CSotD: My favorite cartoonist
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I have to say that. As you read this, he's sitting next to me.
Christopher Baldwin and I are tabling at the Battle of Plattsburgh weekend in Plattsburgh, in support of two local history books, "Freehand," which is set in the War of 1812 of which the battle was a decisive moment, and "Hooch," which is set in Plattsburgh and the environs during Prohibition, an era when border communities had a lot more traffic than usual.
But we'll get back to that.
For the benefit of anyone who wants to find an artist to help you with a project, let me explain how Christopher and I started a partnership that has lasted for 10 years and produced seven stories that have been published in some of the largest newspapers in the country and some of the smallest as well. And now two books.
A decade ago, I was doing educational programs at the Post-Star in Glens Falls — which, coincidentally, is now Christopher's new home, a small city just north of Albany on the fringe of the Adirondack Mountains of New York — and I needed an artist. I was writing a serialized version of the legend of Perseus that would run in the paper, with teachers getting a guide that would provide teaching materials and backgrounders.
I approached Christopher for a very simple reason: He did his job, not just well but consistently.
Bruno, also called "Bruno Baldwin" to distinguish it from another popular web comic of the era, "Bruno the Bandit," was the ongoing story of a peripatetic young woman who went through life questioning her values and those of the world around her.
I liked the strip, because it was thoughtful, but, as a potential partner, I liked the incredible detail that Christopher insisted upon. As the marginal note says, in the panel above, Bruno is walking through the International Rose Test Garden in Portland, Oregon, and, whenever she traveled, you could figure on backgrounds that were absolutely faithful to reality.
And, if Bruno was introspective to a point that was sometimes entertainingly ludicrous, she was there every morning.
Every. Morning. From January, 1996 to February, 2007.
I don't know that he never missed a day, but, if he did, I didn't see it.
And I wasn't looking for a song and dance about flu or competing demands or lack of inspiration or lack of pens. I was looking for quality work delivered on time.
Oh, and I offered him money. I'm pretty sure the word "exposure" never came up. I didn't offer him much money, but I offered him something up front and then a share of the gross. It's been a good deal for him over the years.
For Perseus, Christopher spent some time contemplating Grecian pottery and decided on a strong, clean line. This was the illustration for the first chapter, in which wicked King Acrisius locks his daughter Danae underground in an attempt to avoid the prophecy of her bearing the child who would kill him — futilely, of course.
I loved not just that great, authentic line, and not just the shadow of the keys on the wall and the way the flame of the lamp reacts to the door being thrown open, but the fact that Danae is decidedly Greek and not some Disneyesque generic princess.
We quickly established a lively working relationship, going back and forth on email. This illustration, in which Perseus visits the silly, airheaded Hesperides, prompted an extensive discussion of how a flying man being suspended by the magical sandals of Hermes would hold his legs while descending.
In future projects, it became a running joke, because Christopher was nearly always right and, by "nearly," I mean that my ego would take a blow if we actually kept score.
In our next project, his eye for detail become even more critical: "Woman of the World: The Story of Nellie Bly," based on "Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist" by Brooke Kroeger, was a true non-fiction biography for young readers, with Brooke not only allowing me to crib from her definitive work but watching over our shoulders and vetting the chapters.
Christopher did extensive reference work to find the locations, from Nellie's childhood home to the way the mouth of the Suez Canal looked when she was there. In this illustration, Nellie has stopped on her famous trip around the world to visit Jules Verne, whose best-seller had inspired it, and Christopher commemorates the moment when Verne showed her the map upon which he had marked Phileas Fogg's journey, and added her route by pencil.
The map is not generic — it is a copy of Verne's actual map.
The challenge for our next project was quite the opposite. I was editing an adaptation of Frank Bird Linderman's "Old Man Stories," which he had collected from a community of Cree, Chippewa and Blackfeet. The Cree and Chippewa had fled across the border in the wake of the Reil Rebellion in Canada, and were living on the Blackfeet reserve, which meant that the stories were an amalgam of three cultures.
