Graphic Lit: An interview with Scott Adams

With all the dire news stories about recession, layoffs and other economic woes plaguing the country, it seems fitting somehow to note that this year marks the 20th anniversary of the comic strip “Dilbert,” the ever-funny, ever-savage satire of life in the modern workplace.

Creator Scott Adams celebrated the anniversary recently with “Dilbert 2.0,” a ginormous slipcovered “greatest hits” collection that includes a DVD containing every strip from the past two decades.

I talked to Adams from his studio in California about the new collection and the strip’s legacy. My thanks to Tom Spurgeon and Tim O'Shea for their help in formulating questions.

Q: Tell me about the new 2.0 collection. How did it come about and how did you go about selecting the strips?

A: I got a call in December a year ago and my publisher said “We’d like to fly out and talk to you,” which is an unusual thing. The telephone usually works pretty well for most things. So I knew they were about to ask me something that would be very difficult and there wouldn’t be enough time to do it. That’s usually what that means.

So sure enough, they described their idea for making this big anniversary book and that we would have less time than any book of this size has ever been created basically. But I really wanted to do it and they wanted to do it and I figured it was worth the work so we cleared our calendars and went to work.

Q: And how did you go about picking strips? Were there any criteria regarding what to include?

A: That was a hard process because I had to read every one of my comics several times and there are 8,000 of them at this point. I picked the ones that made me laugh first of all. That was my first filter, because so much time has gone by that I forget my own comics. I get to read them just like a newspaper reader at this point.

Secondly, anything that had a story involved with it. Sometimes I got interesting complaints or answered someone’s interesting complaint with a comic. Or sometimes I did something so naughty I can’t believe it got in a newspaper.

And then anything that was a key turning point in the life of the strip. When a new character was introduced or a major change, I flagged those.

Q: In the early days of the strip was there an “a-ha” moment for you when you felt like everything clicked, both in terms or readership and aesthetic appeal?

A: There were a lot of steps. It wasn’t a smooth increase. There were these points where something important happened. Probably the biggest one was when I started running my email address in the strip. That was about 1993. At the time, not many people had email so it was a big deal to include my email address in the strip, between the panels.

I got all this email from people that said “We like your strip. We don’t love it. But we do love it when Dilbert is doing things at work.” Which was a big deal because up till that point he wasn’t at work very much. He was a guy that had a job but didn’t spend much time at it. He was usually at home inventing something in his basement.

The email was almost universally consistent on that point. So I just changed the strip and put him in the workplace. That’s pretty much when it took off.

There were some other moments, like when Bill Watterson retired it opened up a lot of things. When I published the Dilbert Principle and that was a number-one best seller. That was another big push.

Q: You talk in the beginning of the book about how interested you were in cartooning as a child. What was it specifically about cartooning that appealed to you?

A: You know just about half of every 12-year-old boys want to become cartoonists. It’s just some phase you go through. Apparently there’s some aspect of the maturation process that did not hit me, cause it never really went away. I could rationalize it and tell you it seemed like a good job because I could work for myself and be created and I liked comics, I could tell you all that stuff, but that would be true for every 12-year-old kid. What’s different is it never went away.

Q: But was it something specific about making cartoons or comic strips that took with you as opposed to writing books or making music or whatever?

A: I think it was a function of where I thought my talents were. I knew I wasn’t going to do fine portrait painting because I didn’t have that kind of artistic chops. I have a — usually, not today so much — economical way with words that kind of suits the comic format.

Q: You include a lot of your early work in the book. What was it like to revisit that early material?

A: Looking at my early drawings, the first thing I wondered was why doesn’t everyone become a famous cartoonist? (laughs) Cause obviously there wasn’t much prodigy in attendance.

I really think it was my MBA that made me successful as a cartoonist, which is not a joke. Most artists have the artists have the attitude of “I’m going to do what I think is right and the audience will follow.” But if you have a business degree you say what does the market want and how can I give it to them. It’s probably not a huge surprise that Dilbert is arguably one of the last mega strips to come out in the past 20 years.

Q: You have a lot of notes in the new book. What do you think is one of the big revelations here that readers might not have known about you before?

A: Oh man. My life is such an open book I don’t know if there’s anything.

Q: That’s kind of why I asked the question, because you have been very open about the strip and how it came to be.

A: Well a lot of that was intentional in that I always thought that what made a comic strip more interesting is if you knew a little bit about the person who wrote it. Because if you read it every day it’s almost like you’re forming a relationship with the cartoonist.

As a reader, that’s how I always felt. I felt like I could tell when Schulz was in a bad mood. Or feeling a little blue. It just seemed to be reflected in his strip. And so I took that to the next level and said the more people know about me the more they can enjoy the whole product. So I think the thing that would maybe surprise people the most is that I never considered myself a cartoonist so much as an entrepreneur.

Q: Along the same lines, it occurred to me that you prefigured a lot of the Webcomics that are popular today in that you’re one of the first cartoonists that have had a really direct relationship with their audience. What are the pros and cons of that sort of relationship?

A: Well, I think this ties back to my comment about being more of a businessperson than a cartoonist in the sense that a huge amount of the input I get is negative and always has been. I think from the first time I got email in 1993, every once in a while I get the letter that says “I used to be a fan but you’ve really gone downhill. You’ve lost it. I wish you could get back to whatever you were doing that worked before.”

Every year I get a number of those. And they’re tough to read. If you have an artist’s mentality, that would crush you and you’d just stop doing it. But you would also miss out on all the useful stuff like the people who wrote and told you that Catbert was their favorite character after he had only appeared twice in the comic. I had no intention of keeping him.

Q: Along the same lines though I imagine there must be times where you have to trust your own instincts. How do you know when reader input is worth listening to versus someone just ranting?

A: Well the great thing is you can do both. I can just try something and see what the reaction is. The reaction doesn’t lie. They have no reason to be nice to me obviously. When I do something that doesn’t work, no matter how much I thought it would work, if the reaction is negative I just get off of it.

Q: Can you give me an example?

A: I’ll give you the most direct example. I tried to start a second comic strip, something called “Plop.” It was about a little boy who’s the only hairless Elbonian. It was based on the thought that once I figured out how to be a cartoonist and learned all the tricks that starting a new comic that wasn’t bound by the workplace would be a big hit because obviously I knew how to be a cartoonist, I already had the audience. I had all the assets to make that work.

But I just got eviscerated by readers who saw it. It never got published in newspapers; I tried it out on the Internet first. The trap that was completely invisible to me is that people didn’t compare it to a new comic strip. As if it had been somebody else who had made it. They compared it to where Dilbert was after 10 years of development.

If for example you looked at the first year of the Simpsons TV show and compared it to any comic strip or show you see now, it would look awful. You’d have never predicted it would become on of the biggest hits of all time. And the thing is that when it came out it was compared to nothing, because there wasn’t anything like it. Then they had the luxury of hiring talent and making money and becoming arguable as some people have said the best show ever on television.

Dilbert had already gone through 10 years and people can’t help comparing it to me. So my new stuff didn’t really have a chance. That was a interesting experiment in human behavior.

Q: You talk a lot in the book about people’s overreactions to some strips, the letter from the Square Dance Association being my favorite. Is there a particularly memorable negative reaction that stands out for you?

A: In terms of surprising, I’d say the people who complained about my references to cannibals. I thought cannibals were on TV, the movies, jokes; cannibals are everywhere. It’s just a funny concept. And when I did jokes about cannibals people would write angry letters to their editors, objecting to my cannibal references. That by the way, is an example of something that doesn’t happen anymore. I don’t know if society changed or Dilbert just became more popular, but I get a little bit of a free pass now.

Q: You don’t get those kind of complaints?

A: I’ve written about cannibals since then just to see what would happen and I got no complaints.

Q: That’s another thing you talk about in the book, how you’ve managed to make the humor a little edgier as it’s gone along. It’s interesting to note how certain words have become acceptable on the newspaper page. Do you think that’s just you, or do you think the comics page is becoming a bit more accepting of the kind of PG-rated humor?

A: Well, I think the more successful you are the more you can get away with, so there’s a little bit of that. There’s also the recognition that Dilbert is not your kids cartoon. That gives me a little extra. It’s often on the comics page just as often on the business page. So I think that gives me a little bit of flexibility. But it’s all in the psychology of the editors. I can’t really get in their heads that much.

Q: Do you think you’ve become a better artist as the strip’s gone along?

A: Yeah, I would say so. If you practice this much at anything, you’ll be better. My lines are smoother and the characters look the way I like them instead of whatever they were when I ran out of time.

When I drew on paper, which I don’t do anymore so it’s easier to correct and get it right this time, I used to have a day job for the first six years. So wherever I could do it — an hour an a half — was what it was. Sometimes it was acceptable and sometimes it wasn’t but I didn’t go back. I just didn’t have that luxury.

Q: Do you think cartoonists these days quit their day jobs too soon? Was there a benefit to keeping your day job as long as you did?

A: Well, in the sense that I had more business experience and it’s a business cartoon, but otherwise no I don't think so.

Q: How has corporate culture changed in the years you’ve been doing the strip and how do you keep abreast of those changes?

