November 13, 2008

New Hampshire’s cartoonists
Who’s behind the funnies
By Heidi Masek hmasek@hippopress.com

For some, it’s the first section of the newspaper they look for. For others, it’s a wry joke on a text-heavy magazine page. Then there are comic books.

A lot of work goes into cartooning, and not many people make a career of it. Here’s a look at some of New Hampshire’s top comic creators.

Mike Lynch
“Cartooning has always been the one constant in my life,” said Mike Lynch of Milton. The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, Harvard Business Review, Playboy and Reader’s Digest are among his clients for single- panel magazine cartoons.

As a kid, he drew on the wall. At first he was yelled at. Then his mother started putting paper up on the wall and inviting other kids over for drawing parties.

“I tried to get away from it, but I was unhappy,” Lynch said. Ten years ago, he quit “real jobs” to be a full-time cartoonist, he said. He worked as an education administrator for a music conservatory in Manhattan for seven years, and in computer graphics for Wall Street companies for five.

Lynch took a few drawing classes at Parsons School of Design when he moved to New York about 21 years ago. Born in Iowa, he went to college in Ohio where his father taught.

When people say, “I am a cartoonist,” it can many anything from drawing Dilbert to animating Sponge Bob, Lynch said.

Lynch referenced playwright and screenwriter Martin McDonagh when he explained how he ended up focusing on single-panels for magazines. McDonagh got a book on writing and the first chapter was on writing plays. He wrote one, and it was produced. The second chapter was on writing for TV, but that didn’t work out. Lynch has tried to sell comic strips, but the longer form didn’t seem to work out.

Lynch said he writes about 30 “gags” per week. “Ten or 15, I’ll throw out.” He’ll “draw up” 10 or 15 and mail them to the Wall Street Journal. Next he sends them to the Harvard Business Review, then Reader’s Digest, etc. When cartoons are rejected, he repackages appropriate material to send to another market. At a given time, he’ll have hundreds of cartoons sitting on desks where people are hopefully looking at them, he said.

“I try to stay away from, certainly, overly familiar cartoons — the dumb secretary and dopey boss — and try to be more clever. Because your editors have seen all that and they’re looking for something fresh,” Lynch said.

At the same time, “I love cartoon clichés ... I still remember when I sold my first desert island cartoon. That was so exciting,” Lynch said. A cruise ship floats by a dozen people on a desert island, and someone on the ship points out “the most sequestered jury in the world,” Lynch said.

You can instill an element of surprise in cartoons, he said. In one of his, a woman walks in to find her other half in bed with another woman. The man says casually that she would have seen it coming if she followed his blog, Lynch said.

“I do find that sometimes racier cartoons or more confrontational cartoons don’t find markets here, but thankfully there’s a big English-speaking market in Europe,” Lynch said.

Another example is a guy knocking on a door who says, “Excuse me, have you heard what may or may not be the word?” He’s a proselytizing agnostic.

Lynch is currently the National Representative for the National Cartooning Society. That means his job is to “organize the unorganizable” cartoonists, he said.

He’s lived in New Hampshire for more than a year now. He and his wife vacationed in northern New England and Lynch met some cartoonists, and his wife, who plays Irish fiddle, met musicians. She still does graphic design for a company in Manhattan and performs two or three nights per week.

“There’s probably less than a thousand people in this country who are making their living by cartooning,” Lynch said.

“Everyone gets along and everyone tends to be interested in what the other person is doing,” he said. Lynch said he knows most of his competitors, and some of his best friends are the artists whose work is seen regularly in the New Yorker or Wall Street Journal.

Much of Lynch’s bread and butter is in  cartoons tailored for business topics. “It’s very easy to make fun of these guys,” Lynch said, citing Goldman Sachs as an example. As long as you are generally aware of what’s going on, you don’t need a special background in the industry, he said.

Cartooning might be unique in that it merges visual art and writing. “That’s why I never like the caption contests that are very big,” Lynch said. There’s a world of people who can draw and paint, and a world of people who can write, but it’s rare that people do both, he said.

