Among the glass-encased bugs, crushed tin mailbox, petrified dinosaur dung and ceramic hands from a glove factory tastefully displayed in John Long’s home is a note, framed on a basement wall. It was written to Long’s mother from John’s 6th grade teacher at Le Blanc Elementary School in the working-class Detroit suburb of Lincoln Park. Peeking from behind the note are six remarkably adroit pencil sketches of goofy characters that look very much like those regularly appearing in Mad magazine.
“This paper is a sample of John’s work in school,” Miss Adamczyk wrote to Long’s mother back in 1961. “It certainly is interferring (sic) with his studies. If he would concentrate on his schoolwork, the Unsatisfactories he is receiving in arithmetic and his behavior in the schoolroom would improve. Thank You.”
That was John Long more than a quarter-century ago. That is John Long now. He must concentrate, he tells himself. He must focus.
But not on schoolwork. That directive was part of the problem that delayed this moment for so long. Now, he must concentrate on and nurture the gremlins in his psyche that produced those sketches.
If he does, he believes, great things may come to this affable former firefighter who was so afraid to display his sketches publicly that when he finally did, he showed two about the size of matchbook covers.
John Long could be the heir to the tilted throne of the breakthrough, absurdist cartoon “The Far Side.” This 45-year-old who suppressed his art for so many years may be the man who would be Gary Larson.
The coronation is one that Long’s friend and new business associate John Woldenberg, of Chicago, is pushing. After all, Larson’s 18-year cartooning career, which ended with his retirement in January, produced a $500 million juggernaut of comics, calendars, coffee mugs and T-shirts, among other manifestations.
Momentum for John Long has been building for several years, but the most definitive point on the timeline may have come in December, when the Detroit News held a readers’ poll to determine which of five cartoons would replace Larson’s “The Far Side” in the paper.
The final breakdown of 955 votes showed Long’s cartoon, then titled “Long Overdue” and since changed to “Lumpy Gravy,” the winner with 388 votes. Second place went to Rubes, which earned 265 votes.
“I was really caught off-guard and I really had to get my act together,” Long said. “I really didn’t know what to say.”
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Woldenberg sensed something like this would happen, almost from the first time he wedged his way into Long’s crowded booth at the Old Town Art Fair in the summer of 1993. Woldenberg eyed Long’s single-panel cartoons with the idea of returning and buying a piece or two after the people cleared.
When he came back, the crowd remained but the pieces Woldenberg wanted had been purchased. Woldenberg, at the time vice president of acquisitions and finance at AMLI Realty Co. and a latent entrepreneur, complimented and chatted with Long and kept the artist in the back of his mind.
In the weeks ahead, at the Port Clinton Art Fair in Highland Park and the Ann Arbor Art Fair, Woldenberg found Long’s booths crowded again.
At Ann Arbor, Woldenberg made a soft pitch about embarking on a commercial venture together. Long seemed interested. Over the next few weeks, Woldenberg visited the Ann Arbor home Long shared with his wife, Janet, making business presentations. Long remained interested.
Then Woldenberg took a detour. He and his fiance-now wife-Shari left their very comfortable lifestyles and jobs and set off for southeast Asia to live for a year in some of the most remote and dangerous regions of the world.
It seemed like odd timing, to say the least, but Woldenberg, a kinetic, 33-year-old who looks a bit like Chico Marx and loves to perform card tricks, has a knack for the unconventional. The middle son of a wealthy Highland Park family, he received his M.B.A. from the University of Chicago school of business and at various times in his life has been a budding professional tennis star, successful college businessman, screenplay author, marathon runner, rafter of some of the world’s most dangerous rapids, international traveler, real estate tycoon and art collector.
“At the time, I didn’t think it was going to be a business,” Woldenberg recalled of his proposal to Long.
“I also, quite frankly, thought that there’s no way I would get this guy. He’s got to be in demand by everyone in the industry.”
He was. In fact, during the late 1980s, King Features briefly ran a cartoon feature of his, “Long Overdue,” in about 80 newspapers. Long, however, said he soured on the impersonal environment at the big house and ended the agreement in 1991. He doesn’t like to discuss it.
