LYNN JOHNSTON: I spoke to Garry Trudeau… He was very comforting, and he said, “If you want to make a statement, you have to make it with all honesty and truth and be comforted knowing that it was made with your own strong sense of values and truth.”
TOM HEINTJES: You’re handling this sequence so deftly and so honestly, with a perceptiveness that seems so authentic. I’m left wondering if you simply wrote it from out of your imagination.
LYNN JOHNSTON: I didn’t. I wrote it from experience. My brother-in-law is gay. It certainly has not been by design, but so very many of my friends have been gay, all the way through school, art school, even in my husband’s dental class — our very best friend, who graduated with Rod, was gay and is now HIV-positive. He’s been thrown out of his home. We’ve been part of the private lives of so many people who have had to deal with this. I know this story. I know it’s a true one, and I know the dialogue by heart.
TOM HEINTJES: That explains why it seemed so palpably real.
LYNN JOHNSTON: It is real. That’s why I can stand tall and know that I am not making up a story simply to shock people. I produced a story that is so true that it’s painful. You know what it’s like? It’s like lancing a boil and taking out the thing that won’t allow it to heal. Not that I intended to do that, but I had the confidence that I could tell this story from the side of the people who had experience. In that way, I was being very true to myself, my strip and to them. The strip’s always been very honest.
TOM HEINTJES: How is your mail running, now that a large part of sequence has run?
LYNN JOHNSTON: At this point, it’s overwhelmingly supportive… For the most part, I’m hearing from families, psychiatrists, doctors, teachers, very open-minded people who are saying, “Good ー we have left this in a closet for far too long, and it’s time we allowed people a life.” And I’ve gotten letters of support from people of all ages. There are teachers who are going over this a day at a time with their students, with the approval of the students' parents. They’re writing and phoning to tell me that it’s an educational tool. One letter was from a mother who said that because of the strip, her son had the courage to tell her that he was a homosexual, and because of the strip, she had the courage to handle it well. I also got a letter from a woman in Edmonton who said that if the strip had run last year, perhaps her son would still be alive, because then he would know that he was not the only one in the world with this problem. It’s that kind of response that makes me think it’s been worth the rollercoaster ride it’s put me on. It would be so much easier not to make a statement, not to tell a story, to continue to be that yellowing page on the refrigerator.
LYNN JOHNSTON: …I never thought that I could do this. I never applied for this job. I never sent anything in and said, “Hey, check this out, give me a job.” When I signed a contract at Universal Press Syndicate, the people around that big rosewood table were interested in celebrating. They wanted to take me out to lunch, but I went back to the hotel and – swear to God -ー got physically ill.
TOM HEINTJES: You realized what you’d gotten yourself into.
LYNN JOHNSTON: How could I produce material every day, 365 days a year? How could I do that? I could see producing a book now and then, but a daily comic strip? I was going to have readers every day who would expect a certain level of quality work, and I think that maybe that’s why I segued into the little vignettes that have moralistic and motherly values, like little parables. I might not be able to have a joke every day, but I could have a thought every day.
When you’re very young, you often find yourself completely devoted to something, whether it’s Elvis Presley or a father figure or whatever. You become a cult member of some sort. And when I was very young, I wanted to be married to a minister. I didn’t want to be a minister, but I wanted to be the wife of one, because I wanted to write his sermons. I was about eight years old, and I would lie in bed and pray, “Please, God, make me a minister’s wife,” because I wanted to write something that would mean something to people!
I was brought up believing that everyone was bathed in sin. You would arrive at church, the day would be beautiful, the birds would be singing, everything would smell like fresh morning dew, and you’d feel great! And when you walked out after the service, you’d feel like you had nailed some poor sucker to a cross! “Wait a minute! I was happy until I came here!” [laughter] And I don’t think spiritual guidance necessarily means shredding your self-confidence and destroying your day. You should come out of church wanting to carry on and care about people, pursuing your dreams and being positive. And when I was that little girl, I wanted to write pieces for that audience that would lift them up and make them feel great! And do you know what?
TOM HENTJES: Yeah in a very real way, you ended up doing just that.
LYNN JOHNSTON: And I never even married a minister! [laughter]
TOM HEINTJES: Did you devise any sort of escape mechanism for the life you had?
