Back in the winter of 1996-97, the newspaper I regularly read
hired a delivery person who was scared of driving in the snow or on icy roads.
Since I live in the mountains and August is the only month when it never ever
snows, this was a clear case of the wrong person for the wrong job. Due to Rule
Number Three of Murphy’s law of Meteorological Mutability we always got rough
weather on the weekends.
As a result, my newspaper showed up sporadically and at that,
only late in the day when the roads, presumably, were deemed safe to drive on.
It was an El Nino year so we got four feet of snow in December, which was enough
to convince our delivery person that this area was cursed and dangerous, at
least until August.
As a result of this, I had to switch to a morning newspaper
that hired people not as easily intimidated by orographic peculiarities and
would thus appear in the stands in, you know -- morning. Since one of the two
other papers that made it here was a rabid low-end right-wing rag that spent
most of its time foaming about Bill and Hill, that left the San Francisco Chronicle.
So I started buying the Kronk with some reluctance. The reluctance stemmed from the fact that they had recently won a bitter strike against their workers, engaging in deceptive and unfair practices. I really didn’t like giving my money to them. Further, the paper always seemed to prefer style over substance, and with Herb Caen gone, replaced by a Los Angeles sports writer, the style wasn’t quite what it used to be.
One guilty pleasure of the Kronk was the comics. On Sundays,
it put out a joint edition with its rival newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner,
with the result that the color section was large, rich and varied, and harkened
back to the glory days of newspaper comics.
One strip caught my eye. It had the unlikely name of “Frumpy
the Clown”. The title character was in full clown costume, and indisputably
looked pretty seedy and run down. It had good artwork, with the characters showing
hilariously exaggerated facial expressions which matched the physical humor
of the strip well.
The premise of the strip doesn’t sound good when you just
describe it cold: “Hilarity ensues when a certifiably psychotic clown takes
up residence with a upper-middle class white family with two small children.”
It sounds like a really bad sitcom or a half-way decent Steven King novel.
But the strip avoided the expected pitfalls. Frumpy was psychotic only in relation to the rest of the world, which meant he was profoundly sane. The kids weren’t “Garfields”–that is, cartoon entities deliberately made small and cute because they had personalities you would loathe in a human adult. In fact, they were the most realistic cartoon kids this side of Calvin and Hobbes. And the parents weren’t buffoonish foils; they were intelligent, interactive, and capable of firing BACK.
Frumpy wasn’t always helplessly hornswoggled by the kids,
and the parents weren’t always helplessly hornswoggled by Frumpy. It quickly
became one of my favorite strips, and as good a reason as any to keep buying
the Kronk.
Then one Sunday in 1998, the comic showed Frumpy bidding the
family farewell and riding off into the sunset–on an elephant he had charged
to the father’s account, of course. My wife and I looked at each other and went,
“Wha’ da fa?” The next week, a new comic, featuring a bored Gen X millionaire
and his pet weasel, had replaced Frumpy. A decent strip, to be sure (and it
didn’t last, of course, even with a weasel in it) but it wasn’t Frumpy.
So I logged on and did a web search under “Frumpy”. I quickly found myself looking
at a drawing of the clown bowing out from a floodlight, and an explanation from
Judd Winick, the strip’s creator, as to why he quit drawing it. Simply stated,
Frumpy was a bit much for the family values crowd, and only three papers still
carried it. The rest wanted a new variation on “BC”.
Winick wrote, “I know you must feel like I've let you down and I acknowledge the fact that I have.” At which point I went, “Awwwww...” and did something I’ve never done before in my life: I wrote a fan letter. I praised his work, and thanked him for sharing it with us, and compared him to Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”) and Garry Trudeau (“Doonesbury”).
Now at this point, country bumpkin that I am, I had absolutely
no idea who Winick was, or that he was celebrated for anything other than drawing
“Frumpy”. But I knew that this guy was good, and would be worth keeping an eye
on.
Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised to get a reply in my email in the next day or so, thanking me and responding in such a way to indicate that he had actually read my comments and was not just sending a form “thank you for your interest” missive.
He had sample panels on his website for a new project, “Barry Ween: Boy Genius”, and the samples were screamingly funny. It was obviously aimed for the trade paperback trade and not the syndicates, evidenced by one of the funniest panels, where Barry’s only friend turns to him with a look of incredulous disgust and says, “You sick fuck.” You won’t see this one in the set of panels next to “Family Circus”. The premise is that the central character is an eight year old boy with an IQ of 400. As with Frumpy, the humor lay in the fact that rather than the formulaic cliche characterizations common in comics, Winick asked, “Suppose a real kid had that type of IQ? What would he be like? How would his parents and friends react?”
Barry is strong willed and utterly amoral. This ain’t no Charlie Brown, folks.
