CLENCH & CHEESE BLOG

 

I just returned a wonderful book to the library called "The World on Sunday." It was a huge, full-color book documenting the Sunday World supplements from 1895 to 1906. This magnificent period was really pre-comic strip, although rudimentary versions of the format would appear from time to time. In those days, most city dwellers worked six days a week, often at dangerous menial jobs. In this environment so bereft of what would now be considered necessities , Sunday newspapers were more than entertainment: they were often the single avenue to a brighter and culturally rich world. The Sunday World was a huge affair, large enough to cover a kitchen table and heavy enough to be a significant burden up four flights of stairs. The full-color presses employed by Joseph Pulitzer's mammoth newspaper (with a circulation that topped a million readers at its peak) allowed for unbelievably beautiful illustrations delivered to anyone with a nickel. Because these were newspapers, very few of them were saved or archived (except in the form of microfiche, which does nothing to showcase how wonderful these issues were.) It is our good fortune that a British library archived the issues in bound volumes.

The Reader Holds the Bag

Cartoonists have typically engaged in what I like to call "long form work." Not long form as in Tolstoy-800-page work, but more like George Herriman one strip a day including sundays for 31 years work (11000 pages, for those who like numbers). When a strip runs for that long (and I am really referring to newspaper comics that are the work of one author, not strips like Garfield that employ teams of writers and illustrators or strips like Blondie that continue long after the creator has died) the reader develops a deep, abiding relationship with the characters and the individual world of that comic. The best of comic books enjoy that relationship too... what reader of Tintin doesn't pine for a world of such clean simplicity and elegance? Or the Marvel universe of wisecracks and effortless muscularity? 

The cartoonist, as creator, has a duty to consistently serve the reader. Just because the world is the creation of one individual does not necessarily mean that it isn't shared by others. When a cartoonist throws in the towel and quits drawing their comic, they essentially shut the door on that world for everyone. Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes, the Far Side, Bloom County and, most recently, Achewood, have all gone away because the creators decided for one reason or another that enough was enough (although Peanuts  ended because of Sparky Schulz's death). 

Part of me understands this... I have labored on hundreds of strips and have yet to break through in any way... but part of me is really incredulous. It's hard work, sure, and there is a possibility of failure and mediocrity in every panel, but the risks of continuing on outweigh the lameness of quitting. Every case is different: Bill Watterson battled for years with his syndicate and was burned out, Gary Larson thought he was going crazy, Breathed phased himself out gradually and Onstad said he didn't want to parody himself. Quitting, though, is quitting, and the reader is left holding the bag.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

History of Clench and Cheese

These panels ran during Cheese Goes Straight when I needed to take a little break from the story. They give a bit of background about the characters and their situation. Here's the first of four (I'll spread 'em out over the next few days)

 

Origins 2

So, Clench Goes to the Dentist was the name of the animated short. I designed all the backgrounds and really got to work solidifying the way the characters looked. Here's the background that opens the short:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also added a new character, Alice, an omniscient New York apartment dweller who answers the door in an unusual fashion:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The gag for this was Alice saying  "I thought you were someone else." This started a long trend of Cheese interrupting Alice in the midst of some bizarre activity.

Drawing all these frames one at a time was an amazingly long and detailed process... and they weren't yet even animated! As I went on working every day, I began to get overwhelmed with the enormity. 24 frames a second, sixty seconds in a minute, ten minutes... that's a lot of work. Plus, I recorded a soundtrack complete with music. This is called an animatic or, more properly, a "Leica Reel" since it has sound. Unfortunately, right around this time my Lacie external hard drive crashed, taking most of my files with it. In light of this, I gave up. However, there remains a low-res version of the animatic with an early scratch soundtrack:

Download Dentist_animatic

Apologies in advance for the low quality. At any rate, this setback was just too much and I abandoned the animation in favor of doing a few comics to develop the characters. More on this later, but suffice to say the strip soon became its own particular project... over 250 color and black and white strips, five different storylines and hundreds of thousands of page views.

Many comics

Ah, summer. It's something like 108 (heat index, anyway) and I am slouched over my computer building InDesign books and PDFs of my comics. I'm getting ready to do a big submission to a couple of big publishers in the hopes that I can get some of these jewels out into the public sphere. I'm also giving serious consideration to finding an agent to represent me. With this in mind, I've put together a pretty large body of strips in different styles. Some are in color, some black and white, some hand-drawn, others computer-assisted. It's been a lot of work. I'm not really content with leaving things online because there's not a lot of money in it (read: no money whatsoever) and I have found the readership to be sporadic. Maybe I have been going abut it the wrong way, but even in its heyday on Drunk Duck, Clench & Cheese barely registered. Since most of the comics on Drunk Duck pretty much suck (poorly drawn, badly written, not funny and not interesting), it's not that big of a deal, but still... it'd be nice to be able to do this professionally. Anyway, here are the covers to the comics I'm submitting:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of the comics included in this collection are linked on the right. Here's a brand new one, too:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don't want to tip my hand on this, but it's a longer story that may stretch into a couple hundred pages. I have a couple of ideas that are book-length, hence this train of thought. I'll pick up the Clench and Cheese origin story soon.

Origins

Clench and Cheese started out as a weekly strip for Seattle's Rocket.  Two weeks before it was going to publish the strip, the paper folded (one of the early casualties of what has now become a common problem). I was left with six strips that had no home, so I moved on to other projects. Fast forward ten years. I was taking an animation class and was spending a lot of time developing a storyboard as past of an assignment. As I worked on the board, I was struck by how similar it was to creating a comic. I had, by this time, moved into doing longer pieces, so it was a big revelation to see how well the two things could fit together. I started looking at old work that I had set aside at one time or another and came across the Clench and Cheese strips.  It got my gears turning, and I spent a few weeks developing a story. Soon, I created a series of boards with the goal of creating an animatic. Here are a few panels:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'll continue with part two of this story tomorrow... I'm bushed.