That called for a respectful but somewhat generic character who could represent the trickster/creator/buffoon in any, and all, of those somewhat disparate cultures without offending any of them. In this illustration, Old Man is about to breathe life back into brave little Muskrat, who drowned attempting to find the land beneath the flood in a Chippewa adaptation of the Noah's Ark story. (Note that Muskrat — having succeeded in his quest — clutches a handful of mud in one little fist.)
I like it.
At some point in all this, Christopher ended Bruno and began Little Dee, the story of a lost, pre-verbal little girl adopted by a troupe of talking animals, an attempt at a syndicated strip that got significant and genuine interest but didn't quite get beyond development and into syndication. Their loss.
I liked this strip so much that I gave my granddaughter a signed copy for Christmas, at which she laughed and said, "You gave me this for my birthday last year!" But then she sat back and started re-reading it, ignoring the hoopla around her.
Good strip.
The partnership settled into a groove once we began creating regional historic fiction for the New York News Publishers Foundation's Newspapers in Education program. These were eight or nine chapter serials based on New York State history and distributed to papers throughout the state, with, as in the case of all our serials, teaching guides.
First up was "Tommy and the Guttersnipe," which was a conscious riff on the Horatio Alger stories of homeless boys in the streets of New York at the end of the 19th century. In the story, a plucky lad recruits the aid of a homeless orphan to help support his poor mother, in the course of which they foil the arson gang whose firebombing of a clothing store had put her out of work.
While the Nellie Bly biography had used the thin lines of contemporaneous newspaper illustration, Christopher selected more of a woodcut look for "Tommy."
The story was so popular that we produced a sequel, "Anna's Story," which presented two narrative challenges: One is that Tommy and his family had, at the conclusion of his story, headed west. The other was that the plight of poor girls in the era was considerably more grim than than of boys: They did not last in the streets, and those who survived did so because somebody got them to an agency for homeless children in time.
But that gave us an opportunity: Having escaped from the near-slavery of a tenement cigar factory, Anna was placed on one of the Orphan Trains and landed in Denver, where she encountered Tommy and his stepbrother, the former guttersnipe.
Here, the little orphan heads west on the train, alone and very unsure of her future. I rarely suggest illustrations; I simply send Christopher the chapter and let him come up with the picture. This is one of my favorites of the whole bunch.
But New York is a large and diverse state and we needed to get off the concrete, which we did with Hooch, the story of a young farm kid who discovers that his uncle is smuggling liquor over the northeastern border on behalf of a flashy gangster.
Kenny juggles loyalty to his other uncle, a customs officer, with the allure of gangsters, hot cars and the envy of the town boys who used to tease him for being a farm boy but are now astonished that he knows a famous gangster who drives this beautiful touring car. Christopher's illustration was such a mindblower that I promoted this chapter illustration to the overall story logo.
Our most recent story, Freehand, is part of the War of 1812 Bicentennial, and concerns a young artist who escapes an abusive home with the help of a passing group of American soldiers headed for the base at Sackets Harbor.
Here, in order to persuade their sergeant to let him continue along with them on the road, the soldiers persuade a reluctant Caleb to take off his shirt and show the results of the beatings he has endured.
"“Don’t ever be ashamed of what’s happened to you in the past, Caleb MacCrimmons,” Corporal Daley tells the boy. “Just worry about what you let people do to you in the future.”
Christopher's illustration shows how alone Caleb feels, and yet the strength of the men with whom he has now surrounded himself. And, in the story, the defeat of the British at Sackets Harbor becomes secondary to Caleb's growing understanding of Corp. Daley's advice that day in the forest.
And having said all that, you should know that this is only a fun financial sideline for Christopher, who is currently doing a strip called "Spacetrawler" and getting some significant on-line cred for it.
I'm not a science fiction fan and it took a little while for me to get into the complex cosmos, even more complex plot and occasional silliness that are all interwoven in Spacetrawler, but it's worth the effort. The gang's adventures have become a welcome part of my comic diet.
And he's got some other stuff going on, most of which you can find from there.
But, today at least, you can find us in Plattsburgh, and you can always find our books here.
And here's a video I did with him about two years ago at a conference when he still lived out in Washington, though we were in Massachusetts at the moment:
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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