A while ago someone told me that these days Gary Trudeau mainly just scripts the Doonesbury comicand draws only the vaguest outlines of how the characters should be positioned and colored and another artist and colorist take over from there and actually draw the comic.
Is this true?
I’ve heard the same thing about Jim Davies and Garfield. I’m pretty sure he stopped drawing his comic at least 15 yrs ago.
50 artists to draw one comic strip???
His pencil drawings (syndicate employees do the inking and lettering) look pretty tight on the rare occasions that the public gets to see them. Trudeau has stated that he submits rough sketches to the syndicate and that, to his knowledge, this is the standard procedure for most newspaper cartoonists.
For some reason I was told this about a month ago, apropos of nothing. It could be true, or it could just be a right-wing meme. Either way, there is a very long tradition of established cartoonists hiring struggling ones to draw their strips. E. C. Segar who drew Popeye was particularly notorious for this.
Yeah, I mentioned this earlier, but I went to Indiana to install a 3D modeling and animation system for PAWS. Never met Davis, as I was just working for the guy I was training.
Later, I was working for Hallmark Cards, and they had a deal with Charles Schultz, and as far as I know, he never drew a single one of the Peanuts cards. I wish I had gotten a copy of their Schultz fonts, which were the most complicated fonts I have ever seen, with something like a dozen variations of the lower-case e, and very complex rules about which one followed which letter.
I don’t know specifically about Trudeau but my understanding is it’s very common for the creators of regular comic strips to have assistants who do part of the work of producing the strip.
That may be true for Hallmark cards. But I’ve read that Schulz (no t) was unusual in not using any assistants to make his comic strip. He wrote all the dialogue himself and did all the art single-handed.
It actually said nearly fifty artist and licensing administrators. So it might only be eighteen artists and thirty licensing administrators. And of the artists, maybe only four work on the comic strip and the other fourteen do the art for things like Garfield coffee mugs and t-shirts.
Even more notorious was Ham Fisherwith Joe Palooka. Read how the feud with Al Capp played out, especially the “Retaliation” section.
But many comic strips artists have used assistants (Charles Schulz was notable in that he did everything himself).
According to wikipedia:
In fact there’s a whole book on the topic:
They may have had a font to typeset the lettering on cards, but I have read that Schulz required all licensed Peanuts products to use his own art. His drawings got noticeably shakier as he aged and that unique line quality is quite obvious on reproduced images that were enlarged from original drawings.
Wow. So being a cartoonist is an even bigger skive than it seems.
For some maybe.
“Charles M. Schulz created a total of 17,897 Peanuts strips of which there are 15,391 daily strips and 2,506 Sunday strips.” --From here: Charles Schulz Museum
Mort Walker and Dik Browne worked together creating a number of different strips that their children have carried on. Things were written and drawn in collaboration, but they produced one heck of a lot of work.
I didn’t know Segar used anyone but Bud Sagendorf.
A little OT: the Wiki page in your link includes the following sentence: “The screenplay by Jules Feiffer was based directly on Gelman’s Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye the Sailor, a hardcover reprint collection of 1936-37 Segar strips published in 1971 by Nostalgia Press.” Now I’ve got the entire run of Segar’s Popeye in reprint form, and there is nothing resembling Feiffer’s abortion in it.:dubious: