This year's Kenosha Festival of Cartooning kicked off with a day of school and sponsor visits prior to the formal opening.
The first stop was the local NPR affiliate, where the six cartoonists had a round-table interview (counterclockwise from 5 o'clock, Mark Anderson, Jan Eliot, Bill Morrison, Darrin Bell, Ed Steckly and Mark Tatulli) with a host who, several of them later remarked, did the unusual thing of finding out what they did before he sat them all down. Here's the link to that 50-minute conversation, and I recommend it.
It being the day after the Republican debate, Darrin Bell went back to the hotel and disappeared, since you can't do editorial cartoons in advance in order to free up a few days.
Well, of course, you can, but then you don't get invited to these sorts of festivals, do you?
Mark Tatulli spent the rest of the morning at elementary schools while Bill Morrison went to middle schools, and I followed Mark, but will go with Bill today and report on him in tomorrow's posting. Schools are very much at the center of the festival, and the district's library coordinator makes sure to spread the joy by rotating speakers to different schools each year.
Tatulli has not yet reached the rock star status of Lincoln Peirce, who had encouraged him to expand his two-strip universe to add the Desmond Pucket kids' books, but he's elbowing his way through that crowded field and clearly made fans today.
Some old-school things continue to play well with audiences in new schools, and Tatulli had a masterful way of drawing any fading kids back into his presentation halfway through by whipping out an enormous Whoopie Cushion, inflating it and asking for a volunteer to come sit on it.
This not only presaged a Lio strip that would appear in the gallery show at the local U of W campus that evening ....
... but his volunteer at the second school we visited came to the opening with his mother and two siblings.
Yes, folks, it's Mark Tatulli: Building his readership one enormous fart at a time!
Lunch was at a local gift shop/deli that we had visited last year, where sponsorship is rewarded by the fact that there is enough odd-but-interesting stuff there that a couple of cartoonists will do some shopping as well as eating, and I say that as someone who walked away a year ago with enough gifts for the folks back home that Anne Morse Hambrock had to mail me a large box.
These host/sponsors also get a board with sketches by the various artists, here being perused by Tom Racine. This is a really good idea because not only are the sponsors rightfully happy to get them, but having them posted in their shops and restaurants is excellent year-round promotion for the festival.
We then went to the legendarily tacky and hilarious tux rental and weird stuff shop in town for the now-traditional horrendous-tuxedo photo with the shopkeepers. (And, yes, last year's pic is framed and up in the store's window.)
A quick stop at the local history museum -- here, Mark Anderson examines an AMC concept car that, had it been put into production, would have been the first minivan -- and then back to the hotel for a quick break before dinner.
Dinner being another place that has a sketch board posted, but since the place has been in business since 1889, it's not the only cool thing previous patrons have gifted them with. That's Jan Eliot adding to the piece, while Anne Morse-Hambrock is flanked by Tatullis.
The first formal event of the festival was at the university and combined a gallery show -- which will be up until October if you didn't make this but want to see some cool stuff anyway -- with a panel discussion of Mad magazine and the Simpsons.
The cartoonists were nearly universal in having been deeply influenced by Mad -- Ed Steckly compared his first encounter to opening the briefcast in "Pulp Fiction" --and by having to sneak that initial look at the subversive thing.
The first part didn't surprise me in the least, the second kind of did, since the first copy I ever saw was something my father brought home from a business trip when I was six or seven as a "what did you bring me?" present for his own usual gang of idiots.
But, from the point of view of inspiring future cartoonists, the thing I hadn't considered -- but that, once Darrin Bell said it and Mark Tatulli echoed it -- made perfect sense was that what they really liked was the variety of styles in each issue.
The Simpsons part of the discussion was a bit more technical -- Bill Morrison revealed that the reason Bart's hair became less spiky and more stegosaurean is that animation requires some uniformity, another of those things that makes sense once you hear it.
But Tatulli made an important point about both Mad and the Simpsons, which is that it showed him that "it's okay to be smart and funny, and to make jokes that not everybody is going to get."
Which is as important as demonstrating artistic styles.
As I've said before, the real benefit of these small festivals is the chance for real fan/artist interaction, and it took some time to get out of the building after the presentation because people wanted to chat and the cartoonists wanted to chat with them.
I saw a few things being signed, but it really was more of a cocktail party atmosphere, and that's a whole lot better than standing over somebody's table in Artist's Alley with 20 people lined up behind you waiting for their 90 seconds of contact.
Then back to John's studio for debriefing and so to bed.
More tomorrow.
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