The Road Narrows As You Go

by Lee Henderson

  And so on. In this and subsequent letters to Pazder, she alluded to a father figure of some renown, but didn’t out and out say Reagan, said nothing of Hick Elmdales’s wake either, because she was so certain that the strange ceremonial aspects Pazder might like to hear about weren’t real. Pazder never wrote her back.

  What should I do about my teeth grinding? she asked her business manager when he called from his Motorola. Frank would call from his Hexen office in San Jose about once a season, with a gentlemanly report on what was what. She could always hear more phones going off in the background and men screaming shitbag at each other and frantic demands.

  Your teeth? What’s the matter with your teeth? I know world-class dentists right here in the Bay who can take care of you.

  Sounds like you’re calling from a war.

  I am. One big civil war fought over the phone, Frank said. Hey listen, I just got off the phone with my guy at this national real estate company. I work with them on securitized mortgages, and anyway, they can use your characters for promotions and advertising, what do you think? Worth about fifteen thousand to you.

  Sure, sure, okay, sounds like a deal, she said and did a quick mental tally of what he’d accomplished for her. Toiletries, knick-knacks, patties, cakes, creams, ices, plastics, clothes—all within the span of three years, Frank got her characters plastered everywhere. Every laundromat franchise and hotel chain in America that showed off her characters in brochures and signage paid Frank for the privilege. In the early eighties Strays was so popular, Wendy opened parades in towns she’d never heard of whose populace were so devoted to her strip there was a statue of Buck erected in a local park. Cleveland’s free weekly entertainment newspaper ran her picture on the cover surrounded by her characters and the headline Cleveland’s Own Stray Wows America.

  Wendy took up the kitchen nook at the opposite end of the longtable from Hick’s bedroom, and we spread out around on either side of her. Over a matter of minutes she pencilled Buck’s head on a piece of scrap paper. That started her workday. Then came a body, and a shovel, so for something to do he dug a pit, actually it turned out to be a grave. She listened to funk records Mark flipped on the turntable and the murmur of Biz Aziz singing along in the dining room as she sketched and laid out pages for an issue of her memoir. Patrick Poedouce all of a sudden with his latest idea for a strip—set in a gold rush town—practically inspired by Wendy’s drawing. Letting Buck take life in her hands. This was her method of distracted idea generation. She could be on the phone with Gabby or anyone and doing this. Now Buck was digging a grave in a cemetery. She drew another Buck beside the first, this time lower in the grave and with more earth piled next to him. She drew a bat who bore a striking resemblance to Ignatz, the mouse in Krazy Kat, flapping his black wings over Buck’s head. As she started to ink the sketch, she lost her pencil (in her hair). She still didn’t know what the joke was going to be. She found a new pen, a Pentel nib. She liked the idea that Buck might get a job as a gravedigger. That suited a dog who could always be counted on to see the good side. But she didn’t know the punchline yet. So she made a few more sketches of a panel with a priest and mourners. This one panel took at least five sketches, and each sketch improved on one or two things—first she brought the priest into detail, a kind of Jim Rockford in a frock, so then she had to work out the mourners, they all had to become individuals, a widower, a louche fashion-conscious daughter and her husband, an old frumpy friend, and as soon as she found characters, the next sketch retained their essence but pulled back on the rest of the detail so your eye would focus on Buck, seated at the bottom right corner with the shovel over his shoulder. And she still didn’t know what the punchline was going to be.

  Never mind, she began to ink the frames for three panels onto a fresh page of bristol. There was still time to come up with a joke. The first two panels would show Buck digging and set up the joke. The mourners would take up the final two panels, meaning it would have to be the unknown punchline.

  In an hour she inked everything outside the last panel, which was left in pencil until she thought of a gag.

