CSotD: Sunday profile: Bill Hinds on “Cleats”
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This is a profile I did of "Cleats" creator Bill Hinds that ran January 20, 2003, in the Post-Star, Glens Falls, NY
Bill Hinds was a hit with your kids before he even began writing and drawing "Cleats."
Surprised?
Though known among grown-ups as the artist half of the "Tank McNamara" sports-oriented comic strip, Hinds is also the creator of the comic strip "Buzz Beamer," a very popular feature in Sports Illustrated's spin-off magazine, "Sports Illustrated for Kids."
Now he's flying beneath the grown-up radar again, with a strip that champions soccer,of all sports. Hinds was surprised to hear The Post-Star was running "Cleats" in the sports section, until the local nature of the paper's sports coverage was explained.
"It still scares me a little bit," he said. "Down here in Houston, we've got 24-hour sports-talk radio, and those people hate soccer! I don't mean the callers, I mean the people who have the shows. Most sportswriters have invested their careers in baseball, basketball and football, and they don't even like having to cover tennis. They'll sometimes put up with golf."
Hinds, 52, learned about soccer the way most parents in his generation did: His kids played on rec league teams, where experienced, knowledgeable coacheswere hard to come by.Inexperienced, unknowledgeable coaches were common, and that seat-of-the-pants atmosphere makes up much of the humor in "Cleats."
Though the first wave of tiny American soccer players are now parents themselves, things haven't changed much.
"The guy in the strip who is the most vocal complainer about soccer is a grandfather, and I even draw him as kind of old for a grandfather," Hinds said.
But he also did a Sunday strip that consisted of two long panels. One was the sidelines of a kids' soccer game, with mothers chatting to each other and tending younger siblings. The other panel showed the sidelines at a youth baseball game, and consisted of fathers screaming advice.
"That contrast is where a lot of the humor comes from," he said.
Another contrast is between the two soccer teams in the strip. The boys' team is considerably less skilled than the girls' team, and Hinds has fine-tuned that difference in the first two years of the strip.
At the outset, the girls' team, captained by confident, blonde forward Abby Harper, was to be in a more competitive "select" league, while the boys' team, lead by Abby's next-door neighbor, Jack Dooley, would be strictly rec league.
"I thought the main dynamic would come between Abby and Jack, that she would be a really good player on a good team and he would be a pretty good player on a bad team," he explained,"but when it came to the details of her being on a select team, it got into things like having tryouts every year and it became too complicated."
In addition, there was strong positive reaction to Edith, a bookish little girl who was originally only supposed to appear once.
"In order to bring her back, I made her the coach's daughter, because how else could she be on such a good team?" he said. "But still, if it was a select team, the problem was that she clearly didn't have the field skills."
The obvious place for an eccentric on any soccer team is in goal, and so Hinds resolved the problem with a storyline in which both Abby and the girls' team's original 'keeper, Kat, were recruited by a competitive league. Kat moved up, Abby decided to stay,and Edith set up shop in the nets.
Keeping Abby in rec league soccer also avoided another problem, he said. "I didn't want her to be Superwoman, or else I'd have to start inventing kryptonite."
The need for vulnerable characters had already come up in a proposal to make "Buzz Beamer" into a cartoon show for television, Hinds said. He flew out to Hollywood and met with an Emmy-winning director of animated shows, who had only bothered to look at the strip the night before.
"He said, 'I don't get it. He always loses. How's that funny?'" Hinds recalled. "How's that funny? How's Buster Keaton funny? There's a lot of humor in losing!"
The Hollywood experience cemented his determination to keep Abby skilled, confident and low-key, and to keep Jack and the other boys desperate to win, while their coaches blunder through the familiar, well-intentioned traps of rec league coaching.
"Maybe I just feel this way because I'm a loser," Hinds said with a rueful chuckle, "but I think there's a lot more humor in losing than in winning."
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