;Tom Heintjes: Unlike most cartoonists, you haven’t really had a lifelong passion for comics, have you?
Chip Dunham: No, not at all.
Heintjes: Your earliest interest was in gag cartooning, isn’t that right?
Dunham: That’s right. My brother, Phil, who’s a couple of years younger than me, was in a car accident, and he was in the hospital for almost a month. He had to undergo some physical therapy, and sometimes I’d be sitting around in the hospital, waiting. And I remember looking at a lot of magazines there. This was at a point in my life when I wasn’t doing a whole hell of a lot at all, so I had plenty of time to go and hang around the hospital.
Heintjes: When would this have been?
Dunham: I was probably about 21 or 22, about 20 years ago. I remember looking at some of the cartoons and thinking, “Wow—some of these are really funny!” And others, I thought, “I could come up with something like this.” That kind of sparked an interest. It was soon after that that I began sitting down and seeing if I could come up with any stuff to send to the local Milwaukee Journal. My target was their Sunday magazine section, Insight magazine.
Heintjes: That was your first published work.
Dunham: Right. I think I came up with about 12 cartoons and sent them in, and a couple of days later this woman called me up and said she wanted to buy about five or six of them. It surprised the hell out me, frankly.
Looking back, I’d have to say that that was the first time I said, “Maybe I can do this.”
Heintjes: It occurs to me that there’s a certain irony in going to the hospital to help your brother through physical therapy and ending up getting interested in cartoons.
Dunham: [laughter] Yeah. “Sorry, Phil—I can’t help you right now—the new New Yorker just came in!”
Heintjes: As a boy, you never went through what for many was the rite of passage of reading comic books?
Dunham: No. I would pick up comic books, but I was never a regular reader, and I never had favorites. I was never aware of comic books as something that came out on a regular basis. What are they—weekly?
Heintjes: Monthly, mostly. How about newspaper strips—did you read those regularly?
Dunham: No. I remember one called Our Boarding House with Major Hoople. I would see that in the Milwaukee Journal, in their “green sheet.” Their comics and features section was printed on light green paper. And I remember enjoying Smokey Stover, with the fireman. I’m sure I read Peanuts, but those are really the only ones that come to mind, and I don’t even remember that much about them.
Heintjes: So the medium just didn’t sink its teeth into you.
Dunham:No, not really. Now that it’s my profession, I’ve become more aware of what’s gone on before me, and I can really appreciate stuff that I see now—both the old stuff and the new stuff. But growing up, it just wasn’t my thing.
Heintjes: Once you’d had some success with Insight, did you submit gags to any larger markets?
Dunham: After my first success there, I hit my first roadblock. I’d come up with tons of ideas that I just couldn’t draw. The first ones I sold to Insight were just real, real simple ones. And the ones that were maybe a little more complicated took me forever to draw. I would draw 50 versions of a guy standing on a corner before it started looking like a guy standing on a corner. So anything I came up with that was at all complicated, I just couldn’t draw. I would be so dissatisfied with the result.
I’d have a list of fifty ideas, and I’d look down the list and say, “Well, maybe I can draw four of them.“ [laughter] Kind of slows down your output.
Heintjes: But despite that, something made you persevere.
Dunham: Yeah, and it was my ability to come up with ideas. I filled up a few notebooks, and I would look through them and say, “These are pretty good ideas, and if my mind is taking me in this direction, the body had better be able to follow or this is going to waste.”
Heintjes: Have you ever had any artistic instruction?
Dunham: No.
Heintjes: Had you ever considered a collaborator?
Dunham: Yes. My sister is a really good artist—she does oil painting and art like that. I tried to get her interested in doing this, but it was beneath her [laughter]. She didn’t really have that attitude, but she was busy doing her stuff, and she encouraged me. She said, “Come on—develop your own style; do it your way.”
Heintjes: Easier said than done, sis.
Dunham: Yeah, right. “You’re the one who can draw.” But she was good about encouraging me to keep trying.
