The Beginnings of My Cartoon Career

Was there anything I wanted to be besides a cartoonist?

No.

I studied French at university but the only thing I could think of doing with a French degree was teaching. And I didn’t want to do that. (I never finished my degree…I’m a couple of credits short. Maybe one day I’ll finish it off but it won’t be in French. My French brain cells are long gone.)

I still can’t believe I’ve spent my working life creating a comic strip for a living. There is nothing else I aspired or aspire to be. How damn lucky can a person be?

I didn’t always have the concrete idea or goal of pursuing a career as a comic strip cartoonist. Drawing comics was always just something I did. I laid on the living floor and read the newspaper comics every evening. I read comic books. (Archie, some romance ones, I didn’t especially like Richie Rich or Scrooge McDuck, but if I had access to them, I read ‘em.)

I bought the little Fawcett Crest books of Peanuts. I would cut my favourite comics out of the newspaper and glue them in books to make compilations of my own.

When I got older, I started to create comics of my friends to lampoon them in situations featuring boyfriends, or school antics or whatever was happening in our lives. This is where the nucleus of my comic strip “Between Friends” came from.

The above drawing is me and my friends at age sixteen. (The red arrow is pointing at me) I came across this drawing years ago and I know we were sixteen because I recognize the hair styles and even some of the clothes.

The idea of syndication didn’t actually occur to me on my own. A woman I was working with while designing newspaper ads for a business I worked for is the person who set the wheels in motion. She knew I liked to draw cartoons because I would draw them to use in our advertisements. She researched syndication and the syndicates and suggested we try to work on a comic strip together. She would write and I would draw. The association petered out rather quickly. I’m not criticizing her writing but it just wasn’t clicking with me. I wanted to CREATE comics. I had my own sensibilities and wanted to write AND draw my own stuff…not just illustrate someone else’s ideas.

My earliest Between Friends comics had Susan, Maeve and a woman named Laura. Laura had longish permed hair and was a smoker. Below is a rough rendering of her in a strip with Susan. (this wasn’t an attempt at finished art, it was more writing in progress)

When I was working with Jay Kennedy (King Features Syndicate’s comics editor), he wanted me to ditch the smoking aspect. (Good idea) One day, Jay asked me if I could feature Helen more often. As Helen’s character was a Black woman, he felt it would be a good idea to help make the strip more diverse. Helen was a secondary character and because she was Maeve’s assistant at work, it would have mixed up the dynamic of the three friends. I never felt I had a handle on Laura’s character so I suggested dropping her and bringing in a new character all together which was Kim. (another Black character) Jay was thrilled with the idea. Somehow I had a better feel for Kim than I did for Laura. I have no idea why. (*Note: “answering machine”…yeah, I’m that old)

Above is a sample of me trying to work out a gag with Laura and Maeve. Notice how Maeve has become much sexier than she was back then.

I included this bit of writing above because it reflects how Maeve’s character was cemented from the very beginning. Her love life has never worked.

If you squint, you might be able to read the copyright which says I created this strip in 1993. I actually was 35 at the time and this would have been a bit before I became pregnant with my first baby. At this point, I had managed to convince the St. Catharines Standard (my local paper) to print my comic from Monday to Saturday. It wouldn’t be too much later that I was contacted by Jay Kennedy who wanted to work with me to develop my comic for possible syndication. About a year or so later, my strip launched world wide with King Features…and quite soon after that, my son was born. I’m sure the impetus for this strip reflected how I was feeling at the time: waiting for syndication to happen and hoping to start my family.

I’m sixty-six now and the above strip makes me laugh. I can’t really imagine waking up one morning and never drawing another comic. My career is something I would be doing whether I was “working” or not. How damn lucky can a person be?

You can read my comic strip, “Between Friends” daily by subscribing to Comics Kingdom. https://comicskingdom.com/between-friends