A: I still get lots of email from people and I am my own business to a large extent. The Dilbert Empire, if I can call it that, is a business with meetings and conference calls and contracts and lawyers and all that stuff. I’m kind of always in it. And I own a couple of restaurants, which give me the human dynamics that you can never imagine without observing them. There’s a little of that.

Then there’s the memories that never really change. I liken it to if you were going to prison for five years and then ten years later somebody says “Oh, you’ve pretty much forgotten what that was like, right?” You’d say, “No, I pretty much remember that.” And then there’s the fact that things don’t change that much. The technology changes. There are things like IMing someone at work versus conference calling them from the next cubicle, so that stuff changes, the ability to outsource is greater than before, but that stuff is in the headlines. It’s not too tough to know where that’s going.

Q: Is it harder to make jokes about the corporate environment when people are losing their jobs? Do you worry about cutting too close to the bone?

A: Oddly enough that’s when Dilbert had it’s biggest surge, during the downsizing of the mid-90s. The more miserable people were the more they wanted somebody to represent their misery, represent their point of view and displeasure of the whole thing. My popularity tends to track with the misery index. The worst time for Dilbert, in terms of licensing and everything else, was during the dot-com era when everyone felt that if they weren’t already a millionaire it must be their own fault.

Q: I had mentioned to someone that I was going to be interviewing you and they said Dilbert was almost too painful for them to read at times. Have you ever gotten a complaint like that?

A: I hear that a lot. It varies from joke to joke. I can see that. There are TV shows about restaurant owners like Hell’s Kitchen. I can’t watch those cause that’s too much like work.

Q: How do you settle on the design of a character, something like the pointy-haired boss? At what point do you look at it and say “That’s the character”?

A: A lot of it is just accident. As I talk about in the book, his hairstyle which has become the defining characteristic for the boss, just defined itself over time. One day my pen slipped I just drew one of his tufts of hair a little too tall once. I made the other one equal and it just drifted into that pointy-haired direction over time until he started to look right. So I have a quote which I said a long time ago, it’s probably the thing that gets quoted the most, that creativity is making mistakes and art is knowing which ones to keep. So the creativity in the character design is mostly mistakes and the art is knowing that Dilbert looks better without a mouth. It’s a mistake by any definition, it just looks better that way.

Q: Is that something you realized as you went along or were you conscious of it right away?

A: He was originally a doodle, and when he was a doodle he had a mouth. There was probably jut some day — I don’t remember it happening — but I’m sure what happened is I drew him without a mouth, looked at it and said “Huh. Looks a little better.”

Q: Like you said, you are one of the last mega-strips. What’s your take on the current state of comics strips? Is it as dire as people are saying the newspaper industry in general is?

A: Well, yeah, things are pretty dire. I think the thing that hurts comic strips the most, I that unlike television and unlike movies that are able to be essentially uncensored so they can drift to accommodate popular tastes which got more edgy, they weren’t allowed to get edgy, and couldn’t grow with the preferences of the public.

Q: That’s a complaint I’ve heard from a couple of comic strip artists, people like Stephen Pastis. The other complaint I hear a lot is about legacy strips. That there’s no room for new people to come in the door, because readers still want Snuffy Smith even though it’s 80 years old.

A: OK, now you’re channeling Pastis.

Q: Actually a couple of people have told me that, not just him.

A: There’s definitely that. Especially if the strip has been handed off to another artist or the kids or something. You’ve gotta assume that it would be unlikely that a second person would have whatever spark that made the first person so special that they got in the newspaper in the first place.

Q: Do you follow the Webcomics scene at all? And if so, do you feel any sort of affinity towards those comics?

A: No, I don’t follow them but I look at the social Web sites a lot like Digg and Reddit, and so quite often they point to them, and when that happens I look at it.

But I do follow Basic Instruction. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that one.

Q: No, I don’t think I’ve seen that one.

A: I did a little experiment on my blog. We tried to get him to become a syndicated cartoonist. We had him switch to a comic strip format and character-driven stuff. That turned out to not be successful but it was a good little boost to his popularity. What he does is just fricking hilarious.

Actually if you want an example, he is the perfect example of what’s wrong with comic strips in the newspaper. Here’s a guy who writes a comic that is completely g-rated, because it’s in a square four-box format and doesn’t draw like other people he has almost no chance of being a popular syndicated cartoonist and yet if you showed it to 20 people, 10 of them would say that’s funnier than anything that’s in the newspaper today. The quality of his art is not a predictor of his ability to succeed in newspapers. I don’t know if that’s true in other media.

Q: I think in comics, timing and being able to tell a joke is much more important than necessarily artistic ability. I think the craft in comics comes from layout and timing.

A: That’s why Basic Instruction is so interesting, because his writing is what is sensational.

Q: How long have you been drawing Dilbert on the computer now?

A: I think it’s been about three years.

Q: Other than the obvious — you’ve had this debilitating health problem — how has drawing the strip on the computer helped you? What are the benefits?

A: A lot of benefits. Anything that involves a straight line I can draw a lot better now. I can finish things in half the time which means if I want to do something that’s a little more complex, it buys me the time to do it. And I enjoy it. It’s just easier. It’s a more pleasant experience.

Q: How so? Can you give me a little more detail?

A: Well pen and paper is kind of tedious. It’s small and tiny and you’re hunched over. Even if you have a drawing board. It feels like work. Since we’ve been talking I’ve finished half a cartoon. (laughs) I did the writing already, I was just finishing up the art work. I can talk with one hand and draw with the other. If I draw a bad line I literally push one button and redraw it. Drawing a bad line with pen and paper used to be a huge pain in the ass. What you do is look at it and say “Eh, maybe it’s not really that bad.”
Q: One of the things I enjoyed in your notes in the book is when you talk about the rules of making a strip. What for you is the most important, number one rule in making a funny comic strip?

A: Well, for Dilbert in particular the number one rule is if there is something you can relate to in it. So I don’t have Dilbert going to the moon and a giant salamander eats his head.

Q: I wouldn’t mind seeing that.

A: I know. That’s the kind of comic I did in the first few years that people objected to. It’s the type of thing that other cartoonists like to read, but the public in general is interested in one and only one thing — themselves. Everybody wants to see something about them.

Even now I’m doing a series where Dilbert will eventually lose his job. You’ll see that in a month or so. But I worry because I don’t take that series too far because all the people who did not lose their job aren’t going to be able to relate to it. So you hope that there are enough people that have been laid off — and I think that’s true at this point — everyone knows somebody close to them that’s going through the same set of emotions so that even if they say “that’s not me” they say “oh my god, that’s Bob. I’m going to send this to Bob.”

So I usually go for something recognizable and then something cruel, something bad is happening to somebody. I make one of the characters a talking cat or something like that so that bizarre is in the mix too.
Q: You were talking before about business culture. Is there anything you can make fun of now that you couldn’t say 10 years ago?

A: There’s the ability to track what your employees are doing, which is interesting because they have company cell phones with GPS. You can track their keystrokes in some cases. you can track their IDs so you know where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing. That’s a little different.

I think maybe just ability to work from everywhere is different. Everything that’s different I would say is technology related. The basic human interactions where you put three people in a room and one of them is an asshole every time, that just never changes. It will always be true that all three people have a different opinion of which one’s the asshole.

Q: You talked about listening to your audience and mentioned getting a lot of negative complaints. Do you worry about jumping the shark, losing a connection with your audience?

A: You’re not in this business unless you worry about that every time you pick up the pencil or whatever this is I’ve got in my hand. You should have a certain amount of panic every time you draw a comic. Without that, I think the whole things falls apart. The reality of whether I need to worry about that is separate from the fact that it’s built into the process. It ought to be.

Q: It’s healthy in other words.

A: Yeah. A healthy fear.

Q: You talk in the book about writing affirmations really helped you focus and get Dilbert published. I was wondering if that’s something you still do.

A: Well you hear me talking, right? I don’t know if you know this story, but I couldn’t talk for three and a half years.

Q: I didn’t know whether to bring it up or not.

A: It’s not a sensitive issue.

So I lost my voice through this thing called spasmodic dysphonia. It was considered incurable, just like my hand problem was. But I was actually the first person — I don’t know if I wrote about this or not — but I was the first person who ever essentially — I won’t call it a cure — but found a way around my hand problem. Through just constant repetition of small motions that weren’t quite the motion that caused me trouble. After a period of years it remapped itself.

At the moment my hand is also fixed because I haven’t used it in a classic drawing or writing way unless I write a check or write a sticky note to myself. But for all of those normal uses — as long as I don’t have to write a college essay — it’s never going to be a problem again.

So I have experience with two incurable problems that I personally have cured. And for both of them I used affirmations. What are the odds? I’m not the only person who had the surgery to fix his voice, but there are probably millions of people who have spasmodic dysphonia, and don’t even know the doctor exists. I kind of came at it through several indirect connections that got me to where I needed to be. Although I probably sound a little nasally or hoarse right now on the phone the thing you don’t know is that is my normal voice. You’re probably wondering.

Q: I thought it might be the phone connection.

A: The spasmodic dysphonia sounds like a bad cell phone connection, so if I were to say “My name is Scott Adams,” which incidentally I could not say, it would sound like “My ame Cott Ada.” That’s all you would hear on the phone. I basically couldn’t use the telephone to order a pizza or spell my name or anything like that.