Heintjes: I think it’s interesting to observe how, in Overboard, you’ve developed your own artistic shorthand for drawing things you might otherwise have difficulty rendering—perspectives, sea monsters, textures, things like that. Did you develop these instinctively, or were they conscious efforts to solve problems? How do you approach challenges in your artwork, when you might not be able to represent something as well as you’d like to?
Dunham: The first thing that comes to mind when you discuss this is eyes. In a lot of good cartoons, the eyes are so expressive.
Heintjes: In Overboard, you rarely show the eyes—the hats are pulled down low.
Dunham: When I first started drawing the characters with plainly visible eyes, it looked dopey. It made them look childlike, and it didn’t go along with my attitude about what I was writing. So it was kind of an accident that I started using lines for eyes. I don’t think it was a conscious decision, either—I drew them a few times with the rounded circles and the dots in the middle, and it didn’t fit. I couldn’t draw eyes well enough. The line looked good in one or two drawings, and I just stuck with it. Or maybe I gave up. [laughter]
Heintjes: You rarely show your characters in close-up, so you can get away without showing their eyes. Most of your shots are medium-range. Is there a reason for this?
Dunham: In the construction of my jokes, I don’t like the viewpoint jumping around a lot, because—and maybe this is overanalyzing—I like to create a lull, and the gag works better, because there hasn’t been anything to distract. Does that make sense? This is probably the first time I’ve said it, but I’ve felt it.
Heintjes: It’s obvious that you really enjoy the writing in Overboard, but do you enjoy the drawing, or is it simply more of an obligation? Do you find yourself enjoying the drawing occasionally?
Dunham: It sort of goes back and forth. You’re right when you say that, though. It’s kind of like drawing is “what you have to do so other people can see the joke.” It’s in the notebook, and I like it, but now I have to make it look like a comic strip. [laughter] So it might be a chore with a small “c.” But there are other times when I look at it as an interesting challenge. I’ll look at something I’ve drawn and say, “That came out pretty well. It doesn’t hinder the joke, and it actually works.” Sometimes there are small gratifications for me in the drawing, but much more in the writing.
Heintjes: Do you ever draw anything and think, “I’m not really happy with the way I drew this, but I’ve got to move on to the next thing, so I’ll ship it through”?
Dunham: Oh, no. Tom, I hate sending stuff in that I think my editors will think, “I wish Chip had spent another 20 minutes on this.”
Heintjes: Well, occasionally I’ll see something you’ve drawn, and I’ll think, “Gee, that flamethrower’s pretty rough-looking.”
Dunham: That’s probably as good an example as any. I’ll draw something intending to make it look light and airy, and when I see that flamethrower in print, it looks like . . . I don’t know what it looks like . . . palm leaves or something. It’s not giving the sense of moving at all.
Heintjes: But you only see that in hindsight.
Dunham: Yeah. I don’t ever think, “Oh, that’s good enough—they’ll print that.” Within time considerations, it’s always the best I can do.
Heintjes: No, I didn’t mean to imply that you’d turn in artwork that you believed was less than what you’re capable of. More to the point, don’t you ever give a shrug of resignation and say, “It may not be perfect, but it’s the best I can do“?
Dunham: Oh sure, a shrug like that. Sometimes, after the fifteenth or twentieth attempt to make something look casual, I realize that I’m just beating it to death. So it’s, “On this particular day, that’s the best it’s going to look.”
Heintjes: I’m willing to bet that some of your originals are clean, and some are laden with correction-white.
Dunham: Oh, yeah. A few years ago, those flames you mentioned would have been drawn on top of about an inch of Wite-Out. [laughter]
Heintjes: The cameramen must have loved you!
