The Road Narrows As You Go (19 page)

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.