My road to syndication, part two

So, meanwhile, back at the ranch, I had decided to try and finish one cartoon a day for six weeks to see if I could produce at the pace I’d have to if I got syndicated.  I did not manage to do this, but I was close.  It actually took me about 8 weeks to finish my submission.  But I neglected one little thing.  I had already WRITTEN these cartoons, I just had to draw and ink them up.  Doing those things AND writing a weeks worth in a week was not something I was remotely ready to do until I was suddenly expected to do it.

I had stumbled across a Reader’s Digest story about Scott Adams where he said he used positive thinking to get syndicated.  I can’t remember the specifics, but he’d basically written someting like ”I am a syndicated cartoonist” 15 times a day, every day, until he got syndicated.  So I decided to try it.  During the entire time I was doing my submission, I wrote “I am a syndicated cartoonist” 15 times a day.  One thing it did was absolutely convince me that I was going to get syndicated.  I don’t know if it fools your subconscious or what, but after a while, I had no doubts.  I never did this again though because I started to wonder if it was unChristian.  I never wrote “Clear Blue Water will become a blockbuster strip,” and sure enough, it didn’t become a blockbuster strip.  Funny how that works…

People often want to know how I came up with the name for my strip.  I have an affinity for the color blue and I wanted it in the title.  I also love water.  So I wanted water in the title if possible.  My strip was often political, so I decided that I needed to find a political term with blue and water in it.  I thought the odds of finding one were just about impossible (my back up title was “Something Blue”, from the  marriage poem, Something old, something new, etc.)  I googled politics, blue, water and immediately the term Clear blue water came up.  It’s basically the idealogical divide between two political parties.  Hey, now!  Manny’s Republican, Eve’s a Democrat… it seemed like kismet.  The title was the easiest part of this entire process.  It just fell into place.

Anyway, I finished the cartoons in mid-December 2002, and my goal was to get them sent out before New Years.  I had to draw up a character sheet and a cover for my packet, write my cover letters, put each submission into a neat little packet that was tailored exactly to each syndicate’s specifications… yeah, it wasn’t enough time and I basically rushed it because I also had to do Christmas and holidays with my family as well.  I finished the packets at around 4 pm on the last day of 2002 that had mail service.  I rushed the packets over to the post office so I could get them out before 5, and found out the post office had closed at 4. 

I completely freaked out.  My goal was to get them out BEFORE New Years, and now that wasn’t possible, and now I’d probably messed up the timing and, and…  I KNOW it’s crazy.  What difference could a few days either way possibly make?  My best friend stepped in and talked me down.  She told me that I couldn’t possibly screw up God’s timing, and maybe there was a good reason that my strips weren’t going to go out until January 2.  It’s always nice to have people in your life who will talk you down from your crazy ledges without calling you out on your craziness.  She does this for me.

I sent my submissions out on January 2, 2003, and on January 8, 2003 Lee Salem called me.  My kids were still on Christmas vacation and they were running amuck when the phone rang.  I couldn’t hear him and I began frantically motioning for my oldest to herd everyone into another room so I could hear.  After a short but intense life-or-death game of charades, she finally obliged.  Unfortunately, I don’t remember much of the conversation.  He said he really liked my work and he’d showed it around to a few editors and they’d liked it too, and now he was going to show it to even more people and get their opinions, and he’d get back to me, but he really liked it.

I basically said stuff like, ”Oh!  Wow!  Really?  Thanks!” like a moron, and when he hung up I immediately called my husband and screamed at him that Lee Salem had just called me on the frickin phone!  He said, “Who’s Lee Salem?”  Sigh.  So I explained and then he said, “So are you getting syndicated?!”  And um… he hadn’t really mentioned that part.  And the clouds rolled in…

Because I had heard so quickly from Universal, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that the other syndicates would love me as well.  Why, what if there was a bidding war?  Oh my goodness, what does one WEAR to a bidding war?

…There was no bidding war.  I ended up getting rejected by all of the other syndicates with form letters.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  I never heard back from King at all, and United Media sent me back my own cover letter with the word NO!  scrawled across it in big screaming red letters.  …I’m guessing it wasn’t right for their list.

