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Illinois college cartoonists
Illinois college cartoonists use a variety of methods to display their talents at the collegiate newspaper. At the Daily Eastern News at Eastern Illinois University, David Thill has been drawing cartoons all of his life and draws inspiration from his father. “My father was an art major when he attended Eastern, and when I was young he would often bring home 2 giant pieces of poster board and we would see who could fill their respective poster up with cartoons quickest,” Thill said. “It was a nice little bonding experience and got me drawing early. Ever since then I have just really enjoyed drawing cartoons. Often I doodle at home just for fun. As for editorial cartoons, I have drawn them for the DEN since 2004. The first time I drew one was simply because the cartoonist for that day fell through.” [1]. One of Thill’s first cartoons was making fun of the athletic department raising student fees and won a First Place in the Illinois College Press Association’s Editorial Cartoon category. Thill shares his thoughts on why editorial cartoons are some important. “I enjoy editorial cartoons because they allow you the chance to capsulate a larger topic in one glance and they afford the chance to make fun of or point out the ridiculousness in topics in the news,” he said. “And I enjoy hearing people tell me that my cartoons make them laugh. Often the news is too much of a downer, so being able to draw a cartoon and put my opinion in it while making people laugh is the draw for me... no pun intended.” Thill uses standard drawing pencils for a rough sketch, then a particular type of pen to draw over the lines for the final draft that gets scanned and then placed into the computer. That cartoon will be placed in the Adobe Photoshop and then placed on the editorial page, which will be printed for the press. But Thill doesn’t always use those types of drawing utensils. “Sometimes, if I am trying to draw a more realistic or life-like image, I will use charcoal pencils and a blending stump for shading,” Thill said. Thill’s style and philosophy behind his drawings are unique. “I have drawn all types of cartoons, usually for my own amusement,” he said. “I have a friend who is laughing an "Onion"-style humor website so I'll be submitting some fairly tasteless cartoons to that soon. My style is just my own that I've developed over the years. I tend to draw the same style of characters over and over again. However, sometimes I draw in Japanese anime style just for fun, but my only main other style of drawing is very realistic, life-like sketches. Oh, and sometimes I like to draw very surrealistic cartoons. But he doesn’t consider himself an artist. “Cartoonist,” Thill directly stated. “I do not take my art seriously enough to be an artist. I think I am capable of creating works of art when I really attempt to and I'm just doing it for myself at home but, as far a the newspaper goes, I'm a cartoonist. My job is to sum up a news topic in one frame, one quick picture and make a joke expressing my opinion. Often, these aren't very hard-hitting topics full of biting social commentary, but just cartoons that people around campus can relate to and, hopefully, will have their day brightened by a little.” After taking a look at an editorial cartoonist, let’s took at an actual comic artist for a comic strip. [2]. Billy Fore draws Marco and Marty for the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign. “Well, Marco and Marty started out with two characters,” Fore said. “I would draw in middle school and high school for short comics and stories. Marco was based off of this cat character that I would draw with a scimitar and fez. I called him the "hookah cat" because I really didn't have a name for him. I think he was looking for his lost family or a treasure or something. Marty was based on a dog character I drew back in elementary school and later used for comic strips when my handwriting had improved enough for people to read it. Marco and Marty as a strip is pretty young (I started last semester) but as characters they have existed for some time (four to six years).” Fore said some of his inspirations are Sam and Max by Steve Purcell and Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. “I don't know why I draw them,” Fore said. “Sometimes you are just compelled to do something stupid for no rhyme or reason. I love cartooning and hope to become some kind of a professional cartoonist. I don't know where exactly the characters came from, but I draw them pretty consistently, so I've grown attached to them.” Being more of a comic-strip cartoonists than an editorial cartoonist, Fore uses more utensils. He uses Faber-Castell, felt-tip pens, specifically small point, fine point, extra-small point, and brush tip. “It is simple to use and produces clean lines that reproduce well,” Fore said. “Sometimes I use an inkwell with a sable brush, but that is only when I am feeling whimsical. I use one pen for sketching and short-form comics, which is ideal on the go. That is the Precise V5 rolling ball extra fine by Pilot. If you want to start a comic strip and want to spend minimal money, buy a ream of copy paper and two of these pens. You will be fine.” Fore draws multiple inspirations and even has own website: http://billyforecomics.blogspot.com/. [3]. “Well, I saw a couple of comics there which I didn't think we're very good, so I thought I would throw my hat in and see if I could do it,” Fore said. “It's also been a childhood dream for me to become a newspaper comic strip writer, so this may be the closest I am going to get. Other outlets are... well, I am working on a graphic novel which I would eventually like to see published in book format. Outside of that, I keep a blog with all of my ancillary sketches and drawings.” Fore doesn’t get much feedback from the newspaper and rarely gets screened from the newspaper, only if there is offensive language. “There is very little feedback on the comic, but I do have a small following,” Fore said. “I get a lot of praise from the comic, and I haven't heard too many bad marks against it. But I am pretty free to write whatever I want (I just wrote a strip about somebody playing a trumpet with their rump.) It is a pretty conflict free strip; the hardest part is trying to write new ideas daily. There is no rotation. I am in the paper year-round.” Fore seems well-versed in the art of comics, and can’t wait to start a professional career in the business. “My resume material is nil - a few illustration odd-jobs and that's all,” Fore said. “I tried doing a comic strip for an online magazine on campus but resigned due to emotional stress. My style is simplistic, cartoony, and - as in writing – dark (although not always.) I'd say it's up to critics and historians to designate someone's style in any formal way. I would say it's "Billy Fore" style, not because it's that good but because I really am not sure what else to call it. Why is style? Repetition, routine, and ritual. That much is certain. When you draw enough, you start learning patterns. All of a sudden, that is how you draw. It's kind of weird.”