It’s a good thing my job involves comics. That’s also a reason why I started blogging. It was a way to communicate. And when you don’t have a way you’re used to, you kind of need an outlet.
Q: With the affirmations, do you think it just gives you an ability to focus better? Articulate your goals better?

A: Well, it’s probably several things. I wrote about this in my book God’s Debris, that was my first non-Dilbert book.

I think it’s a number of things. One possibility I’ll call the Boltzmann Brain theory. Do you know the theory?

Q: No, I don’t.

A: If you Google it you’ll find out there are serious physicists who have calculated the odds of the universe just kind of existing in the state that’s perfect for life and the odds that this is all imagined by one brain, because it’s easier for the universe to create simple things such as one brain than an entire universe filled with six billion brains on this planet and other life forms on other planets and all that. There are serious people who say that this reality is not in any way what we think it is. It’s an imagined reality. And if it’s an imagined reality, theoretically you could program it and perhaps affirmations is a mechanism to doing that. Changing what you imagine in other words.

That’s one theory. I don’t accept that theory (laughter), but I’m just putting it out there. It’s one that serious scientists, people who are not even nuts, say is infinitely more probable than whatever you think is real.

The other possibilities are it’s what you said, it’s if you focus more on your goal — and there’s something called reticular activation, which is a fancy name for saying you recognize your own name across a crowded room more than other noises. You just notice stuff that you’re kind of tuned into.

So I tuned myself into all things voice-related and the way I diagnosed my problem with my voice is I woke up one day and thought “I wonder if this has anything to do with my hand problem.” I googled Dystonia, which is the problem with the hand, and voice and up popped a video of someone with spasmodic dysphonia who sounded exactly like I did. That led me down the path that ultimately led me to the solution. It took three and a half years because I tried everything but surgery first, which is rational. But I think back about that moment when I realized which two words to Google, that’s exactly the type of thing that happens when you’re doing affirmations.

Now I can’t say it’s because of affirmations but it’s exactly the type of thing. You notice things or you think of things that you wouldn’t have noticed or thought of without that. So it seems like an insight, but it probably is just a very normal process of focus. The other possibility is affirmations don’t work at all and it’s selective memory. And that I may have done affirmations on lots of things that didn’t work but I don’t remember them. I don’t think that’s the case, you know if you write something down every day for a long period of time it’s hard to forget it. I think it’s worked just about every time.

The other possibility is and this one I kind of lean towards, that on some subconscious level you’re a better judge of yourself than you are on a conscious level. And your subconscious if it even allows you that much time writing something down as a goal, it probably has a good sense that you can really pull it off.

So, for example, if I started writing “I want to become an Olympic gymnast” I’m positive that after the second day my subconscious would find something better for me to do because it knows that one isn’t going to work. When I wrote down “I’ll become a syndicated cartoonist” or “I’ll have a number one bestselling book,” even though those seem unlikely to any rational observer including myself, on some subconscious level I knew I had the ability to make that happen. That’s kind of my best guess.

The way it works is almost irrelevant isn’t it?

Q: Has Dogbert been in the strip lately? I don’t think I’ve seen him in it as often as usual.

A: As a matter of fact I noticed that myself recently. I’m trying to put him back in a little more.

Q: So it wasn’t anything conscious on your part?

A: Yeah, these things happen kind of accidentally. Ashok the intern hasn’t been in lately either. There’s no reason.

Q: I was reading a story recently about the Belgian cartoonist Herge who did a all-ages series called Tintin. They found a bunch of his letters where he rails about how trapped he feels by his character because he’d been doing this character all his adult life. Alongside this question about losing your audience, do you worry about being trapped by Dilbert?

A: Well let me answer the bigger question by saying that cartoonists are the biggest whiners. “Oh boo hoo, I’m a famous cartoonist. I make millions of dollars by sitting in a chair.” (laughter) Well, fuck you. If that’s what you’re complaining about, that you’re trapped by your character that made you famous and let you live in the big house, try a real job.

Q: At the same time I always read stories about people who feel trapped by their characters and start to resent them. It seems odd, but at the same time it’s there.

A: Well, I’m not going to deny that I have those feelings, but I am going to deny complaining about it.

Graphic Lit: Thoughts on the revamped For Better Or For Worse

What’s my favorite comic strip?

There was a time not long ago when my answer would have been Lynn Johnston’s family saga, “For Better or For Worse.”

Oh, “Peanuts” was always seminal for me, and “Calvin and Hobbes” was certainly the last great strip of the 20th century. But after Schulz’s death and Watterson’s retirement, Johnston stood head and shoulders above the comics page as the last bastion of quality.

That’s not the case now, and it hasn’t been for some time. Johnston’s constant need for overly cute wordplay, not to mention her forcing middle child Elizabeth into a marriage with creepy former sweetheart Anthony, left a bad taste in my mouth.

Of course, if you’ve been paying attention to the funnies at all, you noticed that “For Better or For Worse” came to a close of sorts recently.

After a yearlong series of “will-she/won’t-she” announcements, reversals and decisions, Johnston opted to bring the current story line to an end and has been redrawing and editing older strips, telling the Patterson family’s story all over again.

As creative choices go this seems a bit like regressive second-guessing to me. Revisiting and altering your older work doesn’t necessarily “fix” or “improve” anything, as most “Star Wars” fans would be quick to point out.

And yet, despite all my qualms, it’s worth pointing out just how good the strip has been over its 30-year run. One of the few strips to have its characters age in real time (“Gasoline Alley” being the other notable example), “For Better” offered an honest portrait of day-to-day family life that drew upon universal themes without sacrificing humor in the name of drama. Or vice-versa.

Johnston frequently explored risky or serious topics, the most famous no doubt being Michael’s best friend’s coming out of the closet. But she also addressed spousal abuse, bad love affairs, teen angst and the pitfalls of raising kids, often with insight and great characterization. She seemed to take an impish delight in walking right up to the line but not crossing it, and that delighted me.

But what impressed me most about the strip was its lovely art and attention to detail. In an era when most cartoonists responded to the ever-shrinking news space by minimizing as much as possible (see “Dilbert”), Johnston grew more ornate and detailed.

Her strip frequently became a thinly sliced series of panels, each crammed to the point of overflowing with words and pictures, but never seeming dense or weighed down.

Yes, she could be sappy and saccharin. Yes, her constant need to add a “rim shot” fourth panel often resulted in terrible puns or awful homespun wisdom that wouldn’t make it onto a sub-par throw pillow. Detractors will get no argument from me on that score.

And there are plenty of detractors to go around. In recent years, Web sites like The Comics Curmudgeon have made a veritable career out of poking fun at the strip. There are blogs devoted to “The Foobs” that delight in raking its characters over the coals as often as possible.

Why such ire over a simple comic strip?

Perhaps they sense how good it once was and could still be. Perhaps such snark was born out of frustration over seeing the characters they watched grow up be contorted into awkward and unrealistic relationships for the sake of a pat happy ending. Maybe they just didn’t like the strip.

Despite the awkward note “FBoFW” ended on, and however iffy I feel about this new 2.0 version, I’m grateful to Johnston for 30 years of raising the standards of the comics page (one of the few women to do so, it should be noted). She remains one of the greats.

Oh OK, I'll play along

See here and here for details.

Plain = Things I don't have
Bold = Things I do have
Italics = I have some but probably not enough
Underline = Do collections count as runs? If so yes, if no no

1. Something From The ACME Novelty Library
2. A Complete Run Of Arcade
3. Any Number Of Mini-Comics
4. At Least One Pogo Book From The 1950s (my mom's cousin has an impressive collection of these though).
5. A Barnaby Collection
6. Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary (It's included in the Binky Brown Sampler, so I feel safe bolding this one).
7. As Many Issues of RAW as You Can Place Your Hands On (Of the first run, I only have the Read Yourself Raw collection, but I do have all the later Penguin anthologies).
8. A Little Stack of Archie Comics (these are really my daughter's, but she shares).
9. A Suite of Modern Literary Graphic Novels
10. Several Tintin Albums (I'm a Tintin junkie).
11. A Smattering Of Treasury Editions Or Similarly Oversized Books
12. Several Significant Runs of Alternative Comic Book Series
13. A Few Early Comic Strip Collections To Your Taste
14. Several "Indy Comics" From Their Heyday
15. At Least One Comic Book From When You First Started Reading Comic Books (Sadly, most of my original collection has gone the way of the dustbin, twas so overread).
16. At Least One Comic That Failed to Finish The Way It Planned To
17. Some Osamu Tezuka
18. The Entire Run Of At Least One Manga Series
19. One Or Two 1970s Doonesbury Collections
20. At Least One Saul Steinberg Hardcover (I have the book that came with the recent DC exhibition of Steinberg's work, but I don't suppose that really counts).
21. One Run of A Comic Strip That You Yourself Have Clipped
22. A Selection of Comics That Interest You That You Can't Explain To Anyone Else
23. At Least One Woodcut Novel (D&Q's reissue of Laurence Hyde's book makes this one an easier proposition).
24. As Much Peanuts As You Can Stand (and I can stands quite a bit).
25. Maus
26. A Significant Sample of R. Crumb's Sketchbooks
27. The original edition of Sick, Sick, Sick.
28. The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics
29. Several copies of MAD (I lost most of my old copies of Mad somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, but I still have a few issues filed away here and there).
30. A stack of Jack Kirby 1970s Comic Books
31. More than a few Stan Lee/Jack Kirby 1960s Marvel Comic Books
32. A You're-Too-High-To-Tell Amount of Underground Comix
33. Some Calvin and Hobbes
34. Some Love and Rockets
35. The Marvel Benefit Issue Of Coober Skeber
36. A Few Comics Not In Your Native Tongue
37. A Nice Stack of Jack Chick Comics (I've got a few, but not enough to qualify as a "stack").
38. A Stack of Comics You Can Hand To Anybody's Kid
39. At Least A Few Alan Moore Comics
40. A Comic You Made Yourself (I had a brief bout with self-publishing. The less said about it, the better).
41. A Few Comics About Comics
42. A Run Of Yummy Fur
43. Some Frank Miller Comics
44. Several Lee/Ditko/Romita Amazing Spider-Man Comic Books
45. A Few Great Comics Short Stories
46. A Tijuana Bible (I've got that book of reprints that Art Spiegelman wrote the intro for, and I think it counts).
47. Some Weirdo ("one" qualifies as "some," right?)
48. An Array Of Comics In Various Non-Superhero Genres
49. An Editorial Cartoonist's Collection or Two
50. A Few Collections From New Yorker Cartoonists

