Drabble cartoonist Kevin Fagan shares how he makes his career with four panels
Kevin Fagan poses for a portrait, Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2016, at the Daily Herald office in Provo. Fagan is the creator of the comic "Drabble," an internationally syndicated comic strip that appears in about 200 newspapers. SAMMY JO HESTER, Daily Herald
Kevin Fagan poses for a portrait, Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2016, at the Daily Herald office in Provo. Fagan is the creator of the comic "Drabble," an internationally syndicated comic strip that appears in about 200 newspapers. SAMMY JO HESTER, Daily Herald
Kevin Fagan poses for a portrait, Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2016, at the Daily Herald office in Provo. Fagan is the creator of the comic "Drabble," an internationally syndicated comic strip that appears in about 200 newspapers. SAMMY JO HESTER, Daily Herald
A daily comic strip is only four panels. Non-cartoonists look at that and think, “That’s easy. I could do that.”
But most people are unfamiliar with the work behind those four panels, the creative process needed to work within its constraints while creating a world readers want to visit every single day.
“The trick is doing the same thing, but different every day,” said Kevin Fagan, author of the comic strip “Drabble.”
“You have to be fresh and creative with the same characters, but without repeating yourself. You can’t let it get stale, and you can’t let up.”
Fagan met with the Daily Herald on Tuesday morning, partly due to the newspaper recently picking up his strip for publication, and in part because he was in town visiting his kids. Fagan lives in southern California, and has lived there most of his life. But his three children, all in their 20s now, have attended Brigham Young University.
The Daily Herald started running the Drabble comic strip in January.
“I’ve always wanted to be in this paper. I’d come out here — all three of my kids went to BYU — and we’d bring them out here or visit, and I’d always pick up the paper hoping I was in it,” Fagan said.
Fagan has authored Drabble for 37 years. As a child, he always was an artist, and gained exposure during his college years writing strips about a nerdy college student for the school newspapers. But even at that young age, he worried he would run out of ideas.
“And I hadn’t even begun my career,” Fagan said. “But I’ve learned there’s no such thing as running out of ideas. No one is smart enough to run out of ideas. So when I’m stuck, I tell myself to get back to work and see what happens, and something always comes along.”
Fagan signed a syndicate contract when he was just 21 years old, and Norman Drabble was born.
“Back then, the strip was about me. I was a nerdy college student,” Fagan said. “Then as I got married and had kids, my ideas came through Norman’s father, Ralph, more. Now that I have boys in their 20s my ideas are coming through Norman again.”
For 37 years, 365 days a year, Fagan has been chronicling Norman’s foibles and the Drabble family’s follies with no repeats or breaks. Even when he personally goes on vacation with his family, he always writes two or three weeks ahead to cover his time off.
“It’s very hard to do. I’m used to coming up with seven cartoons a week. It’s a much different mindset to come up with 14 or 21 days,” he said.
To keep the ideas flowing, he carries around spiral notebooks — the same found at Walmart or Costco — jotting notes and doodles in them whenever inspiration hits. If those aren’t within reach, he’ll jot notes on his hand, or more recently, his smartphone — now that his kids showed him how to use its note feature.
He has boxes and boxes of the notebooks, and many of them have unused ideas, but he hates to throw them out. When he’s struggling for ideas, he’ll thumb through old ones, revisiting thoughts or sketches.
His favorite part of the process, of course, is the drawing. In his home studio, he still draws his cartoons on the 4-by-14-inch paper originally dictated by the syndicate when he first began. He first pencil sketches the characters, just lightly for spacing, then freehand inks the complete comic.
When he first started his career, he mailed a week’s worth of hand-drawn strips off to the syndicate. For Sunday color comics, he’d color them in on transparency paper that went over the comic, as a color guide for color printing done at the syndicate offices. He has all 13,500 originals stored away in boxes at home.
“My wife wishes I was more organized, and I do too,” Fagan said with a chuckle.
With the advent of computers (and with the help of his wife Cristi) he now scans his hand-inked strips into the computer and emails them each week. He could do them from start to finish on the computer using sketching software, but “I haven’t quite figured that out yet,” he said. Once the strips are on the computer, he now uses software to color them in.
Though he himself is aging, Fagan has no intention of ending the Drabble universe. He even has a project in the works that is a bit of a departure from his usual fare.
“For years I thought it would be cool to write a musical based on Drabble, so I wrote the play and copyrighted it. But I don’t know music, so I stuck it in a drawer,” Fagan said.
He recently partnered with jazz pianist David Benoit, and the duo is working on a Drabble musical, tentatively called “Drabblations.”
“There’s a long way to go before it goes on stage, but it’s coming along nicely,” Fagan said.
As for those young, budding artists inking notebooks of their own, Fagan is cautiously positive they will be able to make a career as a cartoonist.
“There will always be a market for people who tell their stories through comics,” Fagan said. “It will probably be digital, but our syndicate is releasing new comic strips all the time. That is a good sign.”