Lee Salem, "Universal Press Syndicate" editor: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2

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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: We talked about “The Boondocks” a minute ago, but do you think that Aaron McGruder will ever return, and what was the last you heard about this?

LEE SALEM: I know he is enamored of the whole Hollywood sensibility and the opportunities of Hollywood. I think he thinks that he can do a bit more creatively with animation, and I certainly understand that. I think that there are certain personality/creative types who are drawn to what comic strips can do whether on a newspaper page or the web, but I think other sensibilities respond to animation. I think Aaron’s talents are shown on a television show, and I doubt very much if he will return to the confines of a three or four panel a day strip.

ANDELMAN: Have you ever thought what it is that might be different about the culture at Universal compared to other syndicates, that, you have had these brilliant strips, these very unique strips, whether it be “Far Side” or “Calvin and Hobbes,” “Boondocks,” even “Doonesbury,” which has taken some long breaks? You don’t hear these same kinds of things happening at other syndicates. I mean, we never heard about Fred Laswell taking a year off from “Snuffy Smith,” for example, or giving up a popular strip like “The Boondocks.” Why does it seem to happen at Universal whereas we don’t hear about it from other syndicates?

SALEM: Well, the owners here asked me the same question with a slightly different tone in it: “Why is that happening to us all the time?” I think when the company was founded by John McMeel, who is now the CEO, and Jim Andrews, who ran the editorial side and, alas, died in 1980, I think they wanted to do things a little differently, and even in a very conservative medium like the comic page, tried to push out the boundaries a bit, and I think that is the flip side of the coin of being attracted to talents who are somewhat exotic and eccentric in the way they approach the art form. Garry, I think, really was the cornerstone of the editorial viewpoint that we had developed. We like people who try to do things a little differently, and sometimes that entails a slightly different attitude toward the definition of a career. You’re right. There are other cartoonists, and they are legion, who wouldn’t think about taking time off. I think when we announced a vacation program for our cartoonists, Charles Schulz was quoted as saying, “Well, I love this job; why would I ever want to take a vacation from it?” But I am not in a position to judge another person’s creative wellspring, and if our cartoonists sometimes think they need some time off, then we are going to try to accommodate them within certain limits. I think it’s the responsible thing to do for the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and I think if we had not had a time-off policy for someone like Trudeau, I think he would have given up the drawing board a long time ago.





ANDELMAN: Do you think that Universal has kind of looser reins on its artists than maybe others do?

SALEM: Yeah, that’s one way to describe it. Editorially, we are involved quite a bit. We spend a lot of time up front working with cartoonists on characters and development and trying to come up with a common understanding of where the strip might go in the future. I think that we have a reputation for standing with our artists. I think that’s a good thing more often than not, and I think that the artists respect us and like us for standing with them when they try to do something that is perhaps frowned upon by some newspapers. But in terms of loose reins, I am not sure if I would describe that, because we believe in the creative process, and we believe that the cartoonists, once they have developed a relationship with their readers, have a right to try certain things, and maybe it’s not so much a question of tight or loose reins but a different approach to creativity and how that is going to be reflected in the marketplace.

ANDELMAN: Lee, as you look back, if you would look back on Lynn Johnston’s separation from Universal, is there anything you wish you had done differently? And the reason I ask that is that was a tough time to lose a strip that had, I think, 1,800 clients, given that you had just lost, I think, within a period of time Watterson, Larson, and Erma Bombeck had died on the column side.

SALEM: Yeah, that was in a relatively short space of three years or so, and those are four people who left us for different reasons. Yeah, looking back, I am sure that there are things we could have done in our relationship with Lynn that would have encouraged her to renew with us. She decided she wanted to try something else, and we always know that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, and in this case, it wasn’t as green as perhaps she thought it was. It wasn’t too long into it before she called and tried to renew the relationship, and when the opportunity afforded itself contractually, she came back to us.

ANDELMAN: In terms of, and we should include her in the group we were talking about a little while ago about the kind of looseness of taking time off, who came up with the new plan where some strips will kind of repeat, and it’s going to be not fresh every day, or maybe you would want to describe that differently?

SALEM: Well, she has a very able team who works with her on different aspects of the strip and also assists her with licensing and other areas, and I think that in discussions up there, they kind of were moving toward this approach to the strip, and when it was presented to us, we talked about it and had some input here and some input there, but to us, it seemed like a nice midway point between either full retirement or keeping up with the daily grind of deadlines. So we are looking forward to seeing what happens, because I think it will be a blend of old and new, and I think it will be something a little different in the market. It won’t be strict reruns as such, and I think she is going to take some creative steps that this particular approach will allow her. I think it’s going to be good for newspapers and good for fans in newspapers and probably good for the strip.

ANDELMAN: And when will that start?

SALEM: Late September.

ANDELMAN: Okay. Let’s come back to “Cathy” for a moment. I was reading something that interested me. Cathy Guisewite had said that she was originally encouraged by her mother to become a cartoonist, that her mother went to the library, made up a list of syndicate editors to whom her daughter, who was kind of hesitant, should submit her admittedly maybe primitive drawings, and the first name on the list was you. Do you remember that package?

SALEM: I still have that package.

ANDELMAN: Oh, you do?

SALEM: I remember it very well. When I retire, it will be on eBay. It was one of those things, it was addressed to Jim Andrews, whom I have already mentioned, and at that time, the submissions came in to me, and it ended up at the top of my “In” box, and just by fluke, I just grabbed it and immediately loved the writing, and I put a little note on it saying, “I really love this writing, but the art…?” And it went to my out box, and that same day it ended up in the top of Jim’s in box, and he just happened to grab it, and we had a contract out to her the same day. And that’s what’s fun about this business is that things like that can happen. It’s still a great forum for Cinderella stories, and there is a talent out there yet who could send something in and six months later be in a hundred papers and a year from now be in 300 or 400 papers. It can happen that quickly, so it’s still a lot of fun, and that’s what keeps us going.