So now it was down to just Universal and it had been a few weeks with no contact and I was getting worried.  Then I get a letter in the mail from Universal and I almost cried.  They don’t send you letters to syndicate you, they send you letters to reject you.  I didn’t even open the letter for an hour.  When I finally got my courage up, I found a really nice letter from Lee that told me how much he liked my strip and why.  He compared it to a cross between two really big strips (stroke, stroke my ego…) and he told me that there was some concern about the tone of the strip.  The main couple was very angry.  He didn’t reject Clear Blue Water in the letter.  Instead, he gave me his number and told me to call him to talk about my strip.

A decade later I got the same opportunity, again, and this time you better believe I called him.  I actually wrote out a color coded script so I could make sure I remembered to hit important points, and (after a stern talking to by my best friend “You BETTER call this time!”) I sent my husband to the park with the kids, gathered a notebook and pen, and called.  His secretary said he was out.  A reprieve!  We set up a time to call him back when he’d be in, and I hung up.

To be continued… 

Oh, by the way, about today’s strip.  It’s a double daily because I didn’t feel like making it a Sunday and coloring it, considering that today’s Friday, but I also didn’t want to stretch the halloween stuff into two days, and the strip I wrote was too long for a reagular daily.  So it’s a double daily.

My road to syndication, part one

My road to syndication was a winding one, and here’s how it came about.  I’m writing this because I LOVE to read other cartoonists stories.  I just eat that stuff right up! 

I was in high school when Calvin and Hobbes first came out.  I fell in love with it immediately, and soon decided to pursue syndication myself.  Never mind that I wasn’t an artist, I’d never written cartoons before, and I was NEVER going to be as good as Bill Watterson.  I had decided it, and so it shall be.  Ah, youth… 

Anyway, I started writing a cartoon in college that sucked.  Boy, did it suck.  It was called Half Empty (I still like that name!) and it was about a girl named Holly and her best friend Dot and their adventures in college.  It was WAAAAAYYY autobiographical, to the point that now I cringe when I happen upon it and wonder what the heck made me send this out for other people to read!! 

But, send it out I did.  To resounding no’s all around.  And yet, Jay Kennedy from King scribbled a wonderful note at the end of my rejection letter saying that he liked it and to keep trying.  Now, I have no idea if he encouraged everyone, and if he didn’t, what he could have possibly seen in this strip worth encouraging (it really was that bad!) but I was so demoralized and so young, that had he just blown me off too, that would have been the end of it.  That note is the entire reason I kept trying.  I still have it. 

I was going to share one of these cartoons, but I can’t find any.  Perhaps that’s for the best.

A few years later I tried again to get syndicated.  This time I wrote a strip about 6 college age friends, 3 boys and 3 girls who make their way in the world.  The main characters were Wanda and Joe.  It was also called Half Empty, and it was also rejected all around.  But Jay Kennedy once again came through for me.  He graded all the cartoons in my submission so I’d know which one’s worked and which didn’t, and he wrote me a long, encouraging letter that pointed out my strips strengths and weaknesses, told me how to improve on the weaknesses, and asked me to resubmit the strip to him.  To say I was thrilled would be an understatement.  Here’s the first cartoon in that submission.  My female lead in my cartoons always has curly hair like me.  Freud would probably have a field day running through my psyche…

My first strip of my second syndicate submission

And yes, I did send it out just like that.  Two boxes over two boxes, because you often see strips printed like that in newspapers.  I did it this way because it fit exactly on a piece of typing paper.  I probably used a felt tip pen to draw it with.  Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!  Sigh…

 I worked really hard on my resubmission and sent it off to King Features with high hopes.  Soon, I heard back from Jay Kennedy again.  Another encouraging note.  Another rejection.  But this time he gave me his phone number and asked me to call him so we could discuss my strip.  And …I never called.

WHAT?!!  You never called?  Why the heck not?!  Believe me, all my friends and my family badgered me daily, but at that time I was almost pathologically shy and I just couldn’t gather up the courage to do it.  I tried and tried until I was sick, and then the television show Friends debuted and it was a very similar concept to my strip and I realized that it would look like I was copying and I let that be my excuse to give up.  I let this opportunity slip through my fingers.  I’m not saying that had I called I would have gotten syndicated.  I probaby wouldn’t have.  But it was stupid, and it’s something I’ve always regretted not doing.  At the very least I would have had an extremely helpful conversation.  I ended up giving up cartooning for about six years.

