CSotD: On the Job
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We'll start with a Juxtaposition of My Life, or, at least, what my life would be like if I had responsibilities beyond having a dog.
I'm not constantly working, but, like Adam, I don't have an escape from being "at work" and I have to admit that, even when I had an office over there and my home over here, I would go into the office on days when I should have been at home.
As a reporter, it was just dropping by to check on something. Once I became an editor, I was apt to log in and stay for an hour or two, but that was after the boys were grown and gone.
I once asked one of my sons if he thought I was a workaholic and he said, "You mean to the point where it interferes with your social life?" and started laughing.
The good thing about being a single parent was that, like Jill, there were obligations I couldn't bargain away, even from the office: I made as many soccer games as I could, which meant coming in early so I could duck out at 4 o'clock, but even on regular days, I had to go home and cook dinner and be a dad, even if it meant taking off afterwards to cover a meeting.
Once the boys were gone, there was no tail on my kite anymore. I've always had hounds, and they're laid back enough that they happy to see you walk in the door, but they'll wait until you do.
Now that I work at home, and, besides getting a full-bore trip to the park between the time I wrap up this blog and the time I settle in for the rest of the day, the dog is my coffeebreak partner. On days when I'm really wrestling with something, he may get half a dozen walks around the block.
He doesn't complain about that.
I'm semi-retired, which means I only have three days of actual, full-time work, but there are little diddly things that happen on the other days, and it's good that I enjoy what I do because I can't afford to retire and writers don't "retire" anyway, which I think is true of creative types generally.
I know some cartoonists who maintain separate offices outside their homes, but I suspect they still have to be pried away from the drawing board and perhaps would need to put time locks on their studio doors to keep them from drifting back there at odd hours.
Which is what it takes to produce six dailies and a Sunday strip 52 times a year, and a lot of these folks are either doing their cartoon as a second job or doing something else as a second job that anyone else would consider a first job.
Which is to say that neither of these cartoons is particularly funny but they sure struck home and I'm sure their families laughed, kind of the way my son did.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the age scale, the winners of this year's John Locher Memorial Awards have been announced. These awards, named for the artist son of Dick Locher, go to cartoonists between 18 and 25, ideally in editorial cartooning but this year more in the non-fiction area, which isn't surprising since that's where a lot of the energy of young cartoonists is going these days.
That's a difficult way to start out, and a lot of their work is hampered by their own limitations, not in talent but in experience, both actual time-on-the-planet and experience in hashing it all out internally.
J.D. Salinger began writing and publishing before he was out of school, but, first of all, he was J.D. Salinger — not many people are — and, second, his most famous protagonist may have been a teenager, but he wasn't. By the time he published "Catcher in the Rye," he was over 30 and had fought in World War II.
Young cartoonists, like young novelists, need to find something to write about but they also have to find their voices and, for the great mass of writers and artists, that takes time. The consequence, in a world in which anyone with a computer can be a publisher, is, well, often not much.
For some, it's an issue of "not quite." For a few, it's an issue of "not yet."
That's why it's good to have the Locher Awards, which this year were judged by Jen Sorensen, Signe Wilkinson and Mike Thompson, because there are some good young cartoonists out there but, without gatekeepers, they can get lost amid the chaff.
You can see the runners-up at the Locher Awards site. There's not a lot of point in my re-capping here what they've got there, but do make the effort, because it's all good stuff that reaches well beyond the usual.
The winner was Damian Alexander, who recounted how the limitations of media coverage of AIDS left him believing that it was an inevitable consequence of being gay, an impression he discovered later was not his alone. (You can read the rest at the Locher site.)
Damian Alexander of Boston, MA is a graduate student at Simmons College. His illustrations often highlight personal experiences with social equality, LGBTQ issues, and mental health. Damian's comics have appeared on Narratively, and gone viral on tumblr. He has also been a contributing writer to Polygon, Teen Vogue, and others, highlighting social issues in mainstream media. Damian is currently working on a graphic memoir about LGBTQ issues and his experiences with mental health. You can find more of his work at damianimated.com – John Locher Memorial Award announcement
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