Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Still tickling SA’s funny bone
10 ‘Madam & Eve’ cartoonist helps us laugh at situations we all find ourselves in
EVERY day, Rico Schacherl checks his inbox. In it will be a note from his business partner, Steven Francis. The note will either be agreeing with a cartoon idea, finessing it or suggesting something for the next day
here’s a six-hour time difference between Parkhurst, Johannesburg, where Schacherl’s studio is and New York in the US, where Francis is based – but the arrangement works.
The result is Madam & Eve, surely one of South Africa’s longest-running newspaper comic strips and without a doubt one of the most loved.
Hadeda La Land is the 26th annual since the creative genius of Rico, Francis and Harry Dugmore was first harnessed.
Dugmore was the business manager for Rapid Phase, their company that eventually saw Madam & Eve evolve into a live-action sitcom television series for e.tv – a “completely different animal”, he says – and other merchandise.
The TV series was popular, low budget and done at pace. Schacherl and Francis eventually went on to do a pilot for an animated series, much like The Simpsons – and aiming for the same production quality.
“It was an interesting lesson,” remembers Schacherl. “The animation tech is relatively cheap, but it’s the voice actors, the rehearsals, crafting the scripts and post-production that are so expensive. Extrapolating from that, it would have been as expensive to make as Egoli.”
The three creatives met in the very early 1990s, working on the shortlived Laughing Stock satirical magazine, edited by Arthur Goldstuck. Schacherl, Austrian-born but Joburgbred, wanted to join the magazine after he heard its founders, Gus Silber and Goldstuck, on radio.
He went to the magazine, but bumped into the expatriate Francis, who had just returned from the dentist and was still under the influence of the local anaesthetic.
“It was surreal,” says Schacherl, “half his face was full of novocaine.”
The magazine lasted for 13 editions before closing, but it was enough to forge a bond between them that would become Madam & Eve, inspired by Francis’s observations of his new domestic arrangements in South Africa.
When the magazine closed, the three tried doing joke books and greeting cards for the same company before venturing out on their own – initially working out of Schacherl’s then house in Melville.
“When he first came to South Africa, Steve was staying with his in-laws in their beautiful house in Alberton and observed this bizarre relationship between his mother-inlaw and the maid.”
It was 1992 and the country was on the cusp of seismic change. Inspired by Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury, The Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes, it brilliantly captured the zeitgeist of changing power relations.
“The title popped into his head, we did a couple of mock-ups and the Mail &Guardian (then still the Weekly Mail) picked those up,” Schacherl remembers.
“It’s outlasted everybody, even our marriages,” he laughs. “We pre-date all the current newspaper groups as they exist today and only Doonesbury is still going from the three iconic strips that inspired us.”
Dugmore, who had been a writer with Laughing Stock, became the trio’s business manager before leaving in 2004 to return to academia. Today he’s an assistant professor at Rhodes University’s school of journalism.
Rapid Phase was eventually pared down until all that remained was the Madam & Eve comic strip.
Madam & Eve isn’t Schacherl’s only work either, it’s about a third of what he does every day: he does political cartooning for FinWeek and broadcasting for eNCA in the