Like most cartoonists, Jan Eliot had to work tenaciously to forge a career in cartooning. And, like most female cartoonists, she had to work harder still to make her livelihood in what is historically a male-dominated profession. Adding a few pounds to this burden was Eliot’s intention to sell a strip that showcased female characters and, through them, Eliot’s gentle yet unequivocally feminist sensibilities. Her success as represented by Stone Soup is a tribute to both her perseverance as well as her ability to couch her brand of feminism in an appealing blend of family, workplace and relationship humor.
I first became aware of Eliot’s work in the early 1990s, when she was producing Sister City, the philosophical precursor to Stone Soup. Eliot’s work harbors a warmth and genuine quality that many strips, feminist or otherwise, fail to convey. In the years that followed, Sister City remained true to its belief structure while it developed into the more mature Stone Soup. If anything, time has seen Eliot gain confidence as an artist and, especially, sophistication as a writer. Her characters acknowledge the disappointment and occasional emptiness they feel in their lives, just as we all do. In this way, Eliot has created a strip that does much more than hold aloft the standard for feminism; she has created a strip that speaks to everyone.
If we are to believe what many feminists say, feminism is simply the belief that women too are human beings. In Stone Soup, Eliot reaffirms that credo with a humanity and a humor that will remain relevant to her longtime readers and irresistible to newcomers to her work.
—Tom Heintjes

Tom Heintjes: What caused you to want to start cartooning?
Jan Eliot: I started cartooning when I had been divorced for about a year, and I had little kids at home, and I didn’t have very much money, and I missed doing artwork. I had been an art major. I had a pottery studio.
Heintjes: What year would this have been?
Eliot: 1979. A friend of mine thought I was a funny person and suggested that I do cartoons. I thought that was a novel idea, and it was also a cheap idea.
Heintjes: Had you been a comic-strip reader?
Eliot: Oh sure, ab-solutely. I was a comic-strip reader. When I first tried to do a strip, it was hard at first. I had a full-time job and two little girls, and even doing one strip a week—which was my friend’s challenge to me—was difficult.
Heintjes: What was your full-time job?
Eliot: I was driving a Bookmobile. I had just graduated from the University of Oregon. I’d gone back to school as an older student and got a degree in English, so I had both an art background and an English background. I found that doing the comic strip was a great outlet for the frustrations of my life: being alone and broke and having children that I was trying to manage alone. Not being able to pay my bills on time, having lots of conversations with collection agencies . . . all those things you go through when you’re strapped. I directed all that into the comic, and it became such terrific therapy that I became addicted to doing it.
Heintjes: What was this strip titled?
Eliot: There was no title at first. But after I’d done 10 of them, I approached our local alternative weekly newspaper, The Willamette Valley Observer, and they liked them well enough to agree to publish them on a weekly basis. That editor, Ken Doctor, later became editor of the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. He was my first editor.
Then, I called the strip Patience and Sarah, because a mother needs patience, and I always wanted to be named Sarah as a kid. There was also a book by that title about two women pioneering together, and there was something about that that rang true to me: mothers and daughters on their own, pioneering together.
Heintjes: What was the premise of Patience and Sarah?
Eliot: The premise of that strip was almost identical to the premise of my current strip, but it had fewer characters. It was one mom and one daughter and their neighbors. It was basically the single mom and her daughter getting by, making it in the world . . . all the stuff that’s in Stone Soup, but with a slimmer cast.
That strip bloomed pretty nicely, and I worked hard at trying to self-syndicate and to get syndicated by the big guys, of course. Unfortunately, around that time, Lynn Johnston, Cathy Guisewite and Nicole Hollander were all pretty new on the scene, and almost every response I got was, “We already have Lynn, Cathy and Nicole—why do we need you? We have our women.” So I didn’t have much luck with the major syndicates, but I did manage to sell the strip to 10 little newspapers, alternative newspapers and daycare newsletters—whatever I could find.
Heintjes: So you handled both the creative and business ends of self-syndication.
Eliot: Yeah, well, the business end, such as it was. I think I was earning about $70 a month [laughter].
Heintjes: You could buy diapers.
Eliot: Barely. I did borrow some money from my parents and quit my job and tried to cartoon full time. I didn’t succeed in cartooning at that time, but I did create some markets for myself and I built the basis for becoming a freelance graphic artist. I sold a bunch of my cartoons to a new computer-graphics software company who used them to illustrate their manual. I later became their art director. I managed to generate some opportunities for myself that were a little more in line with my goal of becoming a cartoonist. And that in fact became how I supported myself over the next 10 years before I became syndicated and became a self-supporting cartoonist.