Lynch started a blog noting what’s going on in the cartooning community, which offers him a way to promote his work (along with his site, heykidscomics.com). At mikelynchcartoons.blogspot.com, he’s posted various cartoons that look like he pretty much draws what he sees (which is pretty darn hilarious when he’s making fun of strangers in airports).

“I’ve never been into style. A lot of cartoonists and artists really worry about it,” Lynch said. Edinburgh-based cartoonist Rod McKie remarked to Lynch that Lynch’s work looks “so contemporary” because Lynch draws people he actually sees, Lynch recalled.

“I think that regardless of what you do ... you have to be observant to a degree,” Lynch said.

“I also find that I don’t spend eight hours a day watching television,” Lynch said. He’s lucky to watch it 90 minutes a week, and that’s mostly just because he works a lot. “Cartooning is a job, but it’s a job that I love,” Lynch said. The finished product might look simple, “but there’s a lot of choices behind the scenes,” he said.

Lynch can usually tell within five minutes if someone is a part-time cartoonist, he said.

Among their other concerns, full-timers are self-employed and need to cover the business end of things, like managing their taxes, billing and contracts. The average cartoonist lasts six months and throws in the towel, he said. Part of the reason is that there’s not really a template for the job. That’s also why he started the blog, Lynch said. People have questions about how to deal with rejection, why things aren’t anything selling, where to find markets and “what do these people want?”

It took Lynch six months to make a sale, he said. Throughout that time, he was sending out 15 cartoons per week. One of the things editors are looking for is reliability, Lynch said. Perhaps his persistence demonstrated that because after six months of nothing, he made seven or eight sales in one day, amounting to a couple thousand dollars. As an independent artist, Lynch owns his cartoons, which puts him in a position to control how they are used, he said.

Lynch has fallen into teaching cartooning and now teaches kids and adults in New York and New Hampshire.

“Despite how visually bombarded every kid is,” Lynch said, he’s found that many have never seen anyone draw in front of them. On the other hand, he was teaching in a museum in New York this summer and by the third day his students were drawing almost as fast as he was. It makes him wonder how he’ll compete 10 years from now, he said.

Stephanie Piro
Stephanie Piro of Farmington is one of the women behind the comic strip Six Chix. Now she enjoys syndication in about 100 to 125 publications (none in New Hampshire, though), but getting to that point took years.

Piro started submitting work to magazines and publishers in the late 1970s but got “very positive rejections.” There weren’t a lot of female cartoonists then, and even now it’s mainly a white, male profession, although that’s changing some with the popularity of graphic novels, she said.

In the early 1980s, Piro decided to do away with the middle man — the publishers — and diversify her product. “I taught myself silk screening,” Piro said. She brought T-shirts bearing her cartoons to craft shows in the early 1980s, and found women had not seen much humor directed specifically to them that they could relate to. Often, cartoons directed at women are created by guys, she said.

Piro did the craft show circuit for a long time and sold a lot of T-shirts. She started winning humor awards in the textile industry, with her silkscreen designs competing against those of corporations. 

Then she found a licensing agent, and added greeting card lines and calendars to her repertoire. It wasn’t until then that one of her comics went into Glamour, she said.

Meanwhile, “a lot of really nice people ... tried to help me,” she said. She decided to resubmit her work to syndicates in 1994. In 1995, Chronicle Features and King Features called her.

“Everyone thinks syndication is the nirvana of cartooning,” she said. She signed a five-year contract with Chronicle, but it was then sold to a much bigger syndicate, which dropped the three female cartoonists. Piro was able to hold on to some of her clients and is still doing her single-panel Fair Game. She posts it on her Web site, www.stephaniepiro.com, for people to contact her to use it. Her comics have been in text books, magazines and elsewhere.

In 2000, Jay Kennedy, the late editor and chief of King Features, developed a feature called Six Chix. It’s done by a team of six women cartoonists, each assigned a day of the week to write a strip — they rotate Sunday duties. The artists “have very different styles of cartooning” and writing, Piro said. “I think it’s a lot of fun for readers to look every day and see something new,” Piro said. She has Saturdays (thesixchix.com).

