Cartoons: Ed 'n' Art
As gay as they wannabe...
I’ve been getting to know Ed and Art for around 40 years. Crazy, isn’t it? I’ve changed a lot in that time and so have they. What hasn’t changed is their essential nature. Or mine.
When I first got to know them, they were old friends who shared an apartment in Brooklyn. They were single and straight, and some of the dialogue was about their adventures with women. A friend of mine, looking at the comic strips I was writing and drawing with these two fellows, said to me, ‘You know they’re gay, right?”
“They are not gay!” I protested. “Just because Ed sometimes wears a bow tie does not mean they are gay.”
Later I realized they were gay. They were not gay because I know anything about being gay, or because I want to promote gayness; they are gay because from the beginning of their conception in my spirit, they were yin and yang, two sides of a coin, head and heart, and they were me.
Ed and Art are me. They are two sides of me that desperately want to get along and love each other, even though we don’t always understand or honor each other.
Having Ed and Art be each other’s primary person allows me to explore their relationship without distractions. I don’t want either one of them to be on the lookout for someone else.
I am not qualified to present or represent gayness as a cultural artifact. I am qualified to represent relationship, and that’s what this is about. It is about how opposites not only attract—they need each other. It is within the alchemy of love that expansion and illumination can happen.
As intuitive symbols of myself, I needed them to be men. Women, for me, would be too hard to abstract, too personal. Ed and Art are two distinct personalities who absolutely adore and frustrate each other, precisely because each has what the other wants, or doesn’t understand, or admires.
And, just to be clear, maybe Ed and Art are me, but so is every single character I create and work with. Heroes, villains, muddled teenagers, grumpy old men, they are all aspects of self. Most of all they are their very own selves who I must get to know and whose words and actions I must faithfully report.
At the beginning of their existence Ed and Art were the stars of the show… then the cast grew and they became supporting actors. My new idea is that they are supporting actors in the Daisi & JANE show, and they also have their own show, in which they are the focus. The way I draw them will be different in each of those settings.
The next time I post about Ed‘n’Art I’ll get all nerdy about graphic decisions I am weighing around how I want them to look, as personalities, and where on the cartoony/realistic spectrum I want them to be—and how I want to render the images… tools, mediums, formats. How I design the format is partly dependent on how I want to show it, e.g. if I want to use Instagram as a platform then I need to make same-size disconnected boxes.
The examples above are roughs of a daily comic strip shape. I actually love a format that allows breaking up the space in different ways, but I don’t know if it’s practical for sharing. Certainly doesn’t work for Instagram. Some of my ongoing ponders.
To be continued… Stay TOONED!