By: Erin Olson Few people are lucky enough to find jobs that provide a regular paycheck for attending concerts, searching for wild mushrooms, and watching movies, among other activities. But not M.E. Russell, whose job has included doing ? and drawing ? all of the above. He is the man behind a local, non-fiction comic strip called CulturePulp, which runs on a full page every other Friday in The Oregonian. Russell, who also works as a film critic for the Portland, Ore., paper, covers colorful local events and details his own experiences in the comic, which makes liberal use of footnotes.
"It is, I believe, one of the only reported non-fiction comic strips of its kind in a major-market newspaper," Russell says. There's a precedent for it ? non-fiction comics in an alt-comics realm. But I hadn't seen it in a major newspaper in a while."
After being hired as a film critic, Russell pitched the idea for CulturePulp to his editor, Grant Butler, because he was looking for other ways to contribute to the paper. Butler told him to draw a prototype, which he liked so much that it was the first strip published last April.
"It all happened very quickly. It was kind of alarming," Russell admits.
The strip, which runs in a Friday entertainment supplement called "A&E," has received very positive feedback from readers. Butler calls Russell's strip an "interesting experiment in how we tell stories in the paper," allowing the Oregonian to cover events that might not otherwise be considered newsworthy. Regular events like a Thursday night cabaret show, for example (which was featured in one of Russell's strips), become even more interesting and unique in cartoon-news form.
Russell employs creative methods for reporting and drawing CulturePulp. In addition to the standard reporter's notebook, he brings a digital camera on assignment to snap pictures of the scene. The pictures help him remember exactly how the surroundings looked when he is ready to draw the strip.
When it comes to the creative process, however, Russell operates just a little differently from other cartoonists.
Rather than hand-lettering each comic, he had a font of his lettering created to allow for easier writing and editing. Similarly, instead of creating boxes for each strip by hand, he draws them in QuarkXPress, finishes the art separately, and then drops the art into the Quark boxes.
His secret weapon for adding dimension to his drawings is a professional animator named Chad Essley, who shades the illustrations on each strip after Russell has finished drawing. "He makes me look much better than I actually am," Russell confesses, adding that creating the strip in QuarkXPress makes it easier to accommodate the number of elements that go into each comic.
"Grant can be editing the text of my strip at the exact same time as I'm drawing part of it and Chad is shading part of it," Russell explains. "It's a totally nonlinear way to do a comic strip." In the end, Russell says he's just thankful that he has had the chance. "I feel like I lucked into it, it's an absolute amazing dream job. I would love it if more newspapers did something like this."
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