Six Chix has gone international and is in Sweden, South Africa, Italy and Norway, she said.

“That’s the nice thing about being syndicated. They do all the work ...  there’s nothing worse than marketing,” Piro said.

“Ever since I was little, I just loved black and white arts. I loved pen and ink lines,” Piro said. She said she was fascinated by the Peanuts collections her mother would buy, and Charles Schulz’s “deceptively simple” art. Of her influences, Mad magazine was a “revelation” to her, and was different than anything else out, Piro said.

Piro grew up in Long Island and went to the Visual Arts School in New York in the late 1960s, which she recalls as “kind of a hippie school at the time.” Robert De Niro’s father was one of her teachers.

“At that time, I couldn’t get into the cartooning classes,” Piro said. There were only a few, and they were always booked. After two years, she left, and moved in with her now ex-husband. Also a sculptor, she started selling through boutique galleries. “I actually stared selling art when I was 19, professionally,” Piro said.

Piro moved to New Hampshire in 1978 from New York with her ex-husband.

She is now married to John Nolan, editor of the Rochester Times.

When Piro’s daughter Nico went to college in 2002, Piro ended up adding a part-time library job since she spent time there researching. At the Goodwin Library in Farmington, she’s started a cartoon club for kids, a writers’ group for adults, and a book club, among other things. Last year, Piro did the artwork for the State of New Hampshire Summer Reading Program.

A cat lover, Piro recently found out she won awards from the Cat Writers’ Association. One was for her book My Cat Loves Me Naked, and another for illustrations for  books, Paws For Thought and Cool Games For Cool Cats. Piro’s greeting card line with American Greetings started last year, which you can find locally.

Scott Wegener
Scott Wegener of Wilton co-created and draws Atomic Robo.

“I’d always been drawing since I was a little kid, really just for pleasure. It’s like reading a book ... I don’t want to call it escapism,” but it’s a great way to exercise the imagination and keep creative, Wegener said.

He didn’t turn professional until about three years ago. Wegener, a New Yorker, came to New Hampshire by way of Daniel Webster College, where he studied aviation. He was a pilot and flight instructor for years, but tired of the industry.

“An opportunity to try my hand at illustration came along ... I jumped at it,” Wegener said.

A friend was editing a charity book on World War II for the D-Day anniversary and asked Wegener to do a poster inside the book. Eventually, Wegener put together enough work to leave his full-time job.

Wegener said comic books are a medium he’s always felt an interest in. With a low budget, you can tell any story. It’s like being your own Hollywood studio for a fraction of the cost, he said. 

An example of a comic that interested him was the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, when it was self-published in black and white, Wegener said. “It completely captured my imagination,” Wegener said. Since he was young, he’s looked for books that are owned by the person who created them, he said.

To move from illustration to comics, Wegener would spend half his day reading, including books on cinematography and storyboarding.

Wegener co-created Atomic Robo with his friend, Brian Clevinger, a writer. Both are “big history buffs” and “amateur science nerds,” Wegener said. “That’s the beauty of doing your own book,” Wegener said. You can focus on what you like.

The one-year anniversary issue of Atomic Robo was published a few weeks ago. Instead of monthly installments, Wegener and Clevinger create mini-series. They don’t like how monthly mainstream comics can come out looking rushed, Wegener said. It usually takes five to six weeks for them to create a comic book.

“We put out fewer books every year ... [but] we don’t put out books I think we compromised on,” Wegener said.

Their first miniseries was nominated for two Eisner awards, which he said is the comic book equivalent of an Oscar.

“Brian and I are both heavily influenced by movies we enjoyed as kids,” Wegener said.

“It’s funny: neither one of us can look at comics ... and say this is where I learned to do what I do,” Wagener said.

Although Wegener isn’t the writer for Atomic Robo, he does plenty of writing for his blog, www.scottwegener.com. Wegener said he’s good at putting ideas out, and “pretty decent at plotting out the action ... but dialogue is not my specialty at all.” There are people who are a “one-man or one-woman show” but it’s rare to find all those talents together, he said.

