Stay tuned for Joe Wos’ amazing mazes and cartoons
Maybe because cartoonist Joe Wos is a self-styled master of mazes, he’s used to navigating uncertain routes and detours on his way to his destination.
Ever since he was 4 years old, the North Braddock native knew he wanted to be a cartoonist. The walls of his home were covered with scribbles and drawings that his parents happily papered over to provide a more appropriate canvas.
“I am the son of a steelworker,” the 49-year-old cartoonist said, “but my dad always encouraged me to be a cartoonist. He felt strongly that he was making the sacrifices for the family so that every generation after him could pursue their passions as professions.”
The elder Mr. Wos’ only caveat to his son hunched over a drawing desk was a mix of tough love and an acknowledgment that life is about choices: “Don’t screw it up, because your kids deserve the same opportunities to do what they love,” his father told him.
Like his steel mill era dad, Joe Wos has a pretty strong work ethic. Besides teaching cartooning at Central Catholic High, Mr. Wos supplies Creators Syndicate with cartoon mazes for distribution in newspapers around the world under the banner MazeToons!
Five years into the Creators Syndicate gig, Mr. Wos insists he isn’t bored yet.
His daily mazes take 15 to 20 minutes to design, but the Sunday mazes take about 2 hours each. Book illustrations range from one to five hours.
“I like to work in batches, so I will set aside a day to do a whole week’s worth and then focus on other projects,” Mr. Wos said, adding that he never misses a day drawing and sometimes works up to 20 hours a day on several projects.
Ever productive, the cartoonist, who recently moved to Oakmont after 25 years in Penn Hills, is working on his 10th book.
“I make my living from books, public appearances and performing at schools and conventions,” said the founder of the ToonSeum, Pittsburgh’s local museum space dedicated to cartooning and comic culture.
Mr. Wos parted ways with the ToonSeum a few years ago, but has continued his role as the resident cartoonist of the Charles M. Schulz Museum since its opening 18 years ago. He’ll be teaching remote cartooning classes at the museum this month.
One of the endlessly fun facts about Mr. Wos, who remains defiantly left-handed in a right-handed world, is that he established the record for the world’s largest hand-drawn maze. In his role as a cartoonist, he also performed with symphonies, including the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
“I have no musical talent,” Mr. Wos said, “so getting to be on stage with world class orchestras illustrating the music as they play is amazing to me.”
He likes the immediate audience response. “For syndicated work, I create it and it runs months later ... but when I am on stage, I get that applause. I am an old vaudevillian at heart.”
Then along came the COVID-19 pandemic. Because he can’t travel or make his way around the community the way he used to, he has to come up with new ways to stay connected with audiences.
“A day after schools were closed, I went to my YouTube channel that I hadn’t used in a year and noticed that it would be possible to do live training on it. So I announced that day I would do 1 o’clock daily free cartooning classes on weekdays,” he said.
Mr. Wos has 100 recurring students who visit his class daily or stream it later.
“Some days, I’ll have 1,000 people viewing the class. It’s amazing,” he said. “Now, does it make me money? No, but I went from 20 subscribers to 2,000 subscribers in one week. I went from a couple of thousand impressions to 900,000 impressions. In the long run it will help me, but that’s not why I did it. That’s just a side benefit.”
The pandemic has forced him to be more creative and innovative.
“I’ve always had to be able to market myself and produce merchandise for conventions,” he said, but making custom-printed masks with images he created was exercising new entrepreneurial muscle. “In the first week, I had 200 orders,” he said, “but that’s dropping off because others are doing it now, too.
“This is what’s going to work for this week,” he said summing up his COVID-19 philosophy, “but I gotta be ready for next week with something new and ready to go.”
For all of his forwardmoving energy, Joe Wos will probably forever be identified with the ToonSeum: The Pittsburgh Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art, one of three museum spaces specializing in cartoon art in America.
After several years existing as a gallery space at the Children’s Museum on the North Side, the ToonSeum relocated to the Cultural District in 2007. Mr. Wos left his position as executive director a few years ago. The ToonSeum is on hiatus pending reorganization by a new director and relocation to a less expensive site. It closed its doors on Liberty Avenue in 2018.
Asked if it was hard to walk away from what was once his most all-consuming project, Mr. Wos was philosophical. “I gave up a lot to create the ToonSeum. I invested my life’s savings and countless hours. After years of doing it, I knew I couldn’t continue on at the expense of my own work. I was losing my voice because I was so focused on magnifying the voice of the art form.”
Joe Wos is keeping busy now, but he’ll be even busier once the order to shelter-inplace has been lifted.
“You want to do two things in life and in your career,” he said, perhaps unconsciously echoing his father’s advice from decades ago: “Feed your passion and feed your stomach. It’s hard to find something that puts food on your table and joy in your heart. You gotta find that mix if you want to be a success.”