Dunham: Right, I’m sure I was their favorite. But I’ve developed a different way of working that helps me. I put a piece of tracing paper over my Bristol board, and I’ll draw the strip on one side. Then I’ll flip the paper over and draw on that. You can kind of see how to make it better. And I’ll flip it over again and kind of keep working it like that, until I get it the way I want it to look. Then, I have a ruler, and I use it to rub the pencils from the tracing paper onto my Bristol board, and I ink those pencils.
Heintjes: I’ve never heard of a method quite like that. You developed a solution to a problem that’s unique, I think.
Dunham: Well, drawing on Wite-Out is a pain in the ass. Maybe every other artist knows this method already, but I thought it up on my own, just to avoid whiting out stuff. When I came up with that, I was very happy. I won my freedom from Wite-Out!
Heintjes: And then you hurled your bottle of Wite-Out through the window, and time slowed down as it flew end over end.
Dunham: That’s right. [laughter] My symbolic liberation from Wite-Out.
Heintjes: How hard is it for you to draw women? Your women, if I may speak freely, kind of resemble guys in drag with apples shoved up their shirts.
Dunham: I can’t argue. Early on, when I first started this, I got a couple of books on how to cartoon, and every woman in there was a stereotype. It was either the shapely woman or the fat woman. Nothing that looked like that fit in with what I was drawing, and if I tried to put that in my strip, it looked like I drew everything else, and then did a cutout of another style. So I thought, “I’m just going to do this the best I can, and make it look like I’m not just drawing ‘the secretary’ or ‘the fat lady.’ ” And they just came out looking the way they look.
Heintjes: The fact is, an attractive person would be out of place in Overboard.
Dunham: Everyone else is pretty grungy and misshapen. I came to the conclusion that I had to stay with what I can do, and what I can do is draw ugly little people. And if that means the women are going to be ugly little people, so be it.
Heintjes: Overboard is interesting because it doesn’t rely on characters for its humor as much as it does situations. The conventional wisdom at the syndicates says that there have to be strong characters with whom readers can identify. Was this ever a matter of discussion between you and the syndicate or for yourself as the creator?
Dunham: I don’t know what other syndicates are like, but Universal basically said, “Do what you like to do.” There was never any, “Why don’t you try this, or have you ever thought about that?” The only thing Lee [Salem, comics editor at Univeral Press Syndicate] did was to put me in touch with Don Carlton, who is a really good cartoonist who lives in Kansas City. Lee told me that if I wanted, during one of my visits, he’d introduce me to Don, who would show me a few things. And Don was like Lee, in that he didn’t try to change what I was doing so much as he was trying to help me in what I was already doing. He showed me basic things like, “When you’re drawing hands, just slow down and be aware of the hands you’re drawing.” And the dots I use for texture—that was a suggestion from Don. So that was the only direction I got from Universal.
You made the point that my humor is more situational rather than character-driven, and I worry about that. I wonder how far you can go just on situational humor. I also wonder, after I’ve been doing the strip for a couple of years, if I might need some characterization. People like rounded characters, rather than just a one-note joke every day of the week.
And if sales are any indication, character-driven strips might sell better. Overboard is in about 180 papers. That’s not bad, but Universal is used to a strip with so many more than that. They have such big sellers. And I have a feeling that Overboard might be a tougher sell than a strip where they can go in and say, “Your readers will really like these characters.” In other strips, characters run the gamut of emotions, and in mine, they run the old A-to-B gamut. So I don’t worry about it, but I think about it. Sometimes when I send off a batch of strips, I’ll say to myself, “I think next time I’ll see if I can develop a few more sides to the characters.”
Heintjes: You’ve sort of done that with Nate, who has the most complex makeup of any of the crew members. He’s a brawler, but he also has a sensitive, artistic side.
Dunham: Yeah, and I can see myself doing more with the captain’s personality. You know about method acting, where they can’t speak a line until they know the whole history of the character? Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I took the time to get to know my characters better, and really get inside their heads. Then I think, “Get off it!” [laughter] “What the hell am I talking about?”
Heintjes: So you never concern yourself with questions like where a certain character will be 10 years from now, because they’re all just vehicles for your own humor. They’re not going to evolve as characters.