LYNN JOHNSTON: I was very reclusive. I spent hours and hours in my room drawing. That was my other release, and that was my way of surviving. You see, anything I imagined, I could draw. And I found that if I was in a terrible depression and I closed my eyes, the blackness would appear to go on forever. But if I put it down on paper, it was no bigger than 8 ½ by 11, and I could deal with that. If you have a horror inside of you, it goes down to your marrow. But on paper, it’s not so bad.
“I don’t know Bill [Watterson]; I’ve never talked to him. I wrote a foreword for one of his books, but I’ve never talked to him. Like I said before, we’re all individuals, and I dreamed of becoming a comic strip artist. I never thought about licensing or anything like that, but I was driving down the street one day and I saw a truck that had Yosemite Sam pasted on the back of the truck. And I thought, “People love cartoon characters, and the man who drives this truck loves Yosemite Sam enough to paste his likeness to the back of his truck.” What in the world is wrong with that? People love coffee cups and things, and if you can put the characters on TV, sometimes it’s just terrible, but if you can do it [well], fine. You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown is the most-performed musical in the history of the American theater, because we did it right, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. Plus: I don’t think I’m a true artist. I would love to be Andrew Wyeth or Picasso… but I can draw pretty well and I can write pretty well, and I think I’m doing the best with whatever abilities I have been given. And what more can one ask?”
GROENING: I respect Bill Watterson’s resistance to all the offers to exploit Calvin and Hobbes, but I don’t think it would compromise him personally, and certainly not financially. I think people love his comic strip so much that they just want to participate in it in a greater way. And in our culture that means wearing your favorite cartoon character on a T-shirt. To me, a cartoon strip is merchandise, anyway, in and of itself.
GROTH: Just by virtue of the fact that it’s sold?
GROENING: Yeah. I don’t think that a comic strip is innately superior to a T-shirt.
[It would be difficult to find a statement about comic strips that I disagree with more.]
Kelly said people sometimes didn’t understand his work, even early on: “I remember being about three and drawing something; it really wasn’t anything more than a scribble. My aunt and other family members looked at it and asked what it was. At a loss for an answer, I responded that it was a cat. Everyone exclaimed how marvelous a cat it was, showing it around and praising it. I was distinctly puzzled at this reaction since even I could tell it didn’t look anything like a cat.”
FROM THE AUDIENCE: Walt, were you influenced by [George] Herriman at all; did you love his stuff?
KELLY: Not too much because, you know, that guy’s all by himself. I’ve just borrowed devices from him. He had animals and I had animals. I was more influenced by say, [Arthur] Frost, [Rube] Goldberg, [Tad] Dorgan, [T.S.] Sullivant. Really, those guys who worked on sports, or on the bamboozle of the American public, which I think is the greatest and funniest story in the world. Whereas George was a little gentle. He had his own thing, which can only be described as poetry, really. No, I’m not that gentle a person.
KELLY:… We’re in a hell of a lot of trouble now. We have a built-in comic named Agnew who is our vice president, and he has come out with a lot of things that are ripe for comment, and we’re in a stupid business where you have to wait six to eight weeks before you can say anything about him. The comic strip business is very American in that it is always safe. You have to lean over backwards to get yourself in trouble, and I lean over backwards fairly well. I would love to be saying something about Agnew now, and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t. Hell, I’ve had a year to wait for him to do anything, just about, and I’m not doing it. So this is how good my work is: I’m still confined to these things, to our practice of putting our strips out six to eight weeks after the news is off the bush, and this is not good. We as cartoonists should always be commenting on what the hell’s right in front of our noses all the time. That’s what Rube [Goldberg] did in the old days, and I don’t know, how many days did you have for your stuff, Rube, you didn’t turn it out every day, did you?
RUBE GOLDBERG: [from audience] Yeah, every day, yeah.
KELLY: But was it a one day release?
GOLDBERG: Yeah.
KELLY: You see, this was great, this stuff was right on the nose in teens and early ’20s. We can’t do that now.
