Groening on Evergreen

Recently reread this part of Matt Groening's Comics Journal interview in April 1991 where he talks about his time at The Evergreen State College. He's pretty dead on when describing then place back in the 1970s.

I actually recall copies of Arcade sitting around the office of The Cooper Point Journal, the student newspaper Matt edited. Now that I think about it, they probably belonged to Matt!

Matt is being modest here. I was acquainted with Matt and Lynda before they knew each other, and although Matt's chief ambition was to be a writer, he was already into cartooning. Lynda was multi-talented in drawing and writing with a desire to be an art teacher, and Matt, I believe, encouraged and promoted her entry into cartooning. But they did provide each other with a lot of creative spark and energy.

I was some local rural hayseed with barbed wire holes still in my jeans, dazzled by their banter. But they were nice to me anyway.

Can o' Worms issue # 2

1st edition. Olympia, Washington : The Evergreen State College, January 1992. Enlarged digest size. I'm just scanning the front and inside covers here.

A look at the contents page (by Ed Martin) is most interesting. Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, and your faithful pixel correspondent were already considered old guys almost 20 years ago!!! Jeez. A milepost worth noting for this blog.

By now the three of us must be in the fossil category.

Of this second generation of Evergroove cartoonists, I've met Edward Martin III, Cat Kenney, and Megan Kelso.

Ed was a student worker in the Evergreen library when I was employed there as Head of Cataloging 1986-1988. I liked his creativity and he was a fun conversationalist. It seems today he is a film director.

Cat Kenney, who I always liked both as an artist and person, worked in a local comic shop for awhile. She was the one who first alerted me that my work was woven into Understanding Comics.

This book has a very early example of Megan's work. I had the pleasure of meeting her this year at the Olympia Comics Fest.

I like the nice visual directory of the artists on the back cover. The previous Evergreen cartoonists anthology, Tales From the Steam Tunnels (1981), couldn't do that since most of us had already graduated when that title was published.

Bezango: The World's Fair and the Gayway

Olympia Power & Light, March 23-April 5, 2011

J.P. Patches and Gertrude are still around, I'm happy to say. There is a mistaken belief that Matt Groening based Krusty the Clown on J.P., but down in Portland they had their own live kid show host, another clown named Rusty Nails. I used to watch Rusty when I visited my cousins in Vancouver, across the Columbia River.

Matt and Lynda Barry and I used to talk about J.P. and Rusty quite a bit. It was during the time we were together in college that I interviewed J.P. in person, and both of my fellow cartoonists were hungry for the details. Lynda also grew up as a Patches Pal.

I must say having seen both J.P. and Rusty, there was no comparison. J.P. had the magic, Rusty did not. I'm convinced Krusty is Rusty.

Tales From the Steam Tunnels # 1

1st edition, May 1981, Olympia, Washington : The Evergreen State College, Arts Resource Center. Enlarged digest size.

The issuing number 1 would indicate this was originally intended to be a serial publication, but unfortunately this is the lone issue so far as I know.

Published two years after I graduated from Evergroove, I found out about the existence of this book by accident and managed to get my hands on the last copies for sale at the campus bookstore.

It is interesting this was published before Jay Kennedy coined the term "Evergreen Mafia" as a reference to the group of TESC cartoonists from the 1970s. This comic is possibly the earliest recognition in print that Evergroove was really forming some sort of comic art legacy.

Although it is a decent roundup of the various artists from 1971 (when the school opened) to 1981, the editors overlooked four cartoonists who should be included in any compilation of TESC comix artists of that era: Kathleen Meighan, Dana Leigh Squires, Maggie Resch, and a guy I didn't know well but really loved his work, Flicky Ford.

As I read this book again I'm struck by the fact that we were all so young and obviously spinning off of older artists we admired as we struggled to define our own style. None of us seemed fully formed yet-- except for maybe Craig Bartlett.

Trivia:

Cover: Craig Bartlett, who I consider one of the greatest cartoonists to emerge from Evergreen, must've arrived right after I graduated. I never had the pleasure of meeting him. This guy landed on campus as an already accomplished artist. His work shows a strong Gilbert Shelton influence.

The steam tunnels actually do exist under the TESC campus. I was down there several times in the 1970s.

Page 1: The political correctness of Evergroove was one of Matt Groening's favorite targets, as evidence by his vegetarian dog.

Page 5: The guy in black in the last panel is a portrait of Gary May.

Page 6, top of p. 7: Lynda Barry was into fine arts and wanted to be an art teacher when I first met her in 1974. These early cartoons demonstrate she was far more confident with her writing side than her newfound comix artist self. Shortly after these were published Lynda's subsequent comix looked like she admired the style of National Lampoon cartoonist Randall Enos as a starting place to quickly create her own unique voice in comix.

Page 8-top of p. 10: Watching the student reaction to the cartoons of Charles Burns under the editorship of Matt Groening was my first real exposure to how intolerant certain elements of Evergreen's Leftists could be. It was at this point, around 1977, TESC's utopian Libertarian Left started to get shoved aside by the Authoritarian Left, and an era had ended. At least the authoritarians made good targets for cartoonists.

Page 10: "The Family Irkus," apparently a Burns and/or Groening piece, is one of the funniest single panels in cartoon history for my money.

Page 16-19: An excellent story by Craig Bartlett. The Trojan plant, so graciously constructed by those crafty Oregonians right on the Columbia River on the Washington border, was torn down a number of years ago.

Top of p. 21: Tucker Petertil still lives in Olympia. He continues to create art, which can be seen in gallery shows, and writes a popular music review column for Olympia Power and Light.

Page 22-27: The Crumb-influenced cartoonist Jim Chupa was by far the most popular and well known cartoonist at TESC while he was active at the school. His work was very topical and a great snapshot of Evergroove's history in the mid-1970s.

Page 30-33: T.J. Simpson was my neighbor for awhile in 1978-1979. He was from, as I recall, Bangor, Maine and had a great Mainiac accent. John J. Bagnariol, the subject of his cartoon, was known around Olympia as an arrogant jerk in the State House who treated local people in the service industry very badly, demanding special treatment due to his high office. His conviction and subsequent imprisonment by the Feds for being guilty of being a sleazeball in the Gamscam sting operation was welcome news to most of us.

Back cover: Classic Groening.