ANDELMAN: Which is more important, though, the art or the story-telling?

SALEM: Well, I think the times have shifted. People like Garry Trudeau and Cathy Guisewite, even some of the early Larson, the art was criticized by more established or more finished artists, but I think in those cases, the writing really kept things going until the art could catch up to the writing. I think now that we have been through that period of thirty, thirty-five years, "Dilbert" is another good example, I think that given readers’ habits and what newspapers are looking for, good writing will prevail over good art. I think it’s easier to sell good writing with less good art than it is to sell good art with less good writing.





ANDELMAN: I think I know the answer to this next question, but I am going to ask you any way. Cathy appears in easily more than a 1,000 newspapers, but it doesn’t get the same respect that some of your other strips do. As a matter of fact, it is often ridiculed in other strips. How do you explain its enduring popularity?

SALEM: Well, I think it is in some ways an iconic strip. I mentioned before that I thought in some ways she was a pioneer in this industry, and outside of “Brenda Starr,” which wasn’t really a humorous strip, and one or two earlier attempts, there really was not much in the comics pages for or by women in 1976, and this was the year in which, I may be off a year or two, but I think women were the people of the year at Time magazine. We were kind of waking up to the fact that half of our population really wasn’t being given opportunities the way they should be given, and I think “Cathy” was perceived as an example of that at that particular point. I think within a year and a half or two years of syndication, she had been invited to the White House and was involved in efforts for the Equal Rights Amendment, and I think that her long-time readers have come to accept that part of what she did for the art form and for newspapers. I think more recent readers look at the strip a little differently in terms of the small world in many ways that “Cathy” inhabits, but the writing has been consistent over the years, as has the art, and I think people have just come to accept what it is. You’re right. Some of her fellow cartoonists sometimes make fun of her style or the way she sets up jokes or the themes that she explores, but what’s interesting, I think two springs ago, she was honored by the National Cartoonists’ Society, and some of those very same cartoonists who might on occasion ridicule the strip were the first ones in line to shake her hand and give her a hug and ask for her autograph.

ANDELMAN: You have mentioned Cathy Guisewite as one of the first female cartoonists doing a daily and female-centered strip that really hit it big and then also seeking out an African American-based strip in “The Boondocks,” I recall that “For Better or For Worse” got you guys in some hot water at one point when -- is it Lawrence? -- who turned up gay? Are there any gay strips coming? Should there be?

SALEM: I haven’t seen any. I think that if that’s going to work, it would be less because it’s a gay strip than it is because it is a strip with characters, one or two of whom happen to be gay, if you see the emphasis difference there, but who knows? It would depend a lot on the writing and the sense of humor that the artist might employ.

ANDELMAN: It would be a lot trickier, I bet, to get that on the daily newspaper pitch. If you could point comics fans to one largely undiscovered Universal strip, what would it be?

SALEM: Oh, gosh, there are too many people that… I am looking at my wall. One of my favorites is from a panel we do, and the answer shows a guy standing there on the phone, and he goes, “Uh oh,” and the caption is reading… wait, it’s way across the wall… the caption says, “You find out that you are responsible for things you never knew you were responsible for,” and that’s the kind of humor that I particularly like. You are going to have to edit this. I am blanking out on the title of the panel.

ANDELMAN: I like that, actually.

SALEM: It will come to me before the interview is over.

ANDELMAN: All right. And if it doesn’t, you can tell me later, and I will add it in. Now, what strips distributed by your competitors would you like to have had a Universal?

SALEM: You know, I spend more http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.giftime thinking about what we’re doing and less about what the competitors are doing, so I am not really sure how to answer that. Obviously, any syndicate executive would have loved to have “Dilbert” before it took off the way it did, and there are other strips that are making a mark, like “Pearls Before Swine” and “Get Fuzzy.” But you know, I just finished reading a book called April 1865, which is about the last month of the Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln, and there is a scene in which Grant is talking to his generals, and he said, “Lee, Lee, I am tired to hearing about General Lee. What are we going to do?” And that’s kind of like the way I look at it. I worry less about the other syndicates are doing than what we ourselves are doing.

ANDELMAN: Well, let me ask you in a slightly different way, and you already mentioned…

SALEM: “Real Life Adventures,” by the way. It suddenly came to me.

ANDELMAN: That’s it, “Real Life Adventures.”

SALEM: “Real Life Adventures” is one of my favorite panels.

ANDELMAN: Okay. Now, Will Eisner used to tell a story about rejecting “Superman” when Siegel and Shuster were shopping it to New York publishers in the last 1930s. Do you have any similar stories of missed opportunities? You kind of referred a little while ago to “Dilbert.” I wondered if that might be one.

SALEM: I don’t know whether we saw “Dilbert.” We did see “Bloom County” early on, and he signed with the Washington Post Writer’s Group. The story’s here that somebody may have seen “Garfield” way back when, but I can’t confirm that one. It’s a small enough industry with only half a dozen or so major players that it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw one or two others that were picked up by the syndicates and did very well, and vice-versa. It happens in this business a lot, maybe not a lot, but it happens enough so that syndicate editors who are in charge of acquisitions are certainly aware that it’s a problem, and we try to be sure to look at things quickly when they come in.

ANDELMAN: How many submissions a year at this point?