[Garry Trudeau must have heard this and taken it as a challenge]
“The guy that I will not eat my words about is Jim Davis, who I think ought to go straight to hell on a greased pole. I think he’s evil. The content of his strip is horrible and mean and terrible. I think the characters in Garfield are the same jerks that are in the White House. Garfield is a Republican jerk – that’s what he always struck me as: this fat, grouchy – it’s just a horrible, horrible character, and I think Jim Davis is horrible himself for creating this. The licensing is obviously a huge a deal for him. Why this guy has become a sort of cultural hero, I’ll never figure out.”
“Basically, I’ve decided that licensing is inconsistent with what I’m trying to do with Calvin and Hobbes. I take cartoons seriously as an art form, so I think with an issue like licensing, it’s important to analyze what my strip is about, and what makes it work.
It’s easy to transfer the essence of a gag-oriented strip, especially a one-panel gag strip, from the newspaper page to a T-shirt, a mug, a greeting card, and so on. The joke reads the same no matter what it’s printed on, and the joke is what the strip is about. Nothing is lost.
My strip works differently. Calvin and Hobbes isn’t a gag strip. It has a punchline, but the strip is about more than that. The humor is situational, and often episodic. It relies on conversation, and the development of personalities and relationships. These aren’t concerns you can wrap up neatly in a clever little saying for people to send each other or to hang up on their walls. To explore character, you need lots of time and space. Note pads and coffee mugs just aren’t appropriate vehicles for what I’m trying to do here. I’m not interested in removing all the subtlety from my work to condense it for a product. The strip is about more than jokes. I think the syndicate would admit this if they would start looking at my strip instead of just the royalty checks. Unfortunately, they are in the cartoon business only because it makes money, so arguments about artistic intentions are never very persuasive to them.
I have no aversion to obscene wealth, but that’s not my motivation either. I think to license Calvin and Hobbes would ruin the most precious qualities of my strip and, once that happens, you can’t buy those qualities back…
I’m convinced that licensing would sell out the soul of Calvin and Hobbes. The world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize. Once you’ve given up its integrity, that’s it. I want to make sure that never happens. Instead of asking what’s wrong with rampant commercialism, we ought to be asking, “What justifies it?” Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste.
As I said, some strips lend themselves to certain merchandising projects better than others. I’m not condemning licensing across the board; I’m saying licensing doesn’t work for Calvin and Hobbes, and I want the freedom to do with the strip as I see fit.
Obviously, some cartoonists see things differently than I do, and that’s their right. My concern is that I be afforded the right to refuse licensing if I feel it hurts my strip. I think it is wrong that a syndicate should own characters it had no hand in creating, and that a syndicate should use that ownership to thwart the intentions of the cartoonist who did create the characters.”
WATTERSON: Hobbes is really hard to define and, in a way, I’m reluctant to do it. I think there’s an aspect of this character that’s hard for me to articulate. I suppose if I had to choose from those four, the brother and the friend would be the closest. But there’s something a little peculiar about him that’s, hopefully, not readily categorized.
WEST: Well, in a way that says more about Calvin than Hobbes because Hobbes is implicitly, explicitly just a product of his imagination.
WATTERSON: But the strip doesn’t assert that. That’s the assumption that adults make because nobody else sees him, sees Hobbes, in the way that Calvin does. Some reporter was writing a story on imaginary friends and they asked me for a comment, and I didn’t do it because I really have absolutely no knowledge about imaginary friends. It would seem to me, though, that when you make up a friend for yourself, you would have somebody to agree with you, not to argue with you. So Hobbes is more real than I suspect any kid would dream up… The resolution of the question of whether Hobbes is real or not doesn’t concern me or interest me, but, hopefully, there’s some element of complexity there that will make the relationship interesting on a couple of levels… I like the tension that that creates, where you’ve got two versions of reality that do not mix. Something odd has happened and neither makes complete sense, so you’re left to make out of it what you want.
WEST: I guess that’s the rule of some of the best fantasies. Did Alice really go through the looking glass? Was Dorothy really in Oz? What do you choose to believe?
WATTERSON: I should also mention, just in that context, that the fantasy/reality question is a literary device, so the ultimate reality of it doesn’t really matter that much anyway. In other words, when Dorothy’s in Oz, if you want to make this obviously a dream, it becomes stupid – you confine yourself.
WEST: It has less purpose.
