MONKEYING AROUND:
Imagine churning out idea after idea, seven days a week, always using the same style and characters. How would you stay fresh and invigorated? Cartoonist John Kovaleski can teach us a thing or two about that.
John Kovaleski fits the cartoonist look with surprising aplomb: crack-voiced when excited, he's bald with dark eyebrows that bumper-car theatrically into each other when he's perplexed. His pockets are lined with lists of gag ideas like “mummy made of caution tape” and “frozen guy from the 80s” and, exuberantly underlined, “traffic cones!!” Meet the guy who can karate-chop his way through creative block like nobody's business.
John draws a daily comic strip, Bo Nanas, for The Washington Post Syndicate. Bo is a big-nosed, child-like monkey, a magnet for strange characters looking for a friendly ear. Drawing this strip is, for John, the culmination of a life-long dream, nursed on the side during his fifteen-year career in graphic design.
Cartooning is an old-fashioned grind of an art job: every day, seven days a week, cartoonists dig deep for a gag, then hand-draw and ink it, on real paper with a real pen. To the hardscrabble, smoke-and-joe-fueled cartoonist crowd, the idea of creative block is for sissies who have the luxury of time to indulge it. If anything, the loopy, otherworldly appeal of cartoons owes a lot to the pressure that comes from that daily obligation to navel-gaze--to create something, today.
John and I hit a local diner to discuss how he keeps Bo's world fresh and compelling, to him and his readers.
1. PLAN, PLAN AHEAD
John describes Bo like this: “Bo is a stand-in for other people, commenting on the world. I picture Bo as having the same disease as [my fiancee] Jocelyn and my mother have: people just talk to them.” He grins. “I knew I was going to run out of monkey jokes. I used to kid with my friends: when would I resort to throwing feces and rainbow-colored asses?”
John's fight against creative block starts by knowing and respecting his own work style. “Some [cartoonists] will actually start and finish a gag in a day, but I can't do that. The pressure is just too weird for me. I feel better writing ahead, being able to shuffle and rethink ideas.” At any given time, John has 48 to 60 strips ready—eight to ten weeks' worth—plus dozens more ideas in what he calls, deadly-seriously, the “gag file”.
Unlike most design projects, a comic strip world can endure indefinitely—even past a cartoonist's lifetime. (“Dead-guy” strips like Blondie or Dick Tracey are still penned under the original byline by former apprentices.) “A lot of guys churn out idea after idea, thinking: get the [syndication] gig, then you write for it. That wasn't me,” he notes. In his view, the compressed world of a four-panel narrative can only be funny and compelling if it's well-defined from the get-go. “Every cartoonist has their own bunch-o-reality. I've tried to keep the world realistic. Now, Bloom County—his reality is, I can do anything I want. Aliens come down, an electrocuted cat character. If you're doing Calvin and Hobbes, you're actually extraordinarily limited, because it's all about this kid's imagination. Whatever happens can never be completely real. It's really a tight and brilliant concept.”
Sustainability is even important in developing a character's physique. John once drew a weekly strip with a triangle-headed character and immediately ran into trouble. “You use that character three or four times, and then you realize: that doesn't work, I didn't give him a chin,” he laughs. “It made his head really awkward to move.” Each daily strip offers so little room, every gesture must convey personality, mood and narrative facts—and triangle-heads weren't going to sustain all of that long term.
When Bo Nanas launched in May 2003, John was ready. Bo's ears had shrunk to a manageable size, his tail's stance reveals “his emotional state”, and he's the only one who talks in lowercase letters.
Even so, working inside the haiku-like constraints of a daily strip means hitting the same brick wall over and over: how to bring off this gag in just four panels? John hands me a paper with the words MOM TROPHY at the top. “I had trouble with this one. Initially, [in the fourth panel] I had him crying and saying: 'That's the saddest piece of garbage I've ever seen.' It wasn't the greatest ending. So I said, okay, what would an outside observer think about this? The idea of throwing out a specifically crying monkey, that's funny right there. Sometimes it just needs a whole new point of view.”
2. MIND YOUR (FUNNY) ELDERS
Like any other art form, cartoons have a legacy of in-jokes to draw upon. Occasionally John references older strips as a springboard for a new gag. John hands me another strip. “There's a tradition in comic strips of babies that are always called Baby-something, like Baby Huey. I like drawing this kind of egg-shaped, generic baby, with no arms unless he needs them...He'll do stuff that's just beyond baby, like throwing things. I decided to call him Baby Karl. Karl-with-a-K is such an un-baby name.”