Dunham: No, they’re not. I’m not interested in getting a thoughtful sigh from the reader. My challenge is to be funny. If I can be funny and add some character at the same time, that’s a challenge for me.
Heintjes: Usually, cartoonists are fond of their characters, and they convey that to their readers. Do you like your characters, or are they more like chess pieces for you to move around to suit your purposes?
Dunham: I like my characters—I enjoy spending time with them, although they’re chess pieces for me at the same time. I enjoy sitting down and putting them through their paces.
Heintjes: Do you think of them as individuals?
Dunham: Yeah—although there is sort of a nameless, faceless quality to them when there’s a group shot of them fighting or something like that—then it’s a gag waiting to happen. But when I focus in on one or two of them standing there, I like them. I like the strips when not much is happening, like they’re walking on the beach or something, and it’s just the writing that carries it. But none of this means that I don’t enjoy messing up their day [laughter].
Heintjes: We’ll call it a love/hate relationship. You also don’t feel constrained by any sense of continuity. You’ll blow the ship up and kill characters regularly, and they’re back the next day, no questions asked, like the Warner Bros. cartoons have always done.
Dunham: I like the idea of catastrophes happening, but the next day I’m back at work, so they’re back at work too.
Heintjes: Overboard’s humor is very nihilistic and black. Does that sort of attitude come naturally to you? In the strip’s attitude, are we also seeing something of Chip Dunham’s attitudes?
Dunham: Well, the humor comes from the person, so . . . I don’t really know how to answer that. I don’t cut off other drivers, and I don’t leave home to go harass the neighborhood pets [laughter]. That’s just the world I’ve created for them to live in. But I’m a cynical person, that’s true.
Heintjes: How does your cynicism manifest itself? Do you refuse to vote because you’re cynical about that, or what?
Dunham: Well, I don’t vote, as a matter of fact, but it’s because I don’t know where to go to sign up for it [laughter]. If someone wants to give me a ride, I’ll go vote.
It’s a valid question, though—nobody in the strip is honest, nobody likes or trusts each other . . .
Heintjes: “Mr. Dunham, I’d like to explore your inability to trust others . . .”
Dunham: [laughter] How do you even know I’m Chip Dunham?
Heintjes: Hoaxed in our fourth issue! Seriously, if you’ve read Peanuts for years, you get some idea of what Charles Schulz’s attitudes are, and Little Orphan Annie allows you to see what Harold Gray’s views were. Now, I know that Overboard is not a strip that puts forth a world view, but I wanted to see how much we’re glimpsing of you.
Dunham: I don’t know if any comic strip can give you a full idea of who the person is, but they do put more of themselves in. And so far, Overboard has been a gag-a-day strip. Those other strips have a wider palette than I do.
Heintjes: Let’s get ourselves back to the period after you’d been published in Insight. What did you do then?
Dunham: Well, heady with the success, I mailed probably six batches of cartoons to The New Yorker. “OK—Insight bought them; next stop, The New Yorker.” [laughter] And boy, are they punctual! You mail it to them on Monday, you get it back on Thursday.
Heintjes: They FedEx’ed your rejection letter.
Dunham: [laughter] Right. But it’s such a comforting rejection slip. They make it sound like they filled up that week’s issue right before your stuff came, and they just can’t use it this time. I got about six or eight of those, and I thought, “I just can’t draw as well as those guys in The New Yorker.” They have such a casual style, and I just couldn’t duplicate that. Mine looked so worked over, so drawn and redrawn, that I think I drew the life right out of them. So I put cartooning aside. I went to the University of Wisconsin and graduated from there in 1979, and I certainly wasn’t doing any cartooning.
Heintjes: And since cartooning hasn’t been a passion for you, I don’t imagine it was too devastating to stop.
