A Q&A With National Cartoonists Society President Steve McGarry

By: Dave Astor As 2005 begins, Steve McGarry is on the home stretch of his long tenure as president of the National Cartoonists Society. He was first elected to a two-year term in 2001, and, in 2003, became only the third cartoonist in the history of the 1946-founded NCS to be reelected to a second consecutive presidential term.

McGarry also recently created "Biographic," which Universal Press Syndicate is starting to sell this month in preparation for a spring launch. The Sunday-only feature -- aimed at teens and up -- focuses on musicians, movie stars, athletes, and other celebrities.

In an e-mail Q&A with E&P, McGarry discusses the NCS -- whose 600-plus members include comic creators, editorial cartoonists, and non-newspaper cartoonists. McGarry, 51, also talks about newspaper cartooning trends (some of them disturbing); his own career as a syndicated cartoonist doing "Mullets," "KidCity," and other features; why he moved from his native England to California; and more.

McGarry (www.stevemcgarry.com) has received the Stanley Award for general illustration from the Australian Cartoonists' Association and newspaper illustrator of the year honors from the NCS.

What's it like being president of the National Cartoonists Society?

When I moved over here from the U.K. in 1989, the first thing I did was apply to join the NCS. It was such a thrill just to be accepted into the society's ranks, so it never even occurred to me that I might end up as NCS president. It's a tremendous honor, and I've thoroughly enjoyed my four years at the helm -- but it's a very demanding position and I must confess that I'm looking forward to handing over the reins in May.

What accomplishments as president are you most happy about?

To be honest, I'm just relieved that I didn't break the thing. Actually, I've been lucky to work with a great board of directors who have supported me in everything I've tried to do. I suppose the thing that springs most readily to mind is the 2001 Thanks & Giving project, when the syndicated community devoted all the newspaper strips and panels to commemorating those affected by the events of 9/11 and raising funds to help them. It was a daunting task of organization, because it had to be done from scratch. It was weeks of letters and telephone calls with all the various charitable foundations, computer entities, auction sites, and syndicate press offices, planning the print effort and the online auction that eventually raised over $50,000 for the victims.

I'm pleased that we've been able to do things such as support the Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State with a $25,000 acquisitions endowment from the NCS, as well as work in support of the likes of San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum. We now have an annual presence at the San Diego Comic-Con, which I felt was important.

There's one major project that I've been working on for the last couple of years, that will have a huge impact upon the NCS. I should be able to make an announcement in the next couple of months.

As to the NCS itself, we've done a lot of tinkering under the hood to try and make it run a little more smoothly. We are constantly working to improve things like our awards system. I'm quite proud of the Reuben Award weekends I've staged. I negotiate all the hotel contracts myself, right down to the smallest details, and I'm pretty aggressive about those negotiations, so I've been able to secure very low room rates and really whittle down the food-and-beverage charges. Consequently, we all get to stay at these fabulous five-diamond properties and enjoy lavish banquets and parties.

Rick Stromoski ["Mullets"/"Soup to Nutz"] has helped me put some stellar seminars together, bringing in speakers such as Jules Feiffer, Sandra Boynton [greeting cards], and Berkeley Breathed ["Opus"]. Also, because I have a vaguely showbizzy background -- I played in bands for years when I was a kid -- I introduced shows to the program. I roped in other inveterate hams such as Dan Piraro ["Bizarro"], Jerry Scott {"Zits"/"Baby Blues"], Rick Kirkman ["Baby Blues"], David Silverman ["The Simpsons"], and Jeff Keane ["The Family Circus"], and we now have this regular troupe of entertainers. We've roasted the likes of Bil Keane ["The Family Circus"], Mike Peters ["Mother Goose & Grimm"/ editorial cartoons], and Mell Lazarus ["Momma"/"Miss Peach"], staging these all-singing, all-dancing, all-wisecracking extravaganzas with movies, animation, and all sorts of high-tech AV wizardry. They've been great fun and very well-received.

If pushed to pinpoint one thing that I'm most pleased with, it's the heightened sense of camaraderie and community that's been evident at these last few Reuben weekends. My friend and fellow director, "Luann" creator Greg Evans, remarked that you could almost feel the love in the room at the San Francisco Reuben Award [ceremony] in 2003. And he was absolutely right.

Any disappointments in the position?

Not really. We're all volunteers on the board and we do it because we care about the profession and we care about the NCS. Most of my closest friends in life are NCS members, so I've been happy to do my part. My predecessor, Daryl Cagle, left the NCS in great shape. Hopefully, I've been able to improve on it a little and whoever follows me will be able to build on that ... and so it goes.

Why is the NCS important to cartoonists?