In that time I had 3 children.  I wrote two unpublished novels.  We moved across the country.  And I started thinking about trying again.  I decided to write about family life because I was kind of immersed in it daily.  I began writing cartoons and I thought they were good.  Much better than the ones I wrote when I was younger.  I gave the family twin girls because I’d always wanted them, and I wrote and wrote and wrote.  And then I got pregnant.  Surprise!  With twins.  Surprise!  Just like my strip.  Talk about being psychic!  So, next I’m thinking that I need to have the Torres’ win the lottery…

I stopped, had my twins, and resumed writing when they were two.  I decided to buckle down and get serious.  I would draw up a strip a day for six weeks until I had enough for my submission to the syndicates.  This would be a test to see if I could produce on the schedule they required.  This would be my last try. 

I’ll write part two tomorrow.

To the web, to the web, to the web web web…

So far I am enjoying life as a web cartoonist.  Even though I am still producing one cartoon a day, the deadlines are not so intense because I don’t have to stay 6 to 8 weeks ahead of myself.  I don’t have to write a Halloween strip in August, or the Christmas strips in late October.  I’m finding that it’s easier to write about the season we are in rather than the next one.  Easier to write about what’s currently going on, rather than guessing what might be talked about in 6 weeks.  It’s way more fun to be topical.

I am also enjoying the freedom.  I might write my toons in a certain order, but now I’m free to publish any cartoon I want on any day I want.  If I write a cartoon today that I just love, I can publish it tomorrow if I want.  That is nothing to be sneezed at.  There’s no problem with rearranging them, publishing them out of order, or last minute changes.  The freedom is an awesome perk.

Do you know what I’m looking forward to?  Posting my cartoon on the day after the election and being able to name the winner (assuming we HAVE one) instead of dancing around the idea and prentending that everything you write will work equally well no matter who wins.  Because it doesn’t.  Not even close.

Here’s my cartoon that ran the day after the 2004 Presidential election.  I like it and I think it works, but, obviously, I had no idea which person would be saying those words the next day, so I wrote it as if Kerry had lost.  Gloom, darkness and ruin… pretty apt, I’d say. 

I was worried that we’d end up with another 2000 election where we didn’t know who won until weeks after the election.  If that had happened, this cartoon would have made no sense at all.  Luckily, I guessed correctly.  How unusual!

11/3/04

So, overall, I’m happy to have moved on to the web.  I’m still looking into all the different ways to make money, and I’m not there yet, but I hope to make this a success.  Does this mean that I’m glad about what happened?  No.  I’m not.  I had my own timetable for my cartoon which included things like when to pull the plug on print, when to move to the web, etc., and I would have preferred to follow that plan.  But now that I’ve been forced to follow a THIS plan, I see no reason to be miserable, especially when it’s such a nice plan.  A different plan, but nice nonetheless.

Hillary, Sarah and I

I am a huge Hillary Clinton fan.  Huge.  I think she would have made an awesome president, and it saddens me that she probably won’t get her shot now.  I wanted her to win the Democratic nomination over Obama, but now that he’s won, he has my full support.  I frankly don’t understand how anyone could be a Hillary supporter, and then move over and back McCain.  It flies in the face of all that she stands for, and it’s akin to cutting off your nose to spite your face.

I was so disappointed that Obama didn’t choose her as his Vice President.  I knew he wasn’t going to, but I held some misguided hope right up until he announced Biden as his choice.  Now, I like Biden.  I think he seems like a smart, sweet (if overly chatty!) man, and he’s (hopefully!  Knock on wood!) going to make a wonderful VP.  But my initial reaction was that he was a very safe choice.  Another rich, white male.  Ho hum.  Yawn…  The only thing that made it interesting was that THIS time the rich white man was the BOTTOM of the ticket.  The VP to the rich BLACK man running for President.  Hmmm… Maybe not the same old same old after all.

Before Obama announced his choice, I was telling anyone who would listen that McCain was going to pick a woman if Obama didn’t choose Hillary.  He was going to do it to try and win over the disappointed women who loved Hillary.  I figured if Obama did choose Hillary, then McCain would choose either a black man, or a Hispanic man to try and balance the ticket racially.  I’ll never know if I was right about the second part, but I was spot on with the first.

When McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate I ran around the room screaming “I KNEW it!  TOLD ya so!  In your FACE!” while my family rolled their eyes and told me to shush and go take my medication. 

