SEE YOU IN THE FUNNY PAPERS — FOR DECADES
Few comic strips have lasted longer than `Drabble,' drawn by Kevin Fagan of Mission Viejo
Cartoonist Kevin Fagan grew up idolizing Charles M. Schulz and “Peanuts.” Now that his own comic strip, “Drabble,” is turning 45 this week, Fagan is contemplating his long run in the funny pages and once again has Schulz on his mind.
“I knew Charles M. Schulz pretty well,” Fagan says from his home in Mission Viejo a week before the March 5 anniversary of the 1979 debut of “Drabble.” “I'd see him a couple of times a year and we'd talk on the phone regularly.
“I remember when his 50th anniversary was coming up for `Peanuts,' ” he says. “I was on the phone with him, and he was saying, `Yeah, you know, 50 years, 18,000 comic strips.' That's how many strips he'd done in 50 years.
“I'll never forget, he just said, `Where does it all come from?' — he was talking about the ideas for the strip and all of the themes,” Fagan says. “It was a genuine statement of awe. He wasn't fishing for a compliment or `You're a genius' or anything like that. He was just amazed by the whole thing.
“As I am kind of approaching that now, I realize how he feels. You know, cartooning, drawing a comic strip every day, is quite a wonderful thing to spend your life doing. Because every day I have to try to think of something that's going to give people a smile.
“I'm thinking, as I get close to 50 years now, not a lot of people have had the opportunity to share a smile with millions upon millions of people every single day for 45 years or 50 years,” Fagan says.
“Drabble,” which Fagan sold to United Feature Syndicate when he was a 21-yearold college student at Sacramento State, is a comic strip inspired by the shy, slightly awkward young man he was at the time.
“(When) the strip started out, it was all about Norman, who was a goofy college kid, which is exactly what I was,” says Fagan, who led a quiet life living with his mother in Fair Oaks and Citrus Heights outside of Sacramento at the time. “I was Norman Drabble. I couldn't get a date. You know, I was a complete moron. I didn't know what to say.
“So it was autobiographical, but of course, I would go off the deep end on things that didn't really happen,” he says. “But a lot of it was based on my life.
“And over time, when I got married” — his wife, Christi, shares a March 5 birthday with “Drabble” — “and kids started to come, I started to relate more to Ralph, who's the dad in the comic strip. Norman's always been there, but he was no longer the focal point of the strip; it was kind of Ralph and the whole family.”
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Fagan, 67, talked about the evolution of “Drabble,” what it's like to create a comic strip on your own for 45 years, the future of “Drabble” and more.
QIt's a remarkable feat to have a career doing the one thing that you love for such a long period of time, isn't it?
AWell, if they had come to me with a contract when I was 21 years old and said in the contract, “You're going to do this every day for probably the rest of your life,” I would have hesitated, I think. The contract they gave me was, “It's going to be every day for five years, and if we like what you're doing we'll renew it for another five.” I've never really thought about it in the last 45 years until recently, as I started to look back over my life. I'm just very fortunate to have been able to spend my life doing this.
QYou mentioned Charles M. Schulz calculated at 50 years he'd done 18,000 strips. Do you have a sense of how many you've done?
AYou know what, I just took out my calculator five minutes ago because I was thinking you might ask that. Forty-five years is 16,425 strips.
Q
That's an amazing number.
A
Well, you can deduct 12 from that because I got a week off in 1983 when my mother died. My syndicate said, take a week off. And then in 2008, I ended up in the hospital for some dumb thing, so I took another six days off to do that. So it's 16,425 minus 12, whatever that is.
Q
How did it change your life to get that first contract in 1979?
A
I went from absolutely nowhere. I mean, I was in college and I was thinking, “What am I going to do?” I was thinking maybe I could be a teacher or maybe I'll just go and get a job at the mall or something like that. I really had not even thought about my future very much. And then out of the blue they offered this contract and were flying out to meet me, and, you know, we're in business.
I didn't have a lawyer to talk to. I just kind of went on blind faith. I knew the syndicate
The knickknacks in Fagan’s studio include memorabilia for the “Peanuts” comic strip, which was drawn by his friend Charles M. Schulz. “Peanuts” ran for 50years, one of the few with longer tenure than
“Drabble.”