SALEM: We get roughly fifty or sixty a week, so that’s 3,000 or so a year. Not all comics, of course, but a mix of things, puzzles and columns, etc., but everything has to be looked at to be sure that it’s something that we can use or not use.

ANDELMAN: I imagine you might have some good stories, but to what lengths have creators gone to get noticed by you and Universal?

SALEM: Well, there are some who just knock on the door and say, here I am, and sometimes we can see them, sometimes we can’t, depending on what’s going on. I do remember one person had a strip set on a tropical island. I forget the details of it, but for a week we were getting coconuts in the mail in advance. We would open this coconut and no note, no anything, and then maybe the third day there was a note, and by the fifth day, it was like, coming soon, and then we finally got the submission, so that was a creative way to do it, and we looked at it, but there wasn’t something we thought we could do much with. But I think people rely too much on fancy packaging and less on writing and art in the original material, and that’s the one thing I would encourage people interested in the art form, is to spend time on the writing, spend time on the art work, and then don’t worry about the quality of the package. Assume that the editors are going to do their job and read the material.

ANDELMAN: Lee, before we wind up, just a couple more things. Universal, of course, distributes far more than comic strips. It was the home of Erma Bombeck, it distributed my pal Chuck Shepherd’s popular “News of the Weird” feature, and it’s the home of conservative columnist Ann Coulter. Are there any internal conflicts being the distributor of political properties as diverse as Garry Trudeau and Aaron McGruder and Ann Coulter?

SALEM: Not so much conflicts. It’s interesting you would mention Ann Coulter and Aaron McGruder, because at one time, the same editor handled both, and I think he suffered from political whiplash if he had a week of “The Boondocks” come in the same day as a column by Ann Coulter, say. I think that newspapers and readers understand that syndicates are in the business to disseminate entertainment and disseminate ideas and disseminate discussion, and it would not do this company any good, nor do I think it would do newspapers any good, for us to come have a strong ideological viewpoint, personal strong ideological viewpoint that we try to purvey in the newspapers.

ANDELMAN: And I know that Universal has had some events, I guess the 25th or 30th anniversary, have those three ever been in the room together?

SALEM: No.

ANDELMAN: Okay. All right. I realize that Aaron, of course, is not doing “The Boondocks.” Is it still running in some places?

SALEM: We make it available online and in print for foreign newspapers.

ANDELMAN: Which of the three, Trudeau, McGruder, or Coulter, has caused you more sleepless nights or phone calls from nervous editors?

SALEM: Well, all three have presented a variety of problems, but I would have to put Garry Trudeau at the top of the list, only because that’s about as close as we ever came to getting sued. He did a week on Frank Sinatra receiving the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor that an individual can receive, and he did a week on Sinatra, just a blistering week, with alleged Mafia ties, etc., etc., and we had lawyered it inside, out, and backwards, and but that didn’t stop Sinatra and his lawyers, and we had some exchange of mail, and I really thought that this could be it, this could be the test of the First Amendment, but finally Sinatra’s lawyers backed off, but it was touch and go and our lawyers in the situation were terrific. The people we got problems from, of course, was the insurance company.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Mark Tatulli, LIO, HEART OF THE CITY cartoonist: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2

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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA:I have read where you have compared LIO to the character that Haley Joel Osment played in The Sixth Sense in that LIO’s world is real. I mean, that is his world, but is he the only one in his world who kind of lives and functions the way he does, surrounded by the monsters and the robots and animals and aliens?

MARK TATULLI:Yeah, I think he is the most at peace with it. In others, people just don’t see those things, you know, they are kind of walking by, or they happen to have their back turned to the situation. It’s kind of like, it’s his reality is just not acknowledged by other people. But they are there, and sometimes, it finds its way into other people’s worlds, too, but for the most part, we go on with our adult lives not seeing the things that kids are just deathly afraid of.

ANDELMAN:And you know, I apologize for even asking you to go behind the scenes and talk about some of these things, because I know, if you talk to a comedian, the last thing a comedian wants to do is dissect a joke, but LIO is still so new to so many people, and we haven’t had it for years and years yet, so it helps, I think, to explain a little bit. How do you keep it fresh day after day, and how long have you been doing it now?

TATULLI:Well, let’s see. It launched in newspapers last May, that would be May 2006. I originally pitched the strip to my syndicate in May 2005, so since May 2005, I have been basically writing and drawing, so like I said, it didn’t hit papers until last May, but the time between when I pitched it and when it actually hit the papers, I had to do a lot of writing and drawing, find out how I actually wanted to draw it and how I wanted the tone to be. So I have been drawing it I would say, honestly, almost two years.

ANDELMAN:It is still exciting to wake up to, or is it becoming work?

TATULLI:Oh no, it’s great only because, I would say mostly because there are no rules, and so every day, I can do something different, I can take it to a new place. It is always a surprise to me, and it’s an amazing, amazing thing to have a job as a syndicated cartoonist. I couldn’t be happier, I will tell you. I don’t know what I would do with myself if I weren’t doing this.

ANDELMAN:Now, you have done other things, right?

TATULLI:Yes.

ANDELMAN:What else have you done besides Heart of the City?

TATULLI:I started working in the film business when I was 19. I worked in every aspect of production. I did shooting, I did directing, I did editing, and then film segued into video, and then I made my way into 3-D animation and that kind of stuff and doing graphic commercials and television shows, and I also was a post-producer for a bunch of different reality television shows. But always on the side, I did comics.

ANDELMAN:So, it’s interesting that a lot of comic strip artists, I mean, they start doing it from their early twenties, and they haven’t really done much of anything else, and you are coming at it a little bit differently. You have worked in these other media. You have that exposure and that familiarity.