===Former DEN alumns who are cartooning===

Eastern and UIUC are the not the only schools to sport school newspapers with cartoons. But UIUC has editorial cartoonists and comic strip cartoonists for the Daily Illini. The newspaper includes Doonesbury and Marco and Marty, which one is a nationally syndicated comic strip and the other is Fore’s work. The Daily Eastern News used to have comic strips in 1993, but these student works only appeared in the Verge, the weekly entertainment supplement of the DEN. Some of these artists were Paul Weimerslage and Dylan Ethan Collins. They drew Grumpy Duck and One in the Oven for the Daily Eastern News back in 1993. Though, on a day when there were two opinion pages of the Daily Eastern News, there was a separate comic strip. But on this day, April 26, 1993, neither the artist’s name or title of both the cartoon and the editorial cartoonist was listed. Artists also have the opportunity to draw for the Daily Eastern News as content rather than actually comic strips or political cartoons. [4]. Don Chambers graduated in 1986, but was a former Daily Eastern News cartoonist. [5]. Chambers, was a graphic design major, published his first comic strip book in 2001 featuring photographs of 230 towns, universities and parks surrounding Champaign-Urbana, called “Mannequins at home in Illinois and Western Indiana.” “I wanted it to be something completely different from anything that anyone had ever seen before,” Chambers told the Daily Eastern News. Along with the photographs, the comic strips feature three dimensional computer-created characters complete with scans of real clothing and hair, Chambers said. He said he has been the first person to publish a comic strip using such technology. Chambers published his first Mannequins strip in 1996 and continues to publish one each week which runs in: The Altamont News, The Arthur Graphic-Clarion, the Atwood Herald, The (Cerro Gordo) News Record, the Georgetown Independent News, the Mt.Zion Region News, and the Teutopolis Press. During is college career at Eastern, he also published comic strips in The Daily Eastern News. Chambers spent 13 months traveling central Illinois and western Indiana taking photographs for the book. While photographing different cities on the weekends for the book, Chambers said that he ran into a few interesting situations. While walking around Eureka College, Chambers said he asked a student if she knew of any little known landmarks around the area that he might get a picture of. The student said that there was a monument outside of town that commemorated the courthouse where Abraham Lincoln had practiced law. After driving for what seemed like a very long time, Chambers said that they finally pulled over on a road out in the middle of nowhere, and the student got out of the car and parted the grass to show them the monument. “There’s this boulder the size of a beach ball that’s totally hidden,” he said. However, the picture did not go into the book, because it was too weathered and just showed up as a picture of a rock. He said he had other situations with people telling him that he could not take pictures of things. “When I told them what I was using the pictures for, they just laughed and said ‘go ahead,’” he said. He said that the big lens on his camera made people nervous. The book does not flow as a story, but the characters are the same throughout. The mannequins Web site: www.manniquinscomicstrip.co.uk, includes information about the comic strip including character biographies. Content for the comic strips is taken from Chambers’ life experiences as well as keeping his eyes and ears open. Chambers describes the content of the book as “small town rural humor.” He plans to publish further volumes and currently has enough photographs for 2/3 of the next volume. Chambers worked as an artist for a General Motors automotive dealership chain in Decatur and in the advertising department of Supervalu grocery store in Urbana before he became a broadcast animator at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His wife Laura works with the characters’ hair and proofs the comic strip.

