Filling in for Mike Peterson while he’s on assignment in the trackless jungles of Bangalla, I’m Brian Fies.
This weekend: an extended (long!) interview with Alexis Fajardo and Justin Thompson, two cartoonists whose comic strips appear on GoComics.com. They also work together at Creative Associates, the studio that manages Charles Schulz’s Peanuts empire under Creative Director Paige Braddock. Lex is the creator of Kid Beowulf, a prequel to the epic poem that casts the future hero Beowulf and the monster he’s destined to slay, Grendel, as 12-year-old twin brothers. Justin is the creator of MythTickle, a light-hearted philosophical fantasy comic strip about dragons, knights, gods, monsters, myths and legends. We sat down to talk over a couple of pints during last Tuesday’s All-Star Game.
Justin Thompson (left) and Lex Fajardo blocking my view of the game.
Brian: What’s your origin story, Lex?
Lex: I always loved comics, always read them. My dad and I watched Looney Tunes together, so I had a great affinity for especially the Chuck Jones cartoons.
The first comic strip I think I saw was Pogo. It was an old, worn, tattered paperback that I still have a copy of. I would just sit and look at the drawings. I didn’t understand any of it, but it looked beautiful and I was always mesmerized by that. Then I distinctly remember being 8 or 9 years old and visiting a family friend, and they pulled out a copy of Asterix the Legionary. It caught the sun as he was pulling it down from the shelf, and it changed my life. I said, “I want to learn how to draw like that.”
Justin: There was a glint?
Lex: There was a glint, yeah.
Justin: Wow.
Brian: Like Excalibur or something.
So I assume you had some facility for drawing . . . ?
Lex: Not really. I just drew. I don’t think I was a particularly good artist, I just drew all the time. And then by default, people would say you were a good artist because you did it all the time.
Brian: I think that’s the key when you’re young. When you’re 12 years old, you’re not a good artist, but you’re good compared to other 12 year olds.
Lex: Yeah. For the longest time I wanted to be a syndicated cartoonist because that’s just what I read: Peanuts and the Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes. I had a high school strip, then a college strip, then I had delusions of grandeur and thought I could get syndicated after college. I did one of the very first webcomics, called Plato’s Republic. It was about a platypus called Plato and his post-graduate pals. It was Doonesbury and Bloom County combined, only without good art. So I submitted it to all the syndicates and got all the rejection letters. I did get one nice rejection letter, with positive encouragement, from Jay Kennedy.
(See last Thursday’s CSOTD for more about former King Features Syndicate Editor Jay Kennedy; Lex had no idea I’d be writing that at the time of our interview.)
I met John Marshall, who was an artist in the King Features bullpen. He did a comic strip called Walnut Grove and then moved on to Blondie. He was one of the first professionals I met who actually took me aside and was really helpful in steering me in a direction I knew I wanted to go but didn’t know how to get to.
As my artwork got better I wanted to do longer-form stories. Kid Beowulf started as a lark. A buddy of mine was doing a zine. He knew I did the classical thing, and I was re-reading Beowulf at the time because that’s what people like me did. The notion of Beowulf as a kid struck me as funny. What would that be like? So it started as a four-page mini-comic, then through trial and error and drawing and redrawing, it turned into something else.
Exciting swordplay in last Wednesday's Kid Beowulf on GoComics.com.
Life Turns on a Rat-A-Tat-Tat
Brian: Justin, what’s your origin story?
Justin: I fell on a radioactive pen.
The earliest thing I can remember glomming onto was Peanuts. When I was about 6 years old, some kids who lived near me, who were a couple of years older, were all excited because the Peanuts Halloween special was coming on. Everyone was excited because it had been 364 days since anyone had seen it, way before videotape or anything like that. TV specials were events then, you planned your life around TV Guide.
So I saw that and my world was made. That was it for me. I just wanted everything Peanuts I could get. Particularly, I zeroed in on Snoopy’s battle with the Red Baron. When he was on his doghouse and it did that 360-degree flip, I’d never seen that in any cartoon. They were just rotating the camera, but it looked so amazing to me, and then all the color changes with the rat-a-tat-tat, and the danger of when he was sneaking around in France with that incredible music playing, it all worked together to draw me right in. I was completely enamored with the World War I flying ace thing, and it actually got me interested in history. They had book clubs in elementary school and I’d order books on World War I and biplanes.