I knew very little about the Alaskan Governor, and I admit to initially being very excited by the choice.  She was pretty, she had a baby with a disability, she had five kids with unusual names, she was a governor so she had to be pretty smart, right?  I mean, Bill Clinton was a governor before he was President and he’s a genius.  These were all things in her favor, and I was all ready to love her (but not to vote for her.  I don’t like John McCain.  Period.) and then… she opened her mouth.  Sigh…

Turns out she can’t answer questions unless she’s coached.  Turns out she doesn’t tend to make a lot of sense in what she does say.  Turns out that she’s got ethics problems.  Turns out that McCain probably should have thought this MAJOR decision through a bit more instead of running off half-cocked and trying to out Obama Obama.  Because it just might cost him the election.

I don’t hate Palin, I just wish that she were more of a serious candidate.  I wish she had some heft behind her.  I wish she were Hillary’s intellectual equal.  I actually prayed for her before her debate with Biden because as much as I wanted Biden to win (which he did.  Easily), I didn’t want to watch her stand there like a deer-in-the-headlights, frozen and unable to do anything but babble out her talking points.  I hate to see women fail and I can’t believe I am going to have to vote against only the second woman ever to run in the VP spot.  I was too young to vote for Ferraro, and I’m too much of a Democrat to vote for Palin.

Right now, I worry about a McCain presidency.  The man is 72.  If he dies in office, she’s the president.  Tell me that doesn’t send a chill right down your spine. 

Ths cartoon ran on 12/18/05.  It discusses this very thing, and hopefully, Manny was wrong.  I finally have my answer.

I’ll end with these two pro-Obama videos that my sister and my dad sent me this morning.  They are too good not to share (I warned you that it would be election central around here).  The first one is narrated by Steve from Blue’s Clues fame, which is kind of weird, but funny.  I think he created it.  The ony line I don’t agree with is he talks about Sarah Palin’s voodoo prayers, and as a Christian, the wide-spread poking fun of her beliefs bothers me.  But the rest is funny.  The second one is just a link, and it’s personalized with my name, but it shows you how you can personalize it with any of your friend’s names and send it on.  I thought it was pretty clever.  There is some bleeped out language in the both videos.

 

http://www.cnnbcvideo.com/index.html?nid=FYL7cjOD662FrUSvcDvj.DU0ODUwODI-&referred_by=5957062-wwUToAx

Autism Epidemic

I was talking to a speech therapist about a month ago and we had a very interesting conversation about autism.  She’s been a speech therapist in the school system since the seventies, and when she started out there were no autistic children in the entire school.  None in the entire district.  In fact, the first autistic child she helped was in 1991.  She said she figured he would be the “one in her whole career.”  She didn’t know much about how to help or teach this boy because there were only a few paragraphs in one book she could find on the subject, but she did her best. 

The next year, she got another one.  By 1995 she had four autistic patients.  There were only about 400 children in the school at the time, and she just thought this was an enormous amount of autistic kids to have in one tiny school.  She started to worry that maybe our community was an autism hot spot.  Sort of like how there are cancer hot spots that sometimes pop up in communities.  She was so worried about it that she wrote a letter to some man at Yale University (I cannot remember this man’s name) explaining it to him and asking for his opinion.

He wrote her back and said that it wasn’t just our community.  That they were seeing a 5 to 1 rise in autism throughout the entire country, and they didn’t know why.  This was back in 1995.  I get chills when I think about this because my own autistic son was born in 1995, and I had NO idea this was going on.  Autism wasn’t on my radar at all.  In fact, the only time I’d ever even heard the word autism was on a public service announcement that used to run on TV, where Sylvester Stallone talked about his autistic son being stuck in his own little world and asking for funding for a cure.  (When my son was first diagnosed, Sylvester Stallone was the person I thought about.  I bet not many people can make THAT claim…)

When my son was about 20 months old, he pulled a bookcase over on top of himself.  While we were at the emergency room, the doctor was VERY excited to find out that my son most likely had autism (at that time everyone told me he had it, but that he couldn’t possibly get a real diagnosis until he was 3.  Oh, how things have changed…).  This doctor asked if I would mind if he brought in medical students to see him.  I said it was okay, so he brought in about 5 students and started telling them about autism and about how they might not ever meet another child with it, so you know, get a good look. 

Fast forward 13 years, and I cannot IMAGINE this conversation happening today.  I heard that one in every 150 children born in the United States has autism.  But if you just count boys, the figure is now 1 in every 99 boys born.  The autism rate used to be 1 in every 10,000 children born.

