Joe Martin is taking his daily walk along the lake. From a distance, he looks like an ordinary guy who`s getting some exercise and soaking up the beauty and tranquility of this scenic little resort town.
Looks, as they say, can be deceiving.
Martin is working. This is how he gets ideas for Mister Boffo and the two other comic strips he draws.
He needs to come up with a lot of jokes–a minimum of 100 a month–to feed the voracious, insatiable appetites of his three strips, which means that he needs to do a lot of walking.
On this day, a journalist is accompanying him. This is being done so the journalist might get a close-up, behind-the-scenes view of the fascinating and imponderable process of creativity and genius.
This is like having the chance to observe Einstein solve a complex equation, Beethoven compose a symphony or Warren Beatty call up some chick for a date.
What Martin does is amble along in a sort of trance while random thoughts flow in and out of his head; when something passes through that he thinks is funny, he`ll stop and jot it down in a spiral notebook he carries with him.
This alone makes him something more than a normal guy out for a normal stroll. There are also other, more compelling reasons why ”normal” isn`t quite the right word for Joe Martin.
Those who are familiar with his new Mister Boffo strip, which you can find by turning to the next-to-the-last page in this section of the paper and counting up four cartoons from the bottom on the right-hand side, would certainly be able to suggest more accurate adjectives.
”Twisted,” for instance, comes to mind. Or maybe ”warped.”
”Demented” would be good. The psychiatric term for Martin`s condition is acute peripatetic weirdness.
This is because of the nature of the things that strike Martin as amusing –especially his Mister Boffo material. It would be fair to describe many of the random thoughts that flow through Martin`s brain as extremely strange. Wait a minute. He`s about to speak.
”I wrote a joke here last week,” he says. Martin has halted on the path and is pointing to where he is standing. ”I don`t know why I thought of it. A guy`s sitting on a park bench, and he`s wearing a sign around his neck that says, `Out of Order.` Then he turns to the guy next to him and says, `It`s the only way I can keep people from putting quarters in my ear.` ”
There now. Do you understand what we`ve been saying? Does a normal person think this way?
If you want more evidence, here`s another one. ”There`s this big brute who`s lying in a hospital bed. He`s lost his right arm. A visitor is standing near the bed. He asks a doctor, `How soon till we can call him Lefty?` ”
And: ”A family`s at the dinner table. The father is wearing a loud tie. He looks at his young son and says, `I hope you`re satisfied. They fired me for wearing this dopey tie you gave me for Father`s Day.` ”
Need we say more?
This is, however, not to imply that sharp objects should be kept away from Martin or that electric-shock treatments are in order.
On the contrary, for a cartoonist, being slightly wacko is more than an advantage. It`s essential.
And Joe Martin is wacko enough to be very good and right now very hot.
Because of Mister Boffo, he`s in that delicate and treacherous spot of being almost very big. Mister Boffo could be a huge hit. Since it was introduced less than four months ago, it`s been picked up by almost 100 newspapers in some large, important markets. At any moment, it could become more than merely successful; it could take off.
You know the drill. People magazine`s calling on Line One; they want to do a spread. We`ve got ”Good Morning America” on hold; David Letterman`s interested. Then come the Mister Boffo T-shirts, the animated TV special, the coffee mugs and paperweights, the whole enchilada.
Maybe nothing like this will happen, after all. Maybe Mister Boffo will simply become a solid, popular staple of the funny pages, bringing in some nice dough but never really making Martin a household name and a millionaire. But at the very least, the Joe Martin story is an inspirational saga of talent and perserverance, a lesson in Hanging In There and Eventually Making It in a business that`s as tough as they come.
— — —
Joe Martin is 41, lean and a couple of inches under 6 feet. He has deep-set green eyes, blond hair and a receding hairline. He`s seated at a table in Ellen Campbell`s restaurant in Lake Geneva. His attire is All-American nondescript–blue, button-down shirt, khakis and a pair of white jogging shoes.
His wife, Marie, is sitting next to him. She`s a key part of the rather complicated Martin mom-and-pop operation, for Joe has a tendency to be disorganized in some areas. Marie assures that everything is in the proper file and that the strips are in the mail on time, and she even helps with the shading and background in the finished panels.
They`ve been at this for 10 years now, and both of them have the routine down pat. ”I write every day,” he says, ”but I let the notebooks age for two weeks before I look at them and decide what`s usable. It`s like going to a party and thinking you`re witty and glib and hilarious and then realizing the next day that you`ve made a fool of yourself. It`s best to have some distance.”
So every two weeks, Joe sorts through the notebooks he`s filled up with ideas. There may be up to 10 notebooks, each with 70 pages he`s numbered, and as many as 500 jokes, which he has carefully indexed.
He needs 36 jokes for a two-week supply for the daily strips of Mister Boffo, Willy `N` Ethel, which is about a kooky married couple, and
Porterfield, which is designed for the financial pages and whose hero is a bumbling member of the business community.
Martin grades each idea from A to C. ”You definitely draw an A, you probably draw a B, if you`re in trouble you may draw a C-plus, but the rest of the C`s either get tossed out or set aside to be reworked later into an A or a B. I might spend two hours looking for that one A-plus joke among the 500.”
After making their choices, Joe and Marie work until 2 a.m. for two or three nights drawing the strips. The next week, they`ll do it again for the Sunday strips.
”I`m the only cartoonist who`s doing this many jokes and this many strips, and I do all my own jokes. Some cartoonists buy jokes; I don`t,” he says with some pride and defiance.
— — —
It was a long and winding road to pen and ink.