  Not all strips came easy but most of them did. She could bang off two or three on a good day. This one nagged her. This first gravedigger comic sat around for weeks and weeks as she tried punchlines, but nothing quite satisfied her. She drew lots of other gravedigger comic strips though. There was one with the Ignatz bat beaning Buck in the back of the head with a skull on the last panel in homage to Herriman. Gabby called and asked for a revision on that one—she wanted to know why it wasn’t just a brick like the original. Wendy was sure there was nothing offensive about the skull she had drawn, and look, there was even a skull in today’s Wizard of Id. But her editor’s issue wasn’t with the potential for a skull to offend, but wasn’t it funnier with a brick? So she UPS’d this bristol board back to the manor and Wendy whited out the skull and replaced it with a brick. Whereas on the same day as she had gotten her first paycheque made out to Wendy Ashbubble for the amount of fifteen thousand dollars, she also wrote, sketched, and inked another whole strip. Some cats hate Mondays, says Murphy dryly, but I don’t discriminate—I hate every day of the week equally.

  Gabby called from Manhattan twice a day on average. Around noon the phone would ring and Wendy would look up from her coffee and agree to accept the call, to hear out her editor’s reasons to improve some joke or just to gossip about the comics business or some contract Frank Fleecen had landed recently. The latest rumour was that Garry Trudeau’s threats about a sabbatical from Doonesbury were serious, citing creative exhaustion and a diminished motivation with the shrinking size of comic strips. Apparently Charles Schulz was heard on the golf course to say he found the idea of a sabbatical decadent and weak.

  I don’t blame Garry, said Wendy. I’m tired and I just got going in this racket.

  I’m sure you heard, Gabby said, how Berkeley Breathed protested to his editors about the reduction in size over the past year and it got us nowhere. I have to go. Another call.

  And then she called again around nine at night to sugarcoat some feedback from a newspaper. Her strip didn’t read well—meaning that in some papers the readership complained Strays wasn’t legible.

  Okay, okay. I get it. Less detail, Wendy said. Less and less detail.

  To keep apace with all the new deadlines piling up on top of her daily strip, she split up her worklist among us. To-dos stacked up for designs for toys, packaging, clothing and accessories, business logos, brand identifications, and other jobs, we got assigned to the task. Every job went through multiple drafts in the studio before it got sent to the client for approval, whether it was a picture of Buck waving his hand or the whole cast hamming it up in front of a fence, and then might go through another round of iterations before going to the manufacturer. We picked up slack.

  It took Mark a couple days of work to come up with an original drawing of Buck and Murphy in a two-door coupe for a coffee mug six-month tie-in advertising campaign with Exxon to launch in the first quarter of eighty-two. Francis the rabbit and Sam the snake got salt and pepper shakers out of a ceramics company, a T-shirt design needed Raquel’s whole raccoon family and a slogan (Mama needs more sleep), and Lupercal wanted plastic bath toys, packaging for bath sponges, one of each character.

  Patrick was fast with his hands and accurate, but his sketches and ideas lacked originality, so he picked up projects that were near to running late and finished them on time. Patrick never turned down work on Strays; the money Wendy paid meant he could avoid any other kind of job that might take him away from the longtable, which was where he developed his own strips to pitch to the syndicates. Could Wendy introduce Patrick to her editor? Sure, Wendy said, she could introduce them next time Gabby was in town. Patrick’s method was to draw in forty-hour binges, finish two or three weeks’ worth of strips, fourteen or seventeen gags establishing the characters and themes and sense of humour, then sleep for an entire day, then get up and repeat the process on a
whole new idea. Still, even with that, Patrick never hit the mark. The syndicates he submitted to, including Shepherd Media, rejected his strips—Feels forced—Thanks but we already distribute a comic like this—Your art lacks universal appeal and your humour is not family-oriented.

  For inspired ideas we turned to Mark, for he could sketch something brilliant and his sense of humour was similar enough to Wendy’s, but the problem was his hands shook. Too much coffee and mushrooms and the dope from Hick’s laundry hamper, too much everything, so he was no good at a finished drawing, not one of Wendy’s at least. His style needed room to express. Mark’s own drawings resembled Strays in no way whatsoever except for the use of panels. He copied the layout from the pages of superhero comics and inside the panels drew big slashing ink abstracts.