What the hell is happening, and WHY is there not wide-spread panic in the streets?  Autistic kids are everywhere these days.  Everywhere.  And yes, some of them are misdiagnosed but the majority are not.  This is not simply a case of better diagnosis’.  Otherwise, the school system from 20 years ago would have been overrun with quirky kids who had a hard time getting along with others and who didn’t talk much.  And we know this wasn’t the case.  Something is going on.  Something has changed in one generation.  It could be pollution, hormones in our food, it could be ultrasounds.  It could be vaccinations (my personal belief).  The point is, something is triggering this and we need to find out what it is.

To bring this around to the topic of CBW, Seth has autism in the strip mainly because I wanted to raise awareness.  I also wanted to show that raising an autistic child doesn’t have to be all grim all the time.  Making Seth autistic was a hard decision to make, but I have not regretted doing it.  The Torres’ are far from alone in what they are experiencing.  Judging from the mail I receive about autism, it seems just about everyone either knows someone with autism, or has an autistic person in their family.  Treatments for autism aren’t cheap, and they aren’t paid for by insurance. 

For example, my friend has a child in a wheelchair.  Insurance pays for whatever he needs, no questions asked.  She also has an autistic child, and he can’t get services from insurance because he has a developmental disability that isn’t expected to get better, so too bad, so sad.  Next!  I did a cartoon about this once, long ago.  Here it is.  I’ll end on this note, as I think it sums up my feelings pretty well.

5/5/05

Fluff Boy

I thought I’d take a moment to talk about one of my favorite characters in the strip–Fluff Boy.  I get so much mail on Fluff Boy, and most of it is quite funny.  People ask me if he’s Eve’s pretend friend.  I’ve had folks ask if he’s invisible.  People think he’s just so random!  –WHY, is there a dude dressed as a superhero drinking coffee in their kitchen with no explanation?  So here is my official Fluff Boy explanation.

Fluff Boy’s real name is Isaac.  He first entered the strip as the voice of pop-culture, hence the word Fluff in his name.  He knocked on the door whenever the main characters discussed celebrities or music, and threw his two cents into the mix.  In his very first appearance, he came on as Zealot’s arch-nemesis.  I have only rarely mentioned this in the strip since then, so most people don’t know this.  I keep meaning to do something with this relationship in the strip… it has been neglected.

Here is the first strip that Fluff Boy appeared in and the one setting up that strip.  They ran on 9/28 and 9/29/2004.

The set-up

 

The pay-off

 

I really like how I drew FB here.  He looks a little more masculine than he currently does.  Notice that he used to talk in the third person.  You might ask yourself why he doesn’t do that anymore?  I have two answers for that.  One, I simply got sick to death of writing it, and two, in December of 2004 I decided that I was too wordy and started self-limiting myself to 70 words per daily strip.  Sometimes I might hit 74 or 75, but for the most part, I was pretty strict.  (Since going web-only, I’ve loosened it a bit, but I’ll probably go back to that soon.  I think it really is a good editing technique.)  Anyway, having a character talk in the third person and have a catch-phrase (which he also had at one point  ”I’m DOWN with the fluff!” I phased this out, thankfully) simply required too many of my precious 70 words to keep it going.

A few weeks after his first appearance, Easily Offended Man decided that Clear Blue Water needed some color.  They had to hire a black character.  Eve wanted to hire Isaac, but  Easily Offended Man’s nemesis Right Wing, was quite hesitant to make the lone black character a flamboyant superhero.  How would that look?  He was out-voted, and FB signed a contract that stated that he had to appear once a week, regardless of storyline. 

Hence, FB was there the week Eve found out Seth was autistic.  He was at the hospital while she was in labor with her twins.  He was there when she was going through a bad bout of post-partum depression.  He was there so often, in fact, that he became like a member of the Torres family, and he’s currently Eve’s best friend.  He’s revised his contract twice, and now he gets vacation time, he only has to wear his superhero outift every other week, and he’s not limited to pop culture discussions.  I often use him as the voice of reason, and I just really enjoy him.

He is an openly gay character who got married (this was before it was legal to do so, so it’s not binding yet) to his long-time partner Carlos in the strip in late 2007.  Eve served as his maid-of-honor, and Ivy was the flower girl.  It is a testimony to my readers that I didn’t receive even ONE negative response to this entire sequence.  Everyone was so supportive and happy for Fluff Boy, and I thank you for that.