It took me a while to get a copy to read. The outfit Winick was marketing through, Next Planet Over, doesn’t take checks or M.O.s, and I don’t use plastic on the internet–and that is the only way to get “Barry Ween” Dumb marketing.
A few months ago, I started hearing some rumblings about a graphic novel about a guy who is an AIDS activist who dies of his disease. A couple of gay friends were raving about it, saying this is a very courageous and truthful work. I added “Pedro and Me” to the long list of things that I have to read someday. But the title, like “Malcolm in the Middle” didn’t grab my attention.
Book. Cover. Judge. Yeah. Silly me.
Then I come across an interview with Neil Gaiman, who says "Pedro and Me should be made compulsory reading. It's moving, honest, funny, and romantic. This is the real world in a way a T.V. series never could be."
Neil Gaiman.
Back a few years ago, Steven King wrote a piece about how rough it was writing in installments, because you are “writing without a safety net” If you are writing in installments, and you get to an unexpected plot twist in a late episode that you, as writer, weren’t expecting (and yes, that happens to just about all writers) you can’t go back and rewrite to accommodate the changes, because that’s already been published. That’s “writing without a safety net”. If you mention in episode two that the hero’s wife is named Lauri, and in episode six you have a perfect situation that needs the wife to be named Sally, you need to find a different “perfect situation” because if you cheat and change the wife’s name most of your readers are going to spot it. “Gotchas” are always a little bit annoying. If it’s a big one, it’s embarrassing.
King wrote “The Green Mile” in six installments over the space
of a year, some 640 pages. He was proud of himself for accomplishing such a
risky venture. It was a pretty good book that became a pretty good movie.
Gaiman did the same thing. Only in his case it was a epic
mythic story, spread over 80 installments over EIGHT years and totaling over
two THOUSAND pages. It’s one of the great literary accomplishments of our time,
a deep, involved, compelling story worthy of Gaiman’s hero, Shakespeare.
If the author of “Sandman” lavishes praise like that on a graphic novel, I’m going to sit up and pay attention. Who wrote this?
Judd Winick.
The guy who did “Frumpy”? I ask.
Um, I'm advised, the guy from “The Real World”.
I convinced my wife that I had to have this for my birthday.
She considered this and decided it would make a nice sort of bonus gift in addition
to the Miles Davis CD.
Gaiman was right – sort of. “Pedro and Me” doesn’t have the
incredible breadth and sweep of Sandman, but then it’s not supposed to. It’s
a simple, unaffected tale, one that isn’t out to impress with glitter and flash.
Judd Winick, it turns out, started out with a comic strip
called “Nuts and Bolts”, and he hoped to follow in the footsteps of Garry Trudeau
and Berkeley Breathed. Then the Syndicate pulled the rug out from under him,
and at loose ends he put in to audition for a part on “The Real World”. He was
accepted and moved into a San Francisco Town House, along with six other people
to be filmed during all their waking hours to be a series for MTV.
Sure, I had heard of it. But I dismissed it as being just
another “Reality TV” show, and blew it off. I’ve got to stop doing that.
Icy delivery roads. Dumb marketing procedures. Uninteresting titles. TV formats that normally don’t appeal to me. Suggestions for a birthday gift when one had already been chosen. The universe did not seem to want me exposed to Judd Winick’s work.
“Pedro and Me” talks about Pedro–his background, his avocation, his disease. It talks about Judd, his roommate, his fellow cast member, his friend.
Mostly, the story is about friendship, and loss, and hope.
Winick’s biggest strengths lie in the simplicity and honesty
of the story, and the unsparing depth of his perception. As with his other work,
the real charm lies not so much in the story line or what the characters are
doing but in how they interact with each other. You smile and you laugh, not
because they are bantering, but because they are being human.
One thing that Winick has in common with Gaiman is an element that is their biggest strength. They populate their stories with very real personae; the characters, real or fictional, are three-dimensional, and react to the plot devices in ways that you would expect your own family and friends, yourself, to respond.
The book is a silent thunderclap. It’s understated and simple,
and Winick never pulls on the readers’ sleeve, demanding attention. But once
you’ve read it, you’ll never, ever forget it.
At this point, if I was writing a standard review, I would say, “Recommended for mature audiences.” But that would be a lie. People who are a little bit immature should be reading this. It will make them grow a bit.
And watch for Judd Winnick. He’s going to be a powerful voice in America, hopefully for many years to come.
PS: I want to thank my marvelous wife, PJ, for getting me the copy of “Pedro and Me”, which is a highly valued part of my library now, and I want to thank Kathy Lancaster, the noble lady who runs Village Books in Mt. Shasta, for getting me an autographed copy. Even a dyed-in-the-wool rationalist like me knows there is much good juju in a signed-by-the-author copy. And especially, once again, thanks to Judd Winick.