Heintjes: Have you always gravitated toward creating strips that are autobiographical or that draw on your own
experiences?
Eliot: Yes, because it was always such a natural for me to write about my life. It became such a logical thing, and I became very attached to my characters because they were a part of me. When I started writing the new strip, it was almost inevitable that it would be a larger version of what I started. In fact, my Stone Soup character Joan looks very much like Patience.
Heintjes: Does the notion of creating a strip that has no basis in your own experience hold any interest for you as a creator?
Eliot: I wouldn’t say it holds no interest for me. I think as a creator, the spontaneity of it holds some appeal, but I really like writing stories. One thing I can do with my strip is continuities, and I find that less stressful than doing a gag a day. If you have to come up with something just brilliant all by itself every day, that seems hard to me.
Heintjes: It’s too much like work.
Eliot: When I have a storyline going, it kind of writes itself. If it’s a good enough story, it will evolve and unfold and be interesting to people, and if it’s not hysterically funny, that’s not the point. Readers want to know what happened to the teenage girl today, or what happened to the diamond earrings, or is Joan really going to marry Wally. Readers enjoy that—it matters to them.
Heintjes: What were your early artistic impulses?
Eliot: I was interested in art—specifically in pencil drawing and charcoal—starting pretty young, in grade school. I had a teacher, Mr. Arloff, who worked really hard with me in eighth grade, and I accomplished a lot that year in terms of my drawing skills.
Heintjes: That’s when you blossomed artistically?
Eliot: That’s when I started taking myself a little more seriously as an artist. That teacher had been an illustrator for Hallmark, so he had these outside connections to the art world that were appealing to me, because I could never quite see myself as a painter in a gallery. And my parents hired an art teacher for me while I was in high school. She was actually another high school student who was much more talented and serious than I was. She taught me a lot. We drew drapery together, the classic style.
I was an art major in college, but I took drawing and painting my first year, but most college art programs are not very inviting to women. Mine was no exception. Almost all the instructors were male.
Heintjes: Which school was this?
Eliot: Southern Illinois University, where Buckminster Fuller was in residence. This is a classic art-student story. I went there because I waited so long to apply for college that SIU was the only school I could get into [laughter]. I didn’t pick it because they had this great art department, although they did have a great art department. It was luck on my part. It was easy enough academically, so I didn’t have to worry about my academic classes, and I could put a lot of effort into my art classes. But all the graduate students were male, all the painting students were male, all the painting instructors were interested in the guys who stood at the back of the class and threw paint against 17-foot canvases. The rest of us didn’t learn anything. One day, I went into the basement of the art building, where the ceramics program was, and there were about four graduate students in the program who were female. I watched these strong women throwing these huge pots, chatting back and forth and having a grand time, and there were these professors there with low egos who were interested in me and who encouraged me to take a class. That was the first time any art professor had invited me to take a class. That was it—I became a ceramics major. I ended up studying pottery for a couple of years, and I ended up doing most of my painting on pots.
Then I got married and had a
baby . . . well, actually, I did it in the other order. I got pregnant and then got married, all at the tender age of 19. That interrupted my education. Fortunately, my husband at that time was also interested in ceramics and had also started taking classes, and when we moved to Oregon we ended up with some friends of ours from the same program who wanted to open up a pottery. So I was able to have some continuity in my artistic life. It was the ’70s, you know—we did the “back to the land thing.” Bought a farm, opened the pottery, had people living in tepees.
Heintjes: You had a pottery commune.
Eliot: Yes, we had a pottery commune. It was great, and I was able to maintain a lot of artistic friendships that way, because we would do the craft fairs. It kept me involved, even though by then I had another little girl, so I had two daughters.
Heintjes: You mentioned that your parents hired an art teacher for you, so they were obviously supportive of your artistic inclinations.
Eliot: Oh, very. In fact, I think they thought I was a little bit dumb, so it was good that I was artistically talented so I would be able to do something [laughter]. I had a brother and sister who were very scholarly and linear and who were valedictorians and went on to impressive colleges, and I was this free-form, flighty thing who put all her energy into creative outlets.
Heintjes: What were the family dynamics like as you were growing up? It seems that everyone has a “role” they played in the family.
Eliot: I was the clown. My parents and my sister and brother were all really quite serious. If you can picture the side of a die with five spots—one in each corner and one in the middle—that was my family. I was the one in the middle. In the car, I would be the one sitting on the hump in the middle of the back seat. That was in the days before seatbelts, so it worked then. I would sit forward, because my brother and my sister didn’t want me too close to them. So I would lean forward against my parent’s bench seat in the front, and I would make jokes to keep them all from fighting with each other. They were always fighting with each other. I hated all that, and I found that I was the only one in the family who could make my mother laugh.
Heintjes: So in that role you were using humor to deal with challenging family situations, just as you did later in your newspaper strip.
Eliot: Exactly. I think that was, in many ways, my best training ground. To this day, I’m very comfortable with grumpy people [laughter]. I figure out quickly how to humor them, because I grew up with these grumpy people that I had to humor all the time.
Heintjes: It’s pretty evident that cartooning had always been a boys’ club, but in recent decades women have been making a splash. What do you think changed?
Eliot: In the ’30s and ’40s, there were lots of strong women in many professions—think Katharine Hepburn. It was true in cartooning, too—we had Mary Petty and Helen Hockinson at The New Yorker, Gladys Parker, Edwina Dumm. Then, in the ’50s, after the war, women were “encouraged” to stay home. The men came back and took their jobs back, and women went home to have babies. The ’50s were very conservative; men were given priority for jobs because they had to support families. In the ’50s and ’60s, when comic strips became a “big thing,” when we first saw the greats of the most recent era—Mort Walker, Charles Schulz, Johnny Hart, etc.—they were all men. Most newspaper editors were men. It just became the standard. Hilda Terry had to really fight for her place, and Dale Messick had to adopt a male name to get published. She had been turned down when she submitted as “Dalia.” Clearly, there was a bias there. You can’t deny it. And I think that what changed it was feminism and Universal Press. Universal Press broke the comic-strip mold with Doonesbury, and went from there to Cathy Guisewite and Lynn Johnston. Along with Nicole Hollander, they opened the door. And for a while there was the notion of, “We already have our women—we don’t need any more,” but that eventually faded. And more women ended up as editors at newspapers. Like many things, the situation just slowly changed.
In the interview you did with Lynn [Hogan’s Alley #1], she said that there had always been a lot of women cartoonists, but that they had been at advertising agencies and greeting card companies and other people were taking credit for their work. I just about cried when I read that, because that was exactly the situation I had been in. I was writing greeting cards and I was working in an ad agency. It wasn’t that the people I was working for were unkind to me, but I was creating for them, not for me. But I think that there are a lot of female cartoonists, and this is a particularly hard field to break into. I know that women are often told by editors that their strips don’t have enough of an “edge.”
Heintjes: Do you think that women’s strips are perceived differently simply because they’re created by women?
Eliot: This is a generalization, because there are male cartoonists who are doing material like this, but I think women do relationships better. Women really know relationships and think about them a lot. They’re just really good at it, so I think they tend to do strips that are about relationships.
Heintjes: Even while that can be a strength, do you think it pigeonholes women creatively?
Eliot: I think that’s where we get into the “edge” issue. A lovely example was just given to me. I just met Marian Henley
who does Maxine. She’s just fabulous. She told me that Mad had asked her to do a feature for them, because they wanted a woman’s perspective. So she started working on material, and everything she gave them came back with the comment that it didn’t have enough “edge.” Her conclusion was that they don’t want a woman’s perspective. They want a strip done by a woman that has a man’s perspective. I understand “edge.” I like edgy cartoons. But there’s a belief in this country that if it’s not out there, that if it’s not wincingly hard, it’s not good enough. But judging from the mail I get, lots of people like things that are not edgy, just meaningful. Some women do that well, and some men do that well, and some men do action and gag-a-day and slapstick well.
Heintjes: Defining creative traits by gender is a losing game.
Eliot: It is. Rose Is Rose is a great example. Pat Brady does a nice job with relationships. But talented women need to do what they do best and it will be accepted. I think it has a lot to do with sheer persistence. You have to be able to withstand a lot of rejection and believe that you’re good, and that may be hard. Women sometimes don’t have that sort of ego.
Heintjes: I think both men and women have been reduced to tears by the rejections that go into syndication efforts.
Eliot: It’s a tough one. You really have to be able not to take it personally. I think a lot of people nod and go, “Yeah, yeah,” but they don’t know.
Heintjes: How did you manage to work through that?
Eliot: Part of it was that I had already been through some tough times and dealt with it. I had enough of an ego that I was able to maintain belief in myself even when other people didn’t like what I was doing. I had done sales, and I understood the concept that it’s all about numbers. So if you need to sell anything, you just need to talk to enough prospects and you will sell one. There’s a ratio. It might be 13-to-1, it might be 20-to-1, it might be 60-to-1. When I tried to sell greeting-card gags, I usually had to submit 50 or 60 before I sold two or three. It’s all about numbers, and I tried to remind myself that it was exactly the same thing with the strip. I had to put it in front of enough people for something to happen. Along the way, that means you’re going to hear “no” a lot.
I had a local fan base, and that helped. To have a local publisher is a real gift. I encourage anyone who’s trying to get something off the ground to find a way to have an audience, even a small one. You then have people giving you feedback and appreciation. I even had my family behind me, and lots of times I still thought about giving up. I did give up, actually—for five years, in between strips. I’d gotten very close to syndication in ’82. I got a contract, but it had one of those clauses where I would give up copyright in perpetuity. I knew the Superman story and just didn’t believe I could do that. I hired a local attorney instead of finding a syndication attorney. The syndicate wouldn’t negotiate with me at all, and that was the end of it.
Heintjes: You felt strongly enough about copyright ownership that, despite all the effort you put into the strip, you were unwilling to relinquish copyright ownership.
Eliot: I was really afraid I would lose all control and that they could even get rid of me. Also, you have to understand that I was very attached to it. It was my idea and my characters.
Heintjes: Which strip would this have been?
Eliot: Patience and Sarah.
Heintjes: In hindsight, do you think you were justified in feeling that way?
Eliot: In hindsight, I was absolutely justified in feeling that way. Mort Walker gave me some advice, and if I had taken Mort’s advice and hired a more expensive and specific attorney, like his attorney, I may have been able to get them to agree to something that would allow me to remain in control. I could have incorporated myself in some fashion. I probably could have come to some arrangement that would have worked for all of us, but I didn’t feel like I could afford the big-time attorney, and that was a mistake. I should have spent the money. But again, I go back to the single-mom thing, and I was trying to figure it all out.
At the time, I didn’t belong to the National Cartoonists Society. I had met Mort Walker, and he was kind enough to take a phone call from me and give me what advice he could. His advice was, “This is a terrible contract, but it might be the only one you ever get, so you need to decide what you want to do.” Well, that’s a real frying-pan-and-fire sort of decision to make.
Heintjes: Who owns the copyright to Stone Soup?
Eliot: I do. I’ve given the syndicate control of it for the duration of my contract, and that’s all that matters. All that matters is that you get it back someday.
Heintjes: Industry norms have changed—that’s a much more common arrangement.
Eliot: Absolutely. But the contract I had received from the first syndicate was a pretty archaic one even by that day’s standards. Things had already started to change by then.
Heintjes: You’ve always written strips starring female characters. Yet, throughout the history of the comic-strip medium, men have written female characters: Blondie, Polly, Tillie, the list goes on. Some have done a better job than others in sounding plausibly female. How confident do you feel when you write male characters? Do you ever read a male-written strip and think to yourself, “A woman would never talk like that!”?
Eliot: Oh, I do have that experience, yes. Some of the female characters seem very false to me. Others are just fine. But some of them sound like an outside observer is writing the language and the situations.
I feel pretty comfortable writing my kind of men.
Heintjes: You write Sensitive New Age Men.
Eliot: Yes [laughter]. I try to base all my characters on someone in my real life so that there’s an authenticity there. I have a very good friend named Wally who is very much like a character I write about, and I’ve spent a lot of time with him over the last 20 years, and I also have a really great husband who is very much the sensitive new age male, a nontraditional guy. I try to use them as my backdrop for these characters. It will never be like I’m in the skin of the other gender, but on the other hand, sometimes from the opposite gender you can be more detached and observant. I think it’s possible to be as or more authentic in certain ways because of the detachment. So I’m pretty confident. I have to say, though, that I’m definitely more confident with the female characters.
I have a new character, Officer Phil Jackson. He’s been really popular. He hasn’t been in the strip a lot lately, and part of the reason for that is I’m still figuring out who he is. I’m still developing his voice, and I don’t want him to be a duplicate of Wally.
Heintjes: He’s becoming Wally’s buddy.
Eliot: Yes. It’s
a good opportun- ity for Wally to
have a buddy. Heintjes: Phil Jackson breaks a lot of the stereotypical images people have of the tough-talking police officer.
Eliot: He’s modeled on an actual motorcycle cop here in Eugene. Once or twice he pulled me over . . . for no particular reason [laughter]. I live in a progressive community, and I would say that this is a pretty accurate reflection of the motorcycle cops in our community. They’re not big, burly guys, and they’re very much into community policing.