TATULLI:Yeah, I would say the majority of cartoonists that are syndicated have other things to do or still do. I would say that once they get lucky and come out of the chute with a syndicated comic, I would say that is the exception rather than the rule.



ANDELMAN:Do you have children?

TATULLI:Yes.

ANDELMAN:You do. What do you have?

TATULLI:I have three kids. Their ages are, my oldest is seventeen, my middle child, daughter, is fifteen, and my youngest is twelve, soon to be thirteen.

ANDELMAN:An endless source of inspiration, I guess.

TATULLI:Yeah, well, they’re not as weird as I am, though.

ANDELMAN:How do they respond, because this is such a different strip from Heart of the City? How did they respond when they first started seeing LIO? Were they surprised what was coming out of Dad’s mind?

TATULLI:Oh, no, they know I am bizarre. They were wondering what took so long. This is just a side of my personality that just never made it into Heart of the City. I mean, sometimes it did, and you will still see samples of it in Heart of the City, but Heart of the City is a completely different strip from this, which is the only way I can do two comic strips, because I sit down and I write Heart, and it’s in a completely different way, and then when I sit down and write LIO, it’s like I have turned the switch completely 180 degrees the other direction, and that’s the only way I could do it. I’m telling you, I couldn’t do two strip-driven comics, because I think that the dialogue would just be too similar.

ANDELMAN:How many papers is Heart in?

TATULLI:Heart is in about a hundred papers.

ANDELMAN:Okay. Now, were you able to make a living off of Heart before you started LIO? And now that you have the two strips, Heart’s in a hundred, LIO is in about two-fifty or so, is it safe to assume you are making your living off this full-time now?

TATULLI:Yes. Yes, that’s what I do full-time, comic-stripping. I never bathe, I wear the same clothes all the time, all I do is draw, draw, draw.

ANDELMAN:Have you gotten to the point where you have had to bring on an assistant to help with this?

TATULLI:No. I couldn’t imagine somebody working for me. I can barely stand it. I think that, oh yeah, I might be better if I pull somebody in to do inking on or something like that, but then I realize, I am such a control freak, which is the whole reason I do comics for a living, I have complete control over these people’s worlds, and they don’t complain. But I think that I would end up putting just as much work in standing over somebody’s shoulder while they do it, so I don’t think that’s a good idea. And I love it. I love it.

ANDELMAN:What do you think it is that was so different about Heart and LIO? I mean, Heart, a hundred papers is respectable, but as you say, you can’t earn a full-time living from that, and then LIO comes along, and inside of a year, I mean, it’s just exploded. What do you think that you learned from doing Heart, or why did one explode and one is just more of a modest….?

TATULLI:I don’t know. That’s the great unknown. I mean, if we knew that, we could all do it. You could sit down and do it, and the guy across the street could do it. I mean, you just don’t know. What you have to do is just be truthful to yourself and write what you know, you heard it a million times, and you throw it out there and hope it works. You can’t over-think this stuff too much, or you can’t say, ‘Oh, well, what does the market need?’ because it doesn’t work. That always fails. Well, maybe not always, but you know, it’s really, really difficult in the comic strip business to streamline a comic strip to what you think the market wants. What I wanted to do, like I said, was sit down and bring something that I felt was different to the comics pages, something we haven’t seen in a while with a pantomime strip and something with a little bit of a darker edge. Pantomime strips are generally really, really soft, conservative gags, and this one is not that, and so I just thought it would be different.

ANDELMAN:Now, two of my favorite LIOs to date, I think they were both Sundays, one was the appearance by the boys from The Boondocks, “There goes the neighborhood,” where LIO’s family, the moving truck backs up….

TATULLI:”There goes the ‘hood.”

ANDELMAN:”There goes the ‘hood,” I’m sorry. Thank you. And then the one, you will have to help me with this, because I don’t have a stack of them in front of me, but it was also a Sunday strip, and I think LIO was using a spy scope to like peek into another strip. Was that the one that was turned sideways?

TATULLI:Yeah. Actually, I do occasionally draw a Sunday sideways, another little quirkiness to LIO, only because I get in my mind this vision of somebody in their house having to turn their entire comics page sideways, and it gives me like a feeling of power. I just feel that the layout, some strips lay out better that way, and why not?

ANDELMAN:And the moving truck. I think, anyway, you tell me if I’m wrong, it seems like you are definitely one of the artists who has benefited from The Boondocks taking either semi- or permanent retirement.

TATULLI:And Foxtrot.

ANDELMAN:And Foxtrot, right, going from seven days to one. Did you hear anything from anyone in the business about The Boondocks showing up? It was just so spot-on.

TATULLI:No. Aaron McGruder is off doing his Hollywood thing. I don’t think he talks to anybody. I think he is just totally wrapped up in doing his show, so I doubt that he even saw it. I mean, somebody may have shown it to him, but you know, I didn’t hear anything from him. Like I said, that’s a whole other world, that Hollywood thing, and it’s very, very consuming, so….

ANDELMAN:You have done other character crossovers. I am thinking of Mary Worth in particular. That had me on the floor. Have you had feedback from other artists whose characters…

TATULLI:I had put Mark Trail in one of my strips. LIO was playing with a box of mice, and one of the mice chewed through the corner of the panel on its way over to Mark Trail’s panel, and Mark Trail is up on the chair screaming, holding his pants up, classic in that “I’m afraid of mice pose,” and I got a contact from actually the guy that draws Mark Trail, I am not familiar with his name right now, but his accountant contacted me and wanted a copy of that. Actually, I am going to send him the original, I just haven’t done it yet I am so busy. That’s on my list of things to do. I also heard from Jeff Keane when I had done a knock-off on Family Circus. You know, little Billy does that thing where he runs all over the place, and there is a little beeline behind him…

ANDELMAN:Leaving the footprints, right.

