a conversation with darby conley
By Brian Alvey
May 29, 2003
Darby Conley is the creator of the popular daily comic strip Get Fuzzy. Seen in over 250 newspapers, Get Fuzzy explores the hilarious relationship between the scheming Bucky Katt, his sensitive and trusting canine housemate Satchel and Rob Wilco, their human owner.
I was wondering if you use computers or the Web.
Darby: I guess I do two main things with them. Number one, all my referencing and fact checking is basically through Google to make sure I spell "Boutros Boutros-Ghali" correctly or something like that. And I do the digital work on my cartoons myself and then send them in electronically.
Did you go to Amherst College just because Bill Amend of Foxtrot got his physics degree there?
Darby: [laughs] He would have been known at the time I was making my decision. That's true. But no, I thought it was an idyllic place. It's sort of a stereotype of a small New England college. So visiting it, I was sold on it. It might have even been a little small in terms of what it actually could offer class-wise for somebody like me. It sort of churns out lawyers and people like that.
Well it is in Massachusetts.
Darby: They call it western Massachusetts, but it's really kind of central.
I think anything ten feet west of Boston counts as western Massachusetts. I live 30 minutes above New York City and people in the city consider that upstate New York. Real upstate New York is a 6-hour drive north of me.
I was thinking for this interview, that I would only ask you Foxtrot-related questions and see how it went.
Darby: [laughs] Man, I'm screwed!
Doing the research for this interview was so much more fun than all of those other interviews you saw.
Darby: It's very goofy research.
Yeah, I read my three Get Fuzzy books, read some interviews online and caught up on the last month's worth of Get Fuzzy. It couldn't have been better.
Last Christmas, instead of getting different presents for everyone and doing a lot of work, we picked a couple of great gifts and just gave them for everybody. The two things we gave everyone were either the three Get Fuzzy books or calendars from Despair, Inc. They're these demotivational calendars, like the Successories inspirational posters with a big word and a quote, except they're all twisted.
Darby: And there are pictures of sunsets and stuff?
Sunsets, snowflakes, soaring eagles, people playing sports...
Darby: Oh that's great.
If somebody had pets, they got the Get Fuzzy books. If somebody's sister was getting the Get Fuzzy books, I couldn't give them the same gift so they got the Despair calendars. We totally cheated.
Darby: That's very flattering. Jeez, I don't know what to say. I'll check out that despair.com
My friend Todd will totally be into them. He'll probably know about them already. Everything I find out about online today and think I've beaten him to the punch on he already knows about.
What was teaching second grade like?
Darby: That was fantastic. That was one year in fourth grade and one year in second grade. It was tiring, but it was one of the most fun jobs I've ever had. I still miss it. I love kids and I love the interaction. You go from 100 miles an hour to zero in terms of interaction. With this job you really don't interact with many people.
I don't mind it so much, but that's probably the thing that most cartoonists have an issue with.
I work from home, so I get to spend more time with my son and my wife and I don't miss people at all.
Darby: I don't either!
Did you have a cartoon mentor or an art mentor or did you just study everybody's work?
Darby: The latter. If I had to pin most of the traditional idea of mentoring on one person, I never met him or anything like that, but are you familiar with the Belgian Tintin comic books?
Oh yeah. I was like five or six and I didn't understand them. I remember this cute little white dog and a kid who looks like a boy version of Little Orphan Annie...
Darby: He does! He has those little sort of pie eyes.
What about Tintin had a big impact on you?
Darby: In terms of my humor development, I think that came from a million different sources, but I think visually that was probably my strongest influence. I don't think I have much influence from other cartoonists from syndicated people like Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes. People can draw a Bloom Country reference, but I think it's Tintin. And humor is just from everywhere so I think influentially, he was my visual source and my humor is probably more from Douglas Adams.
A strip like Peanuts goes on for decades and the original characters look so different from the most recently drawn ones. How has Get Fuzzy evolved?