He also had been burned by previous business relationships and licensing agreements that included promises of wild successes that never materialized.
“There are still people who owe me money,” Long said, adding that he has walked into stores where T-shirts with his images are being sold and he’s not collecting a dime.
While on his one-year sojourn, Woldenberg rode camels in the deserts of western India, ate a live beetle in Papua, New Guinea, slept in huts, bus stations and the jungle; bungee jumped off a suspension bridge; fled from hostile soldiers in Cambodia; and took 18,000 photographs to preserve the action for posterity.
When Woldenberg returned in the fall of 1994, he decided against joining one of his family’s three businesses, or returning to real estate. Instead, he contacted Long again and over the course of several visits presented another, more detailed business plan that calls for steady growth beginning with newspapers and greeting cards.
For Woldenberg, it offered the chance to satisfy two desires: his love for the arts and the exhilaration he gets from making a deal. For Long, who felt distrustful and stressed out by the business of art, the agreement offered him the freedom to concentrate on his cartooning. And this time, the promises seemed prudent, attainable.
In March, the two signed a contract for Mountain Coast Entertainment Inc., Woldenberg’s newly created, one-man operation run from his home on the North Side of Chicago, to manage Long’s career. Both are investing their money in the venture.
“I consider him to be a potential superstar,” Woldenberg said. “So much of a superstar that I was willing to leave a comfortable, stable career to do this. People call me crazy but I believe in him.”
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Belief in John Long was what he needed for about 35 years.
He says he can’t remember a time when he didn’t want to draw all the time, but that was an awkward avocation for a kid from the gritty town of Lincoln Park, Mich. Born the same year as the famous Larson, Long was the eldest son of a career firefighter and his wife.
In school, he lacked confidence and was a bit of a goof-off, he recalled. By the time he finished high school, he figured out a way to accommodate his artistic longings and the more practical expectations of his family. He majored in teaching art at Eastern Michigan University.
But, discouraged by the lack of jobs for teachers and particularly art teaching jobs, he left school in his senior year and went to work with his father as a firefighter at the Lincoln Park Fire Department.
For the next 16 years, he lived the sometimes harrowing, sometimes mundane life of a firefighter. He married and had two children.
Between the responsibilities of firefighting calls and parenting, he continued drawing and took photographs. He enrolled at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit and earned his bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1974.
His firefighting colleagues called the little room in which he drew “John’s Studio,” and they looked at him a bit sideways because he carried a handbag with his sketch pad inside and wore flared pants.
But he stayed with it and in 1976 he began displaying and selling his photographs in art fairs, winning photo contests and being published in the Detroit News Sunday magazine.
During the late 1970s, while wandering one of the art fairs, he met Janet Bailey, an artist who specialized in knotted fiber sculptures. He bought one of her works, struck up a conversation and began a professional relationship that deepened while chatting with her at art fairs where both displayed their work. That professional relationship between two people who Long said “were unhappily married to someone else,” evolved into a romantic one. They were married in 1985.
Janet gets a great deal of credit for forcing Long’s cartoons to the surface. After they had been dating for a while, she told John that, although he was a wonderful man, he was a man without a sense of humor. Long insisted she was wrong. She insisted she was right.
To prove himself, he sketched two or three humorous but small drawings and displayed them with his photographs at an art fair in 1983. They sold quickly.
Within about two years, he was selling his cartoons almost exclusively and making an extremely comfortable living doing so. He left the fire department in 1988 and became a full-time artist who now travels to about 25 art shows a year, including Chicago’s Old Town Art Fair, and reportedly earns more than $200,000 a year just from selling his cartoons.
“It was sort of like Janet said, `It’s OK to be real,’ and then it was OK, and I was John Long for the first time-the complete package,” Long said. “It was as if half of me was set free.”
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Actor Jeff Daniels has purchased Long’s work, and said of it: “The art is sick, twisted and I love it.”