TATULLI:He had made his way over to LIO, and LIO packed him up in a box and was shipping him off to the home for wayward boys. And he wrote to me.



ANDELMAN:Two other more modern strips, Get Fuzzy, and Pearls Before Swine, frequently break that wall crossing into other strips. Is there a danger at any point of there being too much of that? I never get tired of it.

TATULLI:Yes, I agree with you. Yes, it can be overdone, and I have been kind of stepping back from that a little bit. First of all, it’s not a bottomless pit. You can only do so many comic strips, and you can’t do comic strips that are unknown to the general public, so there is like a handful of comic strips that you can rip on, but yes, I try not to go to the well too often.

ANDELMAN:For some reason, I am drawing a blank. I had interviewed Patrick, the fellow who does Mutts…

TATULLI:Patrick McDonnell.

ANDELMAN:Patrick McDonnell, for a biography of Will Eisner two or three years ago, and he was telling me that his Sunday strip is pretty much always a tip o’ the hat to some artist or some other strip but not in the same way that you and …..

TATULLI:Yeah. He has what they call a throwaway panel that they use as a space filler, and he always gives a nod to some artist, not necessarily always a comic strip artist, but of some artist in that first panel where you would see the panel Mutts.

ANDELMAN:Right.

TATULLI:That’s more of an homage.

ANDELMAN:How do you feel about, I have heard this from several artists over the years, and it’s no big secret that there is a younger generation of artists that is not real happy about how some of these older strips are being kept alive on life support, and they keep eating up space on these newspaper pages that continues to shrink. Do you have any thoughts on that yourself as someone who has two strips and one particularly on the rise?

TATULLI:Ummm, how do I feel about, you mean, dead cartoonists’ strips?

ANDELMAN:Yeah, basically, yeah.

TATULLI:Well, you know, if they want to quit, that’s okay with me. As long as the reading public wants to see it, what are you going to do? I mean, syndication is a business, and as long as the newspapers are willing to pay for them, there is not much you can do about it, and if the reading public wants to see them, what are you going to do? I mean, I wouldn’t pass on my comics to anybody, because I don’t think that anybody can do it. They are not those kinds of strips. They are very, very much mired in my personality, so I don’t think… I mean, they could do it, but I don’t think it would be the same thing, but you know, like I said, syndication is a business, and as long as the newspapers are willing to pay for it and the readers want to read the older strips, then that’s just the way it is. You know, you find a way around it, and that’s, I think, giving newspaper something they want to print more.

ANDELMAN:I guess it was Berkeley Breathed who was the first to really speak out against, well, in favor of having the dead cartoonists’ strips be pushed out of the way, but the thing that I always felt, up until just the last couple of years, was there hadn’t been enough strips that had really come forward to make the case that these should replace the older ones. You know, there have been a lot of strips…

TATULLI: It’s been moot. What’s the point of complaining about it? First of all, nobody listens to cartoonists anyway. We can rip on them in our own strips, and people will agree with us and so forth, but that’s about all you can do. I mean, newspaper editors are going to do what they want, and the syndicates are going to continue to syndicate dead cartoonists’ strips and repeat strips.

ANDELMAN:Right, but I mean, the way I look at it, anyway, there’s this generation in the last, oh, I don’t know, five years, let’s say, there’s LIO, Pearls, Get Fuzzy -- Mutts goes back a little further. Some of these strips, they are as revolutionary in some ways as Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes were at a period of time, but there really hadn’t been much in between that made you say, “Oh, I gotta just push all this out of the way and take up this new stuff.” But now, it seems like there has been some really fresh work being done.

TATULLI:Yeah, I agree, and I think that Pearls Before Swine is certainly an example of that and other strips that… And they are doing well. The new strips are doing well. It’s slow, but sure, that’s just… The fact that I have gotten 250 newspapers so quickly is just really an oddity within the business. It’s luck, it’s timing, it’s having a decent strip, the fact that two major players quit, and you have to give a tip of the hat to Bill Amend. I mean, he could have run repeats. He could have said, “Let’s go back to start with Foxtrot,” and newspapers would have bought it, and I am not saying that all the newspapers would have run it, but certainly a large amount of his list would have stayed, but he didn’t want to do that. I certainly benefited from that. I think he is to be commended for that.

ANDELMAN:Now, some of the guys who created some of the bigger strips of the last twenty years, The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes and Doonesbury, I mean, they have struggled with a couple of things over time. They struggled with the demand to be fresh all the time, and they have taken sabbaticals and ultimately, in the case of Watterson and Larson, have given up entirely, Trudeau always every so often takes a long sabbatical, and then they have also dealt with the demands to commercialize their products, which Trudeau’s has probably given in a little more on than the other two, you seem to be on this arc, this upward swing. Have you thought, as things, opportunities might come along, what you are willing to do and what you are not with LIO?

TATULLI:Oh… I just want to turn the best possible strip that I can. I am worried about building my list and maintaining it.

ANDELMAN:I did see where you were asked, I guess in a syndicate interview, about how you would feel about maybe LIO translating to like an animated series, and you have that film and video experience, so I would almost guess it would be almost disingenuous for you to say it hadn’t crossed your mind.

TATULLI:Oh, I mean, it crossed my mind, but that was not how I designed the strip. Aaron McGruder will tell you that when he designed his strip, it was always with animation in mind. That was his ultimate goal. My goal is to do a comic strip, and if it can segue into television or movies or whatever or Internet pieces or cell phone animations, that’s fine. I will cross that bridge when I come to it, but that was not how this strip was designed. It was designed to be just a strip, but that’s not to say I wouldn’t consider anything that came down the pike. That’s still not where my head is right now.



