So for the time being, she had no major threats beyond Bloom County, which received critical acclaim and sold millions of treasuries however few actual newspapers subscribed to it. Strays was in hundreds more papers, but Opus the penguin plush stuffed toys sold in comparable numbers to her dog Buck or rabbit Francis toys (Murphy the cat toys were her third best selling). Snoopy and Garfield outsold them all.
Garfield was constantly on her mind. The omnipotent cat. She read it second after Peanuts. The antithesis of Peanuts in spirit. The two strips couldn’t be more different in their sense of humour or appear together in more papers. Garfield was in some ways the vain mirror of Peanuts, an image of Peanuts stripped of its pretense. Garfield was greedy. Peanuts seemed to accept collaborations with business, whereas Garfield clearly was a business. The cat was a machine, a die-cut machine of its own likeness, stamped out every day, repeated endlessly, producing timeless, cynical jokes about the ego. A tribute to laziness of the Roman variety, with slaves. Laziness was an ironic theme for a strip that was maniacally perfect in every detail, that required so much work to make right. And in light of the mass-production of Garfield merchandise, there was no lack of industry behind the scenes. The cat was self-centred and lazy, and Garfield the strip was self-centred and tireless. Garfield hated everything Snoopy stood for. Snoopy was outgoing and a charmer, a lover, a hero, a dancer, a poet, friend to small things, considerate of his family, respectful of Charlie Brown. Garfield had none of that. Side to side with Peanuts, Garfield was its inferior. The drawings were better in Peanuts, but drawings aside, Peanuts was the unrivalled behemoth in commercial ubiquity. Not only was Peanuts in the most papers of any strip, but the little folks were everywhere on everything. Snoopy was up there next to Mickey, Bugs, and Popeye in the upper pantheon of product placement. And in less than a decade, so was Garfield. That’s what fascinated her—how quickly Garfield found his place as a legacy strip. She hoped Buck and/or Murphy might one day be added to that list of legacy strips clogging newspapers and thrift stores far and wide. Not art, product—Garfield was the anthropomorphized fatcat company president or CEO with a self-entitled air of indifference to those he subjugates. Garfield was a metaphor, the strip was America.
Wendy sometimes felt that Garfield exposed all cartoonists as frauds after a fast buck and nothing else. Even the absurd world of Garfield was more patently mechanical, a wind-up toy world like a cuckoo clock. The drawings were rigorously consistent, panel to panel, strip after strip, the lines were flawless. The stoned eggs of Garfield’s eyes with the lids mostly shut, his face-to-body proportions, the cat was drawn with the architectural accuracy of a cathedral, with every sign of human touch polished out. The dishes of Garfield’s forward-tilted ears were shaded with the same number of black forks every time, three. The shoulders and back arches followed the draftsman’s golden mean. The three stripes on the tip of the tail echoed the ears.
I’m not good enough, I’m in fact quite awful, the opposite of Garfield. Garfield scares Snoopy. The anti-Snoopy. There is a beautifulness to Garfield’s plastic, immaculate, and synthetic permanence. The fakeness of the whole project of Garfield. I kind of love it.
Garfield appeared in well over a thousand papers worldwide, and the anthologies were monster bestsellers in the millions. In the winter of eighty-two, Wendy’s comic strip had three hundred and seventy-eight North American papers and counting. By the same time in eighty-four, she was in almost a thousand. The kids got keen on her strip, teens thought it was subversive, college kids collected her treasuries, and parents enjoyed the pangs of guilt Wendy’s lost pets struck in their hearts. Buck reminded the elderly readers of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp and Murphy of Buster Keaton’s stoneface. The rabbit reminded them of W.C. Fields.
When I die I hope this doesn’t flash before my eyes, says Buck the dog as he bites dirt after drinking too much tonic at the flat tire.
Francis the rabbit comes hopping up to Sam the snake in one strip and says, Lend me ten bucks, willya, it’s Father’s Day tomorrow.
I only have seven, hisses Sam.
No problem! You can owe me two bucks.