Graphic Lit: An interview with Darrin Bell

Continuing playing catch-up after a lengthy hiatus, here's an interview I did with Darrin Bell, creator of Candorville, for the Patriot-News. Candorville was the fourth and final strip we subbed for Doonesbury while it was on vacation, hence the dated references to Hilary Clinton.



Q: What made you want to be a cartoonist?

A: I’ve been drawing since I was three. My mom taught me how to draw. I always got a lot a lot of attention from teachers when I was caricaturing them. A lot of them told me if I don’t get my mind back on studying I’m not going to become anything. But I give a lot of credit to my mom. She told me if I find something I like doing, just keep doing it and make sure that I do it as best I can and someday I’ll be able to make a living at it.

I kind of forgot about then when I went to college. I wanted to go into journalism. I wanted to be either one of those talking heads on TV like Pat Buchanan or James Carville or I wanted to have my own column. I started writing for the Daily Californian — UC Berkley’s daily college paper. I was excited about it. I was interviewing people like the governor of California, our local congressman, Senator Boxer. I wrote articles and at the same time I had these cartoons that I was drawing in my spare time. I just dumped them on the paper and told them run whenever they feel like.

When my articles ran I asked my friends what they thought. None of them had read any of the articles but everybody had read my cartoons and loved them. So after a few months of that I figured maybe my future lies in that direction.

Q: How did Candorville come about?

A: Candorville grew out of those cartoons that I did. At the time it was called Lamont Brown. It was an autobiographical strip. It gave me an outlet to vent my frustrations about college life. After I graduated from college it gave me an outlet for other things.

I still didn’t want to do that for a living though. I wanted to draw editorial cartoons. I started drawing as a freelancer for the LA Times and San Francisco Chronicle and a bunch of other papers. When it came time to submit my cartoons for awards I submitted both those and Lamont Brown. Again, I got more feedback on the comic strips from people who work at the syndicates. I just thought I’ll develop those and keep sending them and eventually I got syndicated.

Q: Give me a time line. When did the strip became syndicated?

A: In 2003.

Q: How many papers is it running in now?

A: Not counting the papers running it as a substitute for Doonesbury, it should be about 70 papers.

Q: How old are you now?

A: I’m 33.

Q: What are some of your influences?

A: Mainly sitcoms. One Day at a Time, the first season. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that.

Q: Yeah, Valerie Bertinelli.

A: If you go back and watch the first season — not the later ones where they parody themselves — but the first season was really honest and raised a lot of questions even if it didn’t know how to answer them. That’s what I try to do in Candorville. It’s called Candorville not because I think I have all the answers but because I ask what I think are honest questions.

There are other sitcoms like All in the Family, Good Times, The Jeffersons and The Cosby Show.

Q: But as far as comic strips go, things like Doonesbury aren’t as much of an influence?

A: Not really. I didn’t read Doonesbury until just a few years ago. Bloom County I read mostly for the penguin. I was interested in the art work. My main influence in that industry would be Paul Conrad, the LA Times editorial cartoonist. His work was just amazing and I don’t think I’d be interested in politics today if it weren’t for him.

Q: I imagine a lot of people label the strip as political or an ethnic strip. Does that sort of labeling bother you at all?

A: It is overtly political but the labeling does bother me a bit because it’s also an overt relationship strip. It’s overtly ethnic just because it has ethnic characters. It deals with the same issues that I deal with on a daily basis. We all think about politics from time to time but we also think about our girlfriend or our friend saying things we wish they wouldn’t say. It’s a slice of life strip.
Q: Do you feel like you have any unique challenges to doing this sort of strip that touches on political and social issues that say, Hi and Lois doesn’t?

A: Yeah I do. I’m sure they have unique challenges too. For one thing whenever I include a character of color, no matter what I’m talking about someone’s going to write and complain because they thought that I was saying that all black people are this way.

I had one black character who doesn’t like to use the crosswalks. He likes to cross in the middle of the street because that’s an easy way to assert control over his own life. I got an email saying “I’ve seen plenty of black people use crosswalks.”

That’s the kind of thing I have to deal with. In general, whenever you talk politics you’re going to offend at least half the people. I try to make them laugh while I’m offending them. That takes the edge off.

Q: What sort of feedback do you get?

A: Judging by the email feedback and the people I meet at book signings, my readership is largely conservative and many of them actually support what I’m saying. Even if they don't agree with it they like hearing an opposing viewpoint. It gives them something to think about even if what they end up thinking is that I’m an idiot. It’s stimulating. It’s something interesting.

Q: What do you see the viewpoint of the strip being? One of the things I find interesting about the strip is you don’t really take sides. You mock Hillary Clinton frequently for example.

A: I’m thinking of endorsing Hillary Clinton actually. Either her or McCain. Whoever is going to give me the most material. I’m thinking of starting a cartoonists for Hillary fan club. A PAC to help her.

I’ve seen it described as conservative depending upon which people first see. When my strip has been commenting on Hillary and that’s the first week people see it in the newspaper, people think it’s conservative and hold onto that opinion. Even if I go on to talk about McCain, they express surprise to me that a conservative strip is talking about McCain. Conversely other people are sure it’s liberal.

I just don’t like being lied to. Whoever I think is lying to me or insulting the intelligence of the average American, that’s who I’m going to go after.
Q: Do you see the strip’s goal then to expose the lying liars?

A: Yeah, exactly. I’m scouring, looking for some examples for Obama. And if I find it, watch out.

Q: You recently led a group of African-American cartoonists in an event where you all ran the same strip one day. Tell me a little bit about that.

A: Yeah, I did lead that. The goal of it — we were trying to get editors and readers to start thinking about strips featuring characters of color and to think of them in terms of the themes they were dealing with instead of the color of the characters.

For instance, our syndicate did a survey -- you can get the numbers from them -- they found that most papers didn’t have any strips featuring any characters of color and those that did only had one or two. There are a handful of exceptions, I think it was three or four papers that had three. When one is added to a paper another one is taken out. I’ve replaced Curtis in a number of papers even though I don’t think there are any politics in Curtis and my main character is not an eight-year-old boy. It puzzles me why Candorville is always pitted against these other strips. The only similarity is the color of the characters. I don’t want to think that in 2008 that’s what editors are judging strips on. We give our readers a lot more credit that some of the editors do because we get direct feedback from them. We get feedback from people who feel that they’re right but they still enjoy the strip. Race is still an issue, but it shouldn’t be.

Q: Tell me a little bit more about the event and what sort of response you got.

A: We all ran the same strip on the same day. The strip was a send-up of the idea that all black strips are interchangeable. The only goal was to get people thinking that maybe they’re not interchangeable. Maybe when we want to replace a family strip we should look for another family strip.

Q: And not judge it by what color the characters are.

A: Yeah. Replacing Jump Start with Candorville makes as much sense as replacing For Better or For Worse with Doonesbury.

Q: So what kind of response did you get? Do you feel like it drew attention to the issue?

A: It did. It started a discussion just in the confines of the industry the discussion is important. We heard from a lot of newspaper editors who had been operating this way but not consciously. They thanked us for raising the issue. There were a lot of papers that were hesitant to sample our strips because they already ran one or two black strips and didn’t want to get rid of them so they thought "Why should we even try?" There are plenty of those who decided to give us a try. When Doonesbury went on vacation, there are a lot of papers trying out Candorville that already run one or two black strips. I’m told that many of them wouldn’t have done so without the protest. These editors see it mainly as a social/political strip and not a black strip.

Q: It’s hard enough for up and coming strips to get a foothold in the paper. Do you feel like because you have an ethnic strip that you have one more mark against you?

