CSotD: Sunday profile: Darby Conley on “Get Fuzzy”
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(This is a profile I did in 2003 of "Get Fuzzy" creator Darby Conley for the Post-Star of Glens Falls, NY)
First, The Post-Star exclusive: Darby Conley now owns a cat.
Part of the mystique of "Get Fuzzy" is how autobiographical it seems: A young guy living in Boston with a sweet, dumb dog and a diabolical cat. And yet, the story goes, the strip's creator lives in an apartment with a no-pets lease.
Well, the story just changed.
You read it here first.
"I got a cat this weekend," Conley said, in a Wednesday interview. "My girlfriend and my best friend from home took me out and we got this cute little shelter cat. She's a couple of years old, and really kind of a reclamation project. She was terrified of everything, to the point of biting and hissing and shying back in her cage, but once we got her to my parents' house,she started to lighten up. Last night, she even got up and slept on the bed with me."
The cat will live in the suburbs with Conley's parents for a few weeks, until he closes on a house. "We bought a house so we could accommodate a cat," he admits. It seems ridiculous, he concedes, but Boston simply is not a pet-friendly city.
"There's almost no green space," he says. "There's the Commons; but I've watched people who walk dogs there, and everybody looks at them like they're SUV-driving terrorist babykillers, I don't even know anyone in Boston who owns a dog."
In any case, Conley is in a position to buy a house for his new cat. "Get Fuzzy" is one of the hottest strips in the business, and he became a successful cartoonist rather suddenly, about the time he was turning 30. lt wasn't really overnight. He had tried to create strips earlier, and received his quota of rejection slips before turning to teaching elementary school and other jobs that had nothing to do with cartooning. But when "Get Fuzzy" finally happened, it was immediately picked up by enough newspapers that Conley did not have to divide his attention between a fledgling strip and a bread-and-butter job.
He recognizes how fortunate he is and is not tempted to coast on his laurels.
That's good, because the strip is demanding. Part of what makes it a hot commodity is its unusual tone and setting. "One problem with 'Get Fuzzy' is that it's locked into being almost a reality-based comic strip," he explains. "That is, the fantasy element of it is almost gone as soon as you get past the anthropomorphic part about the animals talking."
As a junior-high student, Conley was inspired by "Bloom County" and "The Far Side."
"It's very domestic in its scope," he says. "It's really a strip about three people who live together but who don't see eye-to-eye on anything. I'm more interested in what happens among those three people, two of whom happen to be animals, than in what might happen on some manufactured excursion outside the apartment."
At the same time, Conley is determined to tell jokes, a mission that sometimes prevents the type of continuity found in other "realistic" strips.
"I'm not trying to do 'For Better or For Worse,' where everything is played out in the minutest details," he says. "Some story lines can be left hanging in the interest of keeping the jokes moving. I won't just do a few more strips to tie up the loose ends if I don't have jokes to go along with them. I feel like I'm ripping people off if I don't have a joke each day."
He also doesn't intend to move the storyline forward in the sense of having the characters get older. "Yeah, we'd have storylines about hip dysplasia!" he laughs. But he also needs to avoid allowing the strip to become stale. In its three years, there has already been some change, particularly in Satch, the lovable but dim dog.
"He isn't as 'push-around-able' as he used to be," Conley says. "He's the one who has changed the most, but he's still mostly just an exaggeration of a real dog: He's totally naive but very well-meaning. But he had to change because I was getting sick and tired of pushing him around all the time."
Readers of "Get Fuzzy" can expect some expansion in the cast in the near future. Besides Bucky's arch enemy, the ferret next door, Conley is planning to add a few more characters to keep things from slipping into a formula.
In the meantime, Darby Conley will be adjusting to a new member of his own cast of characters, one with whom he is, so far, learning to see eye-to-eye.
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