ANDELMAN:And last question, when we will see the first collection of LIO?

TATULLI:I am working on the book cover right now, and that’s due at the end of January. I really have to sit down and do that. The first collection probably won’t be out until October of this year.

ANDELMAN:Oh, great. Do you have a title?

TATULLI:Or maybe the end of the summer, I am not sure. Tentatively, I do have a title. It’s called LIO Stage One: Happiness is a Squishy Cephalopod. I have to figure out a cover. A cephalopod, of course, is an octopus or a squid or any other many-legged sea creature.

ANDELMAN:A creature that frequently appears in the strip.

TATULLI:Right.

ANDELMAN:Oh, I have to ask…

TATULLI:That, of course, is a play on the best-selling book by Charles Schultz, called Happiness is a Warm Puppy.

ANDELMAN:I’m sorry, I lied. I have one last question. Why is the character’s name spelled L-I-O? It always seems to be in upper case, as well.

TATULLI:I just like the name Leo. I wanted something short and sweet and just clean because that’s the nature of the strip. There is no dialogue, so I didn’t want to have a clunky name. It just was a short name. I got the name Leo from a couple of different sources, actually. One of the creators of the atomic weapon, one of the inventors was named Leo, and actually, there is this… Have you heard of cartoonist Edward Gorey?

ANDELMAN:Yeah, sure.

TATULLI: He had this thing called “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” like a poem.

ANDELMAN:I don’t know that.

TATULLI:Okay. Well, it will go through the alphabet, and he says, “‘A’ is for Amy, who fell down the stairs, ‘B’ is for Basil, assaulted by bears, ‘C’ is for Carla, who wasted away, ‘D’ is for Desmond, thrown out of the sleigh,” and it just shows these illustrations of kids being killed a whole bunch of different ways. But there is “‘L’ is for Leo” in here, it’s “’L’ is for Leo, who swallowed some tacks,’ and that cinched it for me. If Edward Gorey can use Leo, so can I, but I chose a different spelling only because I think it sets it apart, and it has almost like a foreign look to it. And the whole concept is pretty foreign to comics pages.

ANDELMAN:It’s very European in a lot of ways.

TATULLI:Well, yeah, it’s odd.

ANDELMAN:Yeah, okay, it’s odd.

TATULLI:Definitely odd. I try not to be Zippy the Pinhead odd, because I think that that is over the top, but I am sure there are a number of strips that strike people as being over the top.

ANDELMAN:I just want it on record that I said European and you said odd. That’s all. I don’t want to be blamed for odd or suggesting that Europeans are odd. Mark Tatulli, thank you so much for participating in this Mr. Media interview. We appreciate your time and look forward to many, many years of great LIO strips.

TATULLI:Oh, well, thank you very much. I hope so, too.

ANDELMAN:Thank you.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Lee Salem, "Universal Press Syndicate" editor: Mr. Media Interview

Lee Salem is a guy I’ve admired for many, many years. As the president and editor of Universal Press Syndicate, he is the man responsible for recognizing a slew of creative talent that impacted American pop culture over the last 30-plus years. The origins of Garry Trudeau and “Doonesbury,” Gary Larson and “The Far Side,” Bill Watterson and “Calvin and Hobbes,” Lynn Johnston and “For Better or Worse” and Cathy Guisewite and “Cathy,” all can be traced back to the man I’m about to interview.

I had my own up-close and personal moment with Lee Salem. Mr. Media was originally a weekly syndicated column, one distributed by Universal Press Syndicate from July 1996 to May 1998. I remember my first email from Lee, suggesting Universal was interested in distributing the column, which until then had been self-syndicated. He even invited me out to Kansas City, where I met a half-dozen people – including Sue Roush, Bill Mitchell and Darrell Coleman - who I stayed friendly with for many years to come.

And on that trip, seeing how awed I was by whom I was with and my surroundings, Lee jokingly invited me to take a spin in his office chair. Who could resist? Would a political junkie refuse the chance to sit in the President’s chair at the Oval Office? Would a Trekkie turn down the opportunity to take the con from Captain Kirk? It was a pretty cool ride for a guy who dubbed himself “Mr. Media.”

I like Lee a lot and respect him even more. And when I decided to restart Mr. Media as an online feature, Lee Salem was at the top of the list of people I wanted to interview.


BOB ANDELMAN: Lee, thanks for taking the time to do this.

LEE SALEM: I enjoy it.

ANDELMAN: Not a bad introduction, huh?

SALEM: Pretty good.

ANDELMAN: Let’s start by playing a game of first impressions. Tell me what you remember, the first thing you remember about these things that I mentioned, if you would. Let’s start with “Doonesbury.”

SALEM: Well, a slight correction. “Doonesbury” was picked up by the syndicate in 1970, and I started in 1974, but it wasn’t more than a year and a half or two when I started editing Garry. One of my earliest recollections on the bad side was letting the word “missile” to through misspelled, a word I will never misspell again. And on the good side, I started in July of 1974, and the following spring, we nominated him for the Pulitzer for his work in 1974, which mostly focused on Watergate. And that year, he won his Pulitzer, so that was a thrilling time for all of us.

ANDELMAN: All right. And what about “The Far Side”?

SALEM: We had been doing Gary’s books for maybe a year or so, and Gary at that time was with a smaller syndicate, Chronicle Features, and made it clear that he wanted to come over to us, and we had some tough negotiations with his lawyer, and Bob Duffy, who preceded me in the presidency and was then sales director, and I kind of looked at each other wondering about the tough terms of his contract, but it worked out great for everybody, and we had a wonderful run with Gary and still do calendars with him on a regular basis and still remain friends.