Dunham: No, it wasn’t. “Oh well, I gave it a shot. It didn’t work out, so on to the next thing.” So I got a degree in journalism, and in the meantime, my brother and my sisters moved back to the Detroit-Ann Arbor area. My brother called me up and said he was going to do some stand-up comedy. He had always had a desire to do some stand-up comedy. He’d called up this club that had an amateur night, and he was going to go on in a week. He called me up and said, “Come on over—let’s write some jokes together.” So I moved there and we started doing comedy together. That’s kind of how I got back into doing humor.
Heintjes: What was your brother’s day job?
Dunham: He was a stockbroker.
Heintjes: Did he do stockbroker humor?
Dunham: No, we did screwy humor. Anyone who saw his routine would not put money in his trust [laughter]. He’s just a naturally funny guy, and I always wondered how far he could have gone with that if he had not had other responsibilities. So it became a favorite hobby of ours. About 10 years ago, there was a boom in comedy clubs, and it got me thinking about comedy and joke-writing.
Heintjes: But not necessarily cartoons.
Dunham: No. And in the meantime, moving over here, I went on a couple of job interviews at newspapers, but my heart wasn’t in it. Meanwhile, I had a friend who painted houses, and he needed help. He asked me if I wanted to make a few bucks. It was a beautiful summer, and I started doing that. Seven years later [laughter], I was still painting houses, and as a creative outlet I was helping my brother write stand-up.
Heintjes: What was it that moved you to put together a submission package for the syndicates?
Dunham: I started cartooning again because I quit painting with my friend. I had a girlfriend who said, “What are you going to do with your life? You don’t seem real happy just painting houses, and you’re not making a ton of money.” Painting houses wasn’t really good for us. So I started thinking, “What am I going to do? This has been fun, and I’ve gotten good tans, but let’s see what I can do next.” So I thought, “Well, I sold some cartoons about 10 years ago—maybe I can try that again.”
So I sat down with a notebook, and over a few weeks came up with some one-panel ideas that I was going to try to sell to Writer’s Digest. While I was doing that, I drew a panel with some typical businessmen sitting at a table, and a little pirate was sitting at the same table. That made me think of a pirate in modern times. As soon as I thought of that, I thought, “Gee—there’s a lot of humor there.” It’s not just swinging on a rope with a sword, it’s job interviews, refrigerators—it’s everything. You put pirates in the modern world, and there’s some humor there. Then I started coming up with ideas that I couldn’t put in one box. There was too much writing to put into one panel.
It was a weird moment, Tom—it was turning into a strip, and I thought, “I don’t like strips, but this is the only way I can do this.” I looked at the comics page in the newspaper, and I hadn’t looked at comic strips in years. And when I looked at them, I saw The Far Side. It was a panel, but he was doing some incredible stuff, so I thought, “I guess I can do it.” Mine was a strip, but there was some funny stuff being done. There was Calvin and Hobbes, For Better or For Worse, Mister Boffo—there was just some really funny stuff.
Heintjes: A lot of aspiring cartoonists are inspired to be cartoonists by their favorites, but they draw the inspiration to persevere from the stuff that they consider subpar.
Dunham: I was aware of that, too. The good stuff feeds the competitive side of you, and the other stuff feeds the side that says, “Hey, I can do this, too!“ Both of those fed into it, and before you know it, you’re looking up addresses [laughter].
I put a package together and sent it in to the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News. It was only to get their opinions. And Larry Wright, a cartoonist for the News, called me up! Larry does editorial cartoons and a cartoon called Wright Angles, and he called me the next day! I had included a cover letter asking him for his ideas about my material, and he was so nice. He invited me down to the News, so I drove down there. He said I should send my stuff to the syndicates. He gave me Sarah Gillespie’s name—she was the comics editor at United Feature—and I drove home from that meeting thinking, “Wow—this is a change!”