Darby: It's probably going through a similar visual evolution as any other strip that gets syndicated where you just get better at drawing the characters. They do look very different. If I look at the characters I drew yesterday as opposed to stuff in the first couple of months of the strip, I think they're better drawn and they're more expressive and you get a little less nit-picky with sort of the exactness and get a little more concerned at sort of a nice feel to it.
The early stuff I don't even like looking at. I had a little more time to draw backgrounds back then, but I think all the characters are drawn much better now. You get better at it.
Where do you get your creative inspiration and ideas for funny topics?
Darby: In terms of day to day inspiration?
Exactly. You have to be "on" every single week. I would have a week where I just wasn't funny at all.
Darby: [laughs] I think, I'm not "on" in the sense like I'm a combustion engine where you turn it on and off. I'm more of the solar panel that just has to be left on always running at a low grade because of the deadlines. I wish I could turn it on and off, but really just as soon as you finish one deadline you're onto the next. So it's just this low hum of panic of having to get the work done.
How far in advance do you complete the comic strip?
Darby: You're supposed to be four to six weeks in advance and I'm just three. So I'm a little behind right now. Well I'm up to three on the dailies and like five on the Sundays. They need more time for the Sundays.
Are there any strips you've done that you can go back to if you ever need a chuckle because they're hilarious to you?
Darby: A couple of...let me think about how to answer this...normally I cringe when I look back at this stuff..[laughs]
...mostly visually just because I didn't have time to really do a good background or something like that, but sometimes there's a line and it's got nothing to do with the comic overall. I can laugh at just a specific line for a while, just thinking it's funny. And those are my favorites.
For instance I did a cartoon several months ago where the cat, Bucky, was lying about having bought the dog his birthday present. And when Rob asked him, the human asked him, "Did you get that thing we talked about?" and Bucky is like, "Um...yeah, yeah." And Rob goes, "Well, what color is it?" And Bucky, stumbling, thought for a second and said, "Uh...Monkey?" And Rob says, "Monkey is not a color."
The phrase "Monkey is not a color" stuck in my head. So yeah, things like that rattle around my brain. Monkey is not a color.
There's a recent one about making a verb out of something just a week or two ago.
Darby: "You can food anything if you just eat it?"
Right. Then Bucky goes, "You can wordify anything if you just verb it." Something like that will just stick with me for years and I'll use it on people.
Darby: The word I actually wanted to use in that second thing you mentioned was 'wordalize', but it didn't flow as well. Yeah, stuff like that and it's usually sort of weird. I remember less of the stories and more of just sort of the bizarre little one-liners. I think one-liners are what interest me.
The other thing I do and I don't know if it gets old with people, but I like screwing around with titles and stuff like that and sort of doing puns off of them. It's probably just cheap humor. Bucky was trying to come up with food products one time and he came up with "I Can't Believe It's Not Otter" and that one still makes me chuckle a little bit.
Cheap humor? I do the same thing. In these interviews, the little titles in between the pages are all puns. For the guy who wrote The Brand Gap, I had a reference to the Gap Band.
Darby: That's kind of like the little titles on Frazier.
Exactly. Yours will probably be all Get Fuzzy quotes.
Tell me about getting discovered and breaking into comics. Did anyone give you specific advice to take you from un publishable to cartoon superstar?
Darby: [laughs] Being discovered is really more finding your way out of the jungle. They don't discover as much as tap you on the head after you've gotten out of the maze. The way it works is you just send submissions into them all of the time or as often as you can.
Is there a grooming process?
Darby: There is something called development. A couple of people a year from the main syndicates get a development deal. They'll work with you for like six or twelve months and give you advice and feedback and if they think you're sellable after that period, they'll go ahead and start selling you to newspapers.
Mine took like a year. I know I was bumped back because For Better Or For Worse was signed to my syndicate. My syndicate signed them away from a different syndicate while I was in development and sort of gave it a new sales push. So they bumped back everybody like me that was on their plate.
