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What Charles Schulz Taught Me In Cartooning
In early 1997, I became a cartoonist. Sort of. Before I started this "cartoon journey", might be helpful to know what I was doing. Finding someone like Charles Schulz was not an easy matter for someone like me at the time who knew nobody in the business. But I felt "why not start at the top and work my way down"? I found a friend of his willing to ask him if we might chat a moment. He surprisingly agreed. It felt "awesome" that other top cartoonists also agreed to wield "trade secrets" with me. Fortunately, I was both too young and naive to know NOT to bother the masters. So when Charles Schulz picked up his phone, I started asking the five journalistic Ws (Who, what, when, why, and where). His (and others) advice turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. I was starting to wax philosophically regarding just what "this business of cartooning" was really about.
I wondered why Schulz had chosen cartooning as a way to make a living. He told me he'd just gotten out of the service and tried a myriad of jobs but didn't do many too well. So cartooning seemed the obvious choice to him. I surely understood. I asked him if there was any money to be made in such a venture. I could almost see his smile on the other side of the line. He assured me there was plenty, but not to expect it in newspapers. He told me that even if you do get syndicated, the money is still just pennies per newspaper and that the smart way to approach it, that is, to look into licensing the images onto merchandise such as tee shirts, mouse pads, tote bags other gifts or collectibles.
I told him I did not draw very well (which is true) and, that I wanted to try something very new and different. It was to be a color cartoon in which the artwork, for the most part was more fine art than cartoon art, and that I wanted a different look and feel to each cartoon, but a theme, focused on wordplay and picture-play in which, at times, the viewer might have to take a second or two to get it.
Many cartoons we see we see pubished are team efforts, Schulz told me. And added that often it was a partnership between artist and writer, and that if I did not feel my own artwork was up to snuff, to recruit an artist to draw my concepts. He also encouraged me to read as much as I could about Walt Disney because what I was about to attempt was actually a Disney model; without movement/animation. He coined it Disney meets Gary Larson. I didn't believe him of course. I felt he was "being nice". But I had been told, and later learned, he was truly real, and didn't tend to "lead on astray".
I also spoke with several other cartoonists, most of whom created in the same genre as Gary Larsons Far Side, such as Leigh Rubin (Rubes), Dave Coverly (Speed Bump), and Jon McPherson (Close To Home). I was amazed, again, at how open and available they made themselves. In fact Leigh and I became good friends and talked regularly on the phone. He was already one of the worlds leading cartoonists, and I was just starting. That didnt matter to him. I will never forget that kind of generosity and his willingness to lead me in a direction that made it work for me. And of course the same is true for Charles Sparky Schulz (Sparky by the way was what he liked to be called. That was the name of his favorite dog, a Schnauzer; and I knew I liked him right away. I have a tendency to hang with fellow animal lovers, and Schulz also had an uncanny biting wit, often held back in Peanuts, even though it was always funny, was meant for family audiences, his target. In real life, he displayed a sense humor that reminded me a great deal of some of my British favorites such as John Cleese of Monty Python.
Though all these masters had "different philosophies", they seemed to share similar caveats regarding reasoning with reality. That is, keep centered and don't expect overnight success. Cartooning is a labor of love, and, only a handfull end up making a living at it. One must approach it with a very open mind and a love seeing smiles on faces, and to be flexible, as the nature of the cartoon business was changing as fast as was the Internet.
All of this advice turned out to be pragmatic. The Internet changed everything. Licensed merchandise became even more of the key to making it work than Sparky Schulz had felt; and he had seen it coming. Today, though my cartoons appear in publications worldwide; mostly trade magazines, college textbooks and on websites, the majority of my take is from the sales of funny gifts and collectibles. When I look back over the past twelve years it has all becomes a blur. I have had the opportunity to work with some of the finest illustrators in the world, who could comprehend and render my concepts and writings, Thinking back to the words of the cartoon masters it is still a labor of love.
Though I know it has been hard work, just as I was told it would be, I also have been very lucky. I became what might consider "a success" in a strange business, when told, chances were as good as winning the lottery, even less so if one was/is not such a great artist such as me. But I continue "the battle" as, in some small way, I figure if just one person laughs a little more in his or her day, due to something my team created, the world is just a little better as well.
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