  The one true draftsman among us we all acknowledged was Twyla Noon, a natural with a brush and a nib who could draw better versions of the Strays characters than even Wendy, so she assisted on almost every project, even so far as inking the daily strip when deadlines got tight. Twyla often filled in backgrounds and inked letters. Rachael was a competent and focused illustrator who could do almost any job, but her real strengths lay in organization: she created the pipeline to track all work as it came in, developed, and moved towards deadline. This left Wendy free to do what she loved and was good at. Wendy daydreamed, she read literature, took all day to answer fan mail, doodled for hours and hours. She hunted down, stole, and modified obscure jokes. Night owl, she would stay up late and draw, pull her hair, smoke our dope, listen to old records all night, and half the day grind her teeth in her sleep.

  The lesson of Strays was hard for us to accept, that it took a ghoulish amount of daily work to put out a daily comic strip. She listened to Shepherd Media’s local radio station for cranks and reactionaries, who were good for jokes. Wired up on cups, she would set to work at the longtable scrubbing her hands together in caffeinated agitation, thinking would she rather doodle strips? Finish ongoing strips? Improve punchlines? Redraw smears? Resketch new characters? Rewrite dialogue? Read the papers for ideas? to stay current? Go out for a walk and get ideas? Look at boys? Maybe buy pens? a dress? or a pair of underwear? or toothpaste? foot lotion? Got any jokes about foot lotion?

  The one time she was interviewed for The Comics Journal was in issue eighty-nine, published in early eighty-four. Asking the questions was a freelance comics critic named Chris Quiltain who wrote her a long letter asking to know her opinion on all sorts of tough questions such as poverty issues, the influence of junk bonds on the American economy, eighties fashion, the commercialization of the comics, merchandising deals with Lupercal, and Reagan’s budget for the military-industrial complex. With all due diligence, Wendy set the typewriter out on the table and rolled a blank sheet of paper into it and we took turns typing as she dictated a reply. The greatest president since Merkin Muffley, she quipped. But only the obvious exchanges made the cut and the best thing about the interview was the full-colour repros of the Sunday strips Wendy watercoloured. A variation on: Where do you get your ideas? How would you describe your characters? Which character do you most identify with?

  Yeah, I’m thrilled to bits the strip is a commercial success, Wendy is quoted saying, but I’m equally proud that I’m still doing it all in-house. I live in my studio with my assistants, who are all artists in their own right, and the design for every toy, every image or representation you see out there in the world, every project goes through us. Nothing is farmed out. If I could make the toys here, I would. We’ve even been working for the past couple of years on a top-secret animated cartoon of Strays I hope to sell to a TV network.

  She didn’t mention the part about letting us live here rent-free.

  Q: What was it like growing up in Cleveland?

  WA: Oy, you mean the mistake on the lake? [laughs] A city of quiet, polite people and ugly streets. Boring. Cleveland might as well be in Canada, it’s so provincial. But I guess provincial is good for raising a cartoonist. My nanny was the library. I pored through leatherbound volumes of ancient Cleveland newspapers for their funny pages … The Gumps, Baron Bean, Bringing Up Father, all that goodness. Krazy Kat is still my favourite.

  Walking up Bernal Hill through the tall wheatgrass to the acacia forest surrounding the Sutrito Tower, she let her mind wander as well, studying the ground, the flowers, the sky, the city. She loved to run through the trees and hide somewhere until she got bored. She circled the entire hill, shaped like a little California, and meandered back down the south side to watch the strays. When she came back she started to draw tires, big tires with fat treads, lying on their side. She imagined a place where her animals might meet for a drink, sit down and talk for a while in the way that characters did in Doonesbury or the brick wall in Peanuts, a recurring location.

  In the early months of eighty-four, when Doonesbury was still safely on sabbatical, Wendy still had to open papers to see her Strays up against the satirical penguin Opus, whose beak seemed to grow by the month, this neurotic motherless penguin who regularly broke the so-called fourth wall and talked to the readers of Bloom County. Even Schulz was breaking the fourth wall, having Snoopy pick a fight with the cat next door, Next time try to be more quiet … Or I may just have to punch your nose! Wendy was positive Schulz must be ribbing the comic strip next door—Garfield— because of what Snoopy admitted to his friend Woodstock, seated beside him on the doghouse roof, Well, if he were awake, I suppose I’d leave out that last part. Because nobody on the planet could bop Garfield on the nose, in eighty-four nobody outside a swamp didn’t know Garfield, what a powerhouse, what a juggernaut of merchandising and popularity Garfield was, even Snoopy knew he was being outdone by the latest laziest, most cynical cat ever to live next door.