Comic book shop in Charleston
Charleston, Illinois, is also home to one comic book store – Midgard Comics. The Daily Eastern News tells one what it is like to own the only comic shop in Charleston. [6]. Wednesday is a special day for the only comic shop in Charleston. It’s the comic-shipping day, when all the new comics are shipped to a little-known business on 102 W. Lincoln St. Without Superman/Captain America sign on the side of the road, the white double-business building would probably go unnoticed as the premier comic and novelty shop. These are the days that Mark Waters cannot stand still. The Midgard Comics owner with speckled brown and gray hair, is busy arranging various comic books, graphic novels and talking with customers. When Eastern journalism professor Dan Hagen walks in, Waters talks to him like a friend. This is for two reasons. Waters said Hagen was a day-one customer when Midgard comics opened 15 years ago, and that is the way Waters treats all of his customers. “I’d like to think of it (the business) like “Cheers,” Waters says, referencing the 1980s popular-sitcom about a bar with the tag-line, “where everyone knows your name.” Hagen is an example of what comic shoppers are like on a Wednesday: some¬one who is looking for his favorite heroes latest adventures. Midgard is that place. The Family Business Waters co-owns the business with his brother-in-law, Mike Reinhart. The staff consists of Waters, Reinhart, Water’s mother, Sandra, his father, Floyd, and a few others. Both Waters and Reinhart have other full-time jobs besides running the comic shop, but Reinhart lives and works in Indiana and works at Midgard every other Sat¬urday. Sandra can be found sitting behind the cashier desk, which has an assort¬ment of free comics and postcards. She looks through her small glasses as religious music plays in the background. When a customer is ready to buy a comic, she adds up the price on a handheld calculator and writes the name of the book down on a pad of paper, so she re¬members to stock the book again. Midgard has no computers, but that does not hurt the business. On Wednesdays, Floyd comes in to help his wife. “He helps her check-in comics and set things up since that is our busy day and mom has trouble getting around,” Waters said. Business is good Sandra says the same number of customers have stopped by as on any nor¬mal Wednesday. The personality of the store is with its owners and workers. Waters said his mother enjoys their customer’s company. If all the regulars do not show up, no one is too shocked, because people are sometimes a day late stopping by. The regulars at Midgard are a diverse crowd. Waters says he even has a few lo¬cal doctors who stop in, which strikes him as unusual. But Wednesdays are sure to see the most of them, especially if a new, hot book is coming out on that day. Another reason no one at Midgard gets too scared if business is not as bus¬tling as normal on a Wednesday is be¬cause the store has a process of saving its customers’ favorite comics. Waters even finds businesses from far way by sending comic books to a few Eastern alums who live in the Chicago area. The dream becomes reality Waters said owning his own comic shop was always a dream. It came from the fact that he has always loved comics. “I’ve been into comics since I was a kid,” Waters said. “I was like, man, I’d love to own a comic shop.” This is the part of the reason Waters and Reinhart decided to open the business. They started off small at first. “We initially started doing conventions in Indianapolis,” Waters said. “Then we got a spot in the Mattoon mall with a baseball card show.” That is when he and Reinhart knew they were serious about opening the shop. “I wanted to make the shop what I liked,” Waters said. “Comics were always my favorite thing as a kid.” The shop now sells comic books, graphic novels and various collector item novelties. The look, design of Midgard Waters said growing up, the Marvel comic hero Thor, the Norse-god of thunder was his favorite. In fact, the name of the store, Midgard, is a translation of “what Thor would call Earth.” Thor is on one of the signs for the building. Waters said he designed what he wanted on both signs, but a local and regular customer, Roy Dare, created the artwork. Dare has been coming to the comic shop for years and said he not only enjoys comics, but it was great to see the shop in Charleston. Reinhart who bought Dare’s first piece of artwork, a cut out of Captain America which can be found sitting in the hall outside Midgard. After the initial purchase, Waters and Reinhart decided to buy more of Dare’s work. “We just like his art style,” Waters said. “You know, the way he does faces on the characters.” Dare said he feels a privilege to be a part of Midgard’s artistic style. “I was excited when they accepted my artwork,” he said. As Waters sits behind his desk and talks with a customer about some recent comic releases, he looks around for a moment at the current release shelf, be¬fore he gets on his feet again. Mark Waters can’t stand still. He’s living his boyhood dream. The things he loves so dearly surround him: his family, his comics and his heroes.