ANDELMAN: “Calvin and Hobbes.”

SALEM: Well, Bill is Bill. The somewhat rancorous relationship between the two of us, while occasional, was still public, and he made his feelings clear about the business obligations that we felt and thought that we were asking too much of him and “Calvin and Hobbes” in terms of exposure in the market. We ultimately accepted his arguments and redid his contract, and he retired after a brilliant ten-year run, probably as strong a ten-year run as anyone in comics history, I think.

ANDELMAN: “Cathy."

SALEM: Well, we just celebrated thirty years with “Cathy.” We had a nice dinner with her last fall. When “Cathy” began, everyone was apprehensive. We circulated it in the office before we launched it, and people were saying, what is this, the art and the character? And it is still in well over a thousand papers after thirty years, which, in this market, is quite an accomplishment. I really look on her as a pioneer, and if “Cathy” had not worked the way we hoped it would, I am not sure we would have made the plunge with Lynn Johnston and “For Better or For Worse.” But “Cathy” worked, and it seemed natural to us that the time was right for talented women on a comic page.

ANDELMAN: All right. Well, then, “For Better or For Worse.”

SALEM: Well, that’s a great segue. When we saw Lynn’s work, we loved it. We loved her perspective. In the late ’70s, there was not a great demand for more family strips because the pages seemed to be dominated by them, but what attracted us was the mother’s perspective and the somewhat wry tone she would take on her situation and her husband’s life and children’s lives, and it has proven to be a comic strip that has dominated the surveys in terms of popularity for a long time.

ANDELMAN: And another family strip, “Foxtrot.”

SALEM: It’s a wonder Bill even signed with us. When Jake Morrissey, who was an editor with us, and I first visited Bill out in California, we had breakfast with him and went outside and went to wish him well, and somebody had taken off the bumper on the front of his car, and we had to dash off because we had another appointment. We were in Berkeley, and there was a comics convention then, and we kind of left Bill there. We waved at him and wished him well, and ever since then, I have felt terrible about it, but “Foxtrot” was another case of, answering the question, does the world need another family strip, but the kids were so different, and he was bringing in science, and that occasionally kind of added another perspective to it, and really, until his retirement from the daily portion of “Foxtrot” a couple months ago, I think it was consistently a top ten strip.





ANDELMAN: We just have a couple more. I promise I am not going to take you through the whole list. “The Boondocks.”

SALEM: Well, “The Boondocks,” for a long time we had been looking for a strip by an African-American cartoonist, and nothing really leaped out to us as saying this is a Universal-type strip, and then “The Boondocks” landed on our desks, and one of our editors in Chicago spotted it. He sent in a submission to us about the same time. Everyone had a very similar response that this was a breath of fresh air, and it proved out to be a wonderful strip for us. It didn’t achieve in number as some of the strips we have already mentioned, but in terms of its notoriety, it certainly was a national phenomenon, and he used that to springboard to what we hope will be a successful career in animation in television.

ANDELMAN: “Bloom County.”

SALEM: Not one of ours.

ANDELMAN: I know.

SALEM: But Washington Post Writers’ Group. I have been a long-time admirer of Berke’s work and met him a few times in social situations. I think he tried assiduously to get away from the mantle of being a derivative of “Doonesbury,” and I think to some extent he succeeded, because I think the characters and sensibility developed to be pretty much his own.

ANDELMAN: And the last one, “LIO.”

SALEM: “LIO” is a new strip, has been out less than a year, and it is something different. There is no language in it, it’s all pantomime, which I suspect is very, very difficult to do from the creative standpoint trying to think up a new situation each day using this character as the focal point. It’s a little dark and edgy sometimes though oriented for younger readers, and we have had a terrific launch with it, and it’s approaching 300 papers in less than a year, so we are delighted with it.

ANDELMAN: Oh, is it up that high already?

SALEM: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: I spoke to him a month ago, and it was at 250.

SALEM: Well, it’s at 275 or 280 now. He did benefit somewhat by “Foxtrot” going off the daily pages, but I think we will have a good long run with it.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Mark Tatulli, LIO, HEART OF THE CITY cartoonist: Mr. Media Interview

"LIO" is the creation of Mark Tatulli, and he’s a fresh brand of weird and wonderful now appearing in more than 250 newspapers, with more adding the strip daily. If Far Side creator Gary Larson and "Calvin" creator Bill Watterson had mated, LIO is the character they would have produced. Tatulli’s brainchild, LIO, and that’s spelled L-I-O, is a young boy who combines elements of mad scientist, comic strips, science fiction, and the Adams family, and get this, LIO never speaks.



BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA:Has LIO ever spoken in the strip?

MARK TATULLI:No.

ANDELMAN:Will he?

TATULLI:He never will.

ANDELMAN:And he never will.

TATULLI:I mean, others around him may speak, and he may get visitations from other comic strip characters, but he will never actually talk.

ANDELMAN:I was talking to a friend whose history of comics goes back even further than mine, and we both came to the same connection. We remembered a character called Henry.

TATULLI:Sure.

ANDELMAN:Is that close to "LIO"’s lineage in some way?

TATULLI:Well, they are both pantomime strips, what’s called a pantomime strip, and those area basically strips that are driven by pictures in it instead of dialogue, so characters revealed by action rather than by words. I used to love pantomime strips when I was a kid. Henry is one, as you mentioned, and there was also Ferd’nand, which was, I believe that was not produced in the United States, but it did get circulation here.



