web comic Velia, Dear just yet, I will say that I will forever be making up stories for its characters, who don't seem to want to stop getting into trouble.
Kleefeld: Thanks so much your time, Rina! I really appreciate it!
Piccolo: Thank you so much Sean -- It's been a real pleasure.
The comic strip pictured here is called Sir Bagby. It was by brothers Rick and Bill Hackney, and ran from 1959 until 1966. This particular strip is from 1960.
It wasn't particularly popular and only ran in about 20 papers at its height. The strip has never been collected in a single volume, although some reprints have run in Comics Revue. As far as I can tell, the two men never did another comic strip. I can find record of Bill dying in 2011 after spending most of his career as a claims manager for Nationwide Insurance. His obituary failed to mention Sir Bagby in any capacity.
The reason I know any of this is because I was trolling around on eBay a while back and stumbled across several pieces of original art from the strip. Just in casually browsing the Original Comic Strip Art section. Once I had the names, I did a few Google searches to find out everything else.
Sir Bagby, if the handful of examples I saw listed on eBay are any indication, is not a strip I would particularly have enjoyed. I'd probably rank it around the same place as Wizard of Id -- I might read it if I happened to have a newspaper opened to the funnies in front of me, but I certainly wouldn't seek it out.
You probably won't find Sir Bagby in any history of comic strips. It's popularity, craftsmanship nor originality are in the same league as, say, Pogo or Li'l Abner. At best, it's a footnote.
But, you know, it was still a strip that survived in newspaper circulation for seven years. I've known better strips that didn't last that long. It strikes me that there are a LOT of comics (both strips and books) that I've never heard of. I've read plenty of histories with each taking a slightly different focus, and I have a good sense of who the movers and shakers were/are.
But there have been a lot of other folks who worked in the same fields, toiling away in much the same way, without the recognition of a Charles Schulz or Bill Watterson. I can't do much of anything for these cartoonists, many of whom have certainly passed away. Even if I really wanted to, I can only dig up so many to highlight here. But I do kind of enjoy making little "discoveries" like this, and just taking time for myself to note that there were other folks out there that aren't recorded in the history books. I don't believe in an afterlife or that these guys will bestow any sort of mystical karma on me for giving them whatever notioriety a blog post might bring, but it's still pretty cool to see what else was going on in the newspaper besides the names you already know.
And, hey, if something strikes you for some reason while you're on eBay, go ahead and buy it! They're often quite cheap. I nabbed some original art for Allan Salisbury's June 2, 1974 Fingers and Foes Sunday strip for less than fifteen bucks!
Here in the US, it's Labr Day, ostensibly honoring labor unions and those in them, but many of those people wind up working today while the white collar folks in office buildings have the day off. In any event, here are today's handful newspaper strips that reference the federal holiday...
Much has been made -- as much as can be made at any rate -- about how Peter Gallagher has taken Heathcliff in a sort of mildy surral direction over the past ten or twenty years. The gags of the strip are frequently not intended to be funny in a traditional sense, but more just an amusing juxtaposition of ideas.
There's frequently not really a point to any paricular strip's message other than to showcase concepts that aren't practical or realistic. Meat-flavored gum and using an ape as a mascot to celebrate garbage collection for examples.
Interestingly, however, this week's strips have been borderline political. Take a look...
You can clearly see the "cat lady" theme he's using throughout all the strips, and that basic notion of playing with a single theme for a week at a time is not uncommon for Gallagher. Not surprisingly here, given that the strip's protagonist is himself a cat, the cat lady shown in each cartoon is offered up in a heroic (to varying degrees) light. So how is this political?
About a month ago, comments from
Republican Vice-Presidential candidate J.D. Vance resurfaced in which he complained that the US was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” This type of cat lady stereotype has long been identified as rooted in misogyny and using it in any sort of public forum like the TV interview the quote comes from, much less anything resembling political messaging that comes from a politician, is a great way to show to at least half of the electorate that you actively think little of them.