WATTERSON: And also less potential. There are inner workings in The Wizard of Oz that are too coherent for a dream — at least my dreams are never that coherent- and so it becomes less interesting if it is only a dream. The literary merits, the purpose of writing it that way, are better served by some ambiguity than by making everything very obvious.
[For context, Gary Groth had written an editorial in an earlier Comics Journal criticizing Eisner’s work. He basically goes on for quite a while about how overrated he thinks Eisner is. It’s not that great in my opinion]
“Eisner was interested in comics. And if you’re in comics, somebody has to hit somebody else, somebody has to drive a car over a cliff, somebody has to blow up an airplane, somebody has to be a good guy, and somebody has to be a bad guy. But, more than anyone else in that form, up to that time, and past that time, Eisner was able to squeeze more human interest and more dimension and take heroes and use them–as he used the Spirit–as side characters to telling another story. Sometimes that story was too sentimental, sometimes the story was too trite, but often enough it was full of wit and cautionary values and fascinating visual perceptions that went beyond the visual and made it part of one’s perceptions, the way seeing early Fellini films became part of our perceptions as we left the theater and the world was redefined visually by 8½ or La Dolce Vita. Whenever you finished reading Eisner, the world was redefined by his eye, his camera eye. That contribution was so original, and so innovative, at that time to this time, that I think that anything else one can say about it, whatever shortcomings, whatever lack, whatever you feel–whether I agree with it or don’t agree with it, and disagree with much of it–is beside the point. Whether it’s valid or not, you cannot tell me that this is less than the contribution that Jack Kirby has made, or less than the contribution that Frank Miller is making.
…
I’m sure there’s much to criticize in Eisner’s later work. But there’s much to applaud in the fact that after not touching that work for many, many years, he came back to it, and he’s looking at it with a fresh eye, and he’s not doing bullshit violence, and he’s not buying into the mainstream, and he’s going off on his own track, and it happens to be a track that’s personal to him, and whether he’s stretching that enough or not is beside the point. As critical as one can be of some of that stuff, it’s still more interesting to a reader whose interest is larger than one of the caped hero-genre and flexing their muscles, to a reader whose point is somewhat larger than the further deification of the Sly Stallone syndrome. He’s trying something. And that should be encouraged and applauded, rather than trying to bury him.”
GROTH: Were your parents proud in any sense that you were a cartoonist, that you were working on an art form that you were developing?
FEIFFER: Oh, it was never thought of as an art form by anybody in those years. Including cartoonists. I remember Walt Kelly’s hackles would rise if you talked about cartooning as an art form.
GROTH: Oh, is that right?
FEIFFER: Oh, yes.
GROTH: Do you think he believed that?
FEIFFER: It’s hard to know what these guys believed. I mean, they came out of the newspaper gang, where artists were sissies in a way, and they were proud of being newspapermen, journalists, working in bullpens. And doing work that was disposable. As Caniff has said, you never thought twice about having your originals thrown out.
GROTH: I was under the impression that in the 20s and ’30s, the time when Herriman was working, and Segar, and McCay that it was thought of as an art form.
FEIFFER: No. I don’t know what McCay would have thought, and who knows about Herriman? But most of them didn’t think twice about that. I always thought of it as an art form. My love for Eisner, my love for Caniff, I always thought these guys were artists, and when I brought it up, they got very defensive.
GROTH: What did they think of themselves as, then? Craftsmen?
FEIFFER: Yeah. “This is my job. I’m a cartoonist. What’s all this big deal about art?” Something vaguely unmanly about it.
GROTH: How did Eisner look at it?
FEIFFER: Same way. Eisner now accepts the term “artist” but he certainly didn’t when I was working for him and tried to use it.
GROTH: Did he reject it?
FEIFFER: Sure, he rejected it entirely. He would admit that. That’s not going to be discomforting to him. He remembers those arguments.
[This is interesting, given how strongly Eisner pushed for people to see comics as art in his later years. I guess Feiffer must have had a big influence on him in that regard.]
“Comics is as good, as expressive, as versatile an artistic medium as any other, including the novel, theater, and film. You can write as well in comics as in any other form. Comic book writing is very similar to writing drama: you write dialogue and directions, to the actors and director in one case, to the illustrator in another. You can write any way you want in comics and you can draw any way you want. using any style you like.
