(This is one of a series of cartoonist profiles I did in 2003 for the Post-Star of Glens Falls, NY)
She works in space, but talks about time.
Bunny Hoest operates under very specific rules in writing "The Lockhorns." It's one panel with a set cast of two and only a very small supporting cast.
In addition, there are no word balloons, so no chance for a setup line. There is one line of dialogue each day, and it is rare that any of the bit players - Loretta's mother, the marriage counselor, the bartender, various neighbors - get to deliver that punch line.
With those restrictions, there have to be rules.
"We work with stock situations," Hoest says. "It's like building the sets for a TV show: You've got the living room, the front door, the marriage counselor's office, and, just as with a TV show, as soon as you look, you immediately know where they are. I don't have to set up the situation, and I can't. I don't have time."
The concept of time is, of course, not foreign to comic strips. Some cartoonists are masters at the set-up and delivery, but they're generally working with the luxury of three or four panels.
Bunny Hoest, however, is not complaining. She's only explaining.
And, she explains, the sense of time is conveyed even with only one panel, one punchline.
"People read themselves into the situations," she reports. "Someone will say, 'I liked that cartoon where Loretta is walking along and Leroy comes out of the shop and says ... ' and they've created a whole vignette in their heads. I did one panel, and they got it, they got the sense that first he said this and
then she said that. My readers are very smart!"
Her ability to create the payoff line that allows readers to anticipate the missing action is something of a gift. "It's just the way I think," she says.
But there is a great deal of conscious craft involved, too, much of which she traces to her late husband, Bill Hoest, with whom she created the feature more than 30 years ago.
"We were young," she recalls. "He was a freelance cartoonist, selling to magazines, and one day he said,
'You know, if I made some set characters, this could be a series."
The rules were quickly set, beginning with the fact that it would be only Leroy and Loretta, with no dog or child to diffuse the action.
The panel began in Long Island Newsday as "The Lockhorns of Levittown," but other papers quickly asked to buy it, and the name was shortened to make the setting more universal.
There are no politics in the jokes, and the characters are from the "big nose, big feet" school of clownish art, so that they don't look like anyone in particular, Hoest explains. And for all their friction, they love each other.
"They do have loving moments," she says, "mostly when they're being attacked from the outside, by the IRS or someone. And I think that's realistic: They can criticize each other, but nobody else better!"
Their faults are stock foibles: Loretta's poor driving and worse spending patterns, and Leroy's tendency to either flirt at parties or shoot off his mouth and insult the host. It's all portrayed as harmless buffoonery.
Leroy, for instance, dances, flirts and ogles the pretty girls at parties, but he is an innocent gawker, with no intention of cheating on Loretta.
And, Hoest asks, who can blame him for finding them attractive, given the way artist John Reiner draws them!
"He draws the sexiest, cutest girls in the world," she smiles. "They're not these languid Hollywood types. They look like fun!"
Reiner came to the strip shortly after Bill was diagnosed with cancer in 1986.Mad Magazine cartoonist Mort Drucker recommended the young man, who then spent two years as Hoest's understudy.
It was a labor of.love, as Bill Hoest worked through his pain to ensure that the strip he and Bunny had created together would go forward without missing a beat, and she speaks of him with deep love.
"When Bill died, I thought I'd quit, I thought I'd die.myself. It was a catastrophe," she says. "But what kept me going was the task of keeping the Lockhorns alive. Our finding John together was a miracle,
and I feel very happy to be keeping Bill's promise alive."
But she is not a grieving widow, these 14 years later, she says. She has remarried and is certainly "not to be pitied."
"I'm having a great time!" she laughs.
One panel and one punchline at a time.
Comments