About a year ago I was in Sparky’s (Schulz’s) office, and I saw one of the same books I’d ordered, on World War I flying machines, on his shelf. I had forgotten it, really, until I saw that cover, and just like being in a TARDIS it all came zooming back.
Brian: Can you imagine how different your life would be if you’d missed that Halloween special?
Justin: Yeah, I’d probably be picking up garbage in my home town, Phoenix. Peanuts hung with me for years and years. I would try to draw the characters, and they were just so hard to draw and make them look right.
Brian: People don’t realize that. They look simple, but if you don’t get the curve of Charlie Brown’s head or Snoopy’s nose just right, it doesn’t look like them.
Justin: That’s what’s amazing about Schulz’s work. The writing, of course, was 100 percent from inside of him, but so were the pen lines. Those were all him, too. Pure authenticity, from his brain to his hand, is in that strip. It’s extraordinary.
Brian: What happened in junior high and high school?
Justin: It’s funny. In sixth grade, I had a teacher who had a bookcase, and he wanted to put a mural on the back. He asked me to draw some stuff on it, because by then I was known as “the cartoonist guy.” So I drew Charlie Brown, Lucy and Snoopy on the back of this bookcase. I’d kind of forgotten about it until a few years ago, when I was down in Havana, Cuba, painting a mural of Snoopy for the Schulz Museum, and I thought about that timeline from there to here. In sixth grade I was painting Snoopy on a bookcase in Mr. Henry’s class, and here I am at an artists' community in Havana painting on this giant wall for Peanuts. And I thought, “Boy, that’s really quite a circle there.” Those little eddies in life really mean something to me.
Justin working in Havana, photos from the Peanuts Studio blog (2013)
Brian: You have one of the coolest resumes of anybody I know. You’re an actor with an MFA in theater, you’ve done a lot of Shakespeare. Ten years as a Renaissance Faire knight and jouster. You played Batman in a theme park stunt show. It seems to me that all of that expresses itself through MythTickle, like all of what you are is in there.
Justin: I guess it’s true in a sense, I "feel" the characters moving and living when I’m drawing them in the situations. It’s easy for me to act through them as a communicator, it’s kind of like acting in that way. If you’re a cartoonist and you have a group of characters, that’s not enough now. It has to have a theme. You have to know where they are. You have to ask yourself certain questions: Do these characters like each other? Who are they? Just like when you’re acting, you have to pin everything down to specifics. Why are you there, why are you saying this at this particular time? What do you want? You have to ask these things of your characters.
Lex: Some of the earliest stuff I did, even before Plato’s Republic, was very similar to MythTickle. I had a whole pantheon of Greek gods that I played with. Mythology is something I’ve always loved.
I eventually realized that I’m not as clever and funny as I would like to be. I can’t do the kind of funny stuff that Justin can do. In my longer-form storytelling, I always veer more toward dramatic. Even though my style is cartoony, I want to tell a fun, dramatic story and then pepper it with humor.
Where Inspiration Meets Ink/Electrons
Brian: How do you make your comics?
Lex: Pretty traditionally. I write the script, then thumbnail it. I actually draw it on 11 x 14 Bristol board in blue-line pencil. I have a variety of Japanese brush pens I ink with, then I scan it and it becomes digital for lettering and whatnot.
Justin: Now I do it all on a Cintiq (digital graphic pad) because of my time constraints. But just yesterday I used an old Japanese brush pen for maybe the first time in two years, and I fell in love with it again. It does so much more than I can do with a Cintiq pen. So now I’m thinking maybe I should go back to it, because the line is so much more varied and expressive with that brush pen.
Brian: I want to talk about your books, because you’ve both self-published. There’s one volume of MythTickle . . .
Justin: Yeah, it’s a lot of early strips. It's still available. I’ve really been itching to do another one. I have about four or five long-form story arcs I’ve done over the years, and it recently dawned on me that I could take all those and make graphic novels out of them. I’ve been so focused on keeping the daily gag thing going on GoComics, I had just never thought of it.
Brian: Lex, I know there are three volumes of Kid Beowulf out, plus a teacher’s guide, which I think is fascinating. Kids are reading Kid Beowulf in schools. And you just did a Kickstarter?