About a decade ago I worked with someone who was a consultant for United Media. He said Rose Is Rose and Calvin and Hobbes were in competition to be chosen as United Media's one newspaper-ready strip. Someone made the decision that Rose Is Rose was the better comic strip, so Calvin and Hobbes signed with another syndicate and became a huge success.
Darby: That would make sense. Calvin and Hobbes had that development period with United Media, but they turned it down and he went to Universal.
I think initially when he turned that comic in it was just Spaceman Spiff. They sort of pulled it back down to Earth and had him focus on the family and the boy and the tiger first. Basically they developed it into Calvin and Hobbes and then gave it away.
Is the name Get Fuzzy a play on "Get Shorty", "Come On Get Happy" or "Get Funny" with the N's turned sideways?
Darby: My brother was in a rock band called the Fuzzy Sprouts. As I was developing Get Fuzzy - half for practice of drawing the characters and half just to do something fun for my brother - I did a concert poster for him with the new characters. I had done one with them hanging out on a trash can at the mall trying to look cool. The phrase on it was, "Life's too short to be cool. Get fuzzy." I just liked that phrase better than whatever working title I had at the time.
Who is Rob Wilco based on? You have two best friends named Rob, but is he based on anyone real or is he just Rob the straight man?
Darby: He is Rob the straight man. He's nothing like me. He's nothing really like anybody. He's a bit of a doormat. He's got a little sarcastic streak in him. He's loosely based physically on a friend of mine from Tennessee named Rob. Since two of my best friends were both named Rob I could say he was named after both of them. His hairstyle was sort of based on Rob, but then I cut his hair.
I saw that. I was looking through the comics and saw the ones where his hair fell out and then you restyled it. Was that a planned transition?
Darby: It was! Actually, you'll be able to see this immediately after I tell you about it. People always ask me about his hair and it seemed a lot of people liked that weird hair helmet kind of thing.
It was terrible!
Darby: It was two things. It took a lot longer to draw because I don't use pens or a computer or anything like that. I use the old dipping crow quill ink. So when you draw that it beads up with a lot of ink and it takes forever to dry and then go over it again. The other thing is when you have his hair like that and when you have glasses on him it takes out about 75% of his expressive capability by hiding his eyes and his eyebrows. So really I took off his glasses and cut his hair to expose his eyes and his forehead and his eyebrows so he could be more expressive.
Interesting. Have you ever done a strip where Bucky did something and newspapers wouldn't print it?
Darby: Well I've run a couple of things by the syndicate that were nixed. I shouldn't go into them, but you can't really do anything involving religion or poo. Those are sort of the two off limit topics that I have dabbled in before. Religion and poo.
I did a comic one time where the dog ate chocolate and a got a couple thousand emails in the first day yelling at me that chocolate is toxic to dogs. I don't know if that's true or not. I've still never heard an actual confirmation that chocolate killed a dog. I had a dog for 16 years who ate chocolate probably twice a day.
Well maybe it's an old wives' tale.
Darby: No, it's new. I sort of believe that it's a potential risk. I mean she passed away in 1992 and in her lifetime we never heard anything like that. The first time I heard it was around 1994.
Well I heard it because my wife has dogs and always tells me not to give them chocolate.
Darby: That's the way most people have heard it. Have you known a dog that died from it? No. My dog lived 16 years and had chocolate at least once a day and it would average out to more than that. I believe it; I've just never witnessed it.
A while back you had some lines in your comics about a French guy, like "I'm sorry, is that your surrendering arm?" You did that a few years before it was so popular to make fun of the French.
Darby: I actually had to lay off of the French jokes once it got popular to do that. I learned French jokes from Monty Python and I have nothing in particular against the French.
How do you respond to people when they ask you to mention them in Get Fuzzy or name a character after them?
Darby: I generally don't. I stay away from anybody who wants me to do a strip focusing on them. You know I get email sometimes where somebody says - not understanding not only anything about how likely a thing like this is to happen, but also not understanding the business in general - in the sense that I work like three or four weeks ahead.
I'll get an email that says, "My boyfriend's birthday is tomorrow. I haven't been able to think of anything special to get him. He would love it if you put him into your comic script. This is his name. This is what he looks like. This is what he likes. This is what he doesn't like. This is what you shouldn't do with him." And they write this whole thing assuming that I'm just going to do it for the next day and be happy about it.
I get accused sometimes along those lines of being on the take. It always surprises me how people can do a comic strip about real life where they have no references. It's natural to me that Rob will have a Monty Python tape. All of the references I put in there are because I have a shirt like his. It's amazing how conspiratorial people think these things can be.
I read you spend up to 100 hours a week doing Get Fuzzy.
Darby: That's an old figure, but it was true for like the first six months or something. I just couldn't do them fast enough. Now the strip probably takes about 60 hours a week. It's not that everyone takes that long. I think average for a cartoon is probably 50 or 60. I'm just a slow worker. But now I'm at the point where it's 60 hours a week for the strip and up to 40 hours a week doing other stuff, other illustrations or writing.
Do you color your own strips?
Darby: Yeah, in Photoshop.
The word 'syndicate' sounds really menacing. Is it a good word to describe the company that distributes your work or is it not quite strong enough to capture the evil?
Darby: [laughs] They're really more and an agent and distributor. The syndicate really does elicit a lot of negative reaction. It's funny, I mean most people only encounter the word when dealing with the mafia.
The cartoon mafia...
Darby: They're your agent. They're your distributor. They're your sales people most importantly. And they can be your editor. It's just a catchall term for those functions.
Where do you keep your original work?
Darby: On a bookshelf, just all stacked up.
People ask other cartoonists if they give pieces away or donate them...
Darby: Well I do donate them to charity. I'm rounding up one right now to donate to the Ronald McDonald House. They auction it off.
So when you send your finished work out it's not like you overnight originals or photocopies, you're emailing them out?
Darby: Well if it's working - I upload them to a bulletin board program that the syndicate uses.
So they have some highly evolved intranet that all of the cartoonists sign in to?
Darby: Yeah, highly evolved [laughs]. I don't know about that. It's a weird program and when you're running it your whole computer sort of bogs down. Even though it's a very small program. It seems pretty archaic, but it gets the job done.
Who owns the characters?
Darby: I own the copyright on them.
How well do you know other cartoonists? You're all on the same newspaper page everyday, so I think people imagine you all hang out together in a big office somewhere.
Darby: Well, my best friend now is a cartoonist out in San Francisco named Stefan Pastis. He does a comic strip called Pearls Before Swine, which is also on the United Media Web site.
It's a strip about a pig and a rat. That's the only way to describe it. It's very intelligent and dark and it's sort of a surprise in syndication, but it's doing well. Just from some contact that we had when he was starting his strip up, we became really good friends.
So you met him when he was getting signed up?
Darby: When he was getting started someone put him in touch with me to go over some technical info about Photoshop actually. And he was a nice guy, funny as hell. So we just sort of kept in touch from that. That was three or four years ago at this point.
When a musician has a big record, the record company gives them their own label and makes them into sort of a talent scout. Does United Media ask you for your opinion judging new strips?
Darby: [laughs] No. I wish they did. I'd love to be in that. So you mean like how like a big artist at a specific label has input on what other people are on that label?
Right. Like Madonna is huge so she gets her own Maverick Records label and she goes out and discovers and signs Alanis Morissette and Michelle Branch.
Darby: I would assume that there are more people trying to break into the music business than the comic business although I'm not sure that's true. I know that the syndicates get something like 8000 submissions a year and the main syndicates might choose between three and five.
People do sometimes ask you for your opinion on their work. A lot of times you get the sense that people just want you to go to bat for them and take their stuff to the syndicate. If I was shown something that was incredible, I would go to the syndicate, but I haven't seen that.
I work in technology so my mom buys me 90% Dilbert gifts for Christmas - Dilbert ties, a Dilbert pencil sharpener, a Dilbert calendar, a Dilbert M and M dispenser - all wrapped in Dilbert wrapping paper. I don't work in a cubicle. Stop giving me these Dilbert gifts!
Darby: Yeah. It's an interesting situation where a lot of the people who are some of the biggest fans of it work in this sort of cubicle hell - the late 20th century sort of work version of a Hieronymus Bosch painting - where people are just trapped in all this stuff. It's funny to me that they'll spend their life in hell like that and still want to get little images and jokes of it all the time.
I saw the first episode of the first animated Dilbert show. When I heard the voices, it was a big turnoff.
Darby: Well that's always a fear.
How about you?
Darby: Well, first I should say that I love Dilbert and I think Scott Adams can write really well. He's kind of a friend of mine. He's a fantastic guy.
In terms of the voices for the show, that's a very big fear. In fact we're under discussions right now to make a Get Fuzzy movie and one of the biggest fears is the casting obviously for the voices.
Who would do the voices of Rob, Bucky and Satchel?
Darby: Well, for Rob you could get away with a couple of people. I think somebody like Matthew Perry is very funny.
Voices though, I have no idea. To tell you the truth, I don't have a voice in my head for either of these. When I hear Satchel, if I hear anything, I probably hear Winnie the Pooh and for Bucky...I don't know what I hear.
Hearing the characters speak ruins the cartoons for me - except for Peanuts because I probably saw the holiday specials and heard them talk and sing before I ever realized they were in newspapers.
Darby: Right, when you were a kid.
I was just wondering if that was the next successful step for a comic strip - becoming an animated TV show or a movie.
Darby: Yeah, I wouldn't do a TV show just because there's too much work. I know from talking to Scott about how much work it is. I can more easily fill up information for a 90-minute movie than 13 half-hour episodes.
With a beginning, middle and an end...
Darby: Yeah, different plot lines. I mean you could do it. It would just be 50 times more work.
The voices...we're sort of at the point where I have to sort of admit that this thing could be made and think about what am I going to do for these voices because I don't know how much control they'll offer me. If they come out with, well I shouldn't name names, if they come out with somebody I can't really stand to be the voice of Bucky, I mean I've got to be able to say no.
Like Gilbert Gottfried?
Darby: [laughs] No comment!
What would a plot for something like this be? I thought about Get Fuzzy on TV, but I never imagined a Get Fuzzy movie.
Darby: The scope of the comic strip is very narrow since they don't go out very much and they're house pets. When I thought of having the chance to do a movie, I took that and ran with it. So the movie will be sort of an odyssey and I think Bucky basically has to be found and he's running away and they go through the city and parts of the country. A lot of what I wanted to do with the movie was show people sort of the world that they live in...
Not "Get Fuzzy Goes To Europe?"
Darby: Yeah...they win a game show...oh shoot.
Has that been done?
Darby: I totally dropped the ball on that one...I forgot the name of the show that the Griswolds won...
Yeah, I haven't seen that movie, but I know his name was Clark Griswold and the big line everyone quotes is "Look kids...Big Ben...Parliament!"
Darby: That was the best thing in the whole movie. That was a great line.
It's like you said. There are some lines where the words are just perfect together and it's funny and it tickles you and it's going to tickle you for the next ten years.
Darby: That is one of those lines. I had one comic strip where I think one of the only lines in the comic strip - and I didn't even see this movie until a couple of years ago - have you ever seen Caddyshack?
Oh yeah.
Darby: There's a scene at the end where they're yelling "Noonan" at the guy because he's trying to make a putt and his name is Noonan. Everybody's going "Noonan. Noonan." I did that all growing up and never knew where it came from. Everybody said that in Tennessee.
So I threw that into a strip and people thought it was so funny. A couple of people said, "What the hell is that?" Most people thought it was really funny. I love stuff like that.
In Get Fuzzy or just in general, I think people like being able to read something and think to yourself, "Oh. I get that."
The cultural references.
Darby: Yeah. "That's funny. I'm in on that and I like that too."
What other comic strips are worth reading?