“When you do characters that are people — as opposed to animal characters — people start looking at them as real people, as people that they know and are part of their lives.” —Fagan
that I was signing with was United Feature Syndicate, which syndicated “Peanuts” and a lot of the great features, so I knew this wasn't a fly-by-night; this was a reputable thing.
Q
The day you signed the contract, do you recall what you did? Did you celebrate?
A
No, I've always been a very low-key kind of guy. The vice president said, “Meet me at the (Sacramento) airport; we're going to fly out there, and we'll sign the contract at the airport.” So I went to meet him and he said, “By the way, did you bring a relative or friend with you to witness the signing?” I said, “Nooo, was I supposed to do that?”
He says, “Is your mom home?” — because I was living with my mom at the time — and so we drove back and in front of her we signed the contract. There was no celebration. I thought, “Now the work starts,” after I signed the contract.
QThis goes back to what you were saying about your conversation with Charles Schulz: How do you understand or explain how you and Norman and Ralph and June and the rest have been able to continue to entertain readers all these years?
AOne thing I learned early on is the newspaper syndication business is kind of rough. Because there were several major newspaper syndicates back in the day, and all of them would go into editors' offices and target my strip, since I was a young guy and kind of new. The salesmen would go in and say, “Here's the strip you need to replace with our strip. We're going to give you this new strip and your readers are gonna love it. And this guy, you know, he's just a kid” and blah, blah, blah.
So it's that fear and that knowledge that every day people are trying to replace me. I thought, I can't let up on this. And it turned into a lifetime, like I say, pretty much all day long of trying to think of funny things, and writing down ideas, and really working it hard. It was just that fear that I'm going to lose everything if I don't stay on top of this.
QHas time?
AThe strip kind of evolved, and that's a good thing when strips evolve. And that's because it was one cartoonist writing and drawing the whole thing. Sometimes the cartoonist hires other artists to write and draw his strip. At that point, the strip sometimes doesn't change much, because the people employed to make it, they don't want to mess with a good thing.
But when a strip is drawn by one person, it can really evolve over the years. I didn't realize how much it changed until a couple of years ago, I started doing a Substack newsletter (“The Daily Drabble”). It's this day in “Drabble” history, and I pull out strips from years past. And I see strips that I haven't looked at in 30 or 40 years, some of which I've forgotten all about.
QWhat is it about these characters that has connected so much with comic strip readers?
AWhen you do characters that are people — as opposed to animal characters — people start looking at them as real people, as people that they know and are part of their lives. They get upset if anyone appears to be in any kind of peril. Or, you know, Norman is constantly making a bad decision about this and that; people get upset sometimes.
That's one thing I learned ... because they've made a connection with the characters.
Q“Drabble” changed much over
We started out talking about Schulz and “Peanuts,” which he did by himself for 50 years, which is one of the longest solo runs of any American cartoonist. Now you're at 45. What does it feel like to be close to his neighborhood?
AYou know what, I've never considered myself to be in Schulz's neighborhood because his genius was so far beyond anything that I do. But as I get close to the numbers it's a little shocking that I've been around so long, and I realize that not many people have done that.
I've never done the research. I don't know how many cartoonists have gone to 50 years. I think there's one today, Russell Myers, who does “Broom-Hilda.” I believe he works by himself and I think he's surpassed 50. (`Broom-Hilda' debuted in April 1970, and with more than 19,000 strips has almost reached 54 years with Myers as its sole creator.)
QDo you have a plan for the future of “Drabble”? You're going to keep going? Or is there a time when you might decide you'll just sit on the porch and watch the grass grow instead?
AYeah, I've never had a plan. The idea of retiring is kind of scary because I don't know what I would do. Coincidentally, there's another conversation I had with Schulz. As he got older, his family, I think, and the syndicate were suggesting that he take some time off from the strip. You know, “There's no need to keep working so hard; you can enjoy your life.”
And I remember him saying, “What am I gonna do? Am I gonna go to the park and feed the pigeons? I don't want to take a sabbatical.” Eventually, he did. But yeah, I mean, when you've spent your whole life doing a certain thing, I imagine that when that time comes I'll be pretty lost for a while. We'll see what happens.