(This is one of a series of cartoonist profiles I did in 2003 for the Post-Star of Glens Falls, NY. This particular profile is colored by the fact that McPherson lives in the area.)
Close to Home" is created in Saratoga Springs, where John McPherson shares work space with other artists in a building they call the "Saratoga Creative Block."
It's close to the homes of his Post-Star readers, but it's a few miles from his own home, which he appreciates.
"It's good to have people to go and get coffee with and talk to about what's going on," McPherson says. "When I was working at home, I'd have these revelations of 'Gee, I haven't been out of the house in four days. I haven't shaved, I'm still wearing the same pants ..."
McPherson is originally from Painted Post, near Syracuse, and came to Saratoga Springs after college when he got an engineering job in Albany.
However, he didn't really take to engineering, and'he began trying to break into the cartooning business as soon as he arrived.
"I started drawing up cartoons. I couldn't draw at all, but I did what I could, and I sent a few to the Chronicle in Glens Falls," he explains.
Chronicle Editor and Publisher Mark Frost liked his work and soon McPherson's panel, "Incognito," was a regular feature.in the Chronicle.
It was modest, but it was a start.
"Ten dollars a month!" he laughs. "It paid for cable!"
The exhilarating experience of seeing his work in print, even for a small freelance fee, was enough to get McPherson motivated, and he began to approach magazines.
"In one year, I sent out 160 packets of eight or 10 cartoons to magazines,and they sent back 160 rejection slips. I got rejected all the time, but I loved cartooning so much that I really didn't care."
Make no mistake: These were not carefully thought-out critiques of his work.
"I think there's one rejection letter that was written by one person somewhere in the United States,because they're all the same," he says.
But persistence paid off, and he got a letter from Campus Life magazine, saying they liked his panels but wanted to see things more geared to young readers. McPherson drew up a batch centered around school life, which the magazine accepted.
To this day, his work still appears in the magazine, but, at the time, it was the golden wedge that got him through.
"Campus Life has a broad reach, and other magazines started to call up and ask for cartoons," he says. "And, even if they didn't call me, the magazine swung enough weight that, when I approached other magazines, it made a difference."
"Close to Home" followed, and cartooning became a fulltime profession, which was a good thing, since he was sneaking a lot of cartooning time into his day job anyway.
Throughout this process, McPherson drew single panels rather than multi-frame strips."I've always liked the immediate humor of a single panel," he says. "Even as a kid reading the comics, I tended to gravitate toward the panels rather than the strips."
It comes as little surprise that he lists Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams, a pair of classic artists of the off-beat, as influences for his own eccentric work. It may be more surprising that he doesn't read the comics page very often.
"I don't want to be influenced by what other people are doing," he explains. "I don't want to feel like I'm competing with them; I just want to do my thing."
McPherson's panel has never had a cast of recurring characters, but Mcf'herson has been approached to develop a TV pilot, which not only requires more than one-panel writing, but requires him to define a cast of specific characters, a task he calls "a nice challenge."
In the meantime, he continues to work at the Artist's Block, a place that's close to home and where he can walk downtown with a limited degree of anonymity.
"It's a nice kind of limited anonymity," he says. "People don't know what I look like, so they aren't yelling out on the street, 'Hi, Mr. Cartoon Man!' But when I sign my name on a check or show my library card, sometimes the person behind the counter will say, 'Good cartoon today.' And that's nice."
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.