The Village Voice’s April 6 edition is a special Comics Issue. Don’t want to get catty, but the New Haven Advocate nailed this same concept around a decade and a half ago, and did it for three years in a row. The brainstorm came from Josh Mamis—then the Advocate’s editor, now Published of the whole New Mass Media chain, and we all jumped in with pens and brushes ablazing.
The main reason we had to stop after three years was that the freelance budget couldn’t cover all those artists—we were at least doubling the amount spent on each story. (The Voice, by ethical contrast, avoided paying some artists altogether, under that old cheapskate scam that it would give them “exposure.”)
It was also a logistical nightmare, having to move up deadlines to allow for original art and intense writer/artist collaborations, while making sure the stories would still be timely when they ran.
We also had hard and fast rules about the way we would do a Comics Issue, considerably more stringent that what the Voice has done this week. We decided that all stories which we could control would have to be rendered in comics form. That basically meant everything except the ads (though we did convince some of the advertisers to join in the fun and do their ads as comics), some of the syndicated columns we ran in the back pages (though we did profusely illustrate News of the Weird) and the listings sections (where we were able to at least turn the coming-events preview text boxes into cartoons). We comicsized the letters section, the movie and theater reviews, the table of contents, everything.
When Malik Jones got shot by an East Haven police officer in 1997, a scandalous tragedy which would become one of the biggest local news events of the decade, the story broke on the weekend before the comics issue went to press. We got Paul Heriot, an artist known for his realistic approach to cartooning (and who had lots of experience drawing policemen, having done T-shirt designs for the state police), and he worked overnight on a gritty and visceral depiction of the shooting to accompany Paul Bass’ text.
Proud of those old issues. I remember distilling a season of Yale Cabaret shows into one multi-panel cartoon, and doing a review of a Yale School of Drama show in the manner of B.C.’s Jonny Hart. I did a review of the British play Love and Understanding (co-starring Paul Bettany, now a movie star) as a perverse “Love Is…” cartoon, and while the director of the piece was not amused, my comic was stuck up on doors and bulletin boards throughout the Long Wharf Theatre.
I also remember people thinking, every year, that we’d lost our minds. Which was kind of true.