So I looked up some syndicates in Writer’s Market, and they all said to send six weeks’ worth or something like that. And I found a book in the library that told how to send stuff in to the syndicates: don’t send originals, just make photocopies of your best stuff, so I did that. I sent my material off to five syndicates: King Features, United Feature, Creators, Universal and Tribune Media. They all say they get a lot of submissions and that they look at every one, and I have to believe they do. One time when I was in Kansas City [Universal Press’s headquarters], Lee showed me one week’s worth of submissions. It was just a ton of stuff. And when I sent my stuff out, within a week I think three of them had responded.
Heintjes: What was the feedback like?
Dunham: They all wanted to offer me a contract.
Heintjes: Wow! As of this moment, every aspiring cartoonist in America hates your guts.
Dunham: I know—it was pretty incredible.
Heintjes: Which ones tried to snag you?
Dunham: United Feature, King Features and Creators. Then I got a really nice letter from Lee, who said he really liked the idea and he liked the strip, and he sure didn’t pass on it, but he said the art was a little rough, and that he looked forward to seeing more. He gave me his number, and he said to call him if I had any questions. So I called him right away. It was something about the tone of his letter—it was a real nice letter.
Heintjes: So although other syndicates were silver-plattering their contracts, you felt impelled to contact Universal.
Dunham: I’ll tell you what it was. Universal had The Far Side.
Heintjes: You felt like you had kindred spirits there?
Dunham: That’s a good way to put it. So I called Lee and thanked him for the letter, and I asked him what my next step should be. He said I should send him some more. So I thought, this is the test. Everyone has their whole lifetime to come up with the first batch, but can you come up with six more weeks? So I put the phone down and put together three or four more weeks’ worth as quickly as I could.
Heintjes: Not shaving, not eating . . .
Dunham: Yeah, it was one of those deals.
Heintjes: Were you happy with what you’d produced under that kind of pressure?
Dunham: Yeah, I was. I had a lot of ideas. Something really opened up when I came up with the idea that this was going to be a strip. So it wasn't a problem sending in a few more weeks pretty quickly. After that, Universal offered me a contract. In the meantime, Tribune Media turned it down.
Heintjes: So this was a pretty painless hurdle for you, overall.
Dunham: It really was. I’d read about other syndicates signing people to development contracts, but no one wanted to sign me to a development contract—they just wanted me to sign a contract to start working.
Heintjes: Did anyone insist that you work on your drawing, or did they acknowledge that your writing would carry the strip?
Dunham: All three of those editors were very supportive of my . . . limited abilities [laughter].
Heintjes: You’re such a diplomat.
Dunham: They all said they liked my writing a lot, and they all said that just on the basis of my doing this every day that my drawing would improve.
Heintjes: Which it has.
Dunham: Well, they were right, as it turns out. There may have been a hint of having someone help me out for the first few months—I can’t even remember which one it was—but no one wanted to strongarm me and make me take classes or anything. They all said it was a crude style, but I was getting my ideas across, and they said it would get better.
Heintjes: The characters themselves are kind of grubby and rough-hewn, so it’s an appropriate style. It’s not like you were working on a romance strip.
Dunham: And they recognized that; they all said words to that effect.
Heintjes: Did you negotiate for ownership of Overboard, or was that not a concern for you?
Dunham: To this day, I’m not sure what benefits accrue when you own your copyright. I’m not really up on that stuff. But I notice that a lot of them are copyrighted by the creator, but I’m not sure what difference that makes if it’s just a strip. If it went into cards and cups, it might matter then.
Heintjes: What are your feelings about merchandising? You’re not averse to it?
Dunham: I wouldn’t say “no” to stuff, but I would want to be careful about it. I’m pretty proud of the strip, and I feel a sense of ownership about these characters, and I wouldn’t want it on just . . . you’ve seen stuff and you think, “Oh, geez. What’s that for?” Besides, the offers have certainly not been rolling in. I think it’s kind of a tough sell. And frankly, I don’t think too much merchandising is going to be a problem for me.
Heintjes: But you’re not philosophically opposed to it.
