Andy Hoffman has a question…
Did you ever meet or work with the surrealist cartoonist and drawer of cats, B. "Hap" Kliban?
In one of Sergio's Groo introductions, he drew a signed Kliban illustration hanging on the wall of his studio.
There's also the 1977 fanzine that includes a letter you wrote and a cover by Kliban called Where the Beer and the Cantaloupe Play.
I've been reading your blog for years and have found no mention of him. There is very little information available on Kliban, so it would be great if you had any to share for all the fans of his work.
Meet? Yeah, a few times at Comic-Con Internationals back when they were called by other names. We had lunch one time and he was on a couple of panels I moderated. Here…I have this photo of the two of us from one of those panels…
I'm afraid though I didn't get a lot of info about the man from the limited time we spent together. He seemed like a private kind o' guy who was pretty much willing to talk about any topic but himself or cartooning. He had some pretty firm views on morality and censorship and especially about women. A few of them made me uncomfy but not to the point where I couldn't get along with him.
The disinterest in cartooning seemed oddly appropriate to me, coming as it did from a person whose approach and style seemed largely divorced from anything that had come before. I think that was one of the things that was so impressive about his work. He didn't seem to be doing a variation on something you'd seen before. His drawings were highly organic and natural and usually very funny. He had suddenly gotten very popular and seemed a tad embarrassed that he was making more money off merchandising than he was from the cartooning itself. When I mentioned that I had a Kliban Cat shower curtain in my home, he winced and muttered something like "I wish you hadn't told me that."
He was besieged a lot at those cons for sketches. This was back when a lot of artists did free ones at conventions and the main reason to not do them was that if you got started, you might spend your entire convention doing nothing else. I asked him, after he'd done about a dozen in quick succession for attendees, if he was sick of people asking him for sketches. He said, "Not half as sick as I am of people asking me what the 'B' stands for. I heard, though not from him, that it stood for Bernard.
Here's a photo I took of him doing a sketch for somebody. And I didn't ask him for one but when he saw I had a sketchbook that I was passing around for others to draw in, he grabbed it up and inserted an unsolicited pussycat…
I didn't really work with him on anything but…well, here's the story. Around '83, I was writing for an animation producer who called me in one day and told me he'd acquired the rights to do a prime-time cartoon special based on the Kliban Cats. ABC, he said, had already said they wanted it, subject to the studio coming up with an acceptable script. "They're so hot on it," he told me, "this could easily become a weekly series."
I was a bit puzzled as Mr. Kliban's cats had never appeared in any sort of story continuity, nor did they seem to have names or established personalities or much consistency from drawing to drawing. The producer told me, "You'll have to invent all of that." I was not the first writer he'd had take a stab at this. Another one — someone I didn't know at all — had written an outline which everyone thought went way, way off in the wrong direction. "I'm not even going to show it to you," he said. "I want you to start clean."
I told him I knew Kliban and asked if I should contact him or if we were going to have meetings or anything. The producer said no, that wouldn't be necessary. "We're licensing the rights to do whatever we want with the material. He doesn't want to be involved." I was handed a Xeroxed packet of Kliban cat drawings. There were about seven cats who were to form the core cast of this special. For each of the seven, there were a few Kliban sketches of the cat from various angles, plus the writer before me had named each cat. The names were about the only thing he'd done that everyone liked so we were going to keep those. Everything else was up to me.
My agent firmed up a deal with this producer's lawyer for me to write a special/pilot for The Kliban Cats and I began work on an overview. I gave each cat a personality and a modus operandi and a way of relating to the other cats and I figured out where they lived, what they did, etc. ABC okayed it all with minor notes and I had just been sent off to write the actual pilot script when a San Diego Comic Convention occurred. When I told the producer I'd probably be seeing Kliban there, he said, "Great! Fill him in a little on what we're doing."
I ran into B. the first day of the con and he greeted me warmly. I told him I was working on the TV show based on his characters. He said, "What TV show based on my characters?" I told him all about the project. He knew nothing about any such deal and ran off to his hotel room to call…well, someone — his agent or his lawyer or his publisher or…I don't know who he called.