Professional cartoonists in college
Bill Amend Bill Amend was a physics major in college. Yes the cartoonist of FoxTrot was good at math. He graduated from Amherst College in Amherst, Mass., and drew cartoons for the twice-weekly college newspaper. Amend also contributed more the world of media at the collegiate level, his friend and he founded and published a weekly alternative campus newspaper called Sidelines. Amend took one course in art. “Apart from a basic drawing class my senior year, I never really studied art,” Amend told sources. It should be no surprise that the youngest son Jason, in FoxTrot, is a math genius. Amend worked on FoxTrot for more than three years as Universal Press Syndicate finally picked up the strip in 1987. [7]. FoxTrot debuted on April 10, 1988. FoxTrot strip is built around contemporary issues, unlike many of the popular strips. “My sense of family life was that there was a lot more chaos and politics and silliness and fewer trips to the golf course and running into the mailman,” Amend told sources. [8]. Amend pencils his strips with 2H pencils and inks with Rapidograph pens and Micron Pigma markers on 400 Series smooth surface Strathmore bristol board. He works two weeks ahead of publication for his dailies and six-plus weeks for his Sunday comics.

Matt Groening

Matt Groening was the editor of his college newspaper, The Cooper Point Journal, the student newspaper of the Evergeen State College in Olympia, Washington. He also wrote and drew cartoons. The head of Futurama and the Simpsons, was the key behind the creation of a comics page at the liberal arts university. [9]. “Matt wanted to start a comic page, something the CPJ had previously never seen,” said Steve Willis, roommate of Groening and fellow cartoonist. “Groening rounded up and recruited those of us who he knew liked cartooning, and then he managed to convert some fine artists, like Lynda Barry, to the world of comix. This was the only time in my life that I was ever around several other cartoonists for any length of time. Since we are a species that generally dwell alone in basement apartments, I can't say it was real comfortable. For my own part, being rural and provincial with a group of hip urban hustlers was something of a culture shock. But Matt was always very encouraging and positive. Matt had set out to antagonize the school's administration and faculty. But his humor was so sharp and advanced, that his intended target became his most avid fans. The students, on the other hand, went ballistic when Evergreen satire appeared in the pages of the CPJ. The cartoons of Charles Burns in particular seemed to rile them. I can recall Matt sitting behind his desk, head buried in hands, moaning, "I didn't mean for it to turn out this way."” Groening stuck to his characters and was told to abandon the Simpsons because his lack of art skills.

