Cartoonist Profiles 206
Skip to comments
With Russell Myers, Wayno, Trygve Olson, Lee Mendelson, Mark Pett, Mr. Fish and Art Spiegelman.
Russell Myers
As a boy, Russell Benton Myers was fascinated by the comic strips in the newspaper. The family subscribed to two newspapers, the Tulsa World and the Tulsa Tribune. That gave him two sets of Sunday comics sections — a full 16 pages.
He collected comic books, studied and read anything he could find about comics. He kept a little notebook he doodled in whenever he was bored in class. He was the school cartoonist for the high school year book. When he was 16, he wrote his first comic strip. He submitted it to all the newspaper syndicates of the time, and they rejected it.
His proudest achievement was a 40-page research theme required of all juniors. He wrote “So You Want to Be a Cartoonist.” He described frame sizes and explanations of the creative process with illustrations. Though he had procrastinated until the last week, his paper was given an A+.
Bill Caldwell for The Joplin Globe profiles locally born Russell Myers (or here), famed cartoonist of Broom-Hilda.
Further reading: Broom-Hilda at 50 – Aging Gracelessly
The Trouble Cartoonist Go Through For Their Art
I often search for reference images when drawing specific items or people, and this one was no exception. Here are the pictures I studied when drawing the panel:
Shown here is only half the bother Wayno went to to bring us a Bizarro panel.
Forum cartoonist Trygve Olson
FARGO — Trygve Olson drew his first cartoon for The Forum in 1984. Since then, his drawings have been a regular feature in the newspaper’s editorial sections. That’s over 5,300 images.
“What am I going to do with them? What is anyone going to do with them?” he said, sitting in his house.
In anticipation of an upcoming exhibit John Lamb of The Forum of Fargo-Morehead inteviews the newspaper’s long-time editorial cartoonist Trygve Olson (or here).
He remembers his first Forum cartoon, on April 6, 1984. It was an image of then-Minnesota Twins owner Calvin Griffith.
Shortly after that, then Editor Joe Dille suggested Olson try his hand at editorial cartoons. There was one problem with that: Olson wasn’t keeping up with the news.
“Most of the work of being a cartoonist is not drawing. That’s about 25 percent, in my experience,” he said. “The rest is knowing the news and how it affects people. How do I communicate that? The concept is more important than the drawing. You want people to see things in a different way.”
Where did the term “good grief” come from?
At Reddit “gnorrn” has an answer:
It appears to have become popular around the turn of the twentieth century as a milder version of oaths like “Good God”. In fact, we can see evidence this “mincing” as it happened:
The original 1899 version of Sam Walter Foss’s poem An Art Critic contains the exclamation “Good Lord!“. But when the verse was anthologized the very next year as part of Werner’s Readings and Recitations, vol, 24, the oath was replaced with “Good grief!“.
Burlingame has a Snoopy connection
Lee Mendelson Film Production company
[Lee] Mendelson was raised in San Mateo — a proud San Mateo High School Bearcat and 1954 graduate of Stanford University. In the early 1960s, Lee’s career involved making film documentaries for KPIX, winning a Peabody Award for his film “The Innocent Fair” about San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition. In 1963, he formed his own company and set up shop in Burlingame.
Mendelson loved baseball and his first documentary was about San Francisco Giant Willie Mays. After its success, Mendelson thought, “I’ve made a film about the best ball player; why not make a film about the worst?” He headed off to Sebastopol to make his pitch to Charles Schulz to do a documentary about Schulz and Charlie Brown. His pitch to Schulz was successful, but the documentary was not. The television networks never picked up Mendelson and Schulz’s 1964 collaboration “A Boy Named Charlie Brown.” Yet, the documentary did accomplish a few things: it formed a trusting relationship between Schulz and Mendelson that would endure for nearly 35 years; it put the idea of a Charlie Brown TV special back into the heads of the network executives; and it gave Mendelson the idea of using jazz musician Vince Guaraldi in the soundtracks of his films.
Joanne Garrison for The Daily Journal details the beginning of the Charles Schulz-Lee Mendelson partnership.
Sparky died Feb. 12, 2000, the night before his farewell Peanuts comic strip was published. Bill Melendez died Sept. 2, 2008. Lee Mendelson, the man who wrote “Christmas Time is Here,” passed away on Christmas Day, 2019. Charlie Brown and Snoopy and their friends live on.
Upcoming Animation
Paramount Animation is developing I Eat Poop: A Dung Beetle Story based on the popular children’s book by Mark Pett [emphasis added], with Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort producing under their first-look deal with the Melrose Ave. lot.
Josh Cooley, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Toy Story 4, is adapting and in talks to direct.
Also producing are EGOT-winning songmakers Benj Pasek & Justin Paul via their production company Ampersand.
Anthony D’Alessandro at Deadline has the details.
[Mark] Pett is also the award-winning author and illustrator of I’m Not Millie!, This Is My Book, Lizard From the Park, The Boy and the Airplane, The Girl and the Bicycle, and The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes. His books have sold over a half a million copies and have been translated into ten languages. Before books, he was a political cartoonist in Prague, created the syndicated comic strips Mr. Lowe and Lucky Cow [emphasis added]. He holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest comic strip. A former sixth grade teacher and current professional poker player, he lives with his family in the Mountain West.
Mr Fish Chats with Art Spiegelman
Let’s start broadly—what do you think your mission is as an artist?
It’s really to have a good reason to get up in the morning, [it’s] as existentially basic as that. It’s really to give structure to my own thoughts and feelings that, without [art], would be all over the place. I had an art history professor at college before I got kicked out who said that the definition of art was “anything you can get away with,” which is a pretty good definition, too.
At The Independent Ink Mr. Fish has A Conversation with Art Spiegelman.
As fascism proliferates and the agonizing screams for mercy from genocide fill the air and the world prepares for a war to end all life on the planet, who better to talk to but the genius behind Maus?
Comments 1
Comments are closed.