Gotta Love to Hate
The first cartoon I ever tried to copy was “Peanuts.” I traced over Charlie Brown’s simple round head thousands of times, yet–it never turned out like the original.
Then I tried a different approach. Rather than use a drawn Schulz strip as a model, I reread a few of the collections and then tried drawing Charlie Brown by memory.
The results sure weren’t classic Schulz–but I’d drawn a passable Charlie Brown.
Since I’ve begun drawing cartoons for a living, I’ve done homages and parodies of a number of other comic strips: Lynda Barry’s “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” “Fred Bassett,” “Hi and Lois,” “The Family Circus,” Tony Millionaire’s “Maakies.” Interestingly, the ones with simple lines, like Fred Bassett, were a lot harder to draw than those with a lot of crosshatching, like Millionaire’s. You’d think it would be the other way around, but it’s not.
Which brings me to http://tedrall.isfullofcrap.com. Who can argue that I’ve arrived? Once you have your own hate site devoted to the prospect that you suck, you ARE somebody.
Unfortunately, that site, which contains countless attempts to mimic my work, makes my point about the difficulty of doing parodies of cartoons drawn using simple or primitivist styles. The guy who does this site is so incapable of rendering my work that he’s been reduced to simply cutting and pasting his own (incompetently insulting) dialogue into the word balloons of my published work. That’s not parody, obviously–it’s copyright infringement.
Other better-known cartoonists, such as Art Spiegelman and Sam Henderson, have attempted to copy my style but to no avail.
Which means that, in a way, I haven’t FULLY arrived.
The problem with those failed attempts isn’t that these guys don’t know how to draw, though that may in fact be the case. Their trouble comes from hatred.
To wit: My opinion of Tony Millionaire is a negative one. Yet, I was determined to do a great parody strip–one, because he paid me to do it, and two, because it would put to rest the assumption that I can’t draw.
How’d I do?
It was so good that Millionaire dares not print it, because it would make him look bad. Hilariously he even tried to sell the original, but no one was interested. Well, duh, Tony–who wants to buy original cartoons that never appeared in print?
So, all in all I consider it a moral and fiscal victory.
If I’d been wallowing in contempt for Tony while I was drawing that “Maakies,” I would have failed miserably. Instead, I set aside that emotion and decided to enjoy the world created by his strip with a sense of total detachment. I bought a couple of his books, read them over and over. “Maakies” really is a great strip, and it’s even more fun in book form. It was in that state of mind, loving the strip I was drawing, that I did the never-to-be-published “Maakies.” Gordon Gano said something similar about the Violent Femmes’ cover of “Do You Really Wanna Hurt Me.” He started out hating Culture Club, but the more he got into rehearsing the song, the more he respected it–and the better the parody turned out.
That’s my advice to anyone looking to make fun of me, or any other cartoonist. If you really, really hate a strip and/or its artist–you’ll never pull it off. You gotta love in order to hate.
