mzalen, Thu, June 5th, 2008
Okay, let me just make something clear: My father never got kicked out of any retirement home, my wife likes him, and she has never thrown me or him out of the house and forced us to sleep in a tent.
Now for those of you who read the Back 2 Basics comic which appeared in this week’s Spotlight, you’ll know what I’m talking about. For those of you who haven’t, what I just said will make no sense. So go read the comic, then come back and finish this blog.
Good, now that we’re all on the same page, you’re probably wondering why I felt the need to clarify these points. After all, we’re talking about a comic which is obviously fictional, right?
Wrong. I’ve found that almost nothing I put into my comic these days is taken by 100% of the population as fiction. And this is especially true when it comes to a story line.
Maybe it’s the nature of my comic strip which leads people to assume that I always draw from my own personal experience when coming up with ideas; there are, after all, so many striking similarities: The comic is based on a family, and I, too, come from a family. The main characters are mostly male, and I, too, am mostly male. Need I say more?
To be honest, the assumption is not altogether incorrect. Like most cartoonists, I use my daily life as a basis for new material. There’s no way around it. With a little imagination, everywhere I go, everything I see, and everything I do could be used in a strip. As another cartoonist I know once said when explaining why her comic was autobiographical, life is funny enough as it is, so why bother making things up?
However, I don’t fully ascribe to that philosophy. True, I use snippets of my daily life as inspiration for my work, but that’s certainly not to say that my work is autobiographical. It’s a fine line, but a crucial one. And it’s missed by a lot of readers.
Recently I had an editor of a paper ask me – seemingly out of the blue – if my wife ate tuna and cheese purees for breakfast when she was pregnant. My response was a resounding, “What??” He then proceeded to ask me the same question again, as if I had simply not heard him properly the first time. It took me a few seconds to realize that he was referring to the Back 2 Basics strip being printed in his paper for that week. When I finally made the connection, I had the same talk with him that I’m having with you right now. Not everything I write in my comic is true, I told him. Strangely enough, he didn’t actually believe me, and we ended the conversation with him insistent that my wife had the worst taste-buds in the world.
Which is why, for the sake of my father and my grandmother, I’m preempting any questions about their behavior right now. They are mostly normal, and anything abnormal that they do, I will only put in my comic strip after magnifying it ten times.
We good?