Lex: For an app that just launched, "Lookin' for Lingonberries." It’s a mobile puzzle game.
Brian: So that’s your second successful Kickstarter? How’d it go?
Lex: It worked. Fundraising is tough. I get frustrated when I see people on Kickstarter who want to raise 70 grand for a book and then complain when they get $9000, which is actually really good. I think there are misconceptions about Kickstarter, and I had my own.
Brian: What do you know about Kickstarter that you wish you’d known when you started?
Lex: It’s really hard to get the message out. Communicating with your audience is very challenging. Facebook doesn’t have the penetration it once did. It’s also much more difficult because the novelty of Kickstarter has worn off. You have to keep your expectations in check and set a goal that makes sense and people are actually going to get behind.
In terms of books, I started self-publishing out of necessity but I always wanted a publisher. And I found one with Andrews McMeel, which is relaunching the first book (Kid Beowulf: The Blood-Bound Oath) in full color in August.
Brian: How’d you both get onto GoComics.com, and how’s it been for you?
Justin: I started MythTickle with (webcomics host) Comics Sherpa in 2004. Comics Sherpa is kind of like GoComics' "farm team." My strip was extremely raw, but Comics Sherpa was a site designed for tryouts, where cartoonists could come and learn, post a comic every day, get feedback, get discipline, get better. I stuck with it and learned a lot, and collected more and more readers, and I eventually got promoted to GoComics eight or nine years ago. I really knuckled down and solidified everything, and the strip became what it is. But it took years and I’m glad it did.
Brian: How’s GoComics been for you, Lex?
Lex: It’s been good. This is my second or third year. I’d started to color my black-and-white comic and wanted a place to show it off. I also knew GoComics was the syndicate arm of Andrews McMeel, and in the back of my head I thought maybe I could use that connection to get the book published, so it was also a strategic move.
The Inevitable "Working for Peanuts" Pun
Brian: What are your jobs at Creative Associates?
Justin: I’m an illustrator, and I work on touching up the daily Peanuts strip for the newspapers. The scans of the daily comic from the ‘60s aren’t too good, so we’ve got to go in there and touch ‘em up a bit. It’s kind of like art restoration without touching the originals. I did some work with the Boom comics, and I’m also a consultant on a lot of the merchandise that comes in from Japan. I go to Japan once or twice a year and talk to the licensees out there, give a presentation, basically doing some art director duties for Japan on behalf of the Schulz studio.
Lex: My title is senior editor at the studio, which means I oversee any and all Peanuts publishing. Whether it’s a strip collection or the Fantagraphics books, digital or hard copy, foreign or domestic—they come to my office.
Brian: Justin, I was looking through your old portfolio from your earlier career in a New York licensing firm, and realized I’ve seen a lot of the bedding, towels, and posters that you designed. Those Spider-Man sheets . . .
Justin: Oh yeah, that was really fun. The Spider-Man design I did was a big breakthrough for that company. They’d never done superhero products before, and they wanted to try out the Marvel licenses for bedding and bath. Now, I’d been reading Spider-Man since 1974, so I knew exactly how this bedding was supposed to look, and pleaded with them, “You must give me this!” I worked it up and they loved it, so they showed it to Marvel, which accepted the company as a licensee. It sold really well. To this day, if you go to Target or Wal-Mart and see Marvel Comics bedding, it’s from that company, and I like to believe that I started that for them.
Brian: Is that what brought you to Creative Associates?
Justin: Yeah. I saw the job listing on Craigslist after I moved out here to California--
Brian: It was a Craigslist ad?!
Justin: Just on a whim I looked, and there was this job at Charles Schulz. And all the bells rang from when I was 6 years old. They were looking for someone with a background in licensing, and I’d just done that for five years in New York. So I interviewed and got the job, mostly because I understood licensing from the other side.
What we do at Creative Associates is we’re the approvers. We approve what the licensees come up with. After about a year, I saw that we did some business with Japan so I really pushed to be involved in that because I’ve always had an affinity for Japan and Japanese culture.
Brian: Talk about Peanuts in Japan. It’s huge, right?