Home is the smell I inhale for, says Buck in another strip. If I can just smell home one more time …
We remember the day Gabby woke her up early one morning from a deep, grinding sleep to scold her over the phone for the punchline Up your nose. Need she remind Wendy she was already behind schedule and now this? It’s a simple two-panel daily, and in the first panel Buck and Murphy are on a fence and Buck asks Murphy, Where would you go in a time machine? And Murphy answers, Up your nose. Explain how that makes any sense?
Wendy even laughed again to hear her own joke.
Editors won’t accept Up your nose, Wendy. Readers in the Bible belt will complain it’s too euphemistic for the funny pages.
Is that a word?
So she rewrote the joke to read, I’d go back in time to before you asked that question and kick you off the fence.
Don’t worry, I love your style, but you give printers a headache. Remember, this has to be shrunk down to the size of a bookspine. Just so I can defend it to the guys upstairs, what’s funny about today’s strip? How many trips to the hamper did you make before you drew this one?
Francis says, I’m a bunny from the land of bilk and money?
Yeah, what’s funny about that? Listen, Wendy, editors are looking for new strips to tide them over while Doonesbury’s on repeats. Come out with some sensational stuff this year and you’ll be set for life. Just think about it.
She would rip open fan mail forwarded to her from her syndicate.
Another smalltown American child’s favourite strip was Strays, there was no bigger fan in the universe, and willing to adopt Buck into a good home. She flung the letter in our direction and asked one of us to write the kid back a doodle-filled letter for her to autograph. Aren’t there any letters from a Dr. Pazder today? she would ask.
On bad days, if Wendy was tapped for Strays jokes, she drew what came naturally to her outside comics: watercolours and gouaches of backdrops for Oklahoma!, Miss Liberty, Dracula, White Christmas, and other plays. Growing up she had watched her mother work as a stage manager for dozens of productions. Wendy could sketch these set designs from muscle memory. After losing a day of work distracted by painting, she occasionally fooled herself into thinking she was on to something and considered showing them to Justine Witlaw as a body of work, see what she had to say. But she never got up the nerve.
Oh, I get art all right, says Murphy in one strip. But I don’t think art gets me.
Looking out upon the corrugated city with all the homes laid out like pastry cakes in a dessert tray up and down the hills and valleys of our great peninsula. Lit by store signs and neon advertisements and billboard commercials, skies flush with plastic lemon, lime, orange, watermelon regularly washed in the thick suds of a Pacific fog.
STRAYS
15
You found Justine Witlaw’s art gallery off Pine Street west of Chinatown, up a flight of stairs over a tailor’s shop open seven days a week that did full suits and gowns and alterations within the hour. Justine’s welllighted white plaster cube was open to the public Thursdays to Sundays, noon until four and otherwise for appointments. She represented eleven artists, including Jonjay. The focus was the Bay Area’s contribution to the avant-garde, which Justine Witlaw sold to major American institutions. Twenty-seven-year-old Ferzetti’s anti-objects were meant to attract the interests of the Guggenheim and MoMA. Nobody in San Francisco would buy O’Connell’s blue squares until they heard Witlaw had sold ten to hang in the lobby of Bank of America’s head office. The National Portrait Gallery in D.C. borrowed one of Klein-Regge’s feminist videos for an exhibition with catalogue. Justine lent two Monelles to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a commission from the Seattle Art Gallery for a permanent installation in the mezzanine. Jonjay’s work was in the collection of the Austin University Library and the investment bank Hexen Diamond M
istral.
It was a Friday afternoon and the space was empty except for us and the art. This May Be My Last Path—the title of the current show was labelled in black vinyl letters on a pimply white wall above the name in bigger letters: David Lelio Ferzetti.
Ferzetti made plinths. A dozen of his most recent four- and five-foot rectangular white plinths carved in ivory took up the gallery floor. The surface of each plinth was a cavity filled in with silver and gold, to the effect of making tall teeth of his plinths. The fillings were the sculptures. The walls were empty. There wasn’t much else to see except a price book with numbers in the low four figures, red dots stuck to half the titles.