  By its third year, Strays earned respectable receipts. But compared to six-year-old Garfield in its prime, it was a shameful mess, according to Wendy, who spent the morning under a dark fuzz if a particular comic strip on the funny pages was especially strong or cleanly drawn. Garfield scared Snoopy, it scared Wendy, too. Garfield was lovably stupid, and beautiful, immaculate as a synthetic flower. The early treasuries reassured her—Garfield started sloppy, and even early Doonesbury started way more muddled than it looked today. What did it matter if every year she changed how Murphy her cat looked? There was something funny about it. She was offended by the letters and her editor’s comments that consistency was key, when her drawing skills kept outgrowing her characters.

  Apparently what kids liked about Strays, apart from the jokes, was how much easier her characters were to copy compared to Garfield’s, whose technical perfection was nearly impossible for little hands to accurately match. Buck was only a matter of a few strokes. Murphy and Francis, too. It took a team of cartoonists to create the modern Garfield. Garfield was so clearly a money machine. That was fine by Wendy. She preferred the simple strips, anyway, and like Schulz she liked to draw hers with a noticeably handmade line. As assistants on the strip, we did mostly grub work up until a certain point, and then after about eighty-four, Wendy started to lean on us, and we retained her loose style through careful tracings of her originals. But in those heady years as sales ramped up, the syndicate used to pitch Strays as a voice from the new youth movement, whatever that meant—a way to avoid the words punk or new wave and other tags the South and Midwest editors of audience-advertiser-pleasing newspapers considered synonymous with homosexual and satanic. The new youth was euphemism for all the chunky lines in Strays, the puckish sense of humour, and the admirably self-taught style. She held on to that style even after the toys and licences. That quality of handmade inconsistency that Garfield eventually gave up, Strays never did. Strays always looked handmade by one person even when seven of us worked on a single strip.

  Wendy found the comics and tossed aside the rest of the newspaper.

  She was vocal about her tastes, her likes and dislikes, as she moved from strip to strip.

  She preferred Tiger to Dennis the Menace�
�pored over Tiger and its almost Japanese woodblock style, the perfect flow of black and white in a panel. So many strips had lasted ages, the page itself looked like a message in a bottle from another era. For decades Mort Walker, Johnny Hart, and Dik Browne had had a virtual monopoly in most papers, with two strips each. How did they get it? Most new strips that lasted hobbled along earning decent money imitating another more popular strip, so Marvin imitated the look of Garfield, Captain Vincible was a sci-fi Nancy, Sam and Ellie looked a lot like Hi and Lois. Wendy ignored most of them creatively but eyed them all for technique, even the dramatic strips like Steve Canyon and Rex Morgan, M.D., they took up space, sometimes space was limited to nine scrunched-up shrunken strips.

  She considered a threat a strip that was too similar to hers, in style, content, character types, and how recently it was launched, and so on— there were only so many spots in the newspaper. If an editor had one spot come open and it was going to a cute animal comic to shore up the Peanuts fans who wanted more, then Wendy had to make sure Strays was funnier, had more interesting drawings, and captured the times better than the rest.

  Gordo posed no threat, there was no threat from Wright Angles or Ben Swift—well-drawn family strips in the mode of For Better or Worse weren’t going for all the merchandising she was. Inside Woody Allen—a strip that looked like a Johnny Hart comic but was almost entirely about sex, had limited, college-wide appeal. Eek & Meek was a funny animal-people strip about loafers that had lasted close to two decades. It was more accessible than Bloom County, less mechanical than Garfield, not as anachronistic or offensive as so many other legacy strips; it cleaved the same path as Wendy’s, acting subversive using animals, and not exactly derivative of Schulz but still well within the shadow of Peanuts. There weren’t the cute kids, but slacker hippies and beatnik mice instead. But it was unlikely that Eek & Meek would become a sensation with the kids again after fifteen years. Howie Schneider was someone to learn from. Not a threat.