Justin: It’s mostly Snoopy and Woodstock. They’ll use the other characters, but usually because they’re associated with Snoopy. It’s mostly about the dog and the bird, because the experiences of childhood in Japan are very different from the experiences the American kids in Peanuts have. I suspect the popularity of Snoopy also has something to do with the simplicity of the character design. Snoopy is very simple and elegant, black and white.
When they started, they mostly used Snoopy from the ‘90s, when Snoopy was an older dog and wasn’t as expressive as he was back in his old World War I days. Y’know, he’d settled in a little bit, gotten a little thicker. He was more of a benign philosopher. The wacky stuff came from around his periphery, like from the birds. His role had shifted. That was what Japan was absorbing in the early 2000s. He had that simple, Zen, dog’s-point-of-view life. They didn't see the '60s Snoopy very much.
BOOM!
Creative Associates just wrapped up a five-year contract with publisher Boom Studios to produce Peanuts comic books and graphic novels. Together they put out 39 issues, four longer graphic novels, and one tribute book.
Brian: The people who read this site are comics fans, and the first thing they’re going to say is that Schulz didn’t want anyone else doing Peanuts after he died.
Justin: No no! You’ve got it wrong. It wasn’t that he didn’t want anybody doing Peanuts; he didn’t want anybody doing the comic strip in the daily newspaper.
Lex: He didn’t want to turn Peanuts into a legacy strip (done by replacement writers and artists), and his family didn’t want that, either.
Justin: We saw the comic books as something very different.
Lex: Even during Schulz’s lifetime, he licensed all sorts of storybooks and the Dell comic book series, and he hired illustrators to do anything that wasn’t in the strip. So we cited that as precedent.
I’ll be perfectly honest, when Boom came to us with this idea, we didn’t think we should do it. Then as we rolled the idea around and started working on the graphic novels, we didn’t want anyone else to do it. Like, if anybody’s gonna screw this up let it be us at the studio, so give it to us and we’ll do it as best we can.
Brian: Freshen it up for new generation?
Lex: Kids clearly aren’t reading Peanuts in the paper, so we thought we could produce a really good, strong comic book line for kids that would get collected in trade and sold in bookstores.
Justin: Also, we’d been saying for years that we’re supposed to be an art studio but we don’t really produce anything. Instead of just approving other people’s stuff, let’s create some art ourselves.
Lex: Boom was great for that, because 90 percent of the book was done in-house. So it gave us a chance to work with the content and flex our artistic muscles.
The Boom comics had a great run. We found some really great artists who were able to channel that spirit of Schulz and turn out great work. So it’s nice to see that body of work and know we added a little something to his legacy.
Brian: Talk about carrying the weight of the Peanuts legacy, respecting the original while doing new, relevant things with it.
Justin: Luckily, that onus is on the licensees more than us, we just decide if their usage of the characters is correct and make sure the content falls within the spirit of the strip. It’s up to them to come up with something good and interesting. Everything that’s produced around the world comes through our office for approval.
Brian: So if somebody in South Africa makes a Peanuts toothbrush, you know about it.
Justin: Absolutely. Or we’re supposed to. There’s some knock-off stuff around.
Schulz’s genius is that the strip is still universal. The things these kids think about, the way they think—Sally looking at the bricks in the schoolhouse and thinking they can talk, Charlie Brown being scared of the girl he likes—that kind of thing is still alive in children, and I don’t think it’ll ever change. The strip itself has a way of keeping things fresh.
Lex: It’s humbling and it’s an honor to be part of the studio. I remember my first day of work, driving up and saying “What the hell am I doing?” and being scared for much of the first year.
We know the value of Peanuts because we grew up with it, but our task is to introduce it to an 8-year-old who knows Adventure Time and all these other properties that have a very different type of humor than Peanuts, and help them fall in love with it the way we did.
Justin: You asked about the pressure of the legacy. I really didn’t feel that until I was called upon to do some drawing way back. We had a project with a company that wanted adaptations of some of the TV specials. And my hands were shaking so hard trying to draw those characters. I don’t know if it was because I was in that studio, or suddenly felt the weight of how important this was, but that knowledge hampered my ability. Yes, there’s a lot of pressure.
Brian: I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re physically working where Schulz worked. You’re in the same building.
Justin: And you feel that.
Back on Monday.
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