Dunham: Not at all. I’ve seen some stuff that’s nicely done, like mugs, cards and calendars. Some of it’s kind of cute. I like that kind of stuff. I wouldn’t be opposed to that.
Heintjes: Let’s talk about your writing—I’m sure I’ve gotten you sick of talking about your artwork. Your approach to dialogue really makes the strip, as far as I’m concerned. These rough, cutthroat pirates go around saying “heck” and “gosh,” words like that, and they say some things that are really sensitive, which is incongruous. How do you put together dialogue?
Dunham: Your ear is what makes or breaks it. I have a sense of the rhythm of a joke, and whether it’s in a microphone or on a page, there’s a real rhythm to it, especially if there’s a payoff at the end—you have to work to set it up. And sometimes I’ll go back and put in a “heck” just to achieve the rhythm I want. I might overanalyze this kind of thing, but I might have to take out some words or put in some words just to make the rhythm work. And that’s the stuff I’m changing right up until I drop it in the mail. I’ll have sweated over the drawing a couple of days, but the last thing I do is pencil in the dialogue. I could show you a strip, and I could have five ways—sometimes more—of getting from the first panel to the last one. It just kind of always changes. And they are tough pirates, so it works to give them sort of soft things to say once in a while. It’s a comic juxtaposition. I’m never going to point with pride to the way I drew a hand, but I’m more likely to think, “I made that writing work.”
Also, I have another sister, CeCe, who has become an A-1 shit detector. If I have some gags that I’m not so sure about—if I think I might be writing a private joke for myself or something—I’ll call her up and tell the gag to her. If there’s silence on the other end of the phone, I’ll know it’s no good, and I won’t use it. But it’s good to have someone to talk to who will say, “That one really doesn’t work.”
Heintjes: Will you rework the gags she dislikes?
Dunham: No. Usually, that would require restructuring the whole thing, so I’ll just discard the whole idea.
Heintjes: What proportion of the gags that you approach her with does she dislike?
Dunham: Well, it varies from time to time, but I’ll say generally about half.
Heintjes: Your strip seems to thrive in the daily, four-panel format. You get the sense that some cartoonists feel constrained by the space and that they wish they had more room. Do you feel at home in four narrow panels?
Dunham: Once in a while in the writing I’ll feel constrained. I’ll have a joke that needs five or six panels, but I tend to feel comfortable in those four boxes.
Heintjes: How do you approach Sundays?
Dunham: I’ve gone back and forth on how I feel about Sundays. You know, Tom, it’s a question of what you can do with that size. I’ve done a couple of Sundays where I’ll actually be proud of it, with the drawing and the colors in six panels. There would be some Sundays that I could point with pride to, and I’m even including the drawing. But when it’s printed, it’s so small that you can’t even tell! It’s such a tiny thing. Lately, I’ve been thinking that even in the Sundays the joke has to be in three or four panels, so I can at least draw the characters a little bigger. The other way, it’s so miniature that it’s almost an exercise in futility. And I think I’m stronger with the quicker, four-panel jokes than I am with the six-panel ones.
Lately I’m more satisfied with a four-panel Sunday. I think they’re a little bigger, you can see it a little better, so that’s OK. And I’ll see some Sundays where they used a four-panel joke on a long Sunday strip, and I’ll say, “Oh, there’s someone who used a daily joke and stretched it out into a Sunday.” But for me, it was the size issue more than anything else that made me change my thinking about Sundays. I said to myself, “If they’re going to make them postage-stamp sized, I’m going to stay with my strengths.”
Heintjes: Have you ever had any gags rejected by Universal for being too far out?
Dunham: Early on, there were a couple, but I think I’m a pretty good self-editor. Maybe it took me a batch or two to develop that sense. But I was so proud of getting this opportunity. I remember the feeling I had when I sent in thirty-six gags and Lee liked thirty-four of them. I was devastated. All that meant to me was that I sent two down there that they didn’t like. I didn’t like that feeling. They signed me to a contract, and they expect a professional job. And I sent two down there that they felt didn’t make the cut. I wanted to send them stuff they could use, all of it. But I’ve never sent any down that just repulsed them.