The NCS is the world's premier organization for professional cartoonists. We're not a guild or union, we're primarily a fraternal society, and we try, wherever possible, to present the profession in a good light and promote the art of cartooning. The aim is to stimulate interest and respect for the art, through education, publicity, exhibitions, etc. The NCS awards really are the "Oscars" of the cartooning profession, so I can't stress their importance enough.

On a personal level, cartooning is such a solitary profession that it's a joy for a cartoonist to meet up with peers. All cartoonists are fans at heart and it's wonderful to meet one's heroes and have them become friends. Acceptance into the NCS is also a validation of your work, in many respects. And, of course, the networking aspect is useful.

What trends, good and bad, do you see in newspaper cartooning and syndicated cartooning?

I suspect that the general consensus among the syndicated community is that the trends are pretty disheartening, I'm afraid. There's a genuine sense that many of today's editors view strips as a nuisance. Strips are routinely shrunk and morphed. Rates of pay remain at 1970s levels and some newspaper groups are even trying to whittle those rates down further.

Of course, some things never change. It's always hard for new strips to break through. That may be partly because editors don't want to drop an old strip because they know that they will hear from loyal readers -- so it's easier for them to do nothing. That's certainly one of the reasons that the NCS speaks out against newspaper comic polls. Most of us feel that they are unscientific and will always be badly skewed. Younger readers will just not respond in anything like the same numbers as older readers, who have more time on their hands and are much more likely to take the time to participate.

Consequently, the comics polls always skew older, more traditional, and more conservative. Editors wouldn't dream of conducting a readers' poll to decide which sportswriter to drop, so why apply that method to strips? Of course, if your strip regularly tops the polls, I'm sure you see things a little differently.

Where there are sales, however, there appears to be a slight trend toward demographics rather than content. Although I think that anything that brings as many different perspectives and voices as possible into the profession is to be applauded, I think the quality of the work has be the paramount consideration, because the strip has to engage readers. If the writing is poor or the art too clumsy, it matters little if the intent is honorable. It may actually be counter-productive in the long run.

On the editorial-cartooning front, the prospects are even bleaker. It's horrifying to see how the ranks have been decimated. Newspapers are buying syndicated content and hundreds of staff positions have been eliminated.

Of course, we all know the background stories. The days of competing newspapers in most major markets are over. The survivors are constantly being geared towards profit, so frivolities such as strips and opinionated doodlers on staff are luxuries the bean counters will immediately zero in on. But it's short-sighted. In an age when most people get their news from TV, it's disappointing that editors can't recognize just how valuable the 21st century equivalent of a "Calvin & Hobbes" strip or a Jeff MacNelly cartoon will be in attracting and retaining readership. But those shoes have to be there if they are to be filled. And if you want to attract younger readers, you're going to need to engage them with features that speak to their
generation.

That also opens up the prospect of colorization, which is one other area that intrigues me. I've been supplying full-color daily strips to Europe since the early 1990s, so I think it's only a matter of time before U.S. readers, particularly younger readers, will expect to read the strips in full color everyday. We're already seeing more and more newspapers switching to color. That's going to be an interesting development, because at present, most creators don't color the strips themselves.

One interesting development is that the likes of the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post have started to run the more "adult" strips on a separate page to the more family-oriented fare. It will be interesting to see whether that will give creators a little more leeway in content terms.

How do you find the time to be NCS president and do all your cartooning work?

I don't -- which is why I'm looking forward to bailing out at the end of May and concentrating on my work again!

Did "Mullets," the comic you and Rick Stromoski do, recently reach its first anniversary with Universal Press Syndicate?

Yes, it was launched in November 2003. But, unfortunately, we are just about to kill it off! The final strip runs January 15.

How would you describe "Mullets"?

Er... over.

What inspired you and Rick to create it?

They say write about you know. So we came up with a strip about two idiots. Rick is one of my closest friends. We met at the 1996 Reuben Award weekend in New York and hit it off immediately, over beers and smutty jokes. He's a fellow director of the NCS, and we would spend hours on the phone every week. We kept threatening to do a project together and kicked a few ideas around. One night, the idea for "Mullets" popped into my head. I called Rick the next morning and within a few minutes, his sketches came whirring over the fax machine.

How do you and Rick divide the work on "Mullets"?

It's a fairly unique partnership, I think, in that we're both artists and we're both writers, so there was no actual need for a collaboration -- we just wanted to have an excuse to work together. Typically, I write the gags and then pitch them over the phone. If I can make him laugh, I'll fax him thumbnail sketches. Then Rick does the art, editing out any of my more "cor-blimey-guvnor" Englishisms and adding visual gags. That's his turn to try and make me laugh and he invariably succeeds -- I love his artwork. I'll correct his spelling mistakes, change the gags back to the ones I originally wrote, and then either me or my wife, Debs, will color up the art in Photoshop.

Rick and I are both very fast, so we'll turn out a week's worth of material in just a few hours. I heard Jerry Scott once say that he and Jim Borgman each do 75% of the work on "Zits." I think that's a perfect way of describing how Rick and I work on "Mullets."