Joe was born and grew up on the South Side, a proper Roman Catholic boy in the Little Flower parish. When he was 14 and 15, he was a member of a street gang called the Impalas; remember, though, that this was in the `50s, when street gangs were about as wild as sewing clubs. ”We had these pretty turquoise jackets made up,” Joe says, ”but our parents wouldn`t let us put our names on them, so naturally, we didn`t.”
At 16, he entered what he now calls ”the dark years.” He got married
–not to Marie–and immediately began a period of intense reproduction.
”In the next five years, we had four sons,” he says. Somehow, he was able to support his family, but it was, he says, rough. ”A lot of the time I was working three jobs, all kinds of jobs.”
At 21, he and his first wife were divorced. He has stayed close to his sons from that marriage, who now are 18, 21, 22 and 23, and he and Marie also have a son, who is 12.
Through his 20s, Martin was drawing cartoons in his spare time and sending them to Playboy, which rejected them all. It wasn`t until he was 29 and feeling the anxiety of the approaching birthday that he decided to change his life and do what he had always wanted to do–draw a comic strip.
At the time, he was running his own employment agency, where he had prospered financially and romantically. One of the people he hired was Marie, and they had been married in 1972.
The strip he wanted to do was about an employment agency. ”Believe it or not,” he says, ”funny things happen in the employment-agency business.”
Fortunately, he didn`t understand how grim and unfunny it could be in trying to crack the cartooning business. Countless comic strips are proposed to publishing syndicates every year, but only a handful are accepted. It`s easier to sell concert pianos in Greenland or Pontiacs in Tokyo than it is to have your cartoons end up in print.
But Martin was sufficiently persistent, skillful and lucky to get his foot in the door at the Field Newspaper Syndicate, whose flagship was the Chicago Sun-Times; in 1976, his strip, Tucker, based on his employment agency, made its debut, appearing in 50 or 60 papers before it gradually declined and finally died.
”I learned a lot from Tucker,” he says. ”The concept was too narrow, too limited.” He was confident that Willy `N` Ethel, which he started almost six years ago, again with Field, would work. Two years ago, to provide humor for expanding financial sections in newspapers, he created Porterfield, once more distributed by the same company, now owned by Rupert Murdoch and called News America Syndicate.
All the while, he was trying to sell Boffo, which is closest to his deranged heart and soul. But the powers-that-be at Field and News America kept saying no. ”The first time, I was told that The Tribune had just begun something similar to what I was proposing, and only about 12 papers had bought it.”
They were referring to Gary Larson`s The Far Side, whose syndicate is Tribune Media Services and which has become a monstrous success.
”I explained that Larson was doing a single panel, and I wanted to do a strip, and when I tried to sell Boffo to them again a few years later, I was told that the Trib already had a strip like this.” This was Mike Peters`
Mother Goose & Grimm.
Ironically, it was Tribune Media Services that said yes to Martin. Says Michael Argirion, its vice president and editor: ”It had been offered around and no one had taken it, but I thought it was funny. Thousands of strips are submitted to us each year, but I can`t recall our ever accepting more than three in any one year. Some are well drawn, some are well written, but it`s the humor that counts.”
Martin now had the best of all worlds. ”With the three strips, I can find a place for any idea. Willy `N` Ethel are for family, personality and character gags, Porterfield has a more sophisticated, business image and Boffo is totally wide-open, crazed, zany. With him, I can use the home-run joke.”
In other words, the weird stuff is the right stuff for ol` Boffo. But Martin gives Argirion credit for the crucial decision. Martin hadn`t wanted a single character, which he thought would be restrictive.
”I told him he needed a character,” Argirion says. ”A Mister Boffo. He wanted the universality, and I said so what? Make him Everyman.”
The first Mister Boffo appeared on Aug. 4, coinciding with a paperback collection of Boffos–without Mister Boffo–by Chicago`s Turnbull & Willoughby Publishers, which earlier had printed Martin`s classic ”How to Hang a Spoon.”
— — —
If Martin has a weakness, it`s in being the Chuck Yeager of bad taste. He has an irrepressible affinity for the Bathroom, Locker Room and Sick type of knee-slappers, and he`s inclined to keep pushing the outside of the envelope in these categories.
Example: In his Boffo collection, he shows a mother, father and daughter leaping from an upper floor of a burning building with the words ”The Flying Fontinellies.”
Sometimes, the syndicate says no. One strip that ended up on the cutting- room floor depicts Mister Boffo on a psychiatrist`s couch. ”All my friends think I`m crazy,” Boffo says. In the next panel, the shrink says, ”Why don`t you kill them?”
”It`s an innocent joke, but I understand why they turned that one down,” Martin says. ”On a new feature, all some people are going to see is the word `kill.` They don`t think about the joke, which really has nothing to do with that. The idea is that it`s a bizarre twist, but you have to establish a character first before you can get away with everything.”
Comics are a reflection of the times, and Martin`s Mister Boffo–along with The Far Side and Mother Goose & Grimm–is representative of humor in the late `80s, humor with a sharp edge, a sense of absurdity and an occasional touch of cruelty and tastelessness.
Most of all, it reflects the one-shot, go-for-the-laugh approach.
”That`s been the trend in this industry for the past 15 years,” says Argirion. ”This is a direct result of television, and because of television, continuity strips–those with a developing plot–have suffered somewhat. Everyone`s used to a half hour of color, sound, explosion and a quick pay-off. Why waste three months following a story?”
— — —
Martin sees himself as just an average Joe. In fact, underneath the lunacy, he`s a bleeding-heart do-gooder, who continually calls the journalist who interviewed him, imploring him to mention the benefit for the homeless he`s spearheading on Oct. 12. ”Be sure to say that at 4 p.m. at the Abbey in Lake Geneva, we`re having an auction, and the highest bidder will get to be named in a Mister Boffo strip. We`re trying to raise $15,000.”
