Swapping Heads for Convenience and Profit, or: United Media Memories, Part 4

No chapter on how cartooning causes
a lapse into despair and madness.

My previous "weird" United Media tale concerned one of my co-workers. Today's is about one of the cartoonists whose work we syndicated.

I should begin by noting that to be a syndicated cartoonist, even if you're not a licensing machine like "Dilbert" or "Garfield," is to be in very exclusive company. Back in the mid-1990s, when I worked at United Media, I saw the contract for one of our lesser cartoonists ("lesser" not in quality but in the sheer numbers of newspapers carrying his strip) and the guy was making like 65 grand to draw funny pictures.

So it's not a bad gig, considering a cartoonist is probably getting paid for other illustration work, or whatever he's doing to fill the several hours that he's not drawing comics for United Media.



Despite this, and despite the fact that there are thousands of up-and-comers who would stab their mothers in the pancreas with a Speedball Crow Quill to be signed by a major syndicate, several of the United Media cartoonists -- and this could probably apply to some of the guys at King Features or Universal -- didn't seem to understand how lucky they were.

A not-so-small portion of my time as a member of the Comic Art Department at United Media was hounding one of our cartoonists to turn in his work, which was past deadline.

A BRIEF DIGRESSION BEFORE IT GETS CRAZY

Lynn Johnston: class act.

I write "his" because almost all of our cartoonists were male, and none of the ladies ever gave me a hassle. In fact, shortly after Lynn Johnston switched syndicates and we began running the very popular "For Better or for Worse" -- which was a huge deal, both at the company and in comic-strip-land in general -- she phoned me with a question, and this is how she began speaking to me:

"Hello, Anthony! My name is Lynn Johnston. I draw 'For Better or for Worse'..."

For someone in my position, this would be like a receptionist at St. Patrick's Cathedral picking up the phone and hearing, "Hello, my name is Benedict. I'm the pope." Lynn was so polite, and I was taken aback by her humility and overall niceness (it probably helped that she was Canadian).

There were a couple of other guys that I really liked. Robb Armstrong, who still draws Jump Start, was another nice guy, as was Guy Gilchrist, who for a while worked on the classic "Nancy" strip with his brother Brad, and who found a way to slip my name into one of the strips (it appeared in the title of a book Nancy was reading; I still have the original comic).

But I'm not here to talk about the good guys. I'm here to discuss one of the craziest.

I HOPE HE'S BETTER NOW
There was one guy, I'll call him Clark, who was a complete mess and always gave me grief. What kind of grief?

• His strips were almost always late. Ridiculously late. And we worked in an environment where deadlines were, well, important.
• When he did turn in his strips, which he would scan himself then send the electronic files over, I'd have to spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning them in Photoshop because he never waited for the Liquid Paper on them to dry and they left permanent blotches on his scanner.

Every week I'd have to call poor Clark and ask him, politely, whether and when he planned on getting his strips in. The weekly call became a bizarre exercise, because he obviously knew he was missing his deadline, which would result in my phone call, and I knew that my phone call wasn't going to make the strips magically appear.

When he'd pick up the phone, before I could say anything beyond "Hello, Clark," he'd ramble something like, "Yeah yeah I'm running late I'm sorry I'll get them to you as soon as I can please tell [your boss] that I'm sorry I'm sorry." I could picture Clark rocking in the fetal position under his drawing table among crumpled balls of paper and spilled ink.

HERE WE GO
So anyway, it was a typical week, which meant Clark was late, only he was very late. Like, the strips had to get out the door that day. Without getting into the nuts and bolts of how syndication works, it's the syndicate that distributes the comics, not your newspaper, per se, and all the comics for a particular week (we work several weeks in advance) have to go out at the same time. So we were at the point that Clark had to get his strips in within an hour, otherwise there would be blank panels or a rerun of "Apartment 3G" or something.

Clark finally sent in his strips at the 11th hour, but I noticed something very strange. His handwriting looked different, and the bodies of his characters (a family of a particular kind of forest animal) looked a little "off." I dug through our archives and my suspicion was confirmed: he had grabbed a week of comics from a few years ago, when his characters looked a little different, and he just photocopied heads from more recent strips to cover up what the obvious, because evolution of the heads was the most obvious change from the previous strips. The jokes remained exactly the same.

I brought this to the attention of my boss, a mild-mannered woman who took the integrity of the comics very seriously (and justifiably so) and became enraged in a way I'd never seen before. She asked me to leave her office and shut the door, and she phoned him immediately.

I never got to actually hear the phone call, but my boss told me later that she told Clark that we'd be running the strips because we'd run out of time but to never even consider pulling that kind of shit ever again.

EPILOGUE
Clearly, Clark was dealing with some issues beyond sending his bears to New York every week. Not long after this incident (it might have happened before, but I'm pretty sure it happened afterward), there was another Clark incident, this time making actual headlines.

Clark was also a political cartoonist — a rather successful one, in fact — for a major newspaper in the Midwest, where he lived. At some point — and I'm going to reveal the details that I can remember as accurately as I can, and you can Google this stuff if it exists on the Internet, so it's not as if I'm divulging any secrets — he was arrested for harassing and then confronting his current or ex-wife, and he threatened suicide before the incident was diffused by police as best as such an incident can be diffused by police.

[Edited later to add: I have done the Internet research to back this up, so I know I'm not imagining the incident in the previous paragraph.]

The aftermath of this was Clark having to go "on leave" and, ironically, we ran "classic" reruns of his strip for a while.

And during the time when Clark was likely at the worst time of his life, it was actually the easiest time in my own life as it related to Clark's existence in my life. Because the strips we ran during his absence were strips that had already been cleaned, edited, and published years earlier, working on Clark's strips during this time was a breeze.