CSotD: Saturday profile: Dana Summers of “Bound and Gagged”
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(This is one of a series of cartoonist profiles I did in 2003 for the Post-Star of Glens Falls NY)
When Dana Summers needs to find an idea for a "Bound & Gagged" cartoon, he knows where to look.
In the Yellow Pages.
"That shows how desperate you can get," he laughs. But silly as it sounds, he says, it's a great method: While rifling through the directory, he comes upon businesses, occupations and services he wouldn't have thought about on his own, and one of them often suggests a gag.
Ideas are where you find them, and Summers needs a steady supply. In addition to "Bound & Gagged," he does another daily strip, "The Middletons," with cartoonist Ralph Dunigan, and six editorial cartoons a week for the Orlando Sentinel, two of them local to the Florida market, the other four on national and international topics appropriate for syndication.
The editorial cartooning constitutes his day job. The two strips are done on nights and weekends, at home.
When he first started that extra work, his kids were young and were in and out of the studio while he worked, Summers says.
In the dozen years since, the load has increased, but the kids have grown and left, and his wife is reconciled to being married to a man who lives at a drawing board.
The two strips are quite different: "Bound & Gagged" is random gags, while "The Middletons" is about a family.
The random nature of "Bound & Gagged" is a mixed blessing, he confesses.
"There's an upside and a downside to having no continuing characters," Summers explains. "The upside is that you can do anything. You can do jokes about cowboys, about astronauts, about animals. But a strip with ongoing characters may have a stronger following, with people latching onto it more. And, with no characters, you have to keep coming up with stuff and it means you're really pulling ideas out of the air. With a family strip, you can start out with some kind of family topic and work on that for a couple of days."
"Bound & Gagged" has a mix of gentle humor and occasionally edgy gags. Summers says he's rarely had an idea shot down, though the syndicate did balk at a cartoon that described the Donner party as "the first meals-on-wheels." More traditional jokes about cannibals are discouraged less for squeamishness than because of evolving sensitivity over cultural stereotypes.
Beyond that, however, his own sense of humor seems to line up with public acceptance, he says.
His jokes are marginal in one important sense, though: Summers was inspired to become a cartoonist by Sergio Aragones, whose tiny, wordless gags frequently made the margins of Mad Magazine funnier than the rest of the pages.
"It wasn't so much the drawing style as the approach to humor that appealed to me," he says, though the loose-legged, crazed-faces of an Aragones character are not so far removed from the inhabitants of "Bound & Gagged."
"I thought it was just really funny, and sometimes the jokes were kind of stupid, which I've been accused of," he chuckles.
For a time, he even used Aragones' silent style, but that gave way to a less restrictive policy of keeping words to a minimum. "When I started, I never used word balloons," he says, "but after about three
years of that, I found that I was passing up gags that needed words, so I relaxed the rule a little. But I still consciously try to do no more than two gags a week with dialogue, because I want to keep that unique style. I don't want it to just turn into another strip."
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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