Garry Trudeau Garry Trudeau has translated Doonesbury to the professional world very successfully. In 1975, Trudeau became the first comic strip artist ever to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1989, 2004 and 2005. Trudeau’s Doonesbury became popular at Yale, but the comic strip wasn’t originally called that. G. B. Trudeau's strip Bull Tales first appeared in the Yale Daily News on September 30, 1968. [10]. Renamed after its main character, Doonesbury debuted on October 26, 1970, in 28 newspapers. It now appears in more than 1,400 papers worldwide. Trudeau is an alumnus of Yale, and written about many years later in the college newspaper, he once drew cartoons for. Ramyond Carlson wrote about his Trudeau in this story [11].: It was early September, 1968. A tall, lanky junior wandered into 202 York St., home of the Yale Daily News, holding a handful of hand-drawn comics — a series about the football team called “Bull Tales.” Nervously, the young man greeted Executive Editor Reed Hundt ’69 LAW ’74. After rifling through the first three or four comic strips, Hundt shrugged. He was impressed with the artist’s humor, but less so with his drawing ability. Still, Hundt agreed to run the strip. “Sure. We print pretty much anything,” the young man recalled the editor saying. Little did Hundt know that he had recruited Garry Trudeau ’70 ART ’73, future creator of “Doonesbury” and now, one of the most widely syndicated cartoonists alive. “He was a really, really bad drawer — horrible,” Hundt said in a phone interview this week. Fortunately for Trudeau, his clever humor struck a chord with Hundt. Within just six weeks of that meeting with Hundt, “Bull Tales” was picked up by a syndicate. And the News, then a for-profit paper, felt the effects — financially, at least — since Hundt required Trudeau to sign a contract agreeing to give 10 percent of any future book profits from the cartoon to the News. “As it turned out, that 10 percent paid for my first year’s tuition in law school,” Hundt said. And for Trudeau, the turn of events was even bigger than law school tuition. “It was sheer serendipity,” the notably media-shy Trudeau wrote in an e-mail to the News this week, days after winning an award from the medical school. “I was preparing to be a graphic designer, not a cartoonist,” ‘Peanuts never did this’ Now, 40 years later, Trudeau’s cartoons have swelled in popularity. While his original cartoons based on the Yale football team were anything but serious, his current strip, Doonesbury, follows two characters introduced in “Bull Tales” — BD and Mike Doonesbury — but through them, confronts serious issues in politics and current affairs. In fact, just last Saturday, Trudeau was honored by Yale School of Medicine with the Mental Health Research Advocacy Award for his incorporation of post-traumatic stress disorder into the story line of Doonesbury, which appears in nearly 1,400 newspapers across the globe. While Doonesbury’s depiction of Watergate earned Trudeau the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1975, his recent cartoons have drawn attention for their portrayal of combat in Iraq and the recovery of soldiers. In Doonesbury, BD — who began as a football-playing character drawn with a helmet adorned with the Yale “Y” in Trudeau’s first strip — entered military combat in Iraq. But in the April 21, 2004, strip, Trudeau made an astounding plot shift: BD lost a leg in the war. But rather than using the injury to reflect the brutality of the war, Trudeau depicted the long recovery process of BD, chronicled in two books, “The Long Road Home” and “The War Within.” “I don’t know any other cartoon that has ever taken this kind of step,” said Psychiatry Professor John Krystal as he presented Trudeau with the award. “Peanuts never did this,” he added. But Trudeau told the News that he had not initially considered the psychological trauma of PTSD when deciding to incorporate BD’s injury in the strip’s story line. “Initially I was simply mapping the medical path an amputee typically takes towards recovery, but as I got deeper into it, I found that many of the wounded also had serious readjustment issues,” he wrote. Like any good Yalie, Trudeau did his research, visiting PTSD afflicted soldiers in treatment centers. When accepting his award, Trudeau spoke of his visit to Walter Reid hospital, where he met a 25-year-old soldier who had lost her left hand in combat in Iraq. “Her most vivid memory is of her sergeant finding her hand and engagement ring,” Trudeau said. The account demonstrated the “soldier’s need for narrative,” he said, and stories like these provided the impetus for writing BD’s accident into the plotline. Making the dark bearable But it hasn’t been easy depicting the road to recovery in his drawings — especially because he had to incorporate humor. “You can take [readers] to dark places so long as you make it bearable,” he said. Fortunately, Trudeau’s experience makes him a master at treading this thin line. As a student at Yale during the Vietnam War, Trudeau confronted war in his early Doonesbury comics from what he calls a “countercultural perspective.” “The story line was a peacenik fantasy about the commonalities of the combatants,” he said. Trudeau’s early cartoons appeared in “Stars and Stripes,” a newspaper distributed to soldiers in Vietnam. He said he was amazed by the way the soldiers said they were able to relate to his comics. “Only years later, after I’d actually met a lot of Vietnam vets, did I understand; the strip meant that they hadn’t been forgotten,” he said. “Someone was thinking about them.” Now Trudeau works tirelessly to make sure soldiers are not forgotten. Military servicemen in the War on Terror post their thoughts frequently on Trudeau’s Web site through an online forum called “The Sandbox.” Trudeau’s sensitivity to American servicemen has developed over time, although he has always remained a staunch war critic. “What has evolved over time is not so much my view on war as my view on warriors,” he said. In fact, Trudeau has interacted with veterans while researching his strip for more than 15 years. During the Gulf War, he met with returning soldiers in “a long-overdue immersion in military culture.” Fatefully, Trudeau lived in the same college as a future politician whose policies he would later criticize in his work. “My junior year, Garry Trudeau lived above me and George Bush lived below me,” Hundt recalled. According to Hundt, Trudeau — a member of Scroll and Key — was amiable, “dashing,” “witty” and “intensely verbal.” Bush ’68, too, was “agreeable,” “genial,” but he the center of the Davenport College social life as the go-to source of alcohol for his classmates. Still, Hundt said, “Of the two, one has been a big success — that would be Garry.” Groening, Amend and Trudeau took advantages of their opportunities in college and translated their efforts in the real world. College creates that opportunities, and who knows, maybe the next Groening is sitting right in the classroom?

Notes

1. Interview with David Thill. April 2010. 2. Interview with Billy Fore. April 2010. 3. Fore’s work. http://billyforecomics.blogspot.com/. 4. Daily Eastern News. Archives. 1993. 5. Daily Eastern News. Archives. 2001. 6. Daily Eastern News. Archives. 2008. 7. Bill Amend background. http://www.amuniversal.com/ups/features/foxtrot/bio.htm. April 2010. 8. Bill Amend background. http://www.foxtrot.com/about/ April 2010. 9. Matt Groening background. http://www.evergreen.edu/alumni/writersproject/stevewillis.htm April 2010. 10. Garry Trudeau background. http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/faqs/faq_cs.html. April 2010. 11. Garry Trudeau background. Yale Daily News. http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/features/2008/04/11/for-trudeau-road-to-comic-fame-began-on-york-stree/ 2008. Insert non-formatted text here  Insert non-formatted text here  Insert non-formatted text here