By working as a team, Wegener said, he “ends up brainstorming ideas that on your own you would never come up with.” Wegener said he started the blog hoping to get people to look at his work. It was down for a while last year, but he’s turned it into a weekly ritual.

Wegener also keeps busy with other projects. He did some work for Marvel comics last year, for Punisher: A War Journal. He’s working on another miniseries, Killer of Demons, which comes out in February.  It’s “sort of a horror-comedy ... if you can imagine Shaun of the Dead crossed with The Office.... That’s with writer Chris Yost.” Yost works in animation and is co-writing X-Force.

Clivenger and Wegener are also collaborating on another story, which is in its “embryonic stages.”

The second Atomic Robo miniseries is halfway through its print run. They just finished a book for free comic book day, the first Saturday in May each year. “Publishers do stories specifically to give away,” he said. The day is meant to get kids interested and get comic book readers exposed to new books. Finishing their contribution early means they won’t have to interrupt a project later, he said. They just started working on their third Atomic Robo miniseries.

With his many references to movies, one would wonder if an Atomic Robo film is in the works.

“There’s been a good amount of interest in Atomic Robo ... but Iron Man is messing us up,” Wegener said. There are major differences, though. For one thing, Atomic Robo is a robot, while Iron Man is a guy in a suit, he said. 

“But there’s definitely interest in it,” Wegener said. Hollywood isn’t known for moving quickly, he said. Killer of Demons is also being looked at.

Are movies a main goal? “We definitely want Hollywood’s money,” Wegener said. Comic books are a very competitive market, he said. It’s difficult to plan for the future or save for retirement. However, they both love comics because of the control they have, he said.

At this point, he’s not picky about whether a film from his comics ends up animated or live action, he said. “As much as it’s harming us at the moment, I really love the Iron Man movie,” Wegener said. The CGI was excellent, he said.

Wegener lives in Wilton, and the Atomic Robo team is scattered everywhere. Ronda Patterson, their colorist, lives in Canada. Jeff Powell, who does their lettering, is an old high school friend of Wegener’s who lives in Brooklyn. The publisher, Red 5 Comics, is in Alberta. Clivenger is in Florida.

Wilton is a “nice little town,” he said. He and his wife Dorinda have an eight-year-old daughter he refers to as “the widget.”

“Sometimes I feel like a circus sideshow,” in Wilton, he said. When people ask what he does and he tells them, they then ask what he does for a job.

When their daughter is older, they might move back to a city. They would both like to own fewer or zero cars, and be closer to museums and other city amenities.

At the same time, “There’s an intimacy to living in a small town you cannot get in a city,” he said.

Mike Marland
Mike Marland grew up in northern New Hampshire in Lymon, lived in Northwood, and has been in Spofford for eight years. Rural New Hampshire life influenced his comic strip, R.F.D., when he started it around 1981. It’s now syndicated by King Features, so he took out the “ayup”s to make it seem rural in general.

“When I sit down and write, I usually think about what happened to me this week, then kinda scramble it around and turn it upside,” to put it in a strip, Marland said.

He also creates editorial cartoons for the Concord Monitor, and is a gag writer for the Snuffy Smith comic strip, which has been running for about 80 years, he said.

For his editorial cartoons, Marland keeps track of the news all week, creates his cartoons, and sends them out. “And if they run ’em they run ’em ... we don’t discuss anything about editorial content,” Marland said. “It’s like having my own column pretty much.”

He’s not worried about the end of the campaign cycle. “The politicians will always be doing something,” Marland said.

“I can’t just draw R.F.D., or editorials or Snuffy. I’ve got to do several things to make it pay ... I’m pretty much a hermit in the studio much of the time. But I like it,” Marland said.

Marland went to art college in Manchester briefly and quit. He has also worked in a furniture factory and in newspapers in pre-press doing what was called “paste-up” before computers, he said.

“I’m pretty much Joe the Cartoonist,” Marland said.