Part of what I do is create a world that I want to exist. So I write men that I wish there were more of. Of course, you have to have conflict, so I occasionally have Val’s office-mate Dickerson give her a bad time. But Officer Jackson can’t be a clone of Wally, so I’m working a little bit on who he is before I bring him back.
Heintjes: Do the girls’ names, Holly and Alix, hold any significance to you outside of the strip?
Eliot: Holly and Alix are named after singers from the women’s music movement of the ’70s—Holly Near and Alix Dobkin. Their music was really inspiring to me. Holly Near stayed at my house once, and she’s just as sweet as pie. And strong—very inspiring.
Heintjes: Do you see your characters aging as the strip
continues?
Eliot: I don’t think my characters will age. I like where they are. They’re fun to write about—middle school stuff for Holly, Alix’s tomboy stuff and Max, my little sprite with two emotions: He’s either mad or thrilled. These ages work for me. I’d like to keep them. People really like Max, always dashing around at the bottom of the panel or clinging to his mom.
Heintjes: Stone Soup evolved from Sister City. What were the reactions you received that caused it to evolve the way it did?
Eliot: After I turned down the syndication contract for Patience and Sarah, I quit cartooning for about five years, until about 1988. I did that so I could pursue a career in graphics and advertising and make real money. My kids were getting older and practicality was setting in. But in 1988 I remarried, and one of my daughters was off to college on scholarships, so my whole financial situation changed. I wasn’t bearing the entire burden, and the burden was also lightening. I decided I might have the emotional energy to give cartooning another try. I really missed publishing and doing the comic strip, and I still had people writing me and asking me about Patience and Sarah.
Heintjes: That must have been gratifying.
Eliot: It was. Patience and Sarah was reprinted in a number of books, so it had a small, spread-out audience. So in 1988 I decided to give it another shot. At the same time, I had a friend who was quitting her job because her son had graduated from high school and was no longer dependent, and her husband was persuading her to pursue a career as a writer. So she was going to be out on her own trying to do this scary, nebulous thing. We decided to meet once a week for lunch and cheer each other on in these ventures that had no guidelines or deadlines or boundaries. So we started meeting, and I created Sister City, which was an expansion of Patience and Sarah. I made it two girls so I could have the sisters and they could do their sibling thing, and I created the two moms, who are sisters. And Max was the baby son of one of the sisters. And Wally was the guy next door. Those were my initial characters. Eventually I introduced Grandma. It was a way of going back to Patience and Sarah, which I had loved, but also expanding on it and thinking more clearly about it. Basically, it was something I thought might work.
Also, Eugene is a “sister city.” We had two sister cities in Russia, and I thought if I named it that, the local paper would like the tie-in.
Heintjes: You were already considering the marketing aspects.
Eliot: Well, you’ve got to [laughter]. So I spent about eight months developing the strip and then another eight months trying to sell it to the Eugene Register-Guard, our mainstream paper. I was hoping to have them pick it up as a weekly. Just through luck and miracles, they did.
Heintjes: Was it done in a daily strip format?
Eliot: Yes, but they put it in a feature section so it would run weekly. I couldn’t afford to do a daily strip for one paper. I was still working full time and I didn’t have time. During the eight months that I trudged in and out of their offices every couple of weeks, they had a change of editor, and the new editor had a desire to make his mark. He saw me as an opportunity to do that, and he agreed to put me in. I was very lucky—they have a circulation of 80,000–100,000. It was a great way to get started. And I had a weekly commitment, so that meant I had to produce work. One of the hardest things about not having a publisher is actually doing the work. Deadlines spawn creativity and productivity, at least for me.
Within six months, I started sending work in to Lee Salem at Universal Press.
Heintjes: Only him?
Eliot: Only him.
Heintjes: Why did you limit your prospects?
Eliot: After my experience with the first syndicate, I decided I should be more careful in how I picked my potential business partner. At the time, Universal was the biggest and the best and had a reputation for being the fairest to their artists. Also, they published everything I loved, so I felt like it was a place I wanted to be. And I had met Lee a couple of times, and he was very nice.
It was probably foolish. I don’t know if I’d recommend it. I just felt like it was what I needed to do. I sent him stuff every six months for four years. What kept me going was the nice, long letters he would send me back, containing encouragement and thought. However, after four years of encouragement and thought and no commitment, I was getting impatient. I was also getting older.
Heintjes: Lee never said to you, “We’ve got Lynn. Thanks but no thanks”?
