Barry, Ware, Groening, and Feiffer. In one room.

On November 7 I saw a conversation between the Traveling Wilburys of comics: Lynda Barry, Jules Feiffer, Matt Groening, and Chris Ware. The panel was moderated by Chicago Reader columnist Michael Miner, whom Lynda introduced as the guy you called when .

The panel, presented by the Chicago Humanities Festival, was titled The Not-So-Funny Situation of Alternative Comix, but getting these four in a room resulted in a surefire riot.

The reports so far have focused on the discussion of the downfall of alternative weeklies. It was a main topic of conversation, yes, and rightly so: each of the cartoonists got their start in alt-weeklies, and now all have quit or been dropped except for Groening, who claims that he loses money by doing his strip.

Groening said he recently called Lynda for help with a punchline for a strip, and Lynda said, “I got it!” Matt said, “What? What is it?” “Quit.”

But I feel like that ignores a central idea discussed: the love, joy, and drive to create.

What follows is by a selection of what was said, rather than a complete transcription. I wrote down what interested me most. I should note that a lot of the humor got lost in my translation.

The reason there is less transcribed from Lynda is that she largely repeated herself not only from What It Is and previous talks of hers I’ve heard recorded, but her appearance with Matt Groening at the UIC Forum two nights previous.

Some commentary by myself and others will follow these quotes and summaries. It's are presented in loose chronological order. Please pardon their incompleteness; I believe audio of the entire talk should be posted by the CHF soon.

JULES FEIFFER:

“Along the way you need to take rejection and endless contempt… You depend on luck and you depend on change. And lightning may hit, as it has hit for all of us… There’s no logic to what happened to any of us. If you try to think about it logically, you’ll go crazy. Which may help."

Feiffer said he didn’t make any money on the first eight years of his Village Voice strips.

“If this is the work,” he said, “the last thing you need to worry about is being ‘realistic.’”

”I learned from writers as much as I did cartoonists.” Feiffer also mentioned the influence of comedian Mort Sahl.

LYNDA BARRY:

“Hate’s been given a bad name… If you hated somebody, how would you murder them? I’m an axe-in-the-head kind of person. If there was somebody you hated, you all know how you'd do it, right?”

"People asked me why I moved to Chicago [years ago]. I tell them, Chicago is a place where parking is free and plentiful, and average-looking people are considered beautiful."

CHRIS WARE:

“Whenever I hear about a school shooting, I think, ‘There’s one less cartoonist…’ [People laugh] I shouldn’t have said that.”

MATT GROENING:

“There’s a disengagement you have with type-set words. You can’t take [hand lettering] at great lengths, but in small doses, it can be so personal.”

Ware reveals that he got $25 for his weekly strip, and notes that illustrators got $100. He half-joked that somehow for being a cartoonist, he was docked $75.

Matt said, “My secret was, I always insisted that I got paid as an illustrator.”

Feiffer on his wordless series of dancer drawings:

“I didn’t think I was doing dancers, I was dancing... I applied washes, and color, and made a mess of it.”

“The point was not just to do good drawings, but to keep pushing the ante and trying things, and to have a wonderful time doing it!”

CW:

“Cartoonists work in sort of a glacial time frame compared to normal people. I’ve been working on [the bee story] for seven years, but I feel like I just started working on it.”

“I draw the figures using a brush and I do the backgrounds with a pen. I want the backgrounds and the figures to appear slightly different because that’s the way I see the world.”

“I took a weekly strip just to have a deadline.”

Chris talked about how encouraging Lynda Barry was in formative years of his development, and even showed a postcard that she had sent him. (I was happy to see that Lynda's return address had been on Garfield Ave. S. in Minneapolis, and it came to Chris in Chicago. From my old adoptive hometown to my new one.)

JF:

“With the comics and the play [Little Murders], I had a message. And I wanted to make it entertaining. I didn’t want to make it a polemic. I didn’t have a message in [the dancer] drawings. The message is, ‘Whoopee!’ The message is, ‘I got away with it.’”

“You’ve got to give yourself permission. They tell you the rules are the important part, not the play, not the inspiration. And they’re out to kill you. You’ve got to not get killed.”

MG: “Well, you have to pay the rent, right? You’ve got to pay the rent, and then you’ve got the free time [to work in]…

“You may not expect to be the next Charles Schulz, but you can expect to be the next… Allen Ginsberg. Poets don’t expect to make a lot of money, but they do expect to have an audience.”

CW: “The most important thing to do is to make your art and not care about anything else.”

In response to a question about developing style: “Just see things the way you see them. And if it looks wrong, you’re probably on the right path.”

Ghost Comics contributor Lucy Knisley touches on the talk in an episode of her always-charming autobio comic, below.

The biggest writeup so far is by Todd Allen, which I found via The Beat.

My response to the reports and the talk:

The artists' view on technology may be nearing Luddite status, but who cares? Each of them are older, established artists. As Lewis Trondheim pointed out in “At Loose Ends”, aging increases calcification.

Evolution occurs out of necessity, and they don’t need to change. They have their audience already.

Yes, they could be suppler. They would benefit from it with a wider audience. But I think in their cases, their publishers may be doing a lot of that work. For example, The New Yorker posting Chris Ware’s "Unmasked" Halloween story on-line for free was great.

The necessity of changing media falls on the younger generation of cartoonists. We're the ones who can't ignore it. We won't survive without adapting. They will.

I particularly wished that something might bring Jules Feiffer to a new generation. Feiffer is fairly well known, but he is not widely read among younger comics fans. His lively, funny approach to the themes of alienation, sexual frustration, and neurosis deserves a new crop of readers. He is in many ways the cartoonist equivalent to Woody Allen, which makes sense given their similar backgrounds and the shared influence of Mort Sahl.
I don’t know what could do it. I’m thinking in terms of Roy Orbison’s late period career jumpstart thanks to Blue Velvet. Maybe a new movie based on his work could do it. Filmmaker friends and Hollywood types, I'm looking at you.

All this versus my positive reaction to the talk may prove my selective hearing.

Todd Allen says, “…You have 3 out of 4 of alt weekly comics’ biggest stars of their respective periods saying you can’t make a living at it and two of them questioning whether you should try.”

Still, I heard nothing but encouragement.

p.s. Sorry about the type and formatting fluctuation - something is going on with my blogger that I can't figure out.

Oh, and while we're on it, you know how you always really, really wanted to see Chris Ware interviewed by Fallout Boy's Pete Wentz on German MTV? Well, Christmas came early this year, babies.

Chris said it was a "pretty fun" when I asked him about it.