ANDELMAN:So Henry was certainly a strip that you were aware of.

TATULLI:Oh yes.

ANDELMAN:There really hasn’t been another one like that in some time.

TATULLI:No, no, not since like the 1950s, and I just thought that with the space that they dial down to, that they actually allot to comic strips, I thought that it would be fun to do a comic strip that didn’t have any dialogue and any word balloons taking up any of that space, so I could utilize the entire space for illustration. It’s great fun on Sunday.

ANDELMAN:Is LIO mute, or is it he just doesn’t speak in the strip?

TATULLI:Yeah, he doesn’t speak, his father doesn’t speak, none of the characters really speak. Somebody might show up that you would expect to speak, like say Cathy from the "Cathy" comic strip or maybe Calvin and Hobbes or something like that, and you would expect them to speak because they speak within their world, but within LIO’s world, pretty much nobody speaks. There are sound effects, and there are billboards and so forth, but there is no actual dialogue.

ANDELMAN:Have you ever in the time you have been doing this strip, have you had an idea, you woke up in the morning or in the middle of the night or you are in the shower, wherever you get your ideas, you had an idea for the strip that would have required him to say something, and then you went, oh, and you slap yourself on the head and go, ah, that’s right, he doesn’t talk, it’s not going to work?

TATULLI:No, no, because I don’t think that way when I do these strips. It’s all visual, and so my brain is just switched in that mode. It’s odd, because I do have another comic strip called "Heart of the City," and it is dialogue-driven or script-driven, and I hear their voices. I put them in situations, and I see how they react, and there is dialogue, but with LIO, because I don’t put any dialogue in, I just don’t hear a voice.

ANDELMAN:It must require a tremendous amount of, oh, what’s the word I’m looking for, I mean, focus, to not want to slip and go to words, especially because you have the other strip where you are used to putting words in people’s mouths.

TATULLI:Well, again, you know, I just don’t even think in terms of that. That’s not even an option. The other strip is dialogue-driven, and like I said, I hear the voices, but when it comes to "LIO," I am just thinking visually, completely visually.

ANDELMAN:What other rules have you set for this strip? What parameters are there?

TATULLI:There are no parameters.

ANDELMAN:Okay.

TATULLI:It’s really a basic concept. It’s just LIO who lives with his father, and that’s basically it, and whatever I come up with. I set no parameters because I didn’t want to lock myself in. I mean, having no dialogue means that there is going to be no dialogue-driven gags, so I have to leave myself as open as possible to any kind of thing, so anything basically can happen.

ANDELMAN:Mark, you mentioned that LIO lives with his father, and I wanted to ask you about that. Is there no mother?

TATULLI:There is no mother, no.

ANDELMAN:Is he a product of a broken home, or is it that Disney tradition of kids only have one parent?

TATULLI:Well, I can’t imagine that a sane woman would stay in that environment for too long. Between the father and LIO, they are a couple of weirdos, so my guess is that she just about had it one day and just took off, but you know, it may make things simpler, because then there would be no dialogue between parents or anything. LIO’s father is kind of his guardian, more or less, and he just kind of goes with the flow.

ANDELMAN:Now, we frequently see LIO’s father in fairly treacherous situations. How do you envision their relationship? Is he tolerant, or is he in fear of his son?

TATULLI:Oh, he’s just tolerant. He just kind of goes with it. He just wants to, the interesting thing was that I had written the character of the father when I was out of work. I had lost my job, and I was feeling, you know, useless, and I kind of projected that onto this father character here, and he doesn’t really have a job. We never see him going off to work, and he just kind of sits around and watches TV and just kind of goes with the flow, and weird things happen, but, you know, he doesn’t ask too many questions, because I don’t think he really wants the answers.

ANDELMAN:Now, what are some of the, in your mind, some of the strangest things that have happened between LIO and his father?

TATULLI:Oh, my gosh. Every day is a new adventure, you know. They have been visited, well, I guess one of the strangest things would be that the father went into the refrigerator to get bacon and eggs, because he wanted to make bacon and eggs, and he found this enormous egg in the refrigerator and was very pleased about that, and the final panel is the egg has split open, and it was the alien from the Alien movie, the Ridley Scott movie, it wraps around his neck and was on his face, and LIO comes in and slaps his face, like, oh, my God, he’s getting in my experiments again. I would say that is among the most bizarre things, but those kinds of things happen every day, and everything is fine the next day.

ANDELMAN:That’s the amazing thing. I love that. It’s just like there is a giant octopus or something, and LIO is so in command of his situation. What elements of personality does he take from his creator, and what kinds of things have you given him that would you like to have in your own personality, perhaps?









TATULLI:Oh, geez. It’s mostly about fear. When you are a little kid, I was afraid of everything, because everything seemed so scary, and things that were even designed for kids seemed so scary. When you went and saw Sleeping Beauty, you know, the dragon in that was just really, really scary. Now to an adult taking the kids, oh, this is a lovely fairy tale I am taking my child to, and then you get there, and there’s this evil-looking queen, the most evil-looking queen you ever saw, and she turns into a dragon, and it just envelopes the screen, and it’s really, really horrific. Same thing with book illustrations. I remember being fascinated by Grimms’ Fairy Tales when I was a kid. Those stories are just downright sick, some of them. I remember, you know the story of Tom Thumb, but you don’t know that he actually is killed by a spider, and there was this illustration in this Grimms’ Fairy Tale of the spider kind of coming up on him and pounced on him and did battle with him, but the spider breathes his poisonous breath and then basically killed Tom Thumb, and you know, it’s shocking for a kid. LIO’s world is that way. Everything is kind of a shock or surreal or bizarre or scary.

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©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.