I pass that one back and get another one, on “Dollar Bill”, in return. “I grew up on MAD magazine,” John continues. “When I was reading it in the 70s, there wasn't as much pointing-out of how ridiculous stuff is in the world. So the very pointing-out with a twist was funny. Now we live in a world that's tremendously humor-conscious; senses of humor have progressed. You have to go an extra mile.
“Sometimes I grab onto an idea, something people have touched on before, so I need to do something different. Here”—he pokes at the sheet—“the joke isn't really obvious. You have to go back. Early B.C. strips were like that—quirky and very surreal, like beat poetry.”
3. DRAW OUTSIDE THE LINES
Just like any brand's development over time, rules—whether style guides, prior campaigns, or the confines of a talking monkey's universe—set the boundaries for experimentation. In fact, the more established a creative world becomes, the more experimentation is crucial to move the story forward. “This is one of my favorites,” John remarks, handing me a strip with Bo hanging over a grandma and a teenager, switching their hats. “I just did another one like this: he's hanging, and he notices these little sticks, coming towards him. He says, 'Hold it!' and comes down, and there are three kids with sticks.
“So he says: 'Were you kids going to hit me?' And they go: ' Ye-ess, Mis-ter Nanas .' And he goes: 'What did I tell you kids?' And they say, as if they're quoting him: 'A monkey is not a pinata.' 'And?' 'No matter how hard we hit you, you won't give us candy.' I like the whole concept of hitting somebody so hard that they just give up, like: 'OKAY! here's candy!'”
He pauses. “It's tough. Bo is a subtle character, and his personality doesn't come through in some of these. Sometimes these could be gags with anybody in them. I know sometimes it's a question of: will this sell? I need to start doing more quirky things that just occur to me.” Freshness, in design or cartoons, comes from a clearly felt personality and the right telling details, more than the broad strokes.
4. John K—IN ACTION
From a nice lunch to the pressure cooker. John had pledged earlier to sketch out a gag in my presence, so I could watch him overcome problems in real-time. We pay the tab and head to my apartment.
Granted, this is a setup, so John has had time to contemplate. As he lays out his Bristol frames (for drawing panel outlines) and his non-photo blue pencils, he mulls aloud about this magazine, Bo's innocence, lollygagging at a magazine stand. “My friend Dave Coverly [author of the strip Speed Bump ] came up with this term, 'organized daydreaming',” he explains. “You go from one thing to another, but you're also taking one thing and twisting it.
“Okay,” he continues. “Think of that old-fashioned gag where you're reading a magazine in a drug store, and the druggist says, 'This is not a library.' What would Bo say?” He pauses. “He'd misunderstand the guy's purpose, like, 'Oh, I get it. This is not an apartment house! This is not a jazz club!'” He stops again. “I'm thinking of changing [that] to Bo saying: 'And I am not a marmot!' Which is funny, although truthfully, I have to look up in the dictionary what a marmot is. Either way, he gets thrown out. So”--he peers at my bookshelves--“let's look up marmot.”
The dictionary is produced. “'A rodent with coarse fur'—oh, that's funny ,” John remarks, clearly tickled. “That'll work. Mar-MOT, right? I almost wish it was spelled mar-MET, with an E,” he notes. “Marmet is funnier than marmot.”
Drawing the actual strip is a miracle of distillation: every detail does triple duty. The original four-panel plan is ditched for three panels. Bo is drawn from his feet upwards, to control his scale. Bo's response in frame 2 requires surprisingly rigorous editing: “I will actually think if I should use 'oh', 'um' or 'er' at different times,” John notes. “'Uh' is more of a thinking thing.” Even more surprisingly, it matters: without the “uh”, Bo seems less confused, more smart-alecky--less like Bo. Bo's thrown-on-pavement stance must be fact-checked against prior thrown-on-pavement strips, a touch of consistency that punches up the gag for regular readers. Voila: le monkey est fin!
Not quite. Tomorrow, Bo will dust himself off and rejoin the Christmas elves who summer as ice-cream salesmen, or tango with a caution-tape mummy. And boy howdy, will John be ready to send him there.
—Jude Stewart for HOW, February 2005
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