THE ACCIDENTAL ARTIST
Loose Parts creator Dave Blazek drew his first cartoon at the tender age of 43
Like Loose Parts, the daily comic strip he has been writing since 1998, Dave Blazek's life has been a sustained exercise in the unpredictable. Even now, he seems to think his ending up in this profession is just plain surreal.
Blazek is speaking via Zoom from his sunny “tree house” studio on the outskirts of Philadelphia, in the state of his birth, Pennsylvania. The path to cartooning his freewheeling, absurdist strip was circuitous, starting in his hometown of Erie (about 500 kilometres northwest of Philadelphia), where young Dave was determined to be the black sheep in his family early on.
“My father was a glorified human Excel spreadsheet at a locomotive factory and my brothers were all in insurance and various other things. My sister was a teacher,” he says. “So I didn't really have any templates. I saw what they did for a living. And being the youngest, I thought: I don't want to do that.”
In fact, Blazek dreamt of landing work at a newspaper, albeit in a more conventional capacity.
“I grew up during the Watergate era and I wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein, like so many people wanted to be,” he says. “So I went to college for journalism.”
His four years in Penn State journalism school ended up with him ignominiously working in a cardboard box factory. It was not the paper production he had in mind. “It was a horrible part of my life because I couldn't find a job anywhere,” he recalls.
His sense of humour saved him. Blazek begged for a job in the municipality of State College, Penn., selling advertising to used car dealerships for a local paper. “They didn't even have a desk for me. My first desk was under the front counter. My forehead just stuck above the counter,” he says. “This was the beginning of my creative career in ad sales.”
His unconventional approach to advertising, such as having a dealership buy a blank page in the paper to run a backward ad on the following page — “Hold this page up to light for the best deals in town” — ultimately landed him a job in the marketing department of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“I then spent a few decades writing clever ads and clever advertising campaigns,” he says. “I must have written or directed 500 radio commercials and 125 TV commercials. And then I started dabbling in standup comedy.”
His comic sensibility inspired editors to consult with him on syndicated cartoons they were considering buying.
“I would look at them and say: `These aren't funny at all, these are terrible.' So one guy said: You should try it.'”
Blazek had no experience with drawing. So he teamed with artist friend John Gilpin, who drew up the cartoon ideas that flowed from Blazek's feverish imagination. But after a year, Gilpin had to relinquish his duties when he got cancer.
So Blazek taught himself to draw. “I never drew till I was 43,” he says. “Sometimes, you discover something you're really talented at accidentally.”
He had inspiration. Blazek acknowledges the influence of off-centre cartoonists such as Charles Addams, B. Kliban and especially Gary Larson's The Far Side.
“I still get angry letters from Far Side fans, who are like the Japanese soldiers in the woods who don't know the war is over. `You rip off Far Side! You're a ripoff artist.' I don't get that. If you were a Frank Sinatra fan and Frank Sinatra died, wouldn't you want more of that style? Wouldn't you want more people doing that and doing that well? So I don't understand. But I think I've done more Loose Parts cartoons by now than there are Far Side cartoons.”
“Loose Parts is kind of perfect for the times. It's not controversial. I don't deal with anything in the news,” he says. “Basically, I don't even really deal with a lot of normal societal issues of any sort. It's so absurdist that it's turned into a weird, safe landing place — a desert tropical island for people to go to at a time when most of the news can be somewhat trying.”
Having moved from the Washington Post syndicate to Postmedia, he feels Loose Parts “has kind of hit a renaissance here in just the past year since I moved syndicates.
“I tell people I'm like the indie band that people discover and they're surprised it's been around for a very long time.”
Postmedia has given Blazek access to a larger Canadian market, and he feels it's a good fit, reflecting his own admiration for Canadian comedy institutions such as The Kids in the Hall.
“The Canadian sense of humour is great,” he says. “I think it's a great market. In a weird way, it's very similar to the U.K. sense of humour.”
With all that going for him, retirement is the last thing on Blazek's mind.
“I'm 66 now, but I'm still relatively young at this,” he says.
“It's everything I dreamt it was and I intend to do it until someone physically pries the stylus from my hands,” he says. “I'm nowhere near done yet.”