How did it feel to be working on such an American strip after having lived in England the first 36 years of your life?

Well, by the time we launched "Mullets" I'd been living here for the best part of 14 years, so I'd already pretty much "gone native." We had high hopes for the strip but it seems it was doomed from day one. Just before we launched, UPN debuted a sitcom with a similar premise and title. The show was critically panned and finished dead last in the ratings, before being put out of its misery after six weeks. Then Berkeley Breathed brought Opus back from the dead the weekend we launched, so a lot of editors wouldn't even look at picking anything else up.

And, candidly, many editors couldn't get past our title. They assumed this was a strip that sneered at "white trash" -- and nothing could be further from the truth. It's a shame, because wherever the strip has appeared, it's gone down really well. Daryl Cagle ran a feature on his www.cagle.com Web site when we launched and we received over 2,000 fan letters in less than a month. We picked up some nice clients, such as The Toronto Sun, and even made sales in Scandinavia and Australia.

But, the harsh truth is that a new strip only has a very small window at launch in which it must gain traction, otherwise your sales kit is never going to come out of the sales rep's briefcase again. Syndicates will launch a new feature every few months and once that next feature is launched, unless the previous feature still has momentum, it's a dead duck. The failure rate for new features is pretty high -- most are gone within a couple of years. Rick and I have both been in this business a long time and know the ropes. We could choose to limp along with a small client list but what's the point if there is no chance of growing your audience? Some you win, some you lose. On the plus side, we've loved working together -- it's been an absolute scream! So we are already working on our next joint project.

You started writing and drawing "KidCity" for United Media in 2001. How did you end up working on that Sesame Workshop feature?

I have a pretty long history with United, going back to "Biography" in 1989. My "Pop Culture" series was a part of United's NEA package for three years and they represented me internationally on my sports features for a number of years. We'd always worked well together.

Anyway, I'd had a daily gag strip called "Badlands" that had been running in Britain in The Sun for 13 years. Now, this is the largest-circulation English-language newspaper in the world, something like 4 million copies a day, so it was a very big deal. And exceptionally lucrative! Unfortunately, as my contract was coming up for renewal, The Sun appointed a new editor. He was not big on laughing, and I was now quite an expensive item, so it quickly became evident that he wasn't going to renew. So I was on the lookout for something to replace some of that income.

Amy Lago (who is now with the Washington Post Writers Group) was the comics editor at United Media at that time and knew about my "Badlands" contract situation. "KidCity" had previously been culled from the content in Sesame Street's "Kid City" magazine. The magazine was folding but they wanted to continue the feature and so they suddenly needed someone who could research, write, and illustrate a feature that is aimed at kids. Amy wasn't sure if I'd agree to do it, but I just saw it as one of those perfect moments of serendipity. And I have to say that I really enjoy doing the feature. I've always liked working in a number of different art styles, from various humorous approaches to photo-realistic illustration techniques. With "KidCity," I now get to employ all these methods of working on one single feature, as the mood takes me.

How many syndicated or self-syndicated features are you currently working on?

I have always been pretty prolific. Early in my freelance career, I used to do a lot of newspaper work, from spot illustrations to courtroom sketches. The deadlines were brutal and I got to be very fast. At the moment, I'm doing "KidCity" seven days a week for United Media and my daily entertainment trivia feature, "Pop Culture," is handled internationally by Atlantic Syndication. Plus I do a monthly spread for Australia's "K-Zone" kids mag, and I still take on various illustration commissions for the likes of FHM magazine, etc.

I've always got a few other projects on the go. This past summer, for instance, I created short-run series on the Olympics and the European Soccer Championships. I work directly with international agents on those sort of projects, so those features were sold throughout Scandinavia, Europe, Asia, and Australia. As I mentioned earlier, my wife works with me. Debs researches "KidCity" and handles a large chunk of the Photoshop coloring on things like "KidCity" and "Mullets." (She's also now the colorist on Kirkman and Scott's "Baby Blues" feature.) Plus she handles the accounts, edits the book collections, and makes umpteen cups of tea each day.

I've just signed with Universal to do a Sunday-only feature called "Biographic." The sales force begins pre-selling the feature this month and it will launch in the spring. I'm pretty excited about that, because I think it's some of the finest artwork I've ever produced. It's very detailed, photo-realistic stuff, and I think it will blow people away. The sales kit looks incredible.

What made you decide to relocate from England to California in 1989?