During the first six months of my strip I wrote superhero stuff all the time, and then I was asked to back off from it.  I did, and I’ve never gotten back into it at the same level.  I plan to do more with them now.  I am glad that of all the superhero’s, Fluff Boy is the one who thrived.

Birth and rebirth

When I first submitted my strip to the syndicates, Eve was already pregnant with her twins.  She was about 5 months along.  During the course of my development period with Universal, it was decided that she would not be pregnant at the launch, but would get pregnant shortly thereafter.  The first 9 months of my strip were really fun to write and draw because she was huge, pregnant, uncomfortable and nasty.  I decided to have the babies be born on January 2, 2005 because she was due in January, and that was the Sunday that fit her conception timing (and yes, I took the time to figure out when my cartoon characters would have had to get pregnant.  Which is probably psychotic).  … Moving on!

This is the strip as I submitted it.  I thought it was perfect, but it turned out to be another first draft.

1/2/05 first try

 

As you can see, Eve has blood on her gown from the babies (though I DID make it pink blood to try and make it more friendly).  You know she’s giving birth, but it’s not graphic.  There are no crowning shots or anything.  My editor emailed me and said it was too graphic.  I had to get rid of the blood and Eve was showing too much leg.  So I photoshopped the blood out and moved Eve’s gown down to cover her more in panels 1 and 4, and resubmitted it.  Here’s my second try.

1/2/05

 

Nope.  Still not enough.  It was still too graphic.  Maybe if it was a daily, but it was a Sunday, so I needed to work on it.  Here’s my final try, which was finally approved.

1/2/05

 

Notice the doctor is completely gone out of the first panel and she’s not showing any leg at all.  In the fourth panel you can just barely see the doctor’s head and her thigh is pretty much covered.  There was some talk about the umbilical cords, but it was decided that they would be okay as is.  The only thing I like better about this strip is the last panel because I made the names bigger and easier to read and so I like the announcement better.

I like the final strip, I just liked the first or even the second one’s better.  Who knows.  Maybe the syndicate was right on this one– birth squicks some people out, but I think it’s beautiful, and since I followed her pregnancy warts and all, I thought it would be a cheat not to show the birth.

I like both girls’ names, but Maizy Kate is special because she was named for my best friend.

Nepotism

Today’s strip features a poem written by my sister Lisa.  She wrote it 15-20 years ago when she was just a baby, really, and I’ve always thought it was hilarious.  The end just doesn’t fit with the over-earnest, trying-too-hard beginning.  This poem used to hang on my refrigerator, and one day I decided to make it into a cartoon.  I submitted this exact cartoon to Universal a few years back, and it wasn’t allowed to run.  I was told that you REALLY couldn’t make this reference on the comic pages (even in a regular daily), and that no one else at the syndicate thought the poem or the cartoon was as funny as I did.  Basically, it wasn’t funny enough to risk losing papers over.  I heartily disagreed, but that really didn’t matter.

So, I’m running it now because I CAN.  Now, it might not be funny,  (And if you don’t like it, remember, I didn’t write it.  My sister did.  All shame shall fall upon HER shoulders), but I enjoy it.  If you do think it’s funny, remember I drew it up and thought up the cartoon, so all praise shall fall upon MY shoulders.

Today

I inserted the strip in here just in case anyone reading this blog hadn’t read the strip yet.  Click on the strip to see it bigger.

In other news, to everyone who has asked me about it, there is an archive (what will become a two week archive) on this blog.  It’s located at the top of this page.  The reason it’s not on my actual site is because I wanted to go live with CBW and I compromised on some stuff that wasn’t finished yet.  Eventually, I will add an archive to my karenmontaguereyes site, but for now, this is it.  I’m quite happy with the way it’s working out, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I’ll end with something funny.  My young daughter was playing in the living room where we were watching the news.  They were discussing how Sarah Palin has spent $150,000 on clothes and makeup in just the last two months alone.  I wasn’t even aware that my daughter was paying attention.  Later, she came to me very seriously and told me that if SHE were President, she would have spent less money on clothes and makeup than Sarah Palin had, but that hair and makeup are important.  “Obviously, she just wanted to look her best.” 

The lesson?  …It’s hard to raise young feminists, when Alaskan Barbie is running for VP.

Where nobody knows your name

I have had many jobs I didn’t like in my life.  I’ve worked fast food.  I’ve delivered pizzas.  I’ve cleaned motel rooms.  I’ve handed out the audio tour at a National Park.   All of these things I did simply to pay the bills, no more no less. 