Darby: Well, as I said earlier, it's funny because my list makes it sound like I'm toeing the company line, but the only other three strips I really read are Dilbert, Pearls Before Swine which is done by my friend - and Monty. It's all from the same syndicate, but it just sort of worked out that way.
Monty?
Darby: It used to be Robotman and Monty. He changed the title. He's a funny guy. He's the only guy I've every seen who can draw funny lamps. He can draw a funny TV remote or a funny chair. Anything can be funny. It's amazing.
Your strip has increased in circulation at a record rate. What's the secret of its success? Is it just Bucky?
Darby: I don't know. The secret of the success...it's cliché and I hope it doesn't seem like I'm trying to dodge the question, but I just try to make it really funny. With Far Side, Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes retiring a couple of years back I think there's a space for anybody who can be really funny.
What kind of control do you have over Get Fuzzy products?
Darby: Most people think that comic strips are sort of these big product factories. But there's really only the big three: Peanuts, Dilbert and Garfield. Our stuff is all done through a company called Caf Press.
It's all just images supplied by the syndicate that can be produced on demand. I assume that when and if the movie gets made that will all change.
Hopefully it will be the big four.
Darby: [laughs] Well, I wouldn't argue with that! It's hard to say though. It's really only those three that have any sort of viable licensing at all. Everybody else when they talk about licensing really just means books, but I consider that a little different.
I think everybody was a little bigger a few years ago. Garfield has anything from phones to notebooks to those little Garfields you stick on your car windows with suction cups. Greeting cards are also huge for him. I think the climate's a little different now. I think everybody is sort of scaled back a little bit on that. Except for the Japanese market. It's still really hot.
If my wife was reading the newspaper and giggling uncontrollably, I knew it was because she was reading Get Fuzzy. So I would hunt in bookstores I had to memorize Darby Conley and I finally found your books.
Darby: I'm lucky to have a book, but it took a while - over two years or so for the first book to come out.
It was one of the best gifts I ever brought home.
Darby: That's one of my favorite things to hear, like the story about your wife - the comments from people who stumble on the comic by accident and say, "I haven't been into the comics for a long time and I don't read any others, but saw this."
Most people cite the guys who retired. A lot of people our age stopped reading the comics when those guys retired. I did. I probably shouldn't admit to not having read the comics for years and years, but all of my friends to a person loved those three and then, when they retired, stopped reading comic strips. It's funny.
Have you seen the movie Best In Show?
Darby: No. But only because my girlfriend is extremely busy with her work and we could never coordinate ourselves to be in the theater at the same time to see it. So now we just keep waiting to where we can rent it. I've heard great things about it.
What are some of the strangest things that dog or cat lovers have requested?
Darby: I think you touched on it earlier. I get a lot of people who want their cat and I don't know why they do because he's so nasty - but they want their cat to be the love interest of Bucky.
Oh wow. [laughs]
Darby: Sometimes dogs too, but usually they'll go "I have the sweetest little Burmese and she'd be perfect for Bucky. Why don't you write her in?"
That's very funny.
Darby: Yeah. It's great. And I want to write them back and say, "He's a chauvinistic, semi-violent cat. Why would you do that? Don't you love your cat?" That would be the weirdest one.
I'm looking forward to Best In Show. Even all the criticisms I heard about it have made me want to see it even more. People are saying, "It's almost like a documentary." And I love movies like that.
How do you deal with cat and dog fanatics?
Darby: Well, I should point out that I get like 120 emails a day and only five of them will be weird. So you have to figure that since even more of these bizarre people would be writing than the normal fans, that it is a small number of the overall total. So to this point, I've been nothing but absolutely touched.
It's funny. I'm a guy sitting at home in my studio at a table creating some sort of silly pictures and like you say I'm paying taxes or bills for my car and I get this wildly supportive feedback coming out of my computer from the thin air. So it is a little surreal, but everyone I've met and almost everybody who gets in touch with me is really nice. I don't know what to say. I'm very humbled by it all.
Thanks, Darby. I had a blast talking to you.BACK TO TOP