The light. The climate. Cheap rent. Places become centers of culture for all sorts of reasons. Rome had its day. Greenwich Village had the beat. And Paris, well, we’ll always have Paris.
So what would bring three cartoonists-women cartoonists, the rarest of a rare breed-together to work in a modest loft office in a quiet industrial park on the Near North Side of Chicago? Could it be that dirty little secret of the ’90s, the hell of the home office?
“I felt that days went by when I didn’t hear the sound of my voice,” recalls Nicole Hollander, creator of the nationally syndicated “Sylvia” cartoon strip.
“I lived for seeing Moses my UPS man and Sue, who speaks 12 languages, at the post office,” recounts Jennifer Berman, who runs a thriving postcard business and whose second book, “Adult Children of Normal Parents” (Simon & Schuster), recently hit the stores.
For Nicole Ferentz, a graphic designer whose self-published cartoon books and vignettes on subjects as varied as cancer, pets and the nature of creativity have developed something of a cult following, working at home was just plain lonely.
“To paraphrase Aristotle,” says Berman, “man is an office animal.”
Who would have thought? It turns out that virtual companionship, via phone, fax, modem, e-mail and the Internet, is just that: virtual. There’s nothing like good old in-person real-time interactive multiparty conversation to get the creative juices flowing.
“You can constantly bounce off ideas,” Ferentz says. “You can constantly complain. There’s sympathy.”
But wouldn’t an office of creative individuals be something of a contradiction in terms? Could a group of artists really find happiness in side-by-side cubicles, each with separate phone lines but sharing a fax machine?
Ferentz had talked about the idea for years before Hollander, a sometime colleague at the alternative newspaper In These Times, finally joined in. With designer Tom Greensfelder (who among other things designs the “Sylvia” books), they began to look at lofts in 1988.
The original core group of three has stayed together, joined for the last few years by architect Debra McQueen and Berman. Although the main prerequisite for office admittance remains creative compatibility, inviting an architect on board was sheer brilliance: She redesigned the space.
Now they have a meeting room, just like a real office. In fact, they have everything their corporate counterparts do and then some, including a small kitchen amply stocked with gourmet coffee, and a waiting area with magazines featuring cartoons by the resident talent. They also have a spray-painting booth (for graphic design work) and a bigger-than-life-size cut-out of Sylvia enjoying a bath, placed near the front door.
It’s not just that jeans are allowed-every day is “casual day” in this office-but that people in neckties are looked upon with distinct suspicion. Perhaps inspired by matron saint Sylvia, who knows that one does one’s best work when relaxed and happy (in her case, in the tub), this is an office for people who know the difference between form and substance, between neat and orderly, and between a latte and a cappuccino.
A cartoonist’s job is to point out the overlooked but obvious. And while writers can oh so carefully craft editorials taking on all the big issues, cartoonists have to get right to the point. And, if possible, they do so with a bit of humor.
Although cartoons have been a staple of the daily newspaper for 100 years, few cartoonists, especially in the mainstream media, have been women.
So, whether Hollander meant to or not, she and Sylvia became pioneers when they burst upon the cartooning scene 16 years ago with a strip called “The Feminist Funnies” in The Spokeswoman, a Chicago-based national women’s magazine (now defunct). Since then, “Sylvia” has spawned a daily strip syndicated to 70 newspapers-including the Chicago Tribune-books, calendars, cards, a musical and, coming soon, a 900 number advice line.
Clearly, Hollander doesn’t need to share office space with anybody. It’s just that she enjoys it.
“We exchange a lot of information about what’s happening in the world,” she says. “I think that all cartoonists are listeners-quiet, basically shy, observers.”
Quiet and shy, maybe, but iconoclasts almost by definition. “It’s a lot more fun being on the outside, slinging arrows,” Hollander concedes.
Cartooning hadn’t even been a blip on the radar screen of her ambitions when Hollander, 55, started out. Armed with a master of fine arts degree from Boston University, she was going to be a painter, but, at least in the short run, that plan proved fiscally feeble. So she turned to graphic design, and in the mid-1970s was hired by The Spokeswoman to redesign the magazine and draw some illustrations. With “The Feminist Funnies,” she knew immediately she’d found her true calling.
However, everything from finding the right kind of pens for legible cartoon lettering to figuring out the logistics of syndication had to be learned the hard way: by doing. There really wasn’t anyone who could show her the ropes of the business. “I was fortunate in my bungling way,” she says.
For years Hollander juggled two careers while the world of the ever-wise, smart-talking Sylvia and her coterie of friends, relatives, aliens and cats evolved. But on the day she realized she could pay the rent from “Sylvia” income alone, she hung up her X-acto knife and quit graphic design for good.
In a sense, Sylvia is Murphy Brown’s long-lost Jewish mother. She’s also Hollander’s, who explains that Sylvia is an amalgam of her real mother and her mother’s friends. “Maybe she was my role model. I had to create her and then I could decide I would be like that,” says Hollander.
Much of “Sylvia’s” world has a parallel in Hollander’s. Even the funny lamp on Sylvia’s desk has a counterpart in this universe. As for the cats, well, let’s just say they’re even bigger in life.
On the bleachers with Berman
If Jennifer Berman had a role model in the family, it was a grandfather she never met who drew political cartoons for the Russian humor magazine Krokadil. But, like Hollander, she never seriously considered cartooning as a career. Not, that is, until an irresistible opportunity came her way in the form of a square of sidewalk in the heart of Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue street vendor heaven 10 years ago.