…
Comics have a far greater aesthetic potential than is generally realized: if more gifted people employed the medium, this would become evident, and comics would be taken far more seriously.”
“Ironically, of course, a year after this interview, trouble did in fact begin to brew at the studio. The first manifestation of this was when Don Bluth led a group of experienced Disney animators in a mass exodus, to create their own studio. The group subsequently produced The Secret of Nimh. The entire Disney organization began to go into severe convulsions in the first half of the 80s, when it became apparent that the leadership of the Old Guard was increasingly at sea. The Disney film division was making very little money, and was producing movies that were a bad joke. The animation department seemed to be adrift, taking five years to produce the the indifferent The Fox and the Hound and another five for the truly awful The Black Cauldron. A series of “greenmail” takeover attempts by corporate raiders finally resulted in an overthrow of the management, and the creation of a new regime (in power today) which had succeeded in turning the re-named Walt Disney Company into a standard, but successful Hollywood movie studio, which also happens to have an animation department. The atmosphere at the studio today is relatively workaday, with neither the hum of excitement of the great days, nor the disconcerting lassitude and air of unreality which pervaded the lot in the late seventies.”
[This small footnote is fascinating to read in the context of Disney history. Collins doesn’t give a specific year when this interview was done, but Don Bluth left Disney in 1979 so we can assume it was around 1978. It was published in 1988, only a year before the Disney Renaissance in 1989. The Little Mermaid was in production as this was being published. It just shows how bad things looked at the time, and that no one could have predicted how much of a hit The Little Mermaid and subsequent films would be.]
“So I went in to animation then and started training as an in-betweener, and the first 18 strips were pencilled by Ub. They were written by Walt. Walt had lifted gags out of the animated shorts–the Mickey shorts up to that time–and adapted them to the strip. Ub pencilled the first 18, and Win Smith inked them. Then, after the first 18, Win pencilled and inked the strip, and Walt continued to write them. But he tried to get Win to write them, and Win kept stalling. And I don’t know whether he just didn’t want to take on the extra work…
In April–now the strip was launched in January 1930–and in April, Win came in to my desk, my animation desk, and he was pretty red in the face and quite agitated. I could see it. He says, “I think you got a new job.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “I just quit.” And I said, “Why the hell would you do that?” And he said, “No G.D. young whipper-snapper’s going to tell me what to do.” So he walked out into oblivion. And, of course, the young whipper-snapper turned out to be Walt Disney. [Laughter] But Walt had been after him all this time to write the strip, and Win kept stalling. And finally Walt called him into the office that morning and had a showdown with him. And Win, who had sort of a short fuse anyway, blew up and walked out…
About a half hour after Win left the studio, Walt called me into the office and asked me if I would take over the strip. I said, “Well, Walt, I’ve come to realize that you were right when you told me that the comic strip business and the newspaper business was no place to go, that animation was where it was.” And I said, “By now I’ve become quite interested in animation. I’d like to stay with it.” He said, “Well, just take it over for two weeks until I find someone.” And at the end of a month, I began to wonder if he was looking for anyone, and at the end of two months I began to worry for fear he was going to find someone. [Laughter] Because I had adjusted to the strip now, and was beginning to like it. So I continued for 45 and a half years. [Laughter]”
“Actually Gamin in some ways is patterned after a kid I met in Naples, Italy, who took me for $15 for a diamond ring. [chuckles] He came up and said he wanted to sell me diamond ring, and I said I wasn’t interested in a diamond ring. But he said, “This is my mother’s diamond ring… look, I’ll show you, it’s a real diamond.” He went over to a storefront and made a big scratch on the glass. All of a sudden that made me interested! So we went back in an alley and I still said, “Look, I don’t really want to buy this, but how much is it?” He said it was $25 and I said I would pay no more than $15. He said, “OK!” [Chuckles] It was his mother’s wedding ring, see? Well, the doggone thing turned green before I got back to the hotel, and the diamond was scratched. The “diamond” was piece of glass. And I thought, “Doggone it, this kid was smarter than I was!” He really pulled one on me, and I’ve been fascinated with those type of people ever since, and they’re all over the place. In Jamaica I had a kid who took me up in the mountains and dumped me, and here I was again — outsmarted by a little kid!”
