CARTOON U

Top Drawers

A Vermont school helps artists make a living in everything from the funny pages to graphic novels.

By Tim Brookes

Entering the Center for Cartoon Studies is like walking in on a collision of comic strip panels. Dividers split the former department store in White River Junction, Vermont, into a series of self-contained squares. In the main room, a plastic skeleton stands in a corner; a Spiderman figure, lying on its plastic belly, peers down from a perch over the top of a closet. The class itself, however—the Professional Practice seminar, open only to graduate students—is completely in earnest. Instructor Stephen Bissette, who worked on the now-classic comic books Swamp Thing and Tyrant, is not teaching the 13 students seated at wobbly folding tables how to draw funny noses or big-breasted crime-fighters. He’s teaching copyright law.

“How many of you have heard of John Totleben?” he asks. Casually dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans, Bissette may look like a typical Vermont woodchuck with his gray beard and ponytail, but this afternoon he’s all business.

Several hands shoot up. Among cartoonists, Totleben is a legend. Like Bissette, he worked on Swamp Thing, Miracleman, and many other popular titles now considered gospel among comic book fans. A copy of Miracleman that Totleben illustrated will sell for at least $350—of which the artist receives, in most cases, nothing. A combination of generosity and bad luck resulted in Totleben losing the copyrights to his drawings. The industry and art form of comic books and graphic novels is rapidly maturing, but it’s the individual retailers and collectors—not the artists—who currently reap the profits of the books that are no longer in print.

That’s the situation Bissette would like to help his students avoid. As they listen, most of the artists in the room occupy themselves with doodles of strange, semi-human faces and figures. They represent the new wave of American graphic artists and the latest group to graduate from the Center for Cartoon Studies. The Center is the first cartoon school to offer a Master’s in Fine Arts—the ultimate artist’s degree. It represents the cutting edge of academic respectability for an art form that is finally growing up.

The idea of creating a school that takes cartooning so seriously came, fittingly, on April Fool’s Day in 2004. The cartoonist James Sturm, author and artist of the graphic novel The Golem’s Mighty Swing, called his colleague Michelle Ollie, a former director at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. “Hey, I have this idea,” Sturm told Ollie. “Want to open a cartoon college?”

Ollie did. After years of reviewing admissions portfolios, she had noticed a sea change in the art interests of prospective students: The vast majority of them were now submitting cartoon and drawing work. Yet higher education largely ignored cartoons, and trying to steer academia in a new direction is like turning a supertanker on the high seas. Much easier to start from scratch.

“By starting something new,” Ollie explains in her soft, Lake Wobegon lilt, “we created a curriculum that addressed the education of a cartoonist and built the ultimate program.”

It came as no surprise that the duo would start something new in the academic world of comics. Sturm had recently founded the National Association of Comics Arts Educators, and Ollie had co-founded Mechademia, an academic journal dedicated to the study of manga (Japanese comic books) and anime. The surprise was that they wound up in an economically depressed former railroad town in Vermont.

Sturm had lived for years in the hamlet of Hartland, just outside White River, and the more Ollie visited him to strategize, the more they saw opportunity.

For starters, the hills of Vermont were bristling with cartoonists: Ed Koren and Harry Bliss of The New Yorker; David Macaulay, author of Cathedral and The Way Things Work; as well as Steve Bissette; Alison Bechdel; Rick Veitch; Frank Miller; and others.

The cartoon royalty threw its support behind the fledgling college, serving on the advisory board and helping with fundraising. One of the original investors included Jean Schulz—widow of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz—who underwrote the Center’s library.

Ironically, it helped that White River had fallen on rough economic times:  By taking on the social objective of investing in the community, the Center enjoyed a remarkable degree of support during the fundraising and permitting processes. That support paid off fast.

“We were able to create a business plan and open our doors in one year,” Ollie says. “In a more competitive area, that might have taken several years of fundraising and implementation.”

The Center opened for summer classes in June 2005; its first full-year class started sessions that September, including the first two-year cartooning program in the nation. In 2007, Vermont’s Department of Education allowed the Center to award M.F.A.s. By the following year, the college had five permanent faculty members, with as many as 30 more visiting the school annually to teach individual workshops and lectures. The college accepts 26 students a year, and M.F.A. students now make up about 70 percent of the total. Next year, the Center hopes to continue expanding its classes and increase enrollment.