Vance, in a brazenly stupid PR strategy, has not only not apologized for making an at best insensitive remark (which is what any even remotely half-intelligent public figure would do) but he's doubled-down on the idea and continued to insult women with additional derogatory "cat lady" statements.
That Gallagher has not only taken the cat lady idea as a theme, but repeatedly provided an image of cat ladies that runs 180° counter to Vance's suggests Gallagher wants to showcase how Vance's misogynistic attitudes are wrong. Do I think Gallagher is taking a formally political stance with Heathcliff here? No, not really. But it's still the most political I've seen a newspaper comic strip outside of Doonesbury for nearly 20 years.
Editorial cartoonists, by the definition of their job, use their artistic talents to comment on current topics.
Not surprisingly, many of the recent editorial comics lately have been touching on the jokes surrounding Kamala Harris' presidential campaign
and/or Donald Trump's responses to it. Several I've seen speak more specifically to
the blatantly fake crowd numbers he's been touting the past couple weeks and also provably false claims that Harris used AI to enhance the appearance of her crowd sizes.
I even saw one this morning specifically with Trump complaining about the protest sizes at the Democratic National Convention that began yesterday.
With electronic communications, it's incredibly fast and efficient to get a piece of art from an artist's drawing table to a wide number of people.
Of course, that's true of webcomics too.
That was one of the originally one of the more novel things about webcomics; that they could and did so much faster than traditional syndicates. Syndicates were used to dealing with newspapers, who ran on a much slower (relatively speaking) schedule than the real-time updates of the web. But, to their credit, they seem to have largely caught up and there's very little delay caused by the middleman beauracracy that webcomickers don't have to deal with when publishing their work.
But here's what I don't get...
Why do newspaper strip cartoonists still work on a 4-6 week schedule?
With Garry Trudeau in semi-retirement from Doonesbury, Lalo Alcaraz is currently (I think) the most topically current comic strip artist under syndication.
Today's strip, for example, touches on Colin Kapernick's announcement about starting a company to
make grpahic novels using AI. But that was a news story from a few weeks ago.
Trudeau also had a lead time of about two weeks, but over the decades, he had become very astute at getting extremely early reads on news items and predicting where the stories would go in a week or two, so he often seemed to be more current than he was actually working.
But in a world where events unfold in front of our eyes via multiple sources in real time -- where nearly everyone is armed with a camera and an internet connection -- and where it's not only possible but relatively common to post both written and aritstic reactions in just as real time, why can't comic strip cartoonists work closer to their publication date? Why do they still need to adhere to a syndication schedule that's even outdated within the syndicates themselves?
I could see if there was a greater danger of offending the wrong group and the syndicates wanted to exercise some editorial control, but it seems editorial cartoonists are more likely to do be offensive (intentionally or not) these days, just by virtue of the subject matter. I could see if there was some worry about cartoonists keeping a regular schedule, but they're already doing that just several weeks earlier that publication. I could see if there were more time needed to prepping the cartoons for print, but digital pre-press makes jobs go super quickly and many artists supply their work already prepped. I honestly can't think of another reason why syndicates would require such a lengthy lead time. Anyone have any answers for me on that?
Of all the comic strips that I would never, ever, ever have expected to make the transition to animated cartoon, I would think Gary Larson's The Far Side would be at the top of my list. I don't recall hearing about it at the time, but apparently it as indeed made into a Halloween special for CBS in 1994, directed by Marv Newland of Bambi Meets Godzilla fame.
Much like Larson's strip, there's no single cohesive story, or even recurring characters; it's just a string of largely unrelated gags mostly only with tenuous connections to one another. Which strikes me as a difficult premise to sell for television. Even sketch comedy shows have recurring actors and characters. But even more strangely for a network special, there's almost no dialogue throughout the entire half-hour. I have no idea how that snuck past network executives.
And yet, it somehow was greenlit for a sequel! But not until 1997, nearly three years after Larson's last new Far Side comic ran in papers. However, that sequel was only broadcast in the UK. Both eventually made it to DVD in 2007, but they have long since sold out.