Then I started doing Clear Blue Water and suddenly I had a job I loved that people tend to think is cool.  I had the perfect answer to the “So, what do you do?”  question. 

My strip was syndicated for 4 1/4 years and in that time do you know how many times I was actually asked this question?  Less than a handful.  It just didn’t happen.  I would never volunteer this information to anyone unprompted, so I hardly ever got to use the, “I’m a cartoonist,” line.

The few times I did get to chat about it were interesting conversations.  “I’m a cartoonist,”  I’d reply modestly.  “Really?”  they’d say, with such longing in their voice.  Like you just said, “I get to play all day long, day in and day out for millions and millions of dollars,” (because most cartoonists are millionaires, don’tcha know). 

“What, like you do comic books?”  the conversation would continue.  “No, I draw a comic strip.  For newspapers,” I’d continue, already starting to dread the next question.  “Wow!  What strip do you do?” Here I would hesitate, tempted to say Garfield, or Doonesbury, or any strip with name recognition.  (these random people don’t follow comic strips!  I’d tell myself.  They’d never catch my lie!  I’d be totally safe!)  I would sigh long-sufferingly.  “It’s called Clear Blue Water.  You’ve probably never heard of it-”

“I’ve never heard of it!”  They’d narrow their eyes.  “What papers you in?  Any around here?”  “Um, no.  I’m not in any of the local papers at all,” I would be forced to admit.  …Things tended to go downhill from there.

These conversations weren’t actually much fun, so I don’t know why I wanted to have more of them.  Probably because hope springs eternal that they’d actually have heard of, and enjoy my strip, and then we could talk about it and become life-long buddies, and… Sigh.

One time, I had a layover in an airport in a city where Clear Blue Water was in the local paper.  I bought the paper, sat down, and actually got to read my strip on actual newsprint in real time.  What a thrill!  I had to stop myself from prattling on to everyone seated around me that this was MY strip.  “Look!  See?  I’m the cartoonist, really!  I’ll show you my license!”  I looked around to see if anyone else was reading the paper, perhaps the comic section, but surprisingly, no one was.  They had books or laptops or cellphones but no newspapers.

Another wasted opportunity.

…I still have the newspaper.

The question I’m most often asked.

Is Clear Blue Water based on your family’s real life? 

The answer is yes and no.  Certainly there are similarities.  We have the same ethnicity and political leanings as the Torres family, and we both have five children, (including an autistic child).  But, everyone in my family is older by a few years than their Torres counterpart, and the birth order of the kids is different as well.

They are a fictional family with fictional problems and storylines that usually bear very little witness, if ANY, to what’s going on in my own life at the time.  I might draw on my life and my past to write for Manny and Eve, but I consider my children’s lives to be off limits.  I don’t (except on the rarest of occasions, and with their full permission) pull specifics out of their lives to use as fodder for the strip.  I will draw on themes though.  If one of the kids has a problem with bullying, I might, years later, write some strips about a bully.  The strips would be about a fictional situation whose course and resoulution would be different from what really happened in our life.

Take the autism storyline.  Seth is based loosely on my son, but their stories are very different.  Seth has received much better early intervention and services than my son received when he was young, and consequently he has a better long-term prognosis than my son.  But, like my son, Seth will never recover.  I just refuse to write it.  Seth’s story drew from our story, but it also drew from my best friend’s story with her autistic son, and from things I’d read and heard about…  This works for us.

Eve is not me.  We both are liberals, we both have curly hair and big mouths, and we both get exasperated with our husbands.  But I am nowhere NEAR as outspoken as she is.  She says things I only wish I had the guts to say to someone’s face.  Not that I can’t go there, but I have to get pretty darn mad and be pushed pretty far before I will explode.  Her boiling point is way lower than my own.  She’s also quippier than I am.  Manny and my husband are also different.  One time I asked him what he though was their greatest difference, and he deadpanned, “Well, he’s a CARTOON character.”  ’Nuff said.

I’ll end with one of my favorite stories of all time.  It comes from the folks at Sesame Street.  I hope it’s true, as I’ve loved it for years.  As the story goes, someone wrote in to them demanding to know if Ernie and Bert were a gay couple living together, and why would they choose to show this on a children’s program and blah blah blah.  This was their response.  “Ernie and Bert are not gay.  They are puppets, not humans.” 

Brilliant.