A: Yeah, that’s one of the arguments we were making during the protest. We face the exact same hurdles as all other new strips but we face the additional hurdle of being seen as a black strip. Where all these new strips are competing from six to 36 spots, we were all competing in effect for no more than two. We didn’t think that was a good situation. The thing about most of the editors I’ve met or spoken to — it’s not a conscious thing. People don't’ get into this business in order to discriminate. So we thought all we need to do is bring it to their attention. Once they start thinking about it, maybe they’ll change.

Q: You deal with some touchy topics — politics and race. Of the two, which do you feel is riskier for an artist to be discussing and how do you get your message across effectively without having a flood of hate mails and dropped strips?

A: I’ve always sort of combined the two in my head because the issue of race in this country is very political. When I first started out, I think race was the touchier issue. I used to get a lot of emails from people saying "Not another Boondocks," "Not another angry black man," "I don’t want my kid reading this." After awhile I think people stopped considering the race of my characters so much and I stopped hearing those comments. I started hearing from people thanking me for the diversity, even if they didn’t agree with what I was saying.

A lot of people used to want me to play up the positive of African American culture, because one of my characters isn’t what you’d consider a positive role model. I used to ask them what would be the point of that. This is a real problem, the hopelessness and bad decisions that some people make. This is a real problem and there’s no way to solve problems unless you first acknowledge they exist. In terms of the comics page, unless you learn to laugh at them. The best way to dismiss a problem is to see that it’s not grave. There’s some humor in it. If you can learn to laugh at something, that means you’ve learned to put it in perspective.

Q: What’s your take on the state of the comics industry today? A lot of the artist I’ve been talking to are very critical of the state of the newspaper industry.
A: I think we all [are]. It’s hard not to when you see papers shutting down or ones that survive slashing their comics section. When they haven’t really changed what they pay for comics since 1972 ... There’s also the consolidation in the industry. There’s huge corporations buying up papers.

We have it better than editorial cartoonists though. There are maybe 250 syndicated strips out there. There used to be the same number of editorial cartoonists, and that profession seems to be dying off by attrition.

Q: Does Candorville pay the bills? Do you have a day job?

A: Well I do two strips. My other strip is called Rudy Park.

Q: Tell me about that. I didn’t know about it.

A: Rudy Park started off in 2000 about a dot-commer who the bust happened and he was forced to get a job as a manger at a cyber cafe. At the cafe he’s got a ruthless, conniving boss, he’s got a 80something Luddite nemesis who hates him because he’s enamored with technology.

Graphic Lit: An interview with Richard Thompson

Ok, that was a nice break, but now it's time to knuckle down again. We'll kick things off with an extensive interview I did several months ago with cartoonist extraordinaire Richard Thompson, whose daily strip Cul de Sac is one of the best things going today. While Doonesbury was on vacation, The Patriot-News sampled a few new comic strips and I managed to convince the powers that be that Cul should make the cut, hence the interview.

OK, that's enough introduction now. Here's the Q&A:


Q: I’m a little ashamed to say I don’t know that much about your career before you started doing Cul de Sac. Can you tell me a little bit about your background?

A: As with most cartoonists it was something I always did. I always drew, even when I should have been doing other things like homework, back in grade school.

My parents always encouraged it, they liked it. It was always what I was going to be at some point. I just didn’t know what form it would take. I got into illustration 25 years ago, mostly newspaper stuff. I’m near Washington, DC, so I did and still do a lot of stuff for the Washington Post. When I was starting out I did several things a week.

Q: What kinds of things?

A: Oh spot drawings and illustrating articles. Little digbats. This and that. I started doing caricature and goofy stuff. I did some realistic stuff for them too which I didn’t much enjoy but I found I could do it.

I was doing a series for the Post, there’s a column called “Why Things Are.” It was written by Joel Achenbach and they syndicated it too. I guess it appeared in the Post for about five, six years.

It was a dream job. They just gave me an early version of the text and it was a loose-set up. He would take any question from readers and try to find an answer for it. Something as mundane as “Why are there no green cars?” to “What do you see when you close your eyes?” or “What does the inside of your nose smell like?” and on to more cosmic questions like “Why are there things?”

They didn’t much care what I did as long as I had some vague idea, something vaguely to do with the column. And I just went nuts with it. It got to be a little strip in itself in that each illustration had a balloon with some text in it, so it looked like a comic.

The editor there, Gene Winegarten, who started Dave Barry off in Florida, he pushed me — "Things" ended in about '93 maybe — he said "Why don’t you do a weekly comic for us." A year or so later I started dong a weekly cartoon. It was a free-for-all. They didn’t care what I did too much as long as it was spelled right and free of obscenities and nothing legally actionable with it. That turned into Richard’s Poor Almanac, which I’m still doing every Saturday.

Q: How would you describe that strip? Was it a social satire or a political strip?

A: It’s more social. It’s political sometimes, just because D.C. is a political town, but I wouldn’t call it an editorial cartoon. Politicians appear in it sometimes, but as an almanac I can make fun of the weather too.

Again, they don’t much care what I do as long as it’s funny and makes some sense. I just turn it in on Friday night and they don’t even look at it until it shows up. Another dream job. For years I didn’t think anyone was really reading it so who cares? The pressure was off.

Q: So how did doing a weekly strip lead to Cul de Sac?

A: The editorship changed a couple of times. I guess I’ve been through five editors with it. I think the second or third was Tom Schroeder, who came up to the post through the Miami Herald. He’s now the editor of the Washington Post magazine. Somewhere along the line he said, "Have you ever thought of doing a strip with continuing characters in it?" "Well yeah kind of." "Why don’t you put something together for the Sunday magazine and just have it be about Washington without being about official Washington, the people who live around here." I grew up around DC and the suburbs around DC. It sort of grew out of that. It’s a backwater side of Washington. Calling it Cul De Sac made it obvious it was not the center of town somehow. That started in 2004.

Q: This was done as part of the almanac or —

A: No, it grew out of it. It was a complete and separate entity when it started in the magazine. I did it as a full color watercolor drawing and everything.

Q: Now how did it compare to the strip today? Was it pretty much fully formed out of the blue?

A: I fooled around with it for a year before I showed him anything. I knew that it was about this family and took place in a very small neighborhood and that the husband commuted into Washington. It was somewhat specific. They went to Nationals games and the Zoo and the Smithsonian and stuff like that. It took a while though to settle who was what. I knew who the characters were but I didn’t know what they did. Like most strips they take a while to shake out.

Q: What was the idea behind this particular family? Behind just portraying the social life of the DC area did you have any other goals or ideas beyond that? It does feel like a very universal strip.

A: I had the characters lined up. I sort of to know them better. Like most comic strip cartoonists will tell you I started to hear their voices. They start narrating their lives and demanding their time on stage. They do the talking for you somehow. It’s up to you to capture the slice of life that three or four panels can take.

I knew that Alice, the little girl, she’s four years old and kind of — I think of she and her brother, she’s the unstoppable force and he’s the immovable object. And they can collide and sparks can fly. She’s self-absorbed and pretty unstoppable. Just stay out of her way. He’s curled up in his room in a fetal position in his own little world.

Q: How did it move out of the weekly slot into becoming a daily strip?

A: It was sort of a strain of happenstance chain of events. Lee Salem, who is the editor at Universal Press Syndicate, — back when Bush was first elected, to make a long story somewhat shorter, Bush did not have an inaugral poem read at his first inaugral —

Q: Is this about Make the Pie Higher?

A: Yeah. I did a Poor Almanac where I just took a string of Bush quotes that were mushmouthed and didn’t make much sense and strung them together into a free-form poem. When I did it I thought Jesus, this makes no sense but I’ve got a deadline. It showed up the Sunday before his inaugral and it leaked out on the Web somehow.

I didn’t notice, but my editor pointed out some months later that this thing was out there and called Make the Pie Higher. Lee Salem saw it and didn’t know it was a cartoon and he emailed me and said have you got anything else? I said "Where would I start?" He was coming for a conference here and so we met. We chatted over drinks and I gave him a pile of Cul de Sacs. And we kept in touch and some months later he said "We’d like to do something with this, how about a daily?" I said OK. A daily strip was something I’d avoided for years. I wasn’t sure if I had such a thing in me. He said, "We think you can do something with this." I thought, now’s the chance. I can’t back away from this. This was in 2006. And here I am, two weeks behind already.


Q: So what was the official debut of the strip?

A: It was September 2007.

Q: How many papers did it start out in?

A: I think it was 70.

Q: And how’s it doing now?

A: Pretty good. I think it’s in 120 or 110. It’s nice to hear there are 120 newspapers out there still.

Q: What kind of feedback have you been getting on the strip?

A: Pretty good. I started a blog just as an accident. I was kind of embaressed to do it but somebody said I should give it a shot. I get a lot of stuff back. I’ve gotten some responses from Italy recently where they’re starting to run it translated in a comics magazine. I get a couple a day from people saying “Gee you had Petey playing the oboe the other day and I’m a professional oboist and it’s nice to see that.” It seems like the really specific stuff goes over with a bang more than anything more general. I did one recently with Alice just collecting sticks, like kids do. My daughters have done that.

Q: My son’s four so he’s constantly bringing rocks into the house.

A: My daughter was doing that for awhile. She was bringing little pebbles in and drawing faces on them. Then putting them out in the yard thinking people will find these someday and be happy. How can you describe that logic?