“I think a lot of it is creating your own little world ... you have control over what people do and what people say,” Marland said of the attraction of cartooning.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows of Keene created the comic strip Preteena in 2001.

She ended her syndication partnership with Universal Press in May.

“Not that you’re not aware of this, but print is dead,” Barrows said. 

Preteena will live on, however. “I just needed to find some new delivery system for it,” Barrows said. She’s working on a Preteena book series.

“When I started the strip, my children were little. I wasn’t drawing on stuff from them,” Barrows said. She was pulling from her own experiences as a fifth-grader and as an eighth-grader, the ages of the two main characters, sisters Teena and Jeri.

In fifth grade “you’re almost unisex ... there isn’t any pressure on you,” Barrows said. You can just enjoy life. “Then, in a short period of time, boys are in your life, and your figure is there ... make-up is involved. And suddenly your friends are bitchy,” Barrows said. There weren’t really comics addressing those transitional times, she said.

“I actually think in a weird way fifth-grade girls are smarter than eighth-grade girls,” Barrows said. That’s because the eighth-graders can be so distracted by pressures, often coming from other girls. It’s a real “dog eat dog kind of existence,” Barrows said.

“In my strip, Teena comes out as a level-headed, what-is-your-problem type of girl,” Barrows said. Jeri is a beauty but “masks her own sensitivity with her massive ego,” Barrows said.

Other characters are Teena’s best friend Stick, and a guy, Gordo. The guy in Jeri’s life “is this poor bastard she manipulates,” Barrows said.

Both Barrows and her husband, Romas Kukalis, are artists who work at home, which meant they were always with their kids. “We got a chance to really be here and watch everything. So I made the parents in this strip artists who work at home ... it’s just easier to write the truth,” Barrows said.

She avoided the dad stereotype and created one who “isn’t a complete nincompoop,” she said. She thinks that may be how her strip ended up with so many middle-aged male fans.

Although the strip was about preteens and teens, the audience was families. Parents loved it, she said. You didn’t have to be a caveman to like B.C. or a six-year-old boy to like Calvin and Hobbes, she pointed out.

Preteena ran in the Keene Sentinel and the Union Leader along with large papers like the Chicago Tribune and foreign ones like the Mumbai Press.

Yahoo has started rerunning Preteena from the beginning, which Barrows finds “creepy.” The drawing and level of sophistication is different, she said. Barrows thinks that if you look at any cartoonist, you’ll see “a marked difference in drawing style” over their careers. If you look at Charles Schulz at the beginning and end of his 40- year career, you’ll see a big difference just in Snoopy alone, she said.

“Comics is what I always wanted to do,” Barrows said. However, she was an advertising major, and worked in various parts of the industry including as a copy writer and art director. She worked at home illustrating two children’s books when her daughter was born and probably started working on comic strips in earnest when she was 26, she said. Her strip Friends Fatales came close to syndication and United Features invited her to New York and told her she should be syndicated, but not with Friends Fatales. It was a matter of whittling down, after that. She tried about four more concepts, but Preteena was the hit.

Barrows and her husband previously lived in Manhattan and in Connecticut. They moved to Keene in 1989, where they had their children.

“It was pretty. That was it,” she said. They discovered Keene on a trip with a college friend who was visiting his mother there, she said. It was much more affordable than Connecticut at the time, but that’s changed, she said.

Creative people are “trying to figure out with new parameters that have been set,” Barrows said.

Her husband has been a book cover illustrator for 30 years, but now publishers aren’t commissioning oil painters to design covers — “now they have some kids manipulate a photograph for $250” instead of paying $8,000 for artwork, she said.  Regarding Preteena, Barrows said she still likes the tactility of a book.

Barrows is also a writer, and worked on a graphic series called Goofyfoot Gurl aimed at older teens. The title is a surfing term. She’s also working on a novel.

Barrows said her parents were art teachers. “So I don’t know if I really had much of a choice” about being an artist, she said. But “I love to write as much as I love to draw, maybe even more,” she said. For her, creating comics seemed like the perfect place.

“I get to draw what my point is ... it’s the best job in the world, really,” Barrows said.