Saturday profile: Michael Jantze of "The Norm"

(This profile of Michael Jantze, creator of "The Norm," is part of a series I did in 2003 for the Post-Star of Glens Falls, NY. The Norm has since gone out of syndication but is available on-line in reruns.)

It's kind of like "Annie Hall."

It's like illustrated stand-up comedy.

Sometimes, it feels like jazz.

It's called "The Norm," but it's certainly not the norm for comic strips. It's thoughtful and funny and the main character doesn't look a thing like Mary Worth.

"I grew up with 'Mary Worth,' but I didn't read it," says Michael Jantze, whose strip, "The Norm," debuts on The Post-Star's comics page this morning.

There's nothing wrong with strips that tell a continuing story, however, he insists. The success of "For Better or For Worse" and other story strips proves that.

"Readers do want this stuff; they just don't want it in the old language," Jantze says.

For Jantze, the new language came not from the comics pages, but from life, or, at least, from the life of a young film major with a penchant for graphic arts.

"Woody Allen starts 'Annie Hall' by coming on screen and telling us how the movie ends! You can't do that! That's sui­cide!" Jantze marvels. "But then you watch the movie and you realize he told us the end­ing, but he didn't tell us the path, and he didn't really tell us everything about how it ends."

Jantze often begins a strip, or a series of strips, by telling you what is about to happen. "The first panel sets it up, the fourth panel.wraps it up," Jantze says.

It's not unlike the beginning of a stand-up comedy act, and that's no accident, either. "There was a show on HBO years ago called 'The Garry Shandling Show' that completely broke the fourth wall," Jantze says. "He'd just start talking to the audi­ence!"

The program came along with the stand-up comedy craze of the 1980s, and that, too, became part of "The Norm."

"Comic strips and my brand of humor just came together," Jantze says. "I can't work in the 'Peanuts' format. I'm not funny at it, and I don't know if I'd have ever gotten syndicated with that kind of strip. But nobody had tried to illustrate stand-up comedy. I love that observa­tion-based humor, but I just don't have the guts to do it in front of people." And so he does it on the comics page, in a story-telling structure that feels like jazz.

"It's the closest thing to jazz t can do," he explains. "It's dealing with themes, and you all start out at the same place and then you go off and improvise and kind of wander within that theme, and then you meet again in 12 bars, landing back where you were." A year and a half ago, Jantze wandered so far that his main character, Norm, woke up married to his closest friend, Reine. It was a unique moment in comics history, because Jantze chose to skip most of the courtship and go directly into married life.

There was something so predictable about marriage that he didn't want to drag his characters, and his readers, through a prolonged, obvious storyline simply to get to where he wanted Norm and Reine to be next.

He did work to set it up.

Norm's best friend, Ford, got married and left town, leaving Norm with nobody but his female buddy, Reine, to con­fide in.

Then he brought out Reine's issues with her parents, who worship her successful brother at the expense of their driv­en daughter.

There was a lot more to it, but never mind: It ended up with Norm and Reine married.

Then Ford got a divorce, lost some weight, grew a mus­tache and moved back to town. He had to. They needed him.

"People ask, is Norm me?" says the slim, dark-haired Jantze. "Yes, but so is Reine, so is Ford. So are all the characters. Charles Schulz told me this, that it's all in there, and it's all got to come out and what you've got to do is find the avenues for that to hap­pen."

At the moment, he says, he's closer to Ford than to Norm. "I can't imagine doing the strip without Ford," he says. "He's 40 now, and he's very aware that he's 40, and I'm 40, too, so I know what he's think­ing about."

At the same time, Ford is obsessed with his divorce, something Michael Jantze only knows about through friends. That works out, how­ever, because he can deal with Ford's divorce through Norm.

In fact, he deals with every­ thing through Norm, because it's Norm's comic strip.

"We're never away from Norm in the strip," he says. "It's something I hadn't even realized, but everything in the strip is about Norm, so it doesn't matter how many characters I have, because
you only see them in terms of Norm."

Fortunately, Norm is good to be around, Michael Jantze says.

"Things can go completely wrong for him, but at no time does he ever think he's lost," he explains. "He's that one person in life you envy who gets what he wants, even if it's not what he thought he wanted, because he accepts it on his own terms."