Q: You write about these things, but you don’t do something a lot of comic strip artists do which is write about specific references to current events. You don’t refer to the Wii or whatever the hot new movie is.

A: I try to keep away from that. I can deal with that in the Almanac; make fun of that and get it out of my system. Also, I figure the ages of the kids — 4 and 8 — they’re not totally into the more advance pop culture stuff probably. Petey’s into comic books but I think he’s more into Chris Ware-type comic books, which are more likely to be depressing and bring you down more than make you want to go out and beat up bad guys. I can make my own little world and still make it somewhat specific to the real world.

Q: You talked about how you wanted to avoid making a daily strip for a long time. How has the adjustment been?

A: I’m not real far ahead. I’m so used to deadlines that it’s not as bad as I thought. There’s still miles of Bristol board to cover. I still pull all-nighters sometimes. I was talking to Mark Tatulli and we talk in the middle of the night. “What are you doing?” “Same thing as you.” I haven’t gotten it down to a science yet, which is probably a good thing. I don’t want to settle in too much. I’m tolerating it OK I guess.

Q: I was going to ask you what your schedule is like.

A: (laughs) I work at home which is —

Q: Ideal?

A: Good and bad. It’s ideal in that I can just sit in a comfy chair and work on it, but it’s always right there in your face. All the distractions are here. My daughters come home from school and it’s “Oh, what did you do today? What did you have for lunch? Take me out of this!”

Q: How did your previous work doing illustration, caricature and the Almanac prepare you for the demands of a daily strip?

A: I think it helped a lot in that I tried a lot of different things. I can fall back on them or go back to an old idea and rework it. Not so much old stale stuff but see how things fit together that I hadn’t thought of before. I try a lot of different styles over the years. Making things fit into this little world with these little kids and such. When I started it, Lee Salem said “Keep your day job.” My day job is doing illustration work and also the almanac, so it’s more of the same. I still try to do a lot of magazine illustration cause I need the money.

Q: How did you develop your art style?

A: Some of it was intentional. Over the years I’ve admired hundreds and thousands of cartoonists and tried to mimic or steal from them. Style is kind of a Frankenstein monster that you put together these pieces of bodies over the years and the stitches heel and suddenly boom, you’ve got a style. Nobody sees where the parts join somehow. There’s so many I’ve enjoyed over the years from Pogo to Peanuts to Ronald Searle and Chris Ware and everybody today. I hope to try new things and you either fall on your face or you don’t. Hopefully nobody notices that either.

Q: You talk about trying new things, can you give me an example?

A: Using a lot of black or using a thicker line. Stuff that nobody would notice. But when you do it it’s this sudden breakthrough and you go “Geez, look what I’ve done.” You point it out and nobody can see it. I do a strip and think “This is just godawful” and nobody notices that either.

Q: What are you influences? You’ve mentioned a pretty wide net so far.

A: There are cartoonists that you discover and this window opens and this whole new world is presented to you. I think Searle was one of those. I was 19 or 20 and I got this book of his for my birthday. The watercolor and the line and sense of things you can do with ink that I hadn’t even thought of. Then I can go back to Pogo and I remember the first time I read him in fifth grade. When I’m sure I didn't understand hald the jokes, but it was just so funny, this endless stream of vaudeville and characters just tripping over themselves, the language and everything like that.

Q: One of the things that strikes me about Cul is how you present the child as self-absorbed but in their own world completely and oblivious as to what other things might be gong on around them. The things that fascinate a child of four would not at all fascinate a grown-up and the tension you get from that.

A: It’s something my dad pointed out to me a couple of years ago. He said you’ve got all these people here and they’re in these little circles and don’t notice each other too much. All these worlds don’t collide so much. Just enough to create some friction and keep the wheels spinning somehow. Each one is an unreliable narrator. You’ve got this overall plot where the characters fit into it but they don’t see the whole.

Q: Especially with Alice. I was reading the strips where Alice’s Dad comes into read to her preschool and how the kids are more delighted by the fact he can’t get out of the chair than the story itself. How much of that is autobiographical?

A: Maybe that’s just the way my mind works, which is nothing I want to brag about. I don’t know if I could find another job doing such a thing, but I can think up tangents and non sequitars fairly easily. Doing the Almanac for years, when you’re trying to be funny people brace themselves and say “OK here comes the funny part. I have to laugh.” You have to surprise them. There has to be some kind of tangent or association they didn’t expect. Some kick in the pants they didn’t see coming. I try to do that almost continuously in Cul de Sac. One thing does not lead to another. It’s just a string of laundry down the line, flapping in the breeze somehow.

Q: I guess along those lines another obvious comparison would be Calvin and Hobbes, in the sense that Calvin is someone who’s completely in his own world.

A: Yeah, and everything is seen through him. You see the adult level above it, from a distance. But you also see it through his eyes.

Q: How does the strip come together for you? How do you plan it out?

A: It’s usually the words first. I keep a couple of ideas spinning in my head and try to see how they either fit together or don’t. If there are two or three elements that are disparate enough that they’re colliding and making something funny, some friction, then I figure there’s a strip in there somewhere. The rest is just filling in the blanks. Each one is this brief four panel thing. You have only so much time to make your point and get off stage somehow. Just finding that little slice of life is the hard part for me I think.

There are some I’ve drawn first. There’s one with Dil going down this tube slide and it took him 20 panels to get through it. The whole time he’s going “Oh boy, whee!” I had to figure out what happened at the beginning and end. The rest is just getting the timing right.

You leap from one thing to the next. I’ll have an idea for an Almanac or an illustration and think “maybe this would work better as a strip.” It’s not real logical. I talked to Stephan Pastis who does Pearls Before Swine. He’s fascinated with the process of writing. He’s very logical about it. I’ve seen his notebooks where he takes great care in how he writes out things. He can do it beautifully. He does it much more logically than I would. My method is bits of pieces of paper that I keep rearranging until I’ve got something funny.

Q: You cite a pretty wide net of influences. I get the impression you keep up with what’s going on in comics rather well.

A: Well there’s so much interesting stuff going on out there. I gave a Sunday strip to somebody at Drawn and Quarterly for a box of books. They sent me a bunch of stuff I hadn’t seen. That’s a good way to keep up on stuff.

Chris Ware, I first saw his stuff 10-15 years ago in Raw. It jumped out at me immediately. He’s a pretty dense read these days.

Q: With you, Tatulli and Pastis, there seems to be a renaissance in comic strips right now with a lot of new, talented people coming out.

A: Like we were saying, it’s not just with comic strips, the indie field is exploding.

Q: Do you think they’re feeding off of each other? Sometimes it seems like such tiny circles and no one’s paying attention to what the others are doing.

A: That’s more likely it but it might be breaking through. I hope so.

Q: Tatulli and Pastis are very opinionated on the state of the comic strip today. What’s your opinion? Do you find it hard for a new strip to break?

A: I think it is. I’ve had good luck with mine so far, but as Tatulli said, the day of the 1,000 paper strip is almost over. You don’t get that kind of coverage that you used to. There’s a lengthy process to get a strip into a paper and there’s such a long line ahead of you somehow.

Q: Are you frustrated at all? Do you feel like you’re fighting for space?

A: Sometimes yeah, but it’s doing OK, so in these days and times, newspapers are such a dicey concern anyway, that’s just one small part of it. Nobody knows what’s going on. I worked with the post for 25 years and seeing people taking buyouts and they’ve got a new editor and publisher there now so god knows what will happen.

Graphic Lit: An interview with Jules Feiffer

Jules Feiffer lives a blessed life.

His children’s novel, “The Man in the Ceiling,” is being produced on Broadway by Disney. His memoirs will be published next year. And when I spoke with him recently, he was preparing to see his daughter perform alongside Kevin Kline — in a play he wrote.

Not to mention the other beloved and award-winning plays (“Little Murders”), screenplays (“Carnal Knowledge”) and children’s books (“Bark, George”) he’s written in the past 50 years.

It started with the comic strip. Specifically, the “Village Voice” comic strip.

Originally titled “Sick, Sick, Sick” at its 1956 debut (and later renamed “Feiffer” before its current name), the strip’s sardonic take on Cold War America’s politics and social mores quickly made a name for itself. As a comic strip, it was a pioneer in exploring adult anxieties and foibles.

Now those seminal cartoons are being collected in four extensive volumes, the first of which — “Explainers” — went on sale a few weeks ago.

I talked to Feiffer about the collection and the strip’s legacy. Here’s what he had to say:

Q: What’s it like to revisit this material after all this time?

A: It’s kind of amazing to see how much of it holds up and how interesting it remains to me as the author of it, instead of making me wince and wish it away. I kind of enjoy looking at it. I see it primarily at this late date as a body of work, but it’s a body of work that increasingly builds and develops and makes sense, so I’m quite happy about it.

Q: Are there any strips in particular that stand out for you?

A: Oh, I’m sure there are, but I can’t —

Q: Is there anything that surprised you?

A: Yes, but again I can’t be specific. But here and there I’d say “Jesus Christ, I used to be good.”

Q: Can you talk a little bit about how you got in the Village Voice?