Continuing with the strangeness of all this, after the first special aired, Larson made any number of changes to the piece. Not just a bit of re-editting or changing the order of the gags, but he added several entirely new sequences as well as changed the animations on some of the existing material. I've only seen the home video version but based on the descriptions of the original, it seems to me that all the changes were done for the sake of improving the humor.
Ultimately, the whole endeavor of producing an animated version of Larson's singularly absurd comic is almost a tale as equally absurd itself. Although I'm grateful for it, I really don't understand how any of it actually happened.
Neither of the two specials, either in their original or editted forms, are online. You can find a smattering of short clips but the most extensive look at them that I've found is from
animator Paul Johnson's
Adventures in Inbetweening series in which he discusses some of the details of the animation process -- not surprisingly, mostly focused on the inbetweening frames that he specifically worked on -- from the second special.
Hägar the Horrible has been a staple of the funny pages for a half century now, first debuting in early 1973. Cartoonist Dik Browne had been working on Hi & Lois for years by then, so he was certainly no stranger to the business. He kept working on it until his retirement in 1988, at which point he passed it along to his son Chris. Chris worked on the strip until his death last year, but the strip continues to run daily.
Honestly, I never paid much attention to the strip. Even back when I was a kid and read the funny pages in both the newspapers my parents got. I would read Hägar but only in that it happened to be on the page next to Garfield or Andy Capp or whatever else. Once I left home and no longer got a paper, I've only read it very sporadically, usually only when I'm looking to see how many cartoonists did a strip about Earth Day or something.
I suspect I think more about Hägar the Horrible when I'm listening to Van Halen and make a quick mental joke about the similarity with Sammy Hagar's name.
I do vaguely recall seeing news of Browne's death last year, but I don't know that I really continued the thought of who might continue to work on the strip. I suppose I assumed it would be taken up by Chris' brother, Chance, who'd taken over drawing Hi & Lois from their father in 1989.
However, earlier this month, I did see the Hägar strip that ran on July 4 when I was looking to see how many comics included some kind of Independence Day theme this year. And I was struck by how amateurish the strip looked...
The linework is stiff and lacks much variability. There's no sense of depth -- everything feels very flat, despite the pattern on the bedsheet.
This doesn't feel like the art style that I've seen off and on for the past however many years.
Having different creators on the strip would hardly be new. I mean, Chris picked it up from his father in the '80s making it a legacy strip for decades just by that measure alone. But addtionally, Dick Hodgins, Jr. inked many of the strips over Chris' pencils, ostensibly dating back to 1995. John Marshall also inked and lettered the strip briefly in the early 2000s. (I've seen contradicting dates on that, but by all accounts, it was half a year at most.) Bob Weber, Jr. was brought on to write the strip in 2015.
In checking on the official Hägar site, however, the only two creators mentioned in the "Cartoonists" section are Dik and Chris. (Weirdly, although it does have birth and death dates noted, Chris' bio is written in the present tense and says he still lives in Florida with his wife -- they moved to South Dakota in 2005 and Carroll died in, I think, 2018.) However, Chris hadn't been working on the strip for not quite a decade before anyway. The strips have been written entirely by Weber, who brought with him Gary Hallgren in 2015. Hallgren has noted that he only did sketch layouts at first and took over inking duties when Hodgins took ill and passed away in 2016, and it was soon after that when Chris himself became too ill to do the pencil work any longer, and Hallgren took over the full art duties.
I found video of Hallgren speaking about his work at Comicfestival München 2023, which took place in July of last year. Hallgren seemed healthy and Denis Kitchen pointed out that he had been doing sketches for fans. But compare these two strips that ran on March 11 and 20 of last year...
In both strips, we have basically just two characters talking to one another. The first strip features a background mountains and clouds, and the characters' faces features expressions that change from the first to second panel. Their hands, while obviously drawn in a cartoony style, hold fairly natural poses. In the second strip, the background is all but nonexistent. Their faces are borderline expressionless, and their hands and arms feel stiff and in awkward positions. They feel to me like they're drawn by different people.
