stonesoup

The World of Cartooning

Just a quick note on some very exciting upcoming events, outside the United States, that I've been invited to participate in.

In Mid-October I will be traveling to Algiers for the 2009 Festival International de la Bande Dessinee d’Alger, an international cartoon festival in its 2nd year. I'll be participating on a panel of women cartoonists from Africa and the Middle East. Can you imagine my thrill at getting to meet and speak with a woman cartoonist from the Congo? Or South Africa? 

I will be one of only two US representatives (editorial cartoonist Daryl Cagle will be the other). I will also be doing a forum on competing in a "man's world", which I'm guessing is very different for these women than for me, at this point in time.  My sense is that they are just beginning their fight to be taken seriously. Or have their chosen topics taken seriously.

I struggled in the early days of my career against an attitude of "we already have a woman cartoonist, why do we need another?"  Thankfully, we have grown beyond this idea of quota here in the US, recognizing that women all have different perspectives and appeal to a universal audience. But I think this struggle is still present elsewhere.

(And my sense is, for African American cartoonists, it's still happening here. We have one in our paper... why do we need another? If you don't know Candorville, Darrin Bell addressed this issue not too long ago, staging an "everyone do the same joke" event to make the point that race does not define the cartoonist.)

From Algiers I will travel to Morocco, where I will speak with women artists and cartoonists, and appear in schools in Casablanca, Rabat and Tangiers.

IF THAT WEREN'T ENOUGH... in November I'll be traveling with Habitat for Humanity International to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to participate in a Women Build project there. As readers may know, Val and Joan are licensed by Habitat to promote the Women Build program. We are all extremely honored to be part of Habitat's very excellent mission. And with some luck, we may get to meet Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter in Chiang Mai. Val really wants and autograph!

Beginnings

A kind reader requested a sampling of my early work, pre-Stone Soup. Digging around, I found a few photocopies to scan, so I apologize if the quality is a bit sub-par. But we are talking ancient history here.

If you don't know my origin story, I began cartooning as creative therapy shortly after a divorce, when I was a working mom of two young girls. The stress of making ends meet, managing my dear daughters and their school, daycare and my own work schedule, left me a bit drained and overwhelmed. And of course feeling guilty about all I couldn't do. Cartooning was a perfect outlet, one I could afford, among other things.

My first comic strip was called "Patience and Sarah", and it appeared in one alternative weekly, The Willamette Valley Observer. Eventually it spread to a few other small papers, not making me much money but giving me hope for a career doing something I loved. Cartooning was the only thing I'd ever done where time vanished... I'd work late into the night with no sense of time spent, totally losing myself.

Here are four of the earliest samples. Clearly, I had a lot to learn about cartooning... but the ideas were solid.

You can see the origins of Joan and Holly here. This strip featured a mom named Patience with her one daughter, Sarah. I began it in 1980.

Hooked on cartooning, I did whatever I could to get paid for more. I illustrated computer manuals in 1982-84, the very early days of personal computing. I did greeting cards, I illustrated employee training manuals, sold cartoons to parenting magazines and publishers of parenting books. Here are a couple samples:

If you have no idea what this is about... well, you see, you used to take a regular corded phone and place it in a modem that had a cradle for the phone to actually sit in, and transmit and receive the signal. Really. I'm not kidding.

And then, of course, there is a classic "second wave of feminism" cartoon, published originally as a cartoon in a magazine, later as a greeting card:

This one is from 1989. I think in many places in the world it would still be considered very very contemporary. Such is the status of women worldwide. Here, however, we've all made great leaps forward, right?

There you have it, the tender early days.