Eliot: No . . . well, he may have said something like that. Not “we’ve got Lynn,” but “we’ve got what the market will bear.” People need to understand that a syndicate looks for gaps. It’s not just “are you funny enough and draw well enough.” It’s “do you fit a little gap?” I think one advantage of sticking with the same idea and resubmitting it is that your “gap” might come up someday. Someone might decide, “You know, we really could use this now.” You just don’t know. Mostly, Lee addressed the issue of my humor. I got the “your humor is a bit soft” response. That “edge” thing.
But at the beginning of 1994, after I had been in the Register-Guard for four years, I met with my friend Val, with whom I’d been having lunch every week, and we set our goals for the year. My goal was to become a cartoonist that year. If I had to quit my job and freelance, I was going to become a full-time cartoonist. I wrote a letter to Lee to that effect, and I wrote at the bottom, “This is my year.” I kind of liked that, so I started writing letters to him every couple of weeks [laughter].
Heintjes: Did Lee ever discuss placing a restraining order on you?
Eliot: No [laughter], he was very kind. In each letter, I would give him another reason why he needed my strip. Grace Under Fire had just begun on television, and I thought that reflected the same sort of approach I was taking. After about three months, I got a phone call from Elizabeth Anderson, now my editor at Universal, and she said they wanted to enter into a development contract with me. I did that with them for about seven months.
Heintjes: At this point, the strip’s title was still Sister City?
Eliot: Yes. After we did the development contract, they decided to syndicate me. The one thing they did not like was the title. The feedback they received was that “Sister City” was perceived as too feminist in the South. I was a little floored, but in truth, I wasn’t too attached to the title. I would be much more concerned if someone said, “We like the strip but we want you to add these three characters” or “Could you do something about dogs?” Ultimately, the title to me was a minor issue, but it’s major to the syndicate because it’s a marketing piece. It’s the thing they put on the front of the sales kit. They really wanted a new name. They gave me a few suggestions that I can’t remember and that I didn’t care for, and I set about trying to come up with something they might like. We were brainstorming around the dinner table, and I just threw out the name “Stone Soup.”
My mother used to talk about “stone soup” all the time. She was a good cook, and she would always say, “There’s nothing to eat, but I’ll come up with something.” She would always make something wonderful, and she would call it “stone soup.” When I threw the name out at the dinner table, my youngest daughter knew the story behind it and she said, “That’s it! That’s the perfect title!” It fit the situation. As a single mom, I lived on $500 a month for years. It was not enough money but, with the help of friends and family and the community we lived in, we had a better life than our resources might have allowed. That was the “stone soup” analogy—something from nothing.
Heintjes: What did you do to the strip during the development period?
Eliot: The main thing was that they wanted to see 20 strips a month, and I was only doing four. They wanted to get a sense of my ability to create a greater volume. They didn’t need inked work from me; pencil sketches were fine, and of course the strips had to be well written. That was the most important thing. Ultimately, that sells a strip. Also—I don’t know how it is at other syndicates—Universal is not interested in being the creator, but they were interested in knowing how I would take direction. They’re not the creative force and they know it, and they don’t want to get in the way of what their creators do best. When I say that they gave me direction, it was pretty minor. It was more like they would say, “We don’t think this one is funny enough” or “We think the timing is off in this one.” But there are people who would have trouble taking even that level of direction, and they needed to know that they could make a few suggestions and that I would be reasonable.
I had reduced my workweek at the advertising agency down to four days a week so that I’d have three days a week, including the weekend, to do cartoons. And I think the strip did blossom during that period. It actually blossomed much more during the first year of syndication, when I wasn’t doing anything but the strip.
Heintjes: Did you develop the grandmother during the development period?
Eliot: Yes, she was developed when the strip made its debut. She’s modeled a bit after my mother, who was not a warm and fuzzy grandma. She was a wonderful grandma, and she especially liked grandchildren during their teenage years, which is a great trait in a grandma, but she was a little bit of a crank, and I loved her for it. She sat in the dark and smoked a lot.
Heintjes: I’ll bet we won’t be seeing that in the strip.
Eliot: No, you won’t.
Heintjes: I don’t think Stone Soup is a feminist strip. Its perspective is a female one, but that’s different from being “feminist.” Are there subjects that you have difficulty dealing with or that you’ve been cautioned not to deal with?
Eliot: I have to say that I do consider Stone Soup to be a feminist strip. I think it comes from a feminist perspective, which is basically pro-female. I represent my characters in a strong, positive light, and they are the heart and soul of the strip. From that perspective, I do consider it a feminist strip.