The first strip is absolutely drawn by Hallgren. Notice the odd shape of the key? That's a stylized "GH" that Hallgren sometimes hides in his artwork since he's not allowed to formally sign the work. But now compare the line pattern in Hägar's tunic. In the first strip, they're a series of squiggly lines with enough variation in weight to point to them being inked with a brush. In the second strip, it's just a series of disconnected hash marks that appear to just be made with an ink pen. If you go through the strip day by day, there's a distinct shift when this happens: between March 18 and March 20, 2023. (March 19 was a Sunday strip and likely created much earlier than the two on either side of it.)
So at first blush, it would appear that Hallgren stopped drawing -- or at least inking -- the strip in March of last year.
That would contradict what he expressly said months later at Comicfestival München, but the strip to this day continues to bear Chris Browne's signature so inaccurate credits are hardly new here.
But what did Hallgren actually say about working on the strip anyway? When asked by Kitchen about his day-to-day process, Hallgren responded...
I check the email because that's how the scripts come in [from Weber]. And when the scripts come in, I wait for Debra Browne
to sequence them so that I know which strip is which release date and in what order. Because if I don't do that and just draw what Bob Weber sends me, and then I have to shuffle them and that's not effecient. So I don't waste any time drawing until I've got my sequence and then I bang them out. About a half hour a piece. Just a sketch... real quick sketch... small. So I know where the characters are, where the dialogue starts, where it's placed -- this is very important because each panel has to be composed in a way in which the action is totally clear, there is plenty of room for the words, and any kind of special art that needs to be seen has to have room, you know, for exposition. It's very important; each little panel is an important drawing. And I love strips where it's all dialogue and it's just two guys talking. It's easy...
And after I draw a little rough, I send those to the Brownes. And normally they just say, "fine, go ahead." And then I blow it up on my computer. I blow it up to art size and take it to my studio, put it on a tracing box --
you know what that is, right? A light table. Light's underneath. I can see through it. I take Bristol board, a nice paper, put it on there, draw in pencil... clear. Clear line, no shading. And get my pen and ink, and that's the process.
After it's done, I scan it, email it to Debra Browne, and I never see it again.
For the record,
Debra is Chance Browne's widow and has been the editor on Hägar for many years. And again, this description of Hallgren's process took place months after Chris passed.
Still, the art style of Hägar definitely changed during the March published strips of last year, as I said. The art that appeared in those strips would've been drawn a minimum of two weeks, possibly as many as six, ahead of time, so the switch would likely have occured at the drawing board towards the beginning of Feburary. Which seems like a poignient point to segue to a reminder that Chris Browne passed away on Feburary 4, 2023. It's almost as if Chris' death directly impacted the artwork on the strip, even though he hadn't been drawing it.
Hallgren has been very clear that he was penciling and inking the strips after Browne first fell ill. And the various announcements on Browne's death noted, taken from comments directly from the Browne family, that he had been ill for some time.
My guess is that actually goes back to around March/April of 2016 as the lettering style for the strips' dates changes and Browne's signature gets very shaky for a while before suddenly shifting to copy/paste consistency. In an 2023 interview with Chris' sister Sally, it's mentioned that Chris himself retired in 2017.
Regardless of the specific timing, we're still looking at it having been years since Chris actually drew the strip.
Are there any other shifts we can see in the art when we compare before and after March of last year?
I've gone through a variety of strips from the past year and found several of Hallgren's initials buried in the art at least as recently as two weeks ago, so it would appear that he's still working on the strip.
Since Hallgren didn't originate the strip, I don't think a subsequent artist would add those in the way they might if Dik had included something like that.
In the video I linked above, Hallgren's wearing a visored cap and sunglasses so I thought perhaps he's having issues with his eyesight.
