Matthew Wecksell wrote to ASK me…
Today, in your obit for Dan Spiegle, you wrote that, "A strip like that would have been a full-time job for anyone else but Dan was very fast…"
As a fan of comic books, I've always wondered — why is drawing a comic strip considered a full time job, when most comic book artists can draw 22 pages a month? To this reader, strips see like far less work, particularly when some freakish artists ("Hi, Sergio!") can draw much faster than that…
Well, artists are all different…some much faster than others. For many years, Milton Caniff was writing and drawing the Steve Canyon newspaper strip and Frank Robbins was producing a similar strip called Johnny Hazard. The two features had approximately the same amounts of drawing in each installment in much the same style. Caniff put in a 60 hour week and sometimes employed an assistant to do much of the drawing. Robbins wrote and drew an entire week of strips in three days and spent the rest of his week painting or working in comic books.
It was just a matter of how fast each man was and Robbins was faster, the same way my friend Sergio is faster than many other cartoonists. It's also a function of how much time they actually spend drawing. Caniff had to spend a lot of time supervising the business interests of his strip, dealing with the syndicate, talking to editors, etc. Robbins, perhaps because his strip was less popular — and because unlike Caniff, he didn't own his strip — had less of his work week occupied by that stuff.
Once a strip becomes popular, there are many demands on the cartoonist's time. I once spent much of an afternoon with Charles Schulz during which, in addition to talking with me, he was on the phone a lot to licensees about merchandise and to others discussing an upcoming Charlie Brown TV special. A photographer came by to take some pictures to accompany an interview Mr. Schulz had done the previous week. He also had to sign a pile of books for someone.
He did not spend five seconds on thinking about the strips he had to do that week or drawing them while I was there…and that evening, he had to speak at a college so he wouldn't be at the drawing table then, either.
But maybe the main problem is that a newspaper strip is relentless. Unless you run reruns occasionally, which most artists don't like to do, you need to draw almost every day of every week. A comic book guy can usually skip an issue and they'll run a fill-in by someone else. If a strip artist loses a week due to the flu or a personal emergency, he or she have to make it up somewhere. If you want to take a two-week vacation, you have to get ahead, which means doing a lot more than a week of strips per week for a time.
I have occasionally ghost-written for a couple of strips. One time, one of the artists I've assisted called me in a panic. He was something like six months ahead on his strip. Then he got sick for a week, took some days off to attend to family matters, took his wife away for a weekend, etc. He thought it all amounted to about three weeks but when he went to look at his calendar, he discovered his six-month lead was down to two. A day here…three days there…it all added up.
He said, "I still don't understand it…only that I need to draw two or three weeks worth of strips a week for a while until I get that six-month lead back!" He had me bombard him with gags and a few months later, he had his six-month lead back — But he had to work night and day to get it back. It's just the nature of the job.