Cartooning first made the leap from puerile entertainment to intellectually ambitious art form in the late ’60s when Robert Crumb produced Keep On Truckin’ and Fritz the Cat. By the mid-’80s, such artists as Frank Miller rejuvenated whole franchises with graphic novels like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Alan Moore followed up with V For Vendetta and Watchmen—the only graphic novel to make Time magazine’s list of the 100 best books of all time.

Cartoonists were also proving capable of delivering more explicit social commentary. Art Spiegelman’s Maus shattered preconceptions of the subject matter that cartoon panels could tackle. No cartoonist had dreamed of addressing the Holocaust, or the complex emotions of the survivors and their adult children—until Spiegelman did it. Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor trawled in the sour existential dimensions of unhappiness and anomie. By the early 2000s, the cartoons were rebranded as graphic novels and were selling in the literary sections of major bookstores, while directors were simultaneously re-conceiving them as serious movies.

As Steve Bissette puts it, young people now coming of age never thought of cartooning as an inferior form. Far from it: They consider it a form entirely conducive to exploring their own vision, art, and experiences.

“This is the first generation,” he says, “to believe that their personal mythology is more interesting than Batman’s.”

In the past decade or so, academics have also realized that their comic-reading students might be onto something big. Ivy League Dartmouth College, barely 10 miles away from the Center, has collaborated with them on a variety of projects. And consider the work of Dr. Christopher Bolton, assistant professor of Japanese at Williams College. Though he earned a conventional Ph.D. in Japanese with a focus in postwar fiction, he has included anime and manga in his courses for the past 10 years. “More and more places are teaching anime, and manga is also making its way into the system,” he says. “As faculty, we’re trying to catch up to the students.”

An astonishing array of scholars now includes cartoons, comics, graphic novels, and manga in their classes and research. The journal Mechademia—an annual forum of anime, manga, and fan arts—publishes papers from scholars in literature, film, sociology, gender studies, anthropology, art history, fashion studies, and even the hard sciences.

“They’re pretty high-level dudes, too,” says Frenchy Lunning, Mechademia’s founder, editor-in-chief, and a professor of liberal arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. “These are people who have Ph.Ds in physics and biology. Because there are no academic comic studies, these are fans who adapt their interests to their own disciplines.”

If the Center succeeds in the face of the competition bound to follow—the giant Savannah College of Art and Design, for example, now offers B.F.A., M.A., and M.F.A. degrees specializing in sequential art—it may do so because the school was founded by entrepreneurs and thinks in terms more common in business than in higher education.

The Center has already struck up a publishing relationship with Disney’s imprint Hyperion to produce a series of graphic biographies. The first two, on Houdini and Satchel Paige, made the American Library Association’s Top 10 Booklist, and the third, about Thoreau, earned starred reviews. All three generate revenue for the school. The Center also has a deal in the works with Sunrise Greetings, a subsidiary of Hallmark.

Students constantly look for similar kinds of exposure. Bissette breaks off from his lecture to praise one of the students, Joseph Lambert, who shuffles in his seat. Vermont Public Radio, Bissette announces, chose Lambert’s cartoon work for its fundraiser mugs. The design includes an eight-page mini-comic book that fits inside the mug. It’s both humorous and hiply postmodern, and includes a panel showing VPR’s transmitter tower standing on a mountaintop that looms over the Center for Cartoon Studies’ storefront—as in fact, with a degree of artistic license, it does.

Lambert wasn’t paid for his art, but he’s well aware of its significance: Ed Koren, who designed the first VPR mug, now draws cartoons for The New Yorker.

Tim Brookes is a freelance writer and author of Guitar: An American Life.

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Search for classic ’toons from all of the major studios on the Big Cartoon Database. The site contains links and background info on everything from Woody Woodpecker to The Simpsons.

If you recall the Adventures of Jonny Quest, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or The Super Mario Brothers Super Show, then you’re probably a child of the ’80s. Head to 80scartoons.net to find out what happened to those staples of Saturday afternoon.

Looking for a more obscure find? Inquire at Ohio State’s Cartoon Research Library, where you’ll find exhibits on American artists like Jeff Smith and Milton Caniff.

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