In digging through the ComicArtFans site, though, I've also found multiple sketches Hallgren did for fans around the time of that interview. Interestingly, they include the hash-style detailing on Hägar's tunic that I was thinking might be the result of a different inker and the sketches also point to the more fluid and natural character posing that Hallgren was clearly doing years earlier. Hallgren doesn't seem to have lost any of his artistic chops and the change in tunic design was more of choice on his part than simply from a change of inkers.
So are there any other clues in the past year's worth of strips?
There does seem to be another shift in how the strips' dates are lettered. But while that does suggest a change in finishers, it doesn't speak to who that might be. However,
while going through and checking for Hallgren's initials, I did notice several places where I thought I was seeing similarities with Weber's drawing style. Generally, just a background character here or there, but enough to make me pause. Weber, if you're not familiar, has actually done his own strips for several years, most famously Slylock Fox, which has been running since 1987. So having Weber draw at least some of the strips he's writing wouldn't be that odd a proposition.
So I went back through some recent Slylock Fox strips to see if I could spot any more direct parallels. Compare this June 20 Slylock Fox with the July 4
Hägar the Horrible that I posted above...
The character's pajamas here bear a superficial similarity to the bed sheet earlier, mostly due to the same basic green and simple pattern. But notice in particular that the pillows have the same shape and lack any folds in them -- even a simple curved line to suggest there's a slight dip when one's head would rest, as is typical in cartoon pillows. The sheet also bears a similar treatment of the trim near the top. These are hardly tell-tale signs that Weber drew both strips, of course, but combined with some of the similar figures I'd been seeing already, I'm thinking Weber has a more direct role working on the art for Hägar than he used to.
I did consider that perhaps Weber's current partner on Slylock Fox, Scott Diggs Underwood, might be helping. After all, Weber was the one who brought in Hallgren to begin with, so maybe he opted to bring in someone else he knew when Hallgren began to step back a bit. But I absolutely can't see any of Underwood's style in Hägar at all. I mean, clearly whoever is working on Hägar has to change their normal style to at least somewhat match Chris' and Underwood does try to blend his style in with Weber's as seemlessly as possible on Slylock Fox, but I'm just not seeing anything in the art to suggest Underwood is touching Hägar.
I suspect -- and I'll admit up-front that I have no proof of this, much less anything resembling inside information -- that when Chris Browne passed away, Hallgren used that opportunity to step away slightly from working on the daily strip. He claims he's been only putting about 20 hours a week in on the strip, but he's also nearly 80 years old. While he doesn't seem to be in ill health, the visor/sunglasses combo he wears in that video along with the cane resting nearby suggest that his health isn't as good as it was even as recently as 2021, judging by his Facebook photos. His sketchwork, as I said, shows he's not incapable certainly, but the death of Chris could easily have him reflecting on his own mortality and wanting to spend less time mandatorially at the drawing board.
Or potentially, he does have some eye issues that prevent him from staring at his light board for extended periods.
Again, speculation on my part, to be 100% clear.
But doesn't that idea contradict his statements from June 2023 about how he works on the strip? Well, I think he still does contribute most of the art to it. I think he still gets scripts from Weber, does a rough thumbnail type sketch for approval, and then sketches out a full-size pencil version, which is why we still see the "GH" pop up in the art periodically. But note that he said he did those in a kind of clear line style, i.e. without shading and texture and much detail. If then, he passes the pencil art back to Weber and it's Weber himself who inks the piece, that would certainly explain while I was seeing some stylistic similarities with Slylock Fox and, depending on how loose Hallgen's pencils are, could also account from some of the figure stiffness we see in the final product.
Further, some of those "GH"s look less like an actual "GH" than you would expect from someone putting their initials in the art...
They look like they were inked by somebody who just saw it as a general design element in the pencil artwork, not necessarily specific ligature. Note how the lower part of the "G" isn't even remotely conneted to the crossbar.
Hallgren does mention inking in his statement, but I'm wondering if that was a still-recent-enough change to be considered a slip of the tongue -- he had been inking the strip for nearly a decade after all, and a new process would be, at best, only a few months old.