An hour or two later though, he said to me, "I'm glad you told me about this." As near as we could figure out, here's what happened: He was against doing this kind of thing, at least for now. His reps thought he should so when they got the inquiry from the producer's lawyer, they said in effect, "Yes, the rights are available. Give us your best offer and we'll present it to our client." They were thinking that a huge offer might change his mind. If it didn't, no harm done. And then, since no firm offer was made, they never told him at all.
B. said he didn't really want his characters animated, at least for television at that time and certainly not for the kind of money that a studio like that was talking about. He definitely wasn't about to make the kind of deal the producer had told me they'd made, where he just sells the rights and lets the buyer do whatever they want with it. He thanked me repeatedly for letting him know about it and apologized that the steps he and his reps were about to take — calling the studio, reminding them there was no deal and there would not be one — would cost me some money. That did sorta happen but that didn't bother me. I mean, it was his work. He had not only the legal but also the moral right to control what was done with it.
Sure enough, the Monday after the con, the producer called me and said to stop work on the script. His lawyer, he said, had screwed things up somehow, telling him the deal had been made when it hadn't been. Apparently, the attorney was wrongly certain a deal would be made with Kliban's reps and that it was safe to start on the development. This kind of thing happens more often than one might think.
I am not sure why but often in Hollywood, the parties come to a verbal understanding on some transaction, work starts based on the belief that "we have a deal" and then the paperwork that enshrines that deal follows, sometimes weeks or even months later. Occasionally, getting that paperwork drafted and signed requires additional negotiation. I was once halfway through writing a screenplay for a movie when the two sides began arguing over the terms they'd settled on months earlier and the whole thing was called off. And a year or two after the whole Kliban project I'm telling you about, the exact same thing happened to me at another studio regarding another famous property that the studio was sure they'd acquired. But they hadn't.
Think that's impossible? Wait. A few years earlier — in 1978 — Filmation Studios produced a Saturday morning series for NBC called The Fabulous Funnies. It featured animated versions of popular newspaper strips of the day such as Broom-Hilda, Alley Oop, Nancy and Tumbleweeds. The Monday after the first episode aired, Filmation's lawyers heard from Tom Ryan, creator and owner of Tumbleweeds. It seems each of the lawyers thought someone else in their office had made a deal with Ryan for the rights…but no one had.
Once Kliban's attorneys shut things down, the producer I was working for decided to try and salvage the project. ABC liked what I was writing and as brilliant as B. Kliban was, he didn't own the concept of a band of cats. The decision was made to remove everything Kliban did own by designing different cats that looked nothing like his. A new cartoonist redesigned the cast in a completely different style and his work was so good that ABC said they'd still buy the special, not for prime-time but for Saturday morning. That meant a new production schedule, one that was so tight that I had to call in another writer to help me finish the script on time.
Voice actors were auditioned, selected and recorded, then animation commenced. I think they were about halfway through animating the show when a new problem popped out of nowhere, as new problems tend to do. An Associate Producer at the studio was cleaning out his office when he came upon a set of the Kliban cat drawings that had started the whole endeavor. The drawings were the same ones that had been given to me but on mine, the names of the characters — the names that had been supposedly bestowed upon them by the writer who had preceded me — were typed. On this set, they were handwritten in — in the handwriting of B. Kliban. How, the A.P. wondered, did that happen?
A hurried internal investigation yielded the answer: Kliban, not the writer I replaced, had named the cats. And those names were heard in the dialogue that had been recorded for the show that was now well into production.
New names were chosen for them — names with the same number of syllables. Then about half the voice actors had to be called back in so the lines in which the characters' names were mentioned could be replaced. That meant those actors had to be paid for another day's work even though most of them just did one or two lines — or in one case, just yelled one name. The studio was so happy to have to spend that money, he said sarcastically.
Finally, the special was finished and it aired and no one said anything about turning it into a series. It didn't turn out badly but I suspect its roots as a kind of bastard concoction made it feel like a less-than-inspired notion.
The following year down in San Diego, I told Kliban the entire story. He laughed and said, "You know, I realized later on that maybe what I should have done was to let them animate it and then sue them for a whole ton of money." Then he added, "If you'd agreed to testify that you never told me about it, I would have cut you in on the deal."