A: It’s in the introduction, but I’ll tell you about it. I had been for three years or so been trying to sell my work in book form to editors at publishing houses like Simon and Schuster. All of them expressed great interest in the work and no interest in publishing it.

Their excuse was, as they gave it over and over again, that they didn’t know how to market it. Since I was an unknown, they couldn’t take a chance on publishing it. If I were known, if my name were Steinberg or Steig or Thurber, they would grab it.

My problem was that I wasn’t Steinberg or Steig or Thurber and I had to figure out how I could be. It was clear that once I could get in publications they would recognize, they’d recognize me. I saw on all their desks copies of the Village Voice, so I figured if I could be in that paper, then they might confuse me with Steinberg, Steig or Thurber and publish me. And that’s exactly what happened.

Q: What was the initial reaction when the strip debuted? Did you get any reader feedback?

A: Yes. I thought it would take six months to a year, it took a matter of weeks. It happened incredibly fast. People would stop me on the street and say “How did you get that into print?” They didn’t talk about how funny or satiric or interesting it was. They just were amazed that something that represented their sensibility could be in a newspaper because what they were used to is being aced out of the cultural and political conversation.

We’re talking about the end years of McCarthyism and Eisenhower. A young, college-educated generation in their twenties and thirties, didn’t exist as far as the media was concerned, including in the pages of the New Yorker.

Q: Initially did you have any problems with editorial interference?

A: With the Voice, there was never a problem with editorial interference. When I agreed to syndication three years later, there’s always a problem with that, but there very little of that, because when the newspapers took me in the first place, kind of knew what they were getting into and the ones who didn’t, I confused them with so much dialogue they couldn’t figure out what it was about anyway.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about how you developed your style for the strip? Because it’s very different from the work you were doing initially with Eisner on the Spirit or the Clifford strips you did.

A: It was clear to me that it could not be a conventional drawing style, conventional cartoon style, particularly as in Clifford. I was trying for a form that was far more adult, far more sophisticated vein, so I had to look to others. I started trying to be Steig and I stole from Andre Francois who was a wonderful Austrian/French cartoonist at the time.

I just floundered around, mainly trying to find a line that would be expressive in a newspaper, that would simulate what I could do in pencil but never could manage to do in ink, that would seem fresh and free and innovative. And primarily expressive. I wanted a drawing style that would play with the text and move reader along from panel to panel without drawing attention to itself too much. Because mainly what I wanted them to pay attention to was the story I was telling.

Q: It’s very theatrical. You do away with panel borders and backgrounds. Many of them resemble monologues.

A: Well, if you see the early ones, there are panels and balloons. I went back and forth. It took a while for me to figure out. I’d do a cartoon, it would seem fun, and then I’d see it in the newspaper and wince. In the early weeks and months you see the drawing style would change from week to week. I’d go back and forth. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was determined to try everything until I found my way into what it should be, and that took a period of months.

Q: Was there an “ah-ha” moment where you went “Yes, this is how it is supposed to be?”

A: I think it might have been a little “a-ha” moment, more out of exhaustion than eureka. I was quite frustrated and angry at myself for not being able to do what seemed to me intellectually should have been obvious. It seemed to me that I was a very poor student of myself. That I was not learning fast enough. The writing seemed to be way ahead of the art. It took a while for it to catch up.

Q: As the strip started out it was more of a social satire, with you looking at the social mores of the time. It started to get more overtly political as time went on. What prompted that?

A: When I was starting out, there was no such thing as a credibility gap. People trusted their leaders. Although government has always lied, it wasn’t taken as it is today, as a given. People even on the left were not cynical. There was always a sense of hope. There was always a sense that there were a few bad apples, but it was Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam and Nixon following with Watergate that started this sense of government being bad and you can’t trust your leaders and liberals in particular just tuning out and turning off.

But none of this was in play at that time. Essentially what I was trying to do in the strip was introduce my readers to what government was doing with language, how it said one thing but meant another, and, of particular interest to me, was how the Nuclear Regulating Agency — it was originally called the Atomic Energy Commission and then it was called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — would deny during underground tests that there was any fallout while sheep were falling over in fields. And John Wayne was getting cancer for being out on location where this was going on.

Government was simply lying, and you didn’t read about that in the New York Times. You read it in I.F. Stone’s weekly and maybe in the Reporter magazine, but if you weren’t on the left, you didn’t know this. I was trying to introduce this to a general readership.

Q: Especially in the early strips, it seems like you’re playing a lot with types. You have the nebbish, tightly -wound, anxiety-ridden male —

A: Who became my character Bernard.

Q: And then you have the overconfident boor — and sometimes the two are actually the same person. What led to exploring those types of people?

A: These were the people I saw around me and these were the conversations typical of what I heard. Obviously simplified for six or eight panels, but I was really reflecting what I saw and heard around me and it became clear as I got into this after several months, it excited people because they were not used to seeing themselves represented in any form in a newspaper or magazine and to see it in a comic strip really threw them off balance. It excited them and that’s what essentially made me popular.

They simply weren’t represented. When I came along, it was basically an underground operation. I was doing it in the voice and Mort Sahl was doing it in San Francisco at the Hungry Eye and then Nichols and May came along and started doing it in clubs, beginning in Chicago, but it began in cabarets and my strip in the Voice. It evolved into black humor in novels and Bruce Jay Friedman and Philip Roth and others. Something was in the air and I just happened to be on the scene at the right time.

Q: How conscious were you of the scene at the time? Did you see yourself reflecting the cold war society at the time or was it just these were peoples I wanted to talk about?

A: It was a little of both. there was a consciousness that the way I felt, thought and reacted, not just politically but culturally, was simply not given voice to out there. It wasn’t reflected. So by giving voice to myself I was giving voice to an entire segment of a population simply had been denied. There was nothing unique about my own sensibility.

Q: Did you see yourself as part of that group?

A: Oh yes. When I started finding these people after I had begun my work, I felt very excited because up until then I felt in isolation. I then discovered there was Second City in Chicago, which I didn’t know anything about until I went there, and discovered it. They were doing what I was doing except they were doing it theatrically. My work became increasingly theatrical as I saw people like Mike and Elaine and second city.

Q: You haven’t done a strip like this for a long time. Do you miss being more political now?

A: No, because as the years went by, I gave up the idea that I could be an instrument of change and that was always an important part of what I did. Although I’d always been accused of cynicism, I never thought of myself as cynical. I was always full of hope and I always thought of these cartoons as cautionary lessons. By the time Gore and Bush were running against each other I had become cynical. I no longer have the hope I once had. I no longer believe in change as I once did. I’m having a second wave now with the Obama campaign, but at the time, I thought there was no point to me doing politics anymore because it wasn’t affecting anything. I was just getting my rocks off. I had better things to do.

Q: But you missed out on one of the most tumultuous periods in American history.
A: Oh, all of Iraq and Sept. 11. All I could do was express the rage and frustration that other people and other cartoonists like Tom Toles and Oliphant and some others were doing just brilliantly. I saw no point in echoing others who felt just as I did and doing quite a good job of it. I had by that time gotten involved in writing for children and thought that was the country’s and my future. That’s what I wanted to do and that’s what I wanted to say. Recently I had my first cartoon in the Voice in 11 years because they approached me, on Hillary Clinton and her campaign. That was a lot of pleasure. We’ve been talking about me doing a few others to the run-up of the convention. We’ll see how that works out.

Q: You’ve done comic strips, comic books, written novels and screenplays, children’s books and plays. What’s the one thread that connects all of these different works?

A: I think they’re all connected. It’s my own sensibility and also I think as I’ve analyzed it and tried to figure out what I feel comfortable with and what I don’t, these are forms that I loved by the time I was 12 years old, I could figure out a way of doing them, with the single exception of the adult novel, which requires a knowledge and power of description that is beyond me and always will be. But on the other hand I’ve written a memoir in the first person that is quite literary enough and because it’s my story I don’t have to describe a goddamn thing I don’t want to. And the writing is fine.

I love theater and I love movies and comics and old-time radio, which doesn’t exist anymore or I’d be writing for that. The forms I loved by the time I was 12 in most case could do except for the novel.

Q: But what sort of themes —

A: The themes always, or generally, have something to do with the individual dealing with authority in one form or another. How both authority and the individual would use language not to communicate directly but as a way of avoiding or defusing communication.

Q: It seems like there’s a real interest in power and how people try to wield power over each other, not just in the political strips, but in the gender war cartoons. There’s a fascination with how people attempt to wield power over themselves or other people.

A: And where it leads. The perfect example is Carnal Knowledge, where the narcissism and essential misogyny, particularly in the character played by Jack Nicholson, ends up in a kind of self-loathing, masturbatory isolation. But he’s got control.

Q: Fantagraphics is going to be doing four books of these?

A: So they claim.

Q: They’ve done a really impressive job of keeping your work in print.

A: With me and with others. And their production and stylization has gotten better and better over the years. They're really great. The Popeye series is terrific. The Krazy Kat series is beautiful. And they did a terrific collection of Ed Sorel’s work recently.

Q: I would imagine it’s incredibly flattering to have a publisher so devoted to you, but I wonder if it’s intimidating at the same time.