Heintjes: You never took the “poopdeck” too literally or anything?
Dunham: Well, “poopdeck” is such an obvious joke. It took me about four years to get around to using that one, but I finally did use that. I think it was Charlie who said “I’m going to be on the ‘poopdeck,’ so if anyone needs me, I’ll be on the ‘poopdeck.’” He said it way too many times, then walked away. Then the captain looks at Nate and said, “He’s so immature.” So that’s how I finally used “poopdeck.”
Heintjes: You’ll occasionally do short continuities, like the one where Captain Crow navigated the Revenge into the Arctic Circle instead of the tropics, but you rarely do them. Are they not something you’re very interested in?
Dunham: I wish I could think up more. I think they’re a good way to have people pick up the paper to see what you’re doing today. It brings them back, as Lee says. I did a couple that worked out, and then I did a couple that were really strained. Let’s say I liked the first one and the third one, but it went six days and the other four were flat. But I would run into time problems. I’m always on a deadline, and I would spend a day or two trying to come up with a continuity of five dailies. And at the end of two days, I’d end up saying, “These aren’t good enough.” All that meant was that I wasted two days of working time. So I kind of scared myself away from that kind of stuff. I can’t even remember the last time I did a continuity.
Heintjes: A lot of cartoonists buy gags. Have you ever considered this?
Dunham: Do a lot of them buy?
Heintjes:Yeah, there’s a good number who do. It’s pretty standard practice. Some do, some don’t.
Dunham: I would never . . . well, never say never, but as we sit here today, I would say that it’s my thing. No. I’ve even taught my friends not to give me ideas. I don’t like hearing other people’s ideas.
It took me a long time to find something that I’m proud of doing. I would not like to buy jokes. I want to come up with my own stuff.
Heintjes: Walk me through your production cycle.
Dunham: I work on a monthly cycle. After I send a batch in, there’s always a couple of days where I couldn’t come up with a cartoon idea if I had to. It’s just all gone, and I’m never going to be able to come up with another one. Then I sit down with a notebook and I start drawing the characters again. It takes a couple of days to get the garbage out; it’s just scribbling. But I think it’s important to sit and doodle and not really care about it. Then I’ll come up with the first idea, and it’s like, “Whew! I’m not all washed up in this business!” I kind of do it all day, on and off. So for about two weeks I’m sitting with the notebook. And about eight or ten days before my next deadline, I like to have twenty-four ideas, because I spend about a week drawing three strips a day. And I save the dialogue for the last couple of days. So I’m drawing for about a week before the deadline. So it means about two weeks for coming up with ideas and a week for drawing them.
Heintjes: Do you treat the Sundays separately?
Dunham: I see it thatevery Wednesday I owe them a Sunday. Once in a while I’ll come up with a good idea and say, “That’s good for a Sunday.” But more often, I’ll just take a good idea and say, “OK—that’s a Sunday.” I just want a good visual, something a little colorful.
Heintjes: So you won’t really hear from your syndicate as long as you send your material in on time.
Dunham: No. I hear about other cartoonists whose editors call them and talk to them about “have you tried this, why don’t you do this a little more.” But they felt “Hey, if he’s up there drawing, let’s leave him alone.”
Heintjes: I guess after all is said and done, your girlfriend must be a little surprised that after her prodding, you actually went and became a successful cartoonist, that she inspired you to these heights.
Dunham: And now we’re broken up.
Heintjes: Ah, the typical story—the man becomes successful and dumps the woman who pushed him to achieve success.
Dunham: Actually, quite the opposite—she got rid of me.
Heintjes: Oh. I guess you’re too devoted to your work.
Dunham: Well, life goes on . . .
Heintjes: Gee—that sounds like an Overboard strip.
Dunham: Yeah—I’ll have to use that sometime!