Much of Long’s cartoon “Lumpy Gravy” is centered in wry interpretation. When asked about the derivation of the name, Long responded that it stems from his thoughts on life: “No matter what you do, you’re going to have lumpy gravy,” he said.
A popular panel captioned “Policemen’s Hell” depicts an officer from the rear gazing at separate tables of doughnuts and bullets. The sign above them reads, “Pick Only One.”
Some of his favorite repeat characters include Einstein, Picasso, Mr. Potato Head and the Bible’s Noah. He has drawn dalmations playing connect-the-dots, “Young Heimlich” getting “a lapful of doggie-do” while testing his maneuver on his dog, and a baby kangaroo apologizing to its mother for spilling hot coffee in the pouch.
What may distinguish Long from others is that his sketches look so finished. The manic drawing style of many absurdist cartoons is never found in his work, and he prefers it that way.
That trait mirrors Long’s own lifestyle. While his comfortable Ann Arbor townhouse-he and Janet also share a double-wide mobile home in Naples, Fla.-is decorated with odd pieces of art, the place is meticulous. And the well-tanned, well-groomed Long, whose morning workout includes hundreds of pushups and situps and a 20-minute ride on a stationary cycle, looks more like a European movie star than an artist.
Inspiration and influences for his work are derived from everything, including “The Far Side,” TV shows and popular culture from the 1960s and Discover magazine.
“I fill my head with as much stuff-visual, written, people-and eventually my brain fills up and I know when the ideas are coming,” he said. “If I’m going to sleep, I close my eyes and, it sounds weird, but it’s brighter with them closed. I know something’s coming.”
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Many newspapers held contests to replace “The Far Side,” and one name that cropped up several times was John McPherson, creator of “Close To Home.”
Like the Detroit News, New York Newsday held a readers’ contest to choose a cartoonist who would succeed Larson. A design engineer who broke into cartooning in the early 1980s, McPherson won. His work appears in about 225 daily and Sunday newspapers.
Long wasn’t in that competition and, in fact, a Detroit News feature editor asked him to enter that paper’s competition.
Woldenberg maintains that there is enough room for several successors to Larson, and that Long’s style is distinct enough to bring him that level of fame.
Larson apparently doesn’t want to talk about possible successors. The latest word on him is that he is practicing his guitar, according to Universal Press Syndicate, which began distributing “The Far Side” in 1984.
At the Detroit News, callers to the paper’s comic hotline originally were unkind to “Lumpy Gravy.” All 23 calls on “Lumpy Gravy” were unfavorable, but the ire has dissipated. And, remember, readers of mainstream newspapers originally had a difficult time accepting “The Far Side.”
All but one of the calls came into the hot line during January and February, noted Betty Scott, who has the responsibility of monitoring the News’ hot line. The last call came in early March.
“The people who voted against him are probably angry that he won,” Scott said. “It’s pretty unscientific.”
Detroit News Features Editor Martin Fischhoff said Long “hits more often than he misses. I think he’s a hometown favorite and people around the building say good things about it. I think it’s funnier as you read more of it, as you sort of climb inside John’s mind.”
Woldenberg has designed a plan to make that happen on a large scale. In addition to mailings to more than 2,500 newspapers and magazines in April, and meetings with book publishers, the plan includes a comic stop on the information superhighway.
In about six months, a “Lumpy Gravy” home page will be featured on Internet, Woldenberg said. Computer enthusiasts will be able to read a new cartoon every week, send a comment, review all of the work that has appeared on the home page in the past and read a biography of Long, Woldenberg said. It also may include a “cyberspace treasure hunt” in which the winner would receive one of Long’s original works.
Long becomes very excited by all these possibilities and dreams of someday producing a book of his work. After all these years, he says he feels he can concentrate on his art now, and leave business matters to the entrepreneur.
“I’m at a crucial time,” said Long, who became a grandfather late last year. “I’m doing the best work that I’ve ever done. I think people are ready for what I`m doing. John’s management is going to take the pressure off me.
“I’ll at least know finally. Do I have it or not?”
