The possibly imminent meltdown of altweekly cartooning has had me thinking lately, about this disrespected sub-genre of a disrespected art form to which I have devoted a good percentage of my life. Am I being overly dramatic, in my use of the word “meltdown”? Hard to say. Maybe the VVM suspension is exactly that, a temporary suspension, and in three months we’re all back in the papers where we belong and everyone lives happily ever after. But it doesn’t tend to work that way. You fight tooth and claw to get newspaper space, and to hang on to it, and once you lose it — most of the time, that’s pretty much it, it’s gone.
And as for “disrespected”, here’s a small but illustrative tale: A few years ago, the LA Times ran a Yale yearbook photo that one of their reporters had dug up, of George Bush playing soccer aggressively, which Bob Harris subsequently noticed and posted online — on this site, actually. No disrespect intended to our friend Bob, but all he did was see something in a newspaper and post it on the internet. But an NPR program which focuses on the media industry found the story of Bob Harris reading something in the newspaper and posting it on the internet so fascinating, they spent an entire segment interviewing him about it. By contrast, I hear through the grapevine that this same media program does not consider the unprecedented VVM chainwide supension of all their altweekly cartoons — a potentially crippling blow to the genre — worthy of mention.
Sigh.
But setting those questions aside — as I say, I’ve been thinking about this endangered field and the successive generations of artists who have toiled in it. There have been some amazing people who tried to make a go of this untenable thing over the years. Some stuck with it, some gave it up and moved on. But it has been a genre all its own, quite distinct from daily newspaper cartoons or comic books — if cartooning is the ugly stepchild of American arts, then altweekly cartooning is the ugly stepchild’s ugly stepchild.
Before you had anybody, you had Jules Feiffer, the granddaddy of us all, in the Voice, in the very early days, and everybody who’s come since owes him an unimaginable debt of gratitude for walking into that paper’s offices one day and offering them a strip they could run for free, if they let him draw anything he wanted. Later, in the late seventies, early eighties, when I was living in New York City, surviving on Ramen noodles and picking up the Voice when I could afford it (before they adopted the free weekly model), there was Mark Alan Stamaty’s intricate, crazed MacDoodle Street (later Washingtoon), and Stan Mack’s voyueristic Real Life Funnies, each of which took up, christ, it must have been half a page of newsprint. (Those were the glory days of altweekly cartooning, children, back before space became tight and cartoons were shrunk down so small you needed a magnifying glass to read them.) And then came the generation after that, the shining moment for the baby boomers in our little field, when the altweeklies really took off and made stars of Matt Groening and Lynda Barry. According to the New York Times, at the height of her success, Lynda ran in 75 papers, which is astonishing to me — I’ll probably hit 75 papers soon, but it will be on the way down, as this crappy economy devastates my client list. But Lynda at her high point, in 75 papers, was a rock star — she was a regular guest on Letterman, everyone knew who she was. And Matt — well, every human being on the planet has heard of Bart Simpson, though for me, Matt will always first and foremost be the genius behind Life in Hell, one of a handful of cartoons that inspired me to do what I would do with my life.
In 1983, for a little while, I was living in a Chicago suburb, commuting into the city to a tedious temp job in the offices of a large advertising agency, and one of the things I looked forward to each week was the new issue of the incredibly comics-friendly Chicago Reader (which never did end up runnng my own work, much to my later disappointment). Matt and Lynda, and Charles Burns’ Dog Boy, and I believe Gary Panter, and probably The Angriest Dog in The World — a strip by the film director David Lynch, which literally consisted of the same three panels every week, with only a word balloon altered (foreshadowing David Rees’ work, though the comparison is unfair to Rees, whose recently-retired Get Your War On had infinitely more substance and wit). And a half dozen others I don’t even remember — they were just loaded with comics. The LA Weekly ran a similarly wide range of stuff back then as well — for the longest time, I had a strip clipped out from that paper taped to my wall, about the existential dilemma of a wooden puppy’s inability to chase a ball. No idea who drew it, but it was brilliant.
And I can’t leave out Norman Dog, whose sublimely strange cartoon, Bad Habits, ran — and I believe still runs — in the East Bay Express, and who would later become a friend and studio mate for many years, after I moved west. (And damn, there were a lot of us in the Bay Area then. I didn’t even really think about it that much, when a once-a-month cartoonists’ drinking bash would fill a bar with fifty, a hundred cartoonists. It just seemed like the norm. Who wouldn’t want to be a cartoonist?)
I loved it. I loved it all. And it was what I wanted to do. And I mean specifically cartoons for altweeklies: outside of the rigidly formatted daily newspaper comics page, but also outside of the comic shop ghetto, these papers gave you the chance of reaching an entirely different audience. And I was lucky enough — incredibly lucky enough — to make that happen, to carve out a space for myself. At the time, it felt like there was no more room for any new cartoons, that it was all over already. In retrospect it was actually the perfect moment, but you really never understand, when it’s happening, how lucky you are to be at just the right age at just the right time. Sure, the cartoonists of “my” wave were never going to be Jules Feiffer, would never have that dominance or ubiquity, that moment was gone. Nor were we even going to be Matt-and-Lynda, the aforementioned dynamic duo who owned the weeklies throughout the eighties. But we did okay for ourselves: Derf, and Max Cannon, and myself, and Lloyd Dangle, and Ruben Bolling, and Ted Rall (though Ted was always something of a hybrid, running in as many dailies as he did weeklies). Keith Knight and Carol Lay. Tony Millionaire. Dave Eggers — before he became “Dave Eggers,” he had a strip called Smarter Feller in the SF Weekly, which featured a talking handbag, among other things. Nina Paley, one of the most accomplished cartoonists I have ever known, whose weekly strip never quite took off in the way it deserved to. But this genre is full of stories like that. You fall in love with the form, what others have done before you, and you get sucked in — knowing full well that it’s going to break your heart. Just a question of when.
But the ones who came after us — if we’re the buggy whip makers, they’re the buggy whip interns, the ones who never really got their fair shot before history fucked us all. Jen Sorensen, Matt Bors, Brian McFadden, Mikhaela Reid — these would have been the next generation of altweekly stars, if the internet had not come along to destroy every economic model known to mankind, and more specifically, if craigslist hadn’t devastated the altweekly classifieds market by providing the same service online for free. (All of the crazed ubercapitalists running around during the days of Web 1.0, and my industry gets shivved by the lone idealist.) And if — probably the main point here — the importance of cartoons to the altweekly press had not been increasingly ignored and forgotten and brushed aside as the years went on. Which is not to say these artists haven’t had their own impact, or won’t — just that it won’t be in the altweeklies alone. Those days are probably over.
(Profuse apologies to every fantastic altweekly cartoonist I’ve neglected to mention above; this wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive overview. Though somebody really should write one of those big all-inclusive definitive histories of this overlooked art form before it’s forgotten entirely. The Excessively Verbose Alternative Weekly Cartoon in America, from Jules Feiffer to David Rees. Hell, maybe I’ll do it.)