A: I suppose the reason it’s not intimidating and not in my consciousness is because I’m working as much today and probably harder than ever doing my current work. I’m working on my memoir, I’m also doing my first musical comedy. I’ve never done that before. It all comes together. It’s based on my first children’s novel, the Man in the Ceiling, which is about a boy cartoonist.

So what’s coming full circle is my first musical is about my first form, cartooning as a boy. It’s being produced by Walt Disney on Broadway. It’s this lovely future connecting to the past and the best part of my past.
Q: Sometimes I talk to cartoonists and if they’ve had a really big hit they can be really intimidated and feel like they’re constantly reminded of their past work when they’re working on their next book.

A: I’ve had similar conversations with Art Spiegelman and others. Somehow or other, that has never troubled me or made me have any kind of second thoughts about what I was going to do next. From the beginning, because I wasn’t successful with the strip until I was 28 or so — rather late for a lot of people — rather than being intimidated by success, I knew what it was for, which was to give me what I had never had before in my first 27 years, freedom. Freedom to do the work I wanted. If it wasn’t going to give me freedom; if it was going to give me success and fame and make me cautious, then what was the point in having it? Where would the fun be?

I was determined to have fun with this career and I was determined to play and have a good time. I was determined to go in whatever direction the work took me and not worry about acceptance or rejection. Mostly I’ve been able to do that. Financially from time to time, I’ve had to make deals just to feed my family, write screenplays I didn’t want to and fortunately they were never produced and I got the money anyway.

Q: Looking over your career, you’ve managed to stay really relevant as the years have gone on, unlike a number of your peers. What’s your secret?

A: The secret is I didn’t know there was a secret. There’s always a sense, however established I’ve been -- and I have no illusion about that, that I’m starting out -- that as I get older I feel more stupid, that as I feel more stupid I feel free to play and free to experiment and free to learn. When I feel I don’t know something, rather than that daunting me, it excites me to try to figure the whole thing out. When I come up against a problem I can’t solve, rather than it depressing me, I know that my job is if I can’t solve it is to figure a way around it so that everyone thinks I solved it when I know I didn’t. Because so much of what I do and what anybody in this business does is sleight of hand. Look this way and I’ll do something over here and you won’t even know I’ve done it. And that’s the fun. How you can pull the wool over their eyes and be honest at the same time. And honesty is a big part of what I try to do. I teach a class at Stony Brook South Hampton in Long Island called Humor and Truth. And that’s what it’s all about.

Q: I think that’s certainly one of the big appeals of your children’s books. They have a real emotional honesty to them.

A: Remember that passage from Catcher in the Rye where Holden Caulfield reads a book and he wants to call the author up on the phone? Maybe he does, I forget. Because it’s the one person he can identify with. He holds onto this book. It’s the one version of life that relates to him. And of course, early Salinger was just that way for so many of his readers and that’s the role I envision myself playing with younger readers when I started my children’s books.

Q: What’s the difference between writing for children and writing for adults?

A: You ask where the freshness and relevance come from. It comes from assigning myself to have a good time at whatever I do. Not a pleasure. Some people have a bullshit detector. I have a "hate work" detector. If I’m not having a good time, I don’t want to do it. That doesn’t mean it’s not hard work. Sometimes while I’m having a good time I’m having a terrible time but the work essentially has to be done and I’m determined to do it because underneath it all it’s this great commitment because I’m in love with what I’m doing. I think being in love with it after all these years, and there are a number of older cartoonists, I was talking to Al Jaffee about this, feel the same way. Irwin Hasen, who is just about to turn 90. I love Irwin and he’s a spirit. That’s what I love about cartoonists. Arnold Roth. Cartoonists are in so many ways not grown-ups, except for the New Yorker ones, who are more grown ups.

I don’t make a distinction. Clearly there is one. It’s no more a distinction than writing plays, comic strips and screenplays. Something clicks in my head when I move from one form to another and I make the adjustment. Just as in writing a play, I’m making adjustments in characters’ voices as I move from one character to another. I just take on another identity. I do it as completely as I can to make it work for that character while telling the story I have to tell. And the same thing is true in working in any other form. Obviously there’s language I can’t use and nuanced relationships, but for that matter damaging in more serious ways that you can’t use in a kids book. But I know that. I also know how to get back to who I was and what I was at six and eight and ten and twelve. When you see my memoir which I hope will be out at the end of next year, you can see how completely I’m able to capture my own sensibility when I was [a child]. That was not a reach at all.

Q: You mostly work alone but you collaborate a lot as well. Do you have a preference? Do like them both equally?

A: Theater has been more fun because it is a collaborative form and also because you see something you put on paper live on stage and I never get over the excitement. And also it is in the mouths of actors. Monday of next week we’re having a reading of a play of mine I did in the 70s called Knock, Knock, which is a fractured fairy tale. My 23 year old daughter Halley, who is an actress, is going to have the female lead. She plays a fairy tale Joan of Arc against the male lead who’s going to be Kevin Kline and Peter Friedman. To see these wonderful actors doing my work and to see my daughter in a work that was written and performed before she was born, and which she does better than anyone who’s ever done it, because she’s performed it at Martha’s Vineyard a few years ago. There’s nothing as satisfying as that.

I love hanging around with actors and talking to them about the part and seeing what they add to what I’ve written, which, if they’re good actors, is always infinitely better than what I had in mind. What Jack Nicholson brought to his character in Carnal Knowledge, I didn’t dream anybody could do. It was beyond my highest hopes and expectations. My job can inspire other people to do a job that is remarkable. That’s what I find so exciting. I find it exciting and thrilling when I do my job as well as I can, but there’s an added zest to it doing the unknown where other people can take it and go further than you could.

Q: What about the downside?

A: The downside is if you don’t get people whose egos are involved. Instead of perfecting the work they’re interested in how they look. Or, if their performance isn’t going well, in saving themselves which means they make the wrong choices. But that’s the difference between getting first-rate people and second-rate and I’ve been luckier than most in getting first-rate. Working people like Mike Nichols and Alan Arkin, I can just sit back and let them take over and have a very good time. Very stimulating conversations about where things should go. When you’re in good hands, good things happen. If you’re not in good hands, then you’re dead.

Q: Can you tell?

A: You can tell from the second week on. It takes about two weeks. I’ve had some disasters with some really bad people, but I picked them.

Q: Comics are undergoing a real renaissance right now where people seem to be noticing that they’re a legitimate art form. Do you look around at any of it and see your handiwork? You were a pioneer in many ways.

A: It’s interesting. I was a pioneer who doesn’t seem to have many imitators. There’s no question that I introduced a level of seriousness, of maturity to the form that nobody had done before except for Gary Trudeau, but it didn’t invite a number of pseudo-Feiffers, the way that say Walt Kelly’s Pogo or Calvin and Hobbes or Peanuts led to so many imitators. I haven’t had that many imitators. What I seem to do, which is quite enough for me, thank you, is give license to a whole group of young people to do work they might not have considered doing if I hadn’t been there in the first place. That’s a great feeling. The forms they work in and ways they go about it are not the way I ever would have done it, but that doesn’t matter.
Q: What do you mean by that? The graphic novel medium?

A: The graphic novel medium, the confessional treatment which works better with some people than it does with others. I think Blankets by Craig Thompson is an extraordinary piece of work. Other confessional books are just irritating because they’re too full of self-pity and narcissism. It just depends upon the artist getting away with it. Chris Ware is something of a genius and does the kind of work Raymond Carver would have written. Of course Art Speigelman when he’s doing what he should be doing, which is writing and drawing, instead of doing covers for the New Yorker.

Q: Does it surprise you that comics have finally attained this legitimacy?

A: Yes, it does surprise me. Over the years I was cynical enough to think that here and there there might be something elevated like Spiegelman’s Maus and then we’d go back to the condescension. But Art is really responsible for a breakthrough. And I think it happened both ways. First he gathered more serious critical attention, but also he gave as I did some 30 or 40 years earlier young cartoonists the ambitious push to try something a little bit different and a little harder.

Q: I think when Maus first came out people expected immediately there’d be this overflow and they didn’t realize it would take a generation or so before there’d be constant stuff coming out.
A: And the stuff being done in Europe is remarkable too. Even more sophisticated than we find here. Some of the stuff Drawn and Quarterly does is lovely stuff. A pleasure to look at.

Q: You mentioned the musical you’re working on, you talked about the possibility of returning to the Voice, what else, because that’s clearly not enough, are you working on these days?

A: Well, I finished my memoir and I’m in the editing process now. There’s the musical, and my daughter Kate wrote a book that I illustrated called Henry the Dog With No Tail. Which you should look up for your kids. Simon and Schuster put it out. We have a new book which I’ve been working on. It’s about something that happened to us when she was a little girl up on Martha’s Vineyard, called My Side of the Car. It looks like we’ll sell that and if we do I’ll illustrate it.

My wife Jenny wrote an adult book which I illustrated a few years ago, The Long Chalkboard, and she’s working on another story now. She’s about to have her first essay in the New Yorker too. In any case, if she gets this done and it works as a book I’ll do it. And I want to get back to my picture books for young kids. I haven’t done one in a long time. I haven’t done a picture book in about five years now and it’s irritating.

With this musical, I’ve fallen in love with the form and I hope to do more with the same collaborators.