Saturday profile: Mike Peters of "Mother Goose and Grimm"

 

(This is one in a series of cartoonist profiles I did in 2003 for the Post-Star of Glens Falls, NY)

Mike Peters is working too hard, but he's having too much fun to quit.

Peters has been drawing editorial cartoons for the Dayton Daily News for more than 30 years, and doing "Mother Goose and Grimm" for nearly 20.

"I work all the time," he says. "I wake up at 6 or 6:30, and I'm at the drawing board at 6:31."

Political cartooning requires that he keep up with the news, so television provides "audible wallpaper" in his studio throughout the day, and the barrage of information both inspires him and causes him to reject cartoons.

For instance, when the House of Representatives served "Freedom fries" instead of "French fries" in its cafeteria last week, Peters started to work on a cartoon using the phrase "Freedom kissing."

Then three news anchors used the gag and Peters had to start over.

"Mother Gooseand Grimm" operates at a more leisurely pace, but its intention was quite the opposite: Peters began the strip in order to put some fear back in his life.

"It really began with (winning) the Pulitzer Prize," he confesses. "I went into the composing room, and those crusty old guys who had been the bane of my life started applauding. I realized I had to do something else; I didn't want to switch papers, but I had to find a way to get the fear that you need, the fear you have when you start a new job and wonder if you're doing the right thing."

The syndicate handling his political cartoons had been after him to try a strip, but he was reluctant simply to start a strip for the sake of doing it.

"I knew that if I didn't do something that seemed natural to me, it would be like a really bad marriage," he says. "I'd wake up to it every morning for the rest of my life saying, 'What have I done?'"

Peters grew up in a neighborhood of St. Louis known as "Dogtown," and he had always wanted to do a strip about a dog, a real dog who did dog things like eating out of trash cans and getting fleas.

"But if that was all he did, it would drive me nuts after awhile," he confesses.

So one night he went through his recent editorial cartoons and laid out his favorites. "I tried to take from them what it was that I liked and enjoyed so much about them," he recalls.

There was a warning about asbestos in hair dryers at the time, and he had done a cartoon showing laboratory rats blow drying their hair. Another featured Mickey Mouse, and, in fact, he noticed that several of his favorite cartoons used animals and Disney characters.

He began thinking about fantasy - with a dog.

Robinson Crusoe and a dog yielded "'a lot of coconut jokes, and I knew that wasn't going to last long. Mary's little lamb got no further."

Peters tried a bag lady with a big nose and bun of hair, who could sit on a park bench with her mangy-looking dog,making comments about life, but that didn't work either.

"So I got this Mother Goose book to get some more material to work on, and I thought about it, then drew the goose as that little old lady. And I needed a name for her dirty dog, and 'Grimm,' from the Brothers Grimm, seemed right."

The syndicate liked the idea and Peters produced several months worth of cartoons to set the format for the strip.

Then something else happened.

A hot new cartoonist, Gary Larson, came to Dayton to give a speech about his comic panel, "The Far Side," which was being carried in the Dayton paper, and Peters was chosen to introduce him.

"I saw these fabulous strips on the wall, and they were just amazing, and it gave me a totally different idea!" Peters recalls. "I had already sent in all these strips, but I started coming up with ideas,and I did three weeks worth, and it was just so much fun! I loved it! So I called the syndicate and said, 'I don't want to do that! I want to do this!' and they said, 'It's too late, we're already selling 'Mother Goose and Grimm.'"

They finally agreed to show his new panels and the Mother Goose panels to a group of editors and let them decide. But a fellow cartoonist asked Peters who he wanted to have make the final decision, and then asked, "What do you want to do?"

The answer was "both!" and the result was a strip that sometimes features Mother Goose and Grimm, and other times features oddball humor without established characters.

That lack of set format has kept the strip fresh for Peters, while the strange humor keeps readers alert, too.

Especially, it turns out, some readers.

"Mother Goose and Grimm" was the first strip to depict a dog drinking out of the toilet, and that caused an uproar in Pittsburgh.

A woman there organized her friends to write to the paper protesting the jokes and the editor decided to cancel the strip.

But the cancellation brought an onslaught of "pro-toilet" letters, and the debate went back and forth on the letters page.

Finally, someone from the syndicate contacted the woman who had written the original letter to get her side of the controversy.

Peters can barely contain himself as he recounts the conversation.

"She said, 'You don't understand. If you have cartoons of a dog drinking out of the toilet and any real dogs see it ...'''

Comments

[Jeremy]

I'm a huge Jeff MacNeely fan, so it's only natural that I like Mike's stuff too, big fan of Grimm! I hope Mike doesn't mind that I incorporated him into one of my strips, but is it true that Mike started out in T.V. at a very early age?... It's amazing to me how life happens, probably because I've never had one, but thats moot!.. =) Enjoying your articles Mike, thanks a bunch!..