"get fuzzy" artist lets the cat out of the bag
Byline: Jeff Daniel; St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
July 7, 2000, Friday
* Darby Conley, whose strip is joining the Post-Dispatch comics, says there's a lot of him in Bucky the Siamese.
Just who is the basis for Bucky, the fictional feline that cracks wise and serves up plenty of attitude in Darby Conley's "Get Fuzzy" comic strip? Ask Conley, and the answer eventually reveals itself.
"Bucky's a composite of every cat I've tried to hang out with and has given me the cold shoulder," the 30-year-old artist initially says of the Siamese cat that shares a bachelor pad with protagonist Rob Wilco and an affable pooch named Satchel (himself based on Conley's childhood dog, Patch.)
But a bit later in a recent phone interview, Conley literally lets the cat out of the bag. Bucky, it seems, has a whole lot of Conley bundled up inside of that fuzzy skin.
"Rob Wilco looks a lot like a friend of mine from home -- who just happens to be named Rob," Conley responds with a laugh when asked if he (the artist) served as the model for that character. "People sometimes think that is supposed to be me, but people who know me keep telling me that I'm really a lot like more like Bucky. I have to admit that's kind of scary."
And maybe just a bit natural as well. After all, Conley spends an estimated 80 to 100 hours per week with his characters, following their every footstep from germ of an idea, through ink sketch, to finished panel ready for syndication. (Approximately 175 papers now carry the strip, which made its debut last September. The Post-Dispatch joins the list on Sunday, when "Get Fuzzy" replaces the late Jeff MacNelly's "Shoe." The new strip will appear daily.)
That Conley would inject a bit of his own mannerisms and eccentricities into his main character, Bucky, should come as no surprise.
What does come as a surprise is Conley's revelation that his home-studio apartment in Boston happens to be in a building that refuses to allow pets. Here's a guy working under pressure seven days a week to crank out humorous bits centered around the exploits of a cat and dog -- yet his daily environment is a vacuum of situational experiences. As a result, Conley relies on childhood memories, vicarious living through friends -- and an overactive imagination.
Not that he prefers such a setup. Conley hopes that now that he has reached a point where he can afford to make a living as an artist, he may soon be able to snag a more pet-friendly living space. (Apparently not so easy in Beantown, which Conley labels "the most anti-animal town I've ever seen. The places to live, the restrictions in parks -- it's really tough on pet owners.") For now, he'll just have to enjoy the companionship from afar.
Which seems to be tough on a self-professed animal lover -- a fact that eludes some of Conley's regular readers.
"I get some people (who've apparently witnessed a few of Bucky's more anarchic exploits) sending me e-mail saying 'You hate cats?'" the former grade school teacher explains. "But I love cats. It's just a reality that they can be a bit harder to coexist with than dogs. I think I'm just a little too involved with animals when I get around them, a little too hands-on. I'm always checking them out - and I imagine that turns cats off a bit."
With Bucky and Satchel, Conley follows a long comic-strip tradition of giving those from the animal kingdom human voices and characteristics. It's such a common occurrence in the funny pages that the surreal quality of it all rarely causes the bat of an eye. Bucky jamming a fish into the blender for a salmon shake; Satchel exchanging witticisms with Rob while seated on the couch and taking in a little television - just another day in the comic strip.
"From a cartoonist point of view, the best part about using animals is that you offend people a lot less," Conley says. "You can have a cat do things that, if you had a person doing it, would be a lot more annoying than it already is."
"But it's funny," he adds. "I'll get e-mails from people complaining about some particular aspect of the strip - but totally forgetting about the whole premise that it's an animal they are talking about. You know, something like 'The cat wouldn't eat cake; what's wrong with you?' But in most every strip, the cat and dog are talking. We just seem to forget about that."
Although Conley is relatively new to the daily comic scene, he was one of the artists invited to participate in a recent united, one-day tribute to the late Peanuts creator, Charles Schulz. This was a chance to honor one of his heroes (and along with Gary "The Far Side" Larson and Berke "Bloom County" Breathed, one of his main inspirations), but the experience turned out to be a bit strange, as well as bittersweet.
"I felt uncomfortable about the idea, about artists using these famous characters in their own strips," Conley explained. To get around this, he created a tribute in which Satchel, reading the Sunday comics section of a newspaper, referenced Charlie Brown. The whole experience was a bit hard on Conley, in that the young artist had hoped to finally meet the legendary Schulz at this spring's annual convention of cartoonists. Still, he does have the satisfaction of knowing that the respected veteran knew of his work.
"With my characters - humans and animals - it becomes very difficult to keep everyone in the frame, so I have to devise scenarios to make things work for the viewer," Conley says, explaining that his crew's frequent transformations into couch potatoes isn't so much laziness as it is compositional quality control.
"So my editor shows the strip to Charles Schulz," Conley continues, "And the first comment out of his mouth was 'Oh, my, he's going to have to make that guy a whole lot shorter'."
"So I'm thinking: Animals bigger, people shorter. But then I thought, hey, it's their world, and that's one thing I really like about the strip. It really is life from their perspective."BACK TO TOP