Heintjes: I stand corrected.
Eliot: I’m very proud of the term, even though it’s taken some hits in the last few years. I think the difficulty with the term feminist comes from the assumption that it means that you’re anti-male. But I don’t toss a lot of barbs at men. I would rather create guys who behave the way I would like than to create nasty men and shoot arrows at them. Maybe that’s why people don’t think it’s a feminist strip—we’re not poking fun
at men. But I don’t think that’s the point of feminism.
As far as topics to stay away from, they’re not feminist in nature as you might think. It’s more important to stay away from religious issues, especially abortion, which at this point is basically a religious issue. Bodily humor is something to be careful about. I actually got in trouble for using the word “fart” once. I don’t think that’s particularly terrible, but apparently it’s considered extremely bad in some regions of the United States.
Heintjes: Was it changed at the syndicate?
Eliot: Yes, they took it out. We had to say, “foof.” It was just a little thing: I had the baby farting, but it’s considered pretty gauche. And certain things that you can do during the week you can’t do on Sunday. You have to be a little more gentle on Sunday. I’m putting together my second book collection, and it’s going to be titled You Can’t Say “Boobs” on Sunday. That was one of the first edits I had. The strip had the girls talking about high school girls, and “what do they have that we don’t have?” The older sister said, “Well, they have boobs.” It was a Sunday strip, and my editor said, “You could do this Monday through Saturday, but you can’t say ‘boobs’ on Sunday” [laughter]. I said, “Well, that is the title of a book if I ever heard one.”
Heintjes: Since you’re dealing with adult people, at some point you’re going to have to deal with the issue of their sexualities—dating, boyfriends, etc. Obviously, it’s something you’ll have to treat delicately.
Eliot: Yes, sexuality has to enter in, especially when you’re talking about single mothers. People don’t want to go very far down the road, though, when you’re talking about single mothers having a sex life.
Heintjes: Have you wrestled with its approach?
Eliot: I haven’t gone very far down that road. It’s been more by inference. I’m not ready to step on people’s sensibilities with a strip that says, “Where’s Mom?” “Well, she didn’t come home last night.” [laughter] I don’t see myself doing that, when in fact, single moms do date, and sometimes . . .
Heintjes: Things happen.
Eliot: Things happen. The easiest solution would be if this were a different kind of strip, and the children were with their father for half the week or every other weekend. Then, things could happen when the children were not home. But I don’t have that situation. We have one deceased father and one disappeared father.
But it’s interesting who objects to what. I have found that the people who object to certain topics on moral grounds are younger than you might think. I have a lot of senior fans, and they’re very realistic about all this stuff. Very realistic. It’s the 40- and 50-somethings who dig in their heels and have a lot to say about moral issues, whether we were referring to abortion, whether we were referring to birth control or whether we were referring to premarital sex. I don’t get that kind of mail from senior citizens.
The main thing is, Can you explain it to the kids? People love double entendres, and if there are two ways to take it, or if it’s ambiguous enough that it can go by little ones, then it’s fine with people. Mainly, people don’t want to have to explain really touchy issues to their children. If there’s a way to explain it to the kids that doesn’t involve getting graphic, that makes them happy. If they can get a little snicker out of it because as an adult they understand it . . . it’s like what they used to do in Rocky and Bullwinkle. There were two layers of gags: one for the kids and one for the adults.
Heintjes: You mentioned something to me once about Charles Schulz. He said he felt that he took Peanuts to another level creatively when he had Snoopy walking on his hind legs.
Eliot: When Snoopy stood up.
Heintjes: You said that’s the kind of epiphany you wanted. Has that happened yet, or are you still waiting for it? To your mind, what would be Jan Eliot’s equivalent of Snoopy
standing up?
Eliot: I really don’t know what it will be for me. That actually was my goal for this year. When I was making my goals for 1999, I said I wanted to find a way to make Snoopy stand up. I don’t know if it will be a new character, I don’t know if it will be a relationship . . . I’m still waiting
to see.
Heintjes: I believe Snoopy started walking upright in the mid-’60s. Charles Schulz had been doing Peanuts for well over a decade by then.
Eliot: Yes, he’d been at it for some time. And it isn’t that he wasn’t successful prior to that. But Snoopy standing up is what really made Peanuts what it is today. You think the strip is about Charlie Brown, but it’s Snoopy that is known the world around.
Heintjes: You won’t know when Snoopy stands up for you until after it happens.
