Ridiculous Opinions #301
So, I’m definitely at a crossroads right now when it comes to creative work. I have spent the last six years working on Maurice the Beaver comics, pretty much non-stop and it’s time to move on to something else, but what that next step might be is up in the air. The world is completely open to me, creatively.
I have spent the last week reading the Calvin & Hobbes box set that Tracey bought for me way back in 2004 for my birthday. She lugged this twenty-five pound box of books halfway across Toronto to give to me (which is the moment when I thought, I guess I’ll keep this one!). The books were kept in storage for a long time, but traveled with us to our current location when we moved here.
Bill Watterson has always been a hero to me, both from a creative perspective and from an ethics perspective. It says something about the time in history where I grew up that some of my favorite creative artists were very staunch in their views on things. Watterson was at the height of his success making Calvin & Hobbes comics when he decided to call it quits, and in the time that he spent making the comics, he refused to license the comics for the tons upon tons of crap merchandise that could have made him an extraordinarily rich man. He stayed true to his comic and true to his word when he quit, disappearing off into the wilderness to go paint pictures and live a quiet, creatively fulfilled life.
A contrast to him is the career of one of my other favorite comic artists, Berkley Breathed, the creator of my favorite comic strip as a kid, Bloom County. A lot of the jokes in Bloom County flew right over my head when I was young, but the collections enabled me to expand my view of the world and understand the concepts behind the politics of the time, heady things for a twelve-year old. Breathed quit doing Bloom County at the height of his fame as well, but unlike Watterson, he continued, off and on, to use his characters and make strips right up until today, where it seems like he creates the strips more for himself than anyone else.
Both artists had different paths to where they are today, but I admire them because both have been true to their overall ideals. They quit when they felt the time was right and followed their own paths into the future, both of which seem to be fulfilling (at least from an outsider’s perspective).
I wanted to make comic strips ever since I first got my hands on the Peanuts collections, and that only grew when I was young and could read the Garfield collections. My tastes matured over the years into Bloom County and Calvin & Hobbes, but that feeling of wanting to do a strip never actually left me. There has always been something delightful in four, succinct panels filled with characters you know and love.
Around the year 2001, I decided that I was going to try to do a comic and submit it to a syndicate. I had grand dreams of producing my own strips for newspapers around the world, just like Watterson and Breathed. I was naive in my approach, for little did I know that newspapers (and comics syndication, by default) were dying. I was even more naive in thinking that the strips I was doing were any good at all.
I created a strip called TJHS 1987, which was basically a semi-autobiographical tale of a young seventh grader negotiating the year 1987. I made thirty strips and dropped them in the mail in the hopes that someone would pick them up.
I never received a response. Not that one was deserved.
After that, my dreams of writing comic strips went dormant. However, it was a couple of years after the birth of my children that things changed. When my daughters were very young, I used to write down things that I noticed throughout the the month that they were doing. Some of it was about their development as kids and some of it was about the cuteness of their day-to-day. But then one day, I thought, Why not make a comic strip out of this? So I made a little experimental comic with them. The art was crude, done in a hurry because I was busy being a working dad. And the first strip was very much fictional.
But then, I thought, What if I just draw what actually happens with my daughters? So, over the next five or so years, I started doing little four-panel strips about the day to day existence of my daughters. I called the strips, Harper 3, Abbey 1. The next year, it would be called Harper 4, Abbey 2, and so on. I did over six-hundred of those strips, most of which have never been seen by anyone because I vowed to my daughters not to publish them until they had enough distance from them to not be too personal. They were a wonderful documentation of the things that my daughters did over the years and everything that happened in them was true.
At the same time, I was enjoying my Harper & Abbey comics so much that I thought I would dust off TJHS 1987 again to see what those would look like.
I made a few of those comics and lo & behold, I started doing those in parallel with the Harper & Abbey comics. There was a time period in the late-2000s, both in Ghana and in Shanghai, when everyone in my family would go to bed and I would be hunched over my journal, pen in hand, writing and drawing the Harper & Abbey and TJHS comics late into the night. Every single one of those comics was done as-is. I didn’t sketch them out beforehand. I didn’t do any rough drafts. I just wrote and drew them in the moment. They were gloriously raw and an absolute joy to do. I adore these comics both for the time that they represented and the stories that I told in the books.
I made some half-hearted attempts to put the TJHS comics on the web, but I mainly decided to publish them as two volumes (which you can buy here!). The Harper & Abbey comics have forever sat in my archive.
I love to give myself arbitrary goals, so I thought that I would end TJHS after 365 comics, which would represent the 365 days of the year 1987. I feel like the TJHS comics got better over time, as did the Harper & Abbey comics. But when I finished with TJHS, the Harper & Abbey comics also stopped. I could have kept going, but the spirit of the book would have changed. I made my last Harper & Abbey comic in 2011.
Life moved on and changes happened. China turned into Bangladesh, which turned into Canada, which turned into the UAE. And during that time, I was always thinking about making more comic strips. There was one half-hearted attempt to continue TJHS in high school, but the last thing I wanted to do was relive my high school years in comic strip form. I knew I wanted to continue to make comics, but I just didn’t know how.
The creation of the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil changed all of that.
I’m a lazy creator. I need things at my disposal in order to create. I guess you could say that I’m not actually that lazy, because I have a day job that I work hard at. But when it comes to being creative, I am lazy. If I’m tired at the end of the day, I have to have easy-to-use creative tools in order for me to work. That’s why I write. I can do that easily when I’m tired and I can do it anywhere.
The iPad Pro enabled me to draw anywhere. Then, along came Procreate, which enabled me to have a drawing program anywhere. I was now able to make comics anywhere at any time. I just didn’t know what to make.
In 2019, I was on a trip to Los Angeles when I sat down and tried to brainstorm an idea for a new strip. When Trump was elected in 2016, I thought about making a strip about him, which I did. I think I did two of them, because at that time, Trump was a bit of a joke. However, I’m glad I didn’t follow through on that one.
But 2019 left me wanting to infuse a little bit of Berkley Breathed-level politics in my work. I felt like I didn’t have a voice, like there was nothing that I was capable of doing when it came saying what I thought about politics. Everything about making a difference felt impossible.
There was a period of time where I was pitching books to Marvel Comics, and during that time, I wanted to revive the old story of Howard the Duck running for President (which happened in 1976). No one was much interested in that idea during the Obama years. But I liked my idea.
So, I thought, What if I create a character that is running for President?
Thus, Maurice the Beaver was born…
To be continued next issue!