CSotD: Down a Random Rabbit Hole
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Filling in for Mike Peterson while he’s on assignment to the rogue planet Mongo, I’m Brian Fies.
Sometimes you start writing about one thing and it leads you right down an unexpected rabbit hole to a place you never meant to go. This is one of those days.
Syndicated since 2000, the comic strip Six Chix has an interesting—and as far as I can recall, unique—concept: six women cartoonists each write and draw a different day of the week. The current roster is Isabella Bannerman on Monday, Margaret Shulock on Tuesday, Rina Piccolo on Wednesday, Anne Gibbons on Thursday, Benita Epstein on Friday, and Stephanie Piro on Saturday. They rotate Sunday among them.
Today is Anne Gibbons's turn.
That's a nice observational single-panel gag. It seems obvious but I don't recall hearing it before, which is a good type of humor. It sparks a flicker of "Oh yeah!" That said, our medicine cabinet is full of medicine: Advil and Neosporin and Band-Aids and cough syrup and thermometers. I think my wife still has some contact lens solution in there, even though she hasn't worn contacts since laser surgery 10 years ago. We keep the Q-Tips and cotton balls in drawers. Despite the fact that this gag doesn't accurately reflect my life, I can still relate.
What freaked me out when I was a kid was the little slot in the back of old medicine cabinets for disposing of razor blades. Where did they go? Did it ever fill up? Was there some razor blade recovery squad that went in there every few years to clean them out? When I got older and understood how houses are built, I realized the blades just fall between the wall studs. That's terrible! Somebody demolishing that house in 50 years is going to cut themselves to ribbons!
I note in passing a tiny detail in Gibbons's art that I appreciate: her view of the open medicine cabinet is not directly centered. The point of view is off to the right a little, so in perspective we see a little more of the left wall of the cabinet than the right. I think this asymmetry helps it "read" better than a perfectly centered POV would, and makes for a more interesting drawing.
Although some of the Six Chix creators have go-to character designs and situations (Piro does great cats and critters), the strip doesn’t have a consistent cast or style. It’s just straight gag-a-day, which to my mind is the toughest kind of cartooning there is, in a different cartoonist’s style every day.
Some comic strips are built on a premise: family strips, kid strips, animal strips, workplace strips. Others are built on a singular creative vision: Gary Larson’s The Far Side, Dan Piraro’s Bizarro, Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur. It’s like the difference between TV’s “Cheers” and “Seinfeld.”
A comic strip built on the idea that it’s done by six women doesn’t really fit either pattern. It’s a fine strip, but I couldn’t imagine how King Features Syndicate thought it would fly or how they sold it to newspapers. Poking around trying to figure out its origins, I learned Six Chix was the brainchild of King Features editor Jay Kennedy. That’s when I understood exactly how it happened, and skidded into the rabbit hole.
Jay Kennedy
A lot of people who tried to sell cartoons in the 1980s, ‘90s, or ‘00s have a Jay Kennedy story. The way you get to be a syndicated cartoonist is you prepare a submission packet of several weeks’ worth of comic strips and mail it to a syndicate. It’s just that easy! Except syndicates get thousands of submissions and only take on one or two each year. I began trying when I was 14, and every two or three years for a couple of decades afterward. Except for a few hand-written hieroglyphs on standard-issue rejection slips, of which I got dozens, Jay was the first big-time editor who sent me feedback and notes. And then, one day, asked to see more.
I can’t even tell you what that meant.
So I sent more. And Jay sent back detailed notes, with individual strips marked with a plus, minus or check, and suggested revisions and different directions I might want to try.
So I sent more.
Jay and I worked on that idea a long time, until we eventually beat it to death. The strip we ended up with wasn’t one I wanted or even knew how to do. I wish I’d been a little more mature and confident to have handled the whole thing better, but my overwhelming feeling was gratitude that Jay had seen something he liked in my work and worked with me so long to polish it.
Photo of Jay Kennedy from Hogan's Alley, 2007.
Years passed, at least a decade. I did Mom’s Cancer and got the recognition I got for that, and was at the 2006 San Diego Comic-Con talking to a professional cartoonist I’d met before, when he gestured toward a compact man to his left and asked me, “Do you know Jay Kennedy?”
The sound of a scratching phonograph needle filled my head.
Jay looked at my name tag and said he thought Mom’s Cancer was great. He said his wife had died of leukemia.
I said, “You won’t remember, it was a long time ago, but I submitted a comic strip . . .”
He said of course he remembered, he liked it a lot and was sorry it didn’t work out. We talked happily for another 10 minutes.
I learned a lot more about Jay after he died in a diving accident in March 2007 at age 50.
I learned he had one of the most extensive collections of Underground comics in the world. That’s an odd juxtaposition, the editor of square family fare like Beetle Bailey and Blondie steeped in the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson and Art Spiegelman. He didn’t just work in comics, he was a scholar of comics who lived and breathed them.
I also learned he’d encouraged a lot of cartoonists exactly as he’d encouraged me. Hundreds of them. Jay Kennedy stories poured out, all of them about how engaging, respectful, and kind he’d been, even in rejection. Finding that out made me feel a bit less special than I’d thought I was, but Jay a lot more. No one really understood how immense his influence was until he was gone and everybody compared notes.
So it made all the sense in the world to me that in 2000, Jay went out of his way to build and promote a new strip with an oddball concept bringing six women’s perspectives to the comics page, probably doubling the number of syndicated female cartoonists in one blow. He also signed up Rhymes with Orange by Hilary Price, Between Friends by Sandra Bell-Lundy, and others. He went out of his way to make comics different and better.
Jay’s legacy lives all over the comics page, as well as in the careers of people like me who never made it to the comics page. The Six Chix are six of them.
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