It's also possible that Hallgren is still inking some of the strips -- most (but not all!) of the Sunday installments still look reasonably fluid. And if Hallgren is still inking some of the strips, he does seem conscientious enough of an artist to shift how he renders the tunic's texture to match Weber for the sake of artistic consistency.
So who is actually working on Hägar these days? Weber and Hallgren are both definitely working on the strip, but the breakdown of who actually does what is a bit murky, despite Hallgren's explanation from last year. Despite Browne's signature remaining on the strip every day, it appears to me that Bob Weber, Jr. is writing all of them, Gary Hallgren is doing pencils for all of them, the two of them are splitting inking duties with Weber handling the bulk of it, all while Debra Browne oversees, organizes, and rubber stamps their work. But if someone has conclusive proof of some other arrangement, I'd be happy to hear it!
Several years ago, I saw a copy of Comic Shop News, which I hadn't seen in several years. I stopped being a regular comic shop visitor years ago. I first noticed the higher grade of paper than the regular ol' newsprint they used to use, but the second thing that struck me was that they were now running a week's worth of the Spider-Man newspaper strip throughout the pages. It's a strip I already follow online, so I was quick to recognize it as the previous week's storyline.
(Obviously, I'm dating this incident a bit just by mentioning that Spider-Man strip, since it ended in 2019.)
Regardless of its current status,
Spider-Man was a regular syndicated strip, not appreciably different than Garfield from a distribution perspective. So, while it's perhaps more typical for a paper to run a number of strips from a single syndicate, there's nothing stopping a smaller outlet to get a single strip and run that.
Spider-Man made sense for Comic Shop News. It's designed specifically to be distributed through comic book shops, and tends to focus particuarly on items of interest for a regular comic shop visitor. What is sometimes (somewhat derisively) called The Wednesday Crowd, who tend to have a greater interest in the superhero and related sci-fi/fantasy genres. CSN could probably also have tapped The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician or Flash Gordon to run just as well.
The question one might ask is: why would CSN run any of those strips at all? Aren't they all way past their prime? What benefit would readers have in that content taking up space in paper's pages? Well, the same could be said of newspaper comics more generally, right? It's the same arguement. It might not be the primary reason people pick up the periodical, but the more reasons you give them, the less likely they are to drop it. The strip's content adds a layer of material that's distinct and different from the typical news, makes for a small delighter to the consumer ("I can still read about Spider-Man without having to buy the comic book!") and, from a publishing perspective, it makes it easier to fill out the pages on an ongoing basis.
There are any number of comic strips out there, of course. The classics that you're possibly more familiar with, like Beetle Bailey and Garfield, but many take on genre and stylistic trappings that cater to specific audiences. The Born Loser, for example, speaks primarily to life in an office environment. Baby Blues focuses on raising a young family. Frazz takes place in a grade school, with frequent commentary on running/biking/swimming. Every comic strip has a hook that helps to make it stand out, and that same hook can be used as an identifier of a niche audience who may be more receptive to its style.
Where I'm going with this is that comic syndicates' traditional market -- newspapers -- have been on the decline for several years and things look increasingly bleak for them. Which doesn't bode well for syndicates either. So what if syndicates changed their direction a little to focus, instead of on the broad mass media newspaper outlets, on the any number of smaller outlets that might only be able to afford a single strip? What if they took those niche comics and sent them only to outlets that might cater to those same niches? What if
Tank McNamara showed up as a feature in Sports Illustrated?
What if Mutts ran at the bottom of an animal shelter's emails?
More effort on the syndicate's part? Sure. But with newspapers both dropping as a whole, and cutting back on what they do carry, it seems to me that syndicates must be facing down some really tough challenges right now. I'm not "in" well enough with anyone at the syndicates to know how things are really going and what they might be working on already, but from my armchair quarterback position, I'm not seeing much of anything beyond the occasional foray into "what if we hire a new artist to do the strip ironically?" (e.g. Nancy and Popeye) and I don't think anyone feels that's a scalable solution.
I did a quick scan of today's funny pages and found a number of comics referencing or tied to the US's Independence Day holiday...