It was Wendy who had the idea to bring Mark Bread and his portfolio along with them when they went to pick up what Jonjay was owed. Jonjay went behind the counter to fetch Justine. Moments later she came out into the gallery as if it were a ballroom. Arms spread wide, she flung herself across the hardwood to embrace Wendy in a cold, indifferent hug, and how wonderful it was to see her. The two hardly knew each other. Met once or twice. She was hamming for Jonjay. Justine never smiled. More to the point, nothing was funny. Her tastes ran to the Mandarin. She was taller than Wendy and possessed of a natural and enviable atrabilious elegance, weighed not more than a hundred pounds all dressed, even if she kept on the costume jewellery, the charm bracelets, the scarab bead Egyptian goddess bib necklace spread across the bare ribs of her décolletage, and the chunky gold-plated interlocking C’s of her Chanel beltbuckle displayed in the bowl of her pelvis. The sharp blades of her hips jut out at her sides but there seemed to be no legs inside the flowing pleated pants of her peacock one-piece Kaisik Wong jumper. Justine Witlaw, wispy as she was, could fill a room.
She was most pleased to meet Mark Bread, another artist. She muted a yawn. And do you draw cutie animals, too? Justine laughed mirthlessly and took Wendy by the arm and told them all to follow her into the back room, sit, have an aperitif and catch up. A bottle of champagne popped open on her by accident moments ago and we might as well share it with her. Did someone bring pot by any chance? You’re your hair, Wendy. Where had Jonjay been all this time? Had to cancel your solo show last year, you flake. When should they reschedule? Soon, Justine hoped. He’d need to make new work since she sold the four pieces from the flat files in the back room. No matter, last year was great for Republicans but terrible for the art market.
Mark had two joints. He lit the first and handed it to Justine. She smoked and flipped through the pages of sfumato in the portfolio Mark had laid on the glass coffee table in front of her.
Take this before it murders me, thank you, she said and waved the joint at Jonjay. Coughing brought out the hircine qualities in her. Justine quenched her throat with a fluteful of bubbly, and, blinking through bloodshots, remarked with her usual contempt that it was wonderful to see Mark hadn’t been sucked into the vortex of cliché lowbrow cartoony oompa loompa; that lack of maturity might impress Haight-Ashbury, but it doesn’t play in her gallery. My god is it this pot that reeks of superstrong B.O.?
That’s Hick Elmdales’s. Give her a pen, said Jonjay. Watch what she can do.
Wendy slipped the Rapidograph from her bra and gave it to Justine. She started to draw, her hand moved with dynamism beyond her ken, haunted, the hand moved of its own free will. The result—Bugs Bunny paddling a canoe through a marsh.
Zoink, said Mark.
I drew that? she said and took a deep breath.
Wendy leaned sideways in her Mies van der Rohe leather clam chair and watched Jonjay tour the room, pulling artworks off the shelves lining the walls, silently appraising his peers. If you showed comics, you’d probably sell a lot. There’s so many fans in town.
My field is contemporary art, Justine sniffed. Autonomous radical ideas pushing the envelope, etcetera. The artists I represent make demands. Conceptual. Found objects. Minimal. Postmodern. Don’t you, Jonjay?
Watch me run backwards at top speed through the shopping mall, was his answer.
I love how much you hate comics, Justine, said Wendy and poured herself another glass of champagne and opened a coffee-table book about soft sculpture from the seventies. I know exactly what you mean. Mostly comics are such dumb shit. But what about Doonesbury?
I don’t hate comics, but I don’t see what they have to do with my gallery. Mark lit the second joint. No, oh god no—, Justine waved him away, —I can’t have more. I’m high as American Airlines already. Why do I smoke the stuff? I get so freaked out I think the world is caving in on itself and my next step is through an invisible curtain into a new reality.
Fear is the price of an active imagination, Wendy said. That’s what my mom used to tell her actors.
Justine finished the last of the first joint in a single haul, gave the roach to Mark to keep.
Take a good look at Mark’s drawings, he’s a natural—and you can’t say they’re commercialistic or cartoonism. He’s his own movement’s ism.
Justine squinted down at the paper. These are quite provocative. Okay, one more toke. She took the second joint. Your mark-making is rigorous, agile, and uncompromising. Tell me, besides this crazy weed giving me vertigo, what is your creative process?
