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Intro

Darby Conley

Marshall Ramsey

Paige Braddock

Ron Ruelle

Rick Baldwin

  Toonville

Darby Conley: Fuzzy Yet Undaunted

Bucky rules.

That certainly holds true in the apartment of hapless human Rob Wilco, where the temperamental Siamese cat commands the household under threat of his stiletto claws. Bucky's a bad boy who generally does what he likes, whether it's dissing the tuna cat food he inevitably gets served or smashing household items and proclaiming them to be "art." Rob is usually reduced to cleaning up the damage while his gentle-hearted dog Satchel can only offer his somewhat sluggish observations.

Meanwhile, Bucky also rules the readers of Get Fuzzy, Darby Conley's not-even-a-year-old comic strip that's growing in circulation at a record rate—it launched last September with a very healthy 75 newspapers and has more than doubled that number to date. It can be read from San Francisco to Chicago to Philadelphia (and appears locally in the News-Sentinel). Licensing companies have come calling about stuffed animals and a production company wants to turn Get Fuzzy into a TV show. Ask the 29-year-old former Knoxvillian for the source of the strip's popularity, and he has an immediate answer.

"It's Bucky," he says from his apartment in Boston. "All Bucky, all the time. I love cats, but I was surprised at how vocal the Bucky fans are. I really like the dog—I think dogs are funny in how slow-witted they are, but people really want to see the cat being bad."

Yes indeed. Although there have been hundreds of cartoon cat predecessors on the Sunday comics pages—from Krazy Kat to Garfield—Bucky is unique. He may talk just as his brethren did before him, but he's not just another human character masquerading in cat fur; you get the sense that if cats really could talk, this is what they would be saying. "I've always liked the idea of talking animals—like, what the hell are they thinking?" muses Conley. "I've always wondered that. Even if they could talk, a dog probably couldn't understand you, and a cat probably wouldn't care."

And therein lies the alluring essence of Bucky—no matter the incidental hell he puts his roommates through, he doesn't particularly care. He shows no signs of remorse; he is a cat, after all, and for this species it is the experience of the moment that matters, not the aftermath. As one of Rob's friends says after being slashed for daring to pet Bucky, "And yet...I'm strangely drawn to him..." Conley based the character on a friend's cat with remarkably similar idiosyncrasies. "I knew a Siamese cat that hated me no matter what I did," he confesses, "and I loved it and I wanted to pet it all the time, but it hated me for no reason." Such is our twisted love affair with felines, which Conley nails seven days a week—a feat of detailed illustration work that typically takes him 100 hours a week to produce.

"It's funny how much time goes into even the bad ones," he says. "Even the ones I'm not real happy about when I'm sending them out, it still took a huge day's work to get it done. Sometimes at 3 or 4 in the morning you start wishing you had little Dilbert characters with balloon heads and polka dot eyes."

Growing up in Knoxville, Conley never actually owned a cat—but he did immerse himself in comics. You could've found him lying on the floor at Mt. Olive Elementary School during the second-grade reading period, surrounded by a pile of Peanuts books. By the time he hit 7th-grade at Doyle Middle School, he was putting square borders around his doodles and inscribing them with captions. Finally, during his high school years, he found his epiphany at the Doyle High Trailblazer, ripping off Gary Larson's massively popular The Far Side. His single-panel strip of weirdness won him first place in a News-Sentinel student cartoon competition in 1986, thus planting the idea of someday becoming a professional cartoonist.

"Some people are into movies, some people are into TV—my favorite things in high school were Bloom County and The Far Side," he says. "I remember getting to school early and racing to the library just to grab the papers before somebody stole them all, just to read them."

Conley attended art school at Amherst College in Massachusetts, double-majoring in art history and fine arts while continuing to improve his Far Side clones for the Amherst Student. After graduating in '94, he taught at an elementary school for two years, then became the art director for The Science Discovery Museum in Acton, Mass. Meanwhile, he had been submitting his cartoons to syndicates, the companies that distribute comics to newspapers.

"I had slapped together a bunch of stuff I did in college for the student paper, and it was all Far Side rip-off type stuff," Conley says. "But I guess it was funny enough that a couple guys got back to me and told me what they'd like to see—and that pretty much involved creating an actual strip with recurring characters. So from then on, I worked on the Get Fuzzy idea, the cat and dog stuff."

Getting an editor's attention is a remarkable achievement in itself—at any one time, there are between 600 and 800 people submitting their cartoons for consideration. That Conley was able to turn that bit of interest into a contract with mega-syndicate United Media (home to Peanuts and Dilbert) is amazing; that the strip took off immediately after launch is a genuine miracle in this industry. While there are probably thousands of aspiring cartoonists, established cartoonists aren't leaving their slots anytime soon—and there's only so much page space. This leaves most up-and-comers out in the cold.

Nevertheless, the cartooning pay-off seems nigh for Conley; his first book is scheduled to be published in 2001 and he's meeting next week with those producers in New York about the proposed TV show ("I'll believe it when I see it and hope it doesn't stink.") Of course, marketing juggernauts aren't always healthy things for cartoon strips; will he ever consign his creations to an early grave like his heroes Gary Larson and Berke Breathed?

"I'd do something as long as I wasn't embarrassed about doing it," he says. "The one thing I'm terrified about is churning out clichés, something I'd be embarrassed to sign my name to and have people say 'Yeah, I know that guy.' So as long as I can keep going and not feel bad about it, it is sort of fun."

The Get Fuzzy website
 

April 20, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 16
© 2000 Metro Pulse