Eliot: I think that’s true.
Heintjes: How many papers is Stone Soup in currently?
Eliot: It’s in 120 papers now.
Heintjes: In how many did it make its debut?
Eliot: It was at 25 when it first opened, and it was at about 90 within about six months. It was a good beginning. The syndicate did a good job of getting it established. It’s been modest growth since then, but I’ve managed to hold on to almost all of my original papers.
Heintjes: What cartoons do you enjoy?
Eliot: I’m a big fan of For Better or For Worse. I really like Dilbert. I love Close to Home and Non Sequitur. I chide [Non Sequitur creator] Wiley about his humor every now and then.
Heintjes: What aspect of his strip do you chide him about?
Eliot: His guys always seem to be having such huge problems with women [laughter]. But he’s a very funny guy, and he draws beautifully. I also always look at Dennis the Menace. The humor is not inspiring to me, because it’s very traditional. But Marcus Hamilton [the artist on the daily Dennis] does work that’s gorgeous to look at. I have a couple of collections of Hank Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace just for art reference. Of course, I was a huge Calvin and Hobbes fan—I still sit and reread my Calvin and Hobbes collections. I really like Sylvia by Nicole Hollander. There’s an Australian cartoonist named Michael Leunig whom I dearly love, and I wish we could get here. He’s kind of like
their Feiffer. I’ve bought many of his books. He draws his panel for the Melbourne Age. They’ve taken his characters and made plays out of them. He’s very popular in Australia. He’s political, he’s funny, he writes a lot about the state of homelessness and things like that.
Heintjes: Your tastes in comics are pretty wide-ranging.
Eliot: Yes, although I don’t really like comic books. But I am a big fan of Will Eisner. I knew who he was, but I didn’t know much about him. But my friend Michael Gilbert, who does a feature called Mr. Monster, was just indignant that I didn’t own any of Will Eisner’s work. He bought me a copy of A Contract With God, and I was so struck by it I couldn’t believe it. And I like Bone by Jeff Smith.
I also love the work of the French cartoonist Claire Bretecher. I wish there were more English translations of her work. She has a book titled Agrippina, and she has just absolutely pegged the teenage-girl experience, and whenever I’m stuck for a way to make Holly look indignant or insipid or disgusted, I open up Agrippina to get reminded of what the perfect posture is.
Heintjes: What directions do you see the industry taking? Although newspapers are hardly thriving, many people think the Internet will open up new ways of doing business. Do you see the future as bright for both established cartoonists and aspiring ones?
Eliot: I don’t know. It’s not promising in the way that it once was, like for the guys in the ’50s when everything was just opening up. It was a golden era for them in terms of being able to make money at it. But it’s a moot point, because there are a million things in our society that are like that. I think the biggest issue is space. It’s been said before, but the size at which strips are done has become rather critical. I notice that the Los Angeles Times just redid their comics page to give the strips more space, and I was absolutely thrilled. They expanded to three pages. It’s three partial pages so they can run strips down one side and have other material on the rest of the page. Before, they had a few strips that they were running at less than half a page’s width, and they were sticking panels in between. It was getting to the point where you couldn’t even read these things anymore. I looked at Close to Home in there about a year ago, and I literally couldn’t read it.
I don’t think newspapers are going away, and I think that there will always be a market for comics. I’m glad to see that, despite the size constraints, there are a few really good artists who are doing really good things. I admire that tremendously, because I think that if we all become minimalist artists who draw talking heads, the value of what we do will plummet. It’s a real chicken-and-egg problem, though: Do we get more space so we can be more artistic, or do we try to be more artistic and hope that they give us more space? I don’t think we have a choice except to hang in there and keep making it beautiful. Maybe we use the Internet. Some artists are working on animated television stuff, and we’ll see how that works out. Published collections are still popular, although I don’t know if they’re as popular as they were 10 years ago, when Gary Larson was having new collections all the time. There’s a lot of grumbling about minimalist strips like Dilbert, that it’s not really cartooning, but I don’t really agree. I think it’s very funny. It’s engaged people tremendously. The comics have a real spot in the social consciousness, and Dilbert has opened up a big spot in people’s conversations. They’re talking about a comic strip! That’s what we do: We create controversy with our pens. But I wouldn’t want to see a comics page entirely devoted to strips as minimalist as Dilbert, though. I think the artistic aspect of comics is extremely important, too. The visual humor is what makes it a cartoon.
A new Stone Soup collection, You Can’t Say ‘Boobs’ on Sunday, has just been released by Four Panels Press.