Mark gripped his champagne glass like a microphone at a spelling bee and said: I made these while reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Julian Jaynes. Interesting. That book has been on my reading list forever. Groundbreaking study, I read the reviews. Justine passed the joint eventually. Oh fuck now I’m really high. Nothing in her posture or voice gave away she was.
My other inspiration is glass, Mark said. It was on Wendy’s advice that he had practised some lines in advance. If he spoke from his heart it would invariably come out as Saturday morning Scooby-Doo blabber.
Glass is very in, reminds people of Duchamp, said Justine. Dan Graham is working in glass. I’m impressed. I make a point not to represent lovely pictures or pretty things. I represent ideas. Your pictures are lovely ideas, she said. However I prefer not to represent two artists working in the same medium, and Jonjay already subverts traditional drawings on paper, so. But perhaps there’s a space. I would like to think of you for my winter group show. I’ll nick some strong pieces from your portfolio if you don’t mind so I can treat a few blue chippers to a sneak peek in the meantime.
Shazam, said Mark and drank deeply from his glass flute.
What do you call this series?
Wiggles, said Mark through pursed lips.
Hmm, we might want to think of another title. Or not. What are some of your other influences, in visual art?
Kirby krackles, Kirby squiggles. Biz Aziz.
Hmm. Justine nodded as though she understood when it was plain to all of us she didn’t. Where are you from, here in the Bay?
Ba-deep-ba-deep, said Mark. Sweesh! Shimmysham! Slamjam! Boobie doobie blammo!
Wendy flagged the gallerist’s attention. Please, won’t you pass that joint, please. Jonjay, hey, Jonjay, Wendy snapped her fingers, … didn’t you have something you wanted to ask Justine?
I did? Oh yeah of course, duh. Hey, Justine, that reminds me, I heard through the ole gravepine you sold some of my drawings.
Yes, oh god, she slapped her palm to her forehead. I forgot to tell you, that’s right, yes, to the collection of Hexen Diamond Mistral, a Wall Street banking institution that’s been operating for over a hundred years. Good news.
Listen, if it’s cool I could use my cut, said Jonjay. I’m kinda strapped.
Of course now that you’re home we can settle up. Justine said her accountant was in next Friday and she would have him write a cheque for the full amount. Like all the galleries with any reputation, Justine Witlaw split sales with her artists fifty-fifty. Four large-scale drawings meant she owed Jonjay to the tune of sixteen hundred dollars.
I could use it in my pocket right now, he said and lifted a silkscreened blue square out of a flat file.
Careful with that. She
jumped for her starry gold-lamé purse—it looked like a motorcycle helmet. What can I give you? Here’s fifty. I’ll peel it off what I owe. In fact, just take it.
Jonjay pocketed the fifty. You’re a peach with no pit, Justine.
When I was out for dinner with Frank from that bank Hexen, said Wendy as she pushed a flute of champagne to her nose, he told me he was at that show with the blue squares.
O’Connell, said Justine. You know Frank Fleecen?
Yes sort of … Just signed a contract with him for my strip. What do you think of him anyway, is Frank on the level?
Justine said she wouldn’t know. He bought Jonjay’s pieces over the phone. She never spoke more than a few words to him in the times he followed his wife to the gallery for openings and then Justine was always too busy with regular clients to single him out. She presumed his wife was in charge of the art collection.
The wife. Wendy slid down a bit in her chair and lowered the lids of her eyes as she fixed her stare on Justine. What’s the wife like?
An intellectual, I guess. Of the two, she seemed to make the decisions in the gallery. One afternoon she came here on her own after O’Connell’s opening and I gave her the tour. Struck me as smart and down-to-earth, dressed in a sandy-blue pantsuit or something I took to mean she was ready to do business. Told me she wrote and had published a short story. Wives are often the ones who study art and decide the direction of the husband’s collection, for these overworked, overpaid, guilt-ridden millionaires who want to appreciate culture but don’t have the time to do the legwork. So the wife appreciates for them both. She was polite and curious the whole of my tour and I thought I had made a sale and then she said, Why does art make me feel so stupid? I offered to take her to the back room, and she looked through the files. All she was interested in seeing when we got here was Jonjay’s pictures.
The Road Narrows As You Go Page 15