I'd had a bit of success self-syndicating a feature called "The Diary of Rock & Pop" to a few U.S. newspapers and that had brought me to the attention of United Media. When they needed an artist and writer to take over "Biography," they approached me. We were living in Manchester, England, at the time, but I'd visited California a few times and had this vague notion of spending time there. Our twin boys were 18 months old, and Debs and I fancied an adventure. I'd just signed my first "Badlands" contract with The Sun and I was doing a weekly soccer feature for a big U.K. soccer mag, so regular income was assured. The "Biography" contract meant that I could get a work permit -- so we just decided to spend a little time in the sunshine. I'm very shallow.

Are you now an American, British, or dual citizen?

We're all still British citizens. My kids, Joe and Luke, are seniors at the Orange County High School of the Arts here in California. We're currently trying to decide whether they should go to an arts school here or in the U.K.

When and how did you first get interested in cartooning while growing up in England?

As a kid, I loved to draw, and I was soccer-crazy. If I couldn't be outside kicking a ball, I'd be indoors with a pencil and paper, usually drawing my favorite soccer players. Then, as a teen, I became obsessed with music, so I'd be drawing pop stars all day. Come to think of it, it's pretty much what I've ended up doing all my adult life.

As a kid, I'd also copy the characters in my favorite comic strips and then gradually, I started to invent my own. I've discussed this with cartoonists from all over the world, and we all tell a similar story. But it's interesting because all my American peers cite Sparky Schulz as their greatest influence. Growing up in Britain, "Peanuts" only ran in one national newspaper and my family didn't subscribe to that paper, so I never saw the strip. The "Peanuts" specials didn't run on TV. I think I vaguely knew who Snoopy was but that was about it. (Thinking about it, because the British don't play baseball or gridiron football and Halloween wasn't an event we celebrated, I suspect most of the cultural references were lost on a British audience anyway.)

Anyway, we were Daily Mirror readers and their big strip was, and still is, "Andy Capp." Reggie Smythe was a huge influence on me. The Daily Mirror also carried an adventure strip by a brilliant illustrator called Frank Bellamy, and he was the inspiration for the stipple technique I use on my more realistic illustration work. As a young professional, I made a point of catching up on "Peanuts" and was quickly seduced. And, of course, I met Sparky many times after moving to the States and signing to the same syndicate -- but I came to him comparatively late in life.

How does British and American humor compare? What's different and what's similar?

In general, funny is funny. All my friends, whether they are British or American, adore U.S. fare such as "Seinfeld," "The Simpsons," and "Spinal Tap," just as much as they adore British stuff like "The Office," the stand-up comedy of Eddie Izzard, and movies such as "Shaun of the Dead." But I think it's fair to say that the British prefer their humor a little bawdier.

When it comes to newspaper strips, the British don't do cute or twee, for example. It would be very hard to sell something as gentle as "The Family Circus" or "For Better or For Worse" in the U.K. By the same token, I can do gags for the U.K. market that I wouldn't dream of trying to place here. For instance, I did a gag in "Badlands" where an old gentleman, wanting to go dancing at the senior-citizens center, has taken his tuxedo out of mothballs and is surprised that it still fits him. "Ballroom?" asks his female companion. "Plenty, thanks," he replies, "although the sleeves are a little short." Now that's an outrageous gag by U.S. standards, but this ran in the U.K.'s biggest-selling national newspaper and nobody batted an eye. Mind you, The Sun is also the home of the topless pin-up on Page Three, so it's not really surprising.

Do you think your own work these days is more British, more American, or a combination of both styles?

The artwork is universal, but when I write, I do so with a specific audience in mind. I'll write much differently for a U.S. audience than I would for a British readership, even though the thrust of the gag may essentially be the same. I've lived so long in both countries that I can switch quite easily. But there is a skill to it. And it's not just the differences in English. With my soccer features, for example, I've learned that the translations we have done for Brazil will not work in Portugal, nor can we use the same copy for clients in Argentina and Spain, etc.

You used to do posters and flyers for the legendary Rafters rock venue in Manchester. What was it like seeing Elvis Costello, The Police, Dire Straits, and others in their early days?

As a teenager, I sang and played guitar in various local bands in the Manchester area. So when the new-wave era dawned in the '70s, I was very much part of the local scene and because everyone knew that I was also a designer and illustrator, I was "press-ganged" into designing record sleeves for a host of bands, some of whom went on to great things. For instance, I designed a sleeve for Joy Division, who later became New Order. That record changes hands for huge sums of money now! I did all the posters and flyers for Rafters, so I saw all the luminaries up close and sweaty. I loved every minute of it.

What are your hobbies? Do you still play guitar?

For years, I coached AYSO [American Youth Soccer Organization], and I loved that. A year or two ago, my kids hung up their cleats and are now aspiring musicians, as well as talented artists in their own right. So I enjoy seeing their art skills developing and I get tremendous pleasure from watching them write, record, and play their music at local gigs. I "help and advise" where I can, when they let me. Or "meddle and interfere," as they would probably have it. The wheel feels to be turning full circle.

Any other comments?

I talk too much, don't I?