Berman had moved to the Bay Area in 1984, hoping to get into law school at the University of California at Berkeley after establishing residency for a year. But three months of office work was about all she could bear. “One of the reasons I ended up in this career is that I absolutely refused to play that downtown dress-up game. I just couldn’t do it. I would rather jump out a window than have to shove my wide Jewish feet into those little capsule shoes you have to wear,” she explains.
So she ended up hawking postcards next to Hassan the flower vendor and a Hare Krishna who sold cotton drawstring pants, “the ones that look terrible on everyone,” she recalls.
“I did 12 postcards and I did everything wrong. I printed them on this deluxe velum bristol paper, so I basically had to sell them at cost just to try and break even,” says Berman, 33. Within a year she blew through her life savings of a few thousand dollars and returned home to Chicago when an old friend offered her a part-time job designing record covers. “I could continue to build my postcard business while I had a steady, yet meager, source of income,” she explains.
That business-Humerus Cartoons-sells tens of thousands of postcards each year, providing a tidy little income and the cornerstone of the “Jennifer Berman Juggling Act.” Berman draws five cartoons a month for Chicago-based Carmen Syndicate, which distributes them mostly to college and alternative newspapers (locally, her cartoons run occasionally in The Reader). Her first book, released last year, “Why Dogs Are Better Than Men” (Simon & Schuster), has sold more than 50,000 copies.
If “Sylvia” has a tub’s-eye view of the world, Berman likens her perspective to “sitting on the bleachers of life, pointing and saying, `Did you see that?’ ” And though she occasionally strays into politics (“Idiots!” grumbles a canine in disgust. “No dog ever voted for Clarence Thomas!”), many of Berman’s cartoons take their aim at the deliciously fraught realm of Relationships.
“I think it’s the biggest practical joke God ever played-somehow (men and women) come out in this world looking basically the same, but are so different. You sort of wonder-are female trumpeter swans going through the same thing? Is this universal?” asks Berman.
To be fair, the women in Berman’s universe are a somewhat neurotic lot. In “I Like My Coffee Bleak: Or, Grounds for Dismissal,” a 16-page “short story/long cartoon” at the end of “Adult Children,” a man asks a woman out for coffee. But before she can respond, the heroine imagines the life cycle of their relationship-romance, marriage, child, fights, betrayal, bitterness, widowhood-and eventually, and rather adamantly, declines the offer. The man, of course, is clueless about what has just transpired. Undaunted, he asks her out for tea.
Ferentz’s front lines
Nicole Ferentz’s cartoons are dispatches direct from the front lines of her life. Unlike Hollander or Berman, who tend to focus on the blurry area between what people say and reality, Ferentz finds humor in reality itself, however painful or difficult.
Three years ago, while visiting her mother, who was dying of brain cancer in San Francisco, Ferentz began drawing a series of cartoons based on her mother’s experience. “It was the most gratifying moment in my entire life as an artist-I could make my mother laugh in this hideously grim situation,” Ferentz recalls. “When I went home, I made the cartoons into this little book so she could give them out to nurses and doctors. It gave her a way to connect.”
The book, “Recovering From Cancer at Home,” is about the day-to-day tribulations of adult children caring for an ill parent.
“How many daughters does it take to give a patient a shower?” posits the caption under one cartoon where everyone, including the dog, tries to make the best of the situation. “Patient watches visiting daughter’s home video for the hundredth time,” shows mom valiantly putting up with her offspring’s good intentions. “Son’s dream about a little house in his backyard where his sick mother can live. . .” poignantly illustrates the impossible wish to make everything all better again. Ferentz’s humor, steeped in compassion, is as likely to make you cry as laugh.
Like her office-mates, Ferentz, 42, never meant to be a cartoonist when she grew up. In fact, like Hollander, she studied painting, picking up BFA and MFA degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And, like Hollander, she found earning a living as an artist tough. “While I was a painter, I was primarily a temporary secretary,” she says.
So in what turns out to be a time-honored tradition, Ferentz became a graphic designer and now runs her own business. Her cartoons are done not so much for profit as for herself. Although she markets a couple of lines of cards-one aimed at lesbians distributed through Cardthartic and a series of pet sympathy cards (Dear Departed Pet Cards Ltd.)-she’s not the natural entrepreneur Hollander and Berman are.
“It didn’t really happen by my thinking, gee, there’s an absence of cards for lesbians. I would do individual cards for friends. A friend of ours had a dog that died and I did an individual pet sympathy card for her,” Ferentz explains.
Ferentz’s latest book is “Fundamentally Compromised: An Unauthorized Examination of the Life of the Creative Person,” tackling the thorny issues and inner demons of a struggling artist. Her dead-on observations on everything from Frightening Ideas About Creative Work (on poverty: “I work for paint”) to Inhibiting Working Processes (“This looks like Matisse! I better stop”) have struck a chord among the artistically frustrated. Although she has had no luck so far finding a publisher, Ferentz’s books are available at several local bookstores, including Women and Children First and Booksellers Row.
Relationships. Politics. Cancer. Cats. Dogs. It would seem there isn’t a topic left that Hollander, Berman and Ferentz have yet to explore. But there is one: the office. Unfortunately, as Berman points out, things that work make for boring cartoons. And in this factory of the funny, things seem to work out just fine.
