Today’s Teachable Moments post comes from Robert Sharenow, author of The Berlin Boxing Club [review], himself.  I have no doubt you’ll enjoy gaining more insight into the process of this book’s creation, particularly the inclusion of the cartoon panels interspersed within.  Please join me in welcoming Robert Sharenow to Galleysmith.

Confessions of a Failed Cartoonist

One of the most pleasurable aspects of working on my novel, The Berlin Boxing Club, was creating the illustrations and cartoons.  My boyhood dream was to become a cartoonist, but I had not really picked up a drawing pen and pad in more than twenty years, save for an occasional doodle or birthday card.  Through my lead character Karl, also an aspiring cartoonist, I got to rediscover the joy of drawing and in some way fulfill at least two of my personal ambitions by birthing my own comic strip (Winzig and Spatz) and superhero (The Mongrel) that both appear in the book.   For me it was some small redemption for one of my life’s bitter disappointments.

Growing up I had an unusual passion for comic strips, comic books, and political cartoons.  To me, the comic strip was one of the highest forms of narrative art.  I particularly reveled in the worlds of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and Herge’s Tintin.  While Herge’s intricately drawn and plotted creation provided adventure and escape, Schulz offered a roadmap of the human condition. Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, and Snoopy were as real and dimensional for me as any characters in the history of fiction.    With just a few panels, Schulz conveyed story, character, humor, and emotion.   They cheered and comforted me and gave me rich insights into the workings of the world, reflecting my own struggles with family, love, hate, friendship, longing, success, and failure.  So from an early age, I drew caricatures and formulated ideas for original comic strips and comic book heroes.

Later I attended Brandeis University, where I drew political cartoons and a comic strip called Feedback for the school newspaper.  Like Gary Trudeau’s original Doonesbury strips at Yale, Feedback was loosely based on the lives of my roommates and friends.  When my friend Eric protested apartheid in South Africa, so did one of my characters.  When my roommate Dan was put on academic probation because of excessive library fines, so was one of my characters. When fraternities tried to come onto campus, one of my characters joined and one of my characters tried to block them. In perhaps my most forward thinking moment as a cartoonist, one of my characters even came out of the closet.  This was 1987, a full decade before Ellen DeGeneres became the first openly gay character on television.  Although, to be honest, one of my gay friends insisted he was my most underwritten character and that I shouldn’t be too proud of myself.  By my junior year, Feedback had developed a loyal following of readers, and I was, in some ways, living out my childhood ambition.

Every college cartoonist dreamed of being the next Gary Trudeau and having their college strip become the Doonesbury of our generation.  While I was at Brandeis grinding out Feedback, Yale’s newspaper cartoonist Sabin Streeter had a compilation of his comic strip Hollenhead published and nationally distributed by Plume.  To say I was jealous would be a vast understatement.   I envied Streeter with a passion that bordered on mania.  Someone bought me a copy of his book, and I steadfastly refused to read it.  I even hated the guy’s name.  Sabin Streeter?  Who was he trying to impress with that pretentious literary moniker?   (I now realize that it probably was and is his real name and not a pseudonym like Dr. Seuss or Mark Twain.)

At the same time, my jealousy of Streeter was counterbalanced by my already formidable collection of self-doubts.  Why weren’t my strips funnier?  Why couldn’t I draw better?  Why hadn’t I studied harder in high school and been able to go to Yale?  Then it surely would’ve been my comic strips published in a book, not his.

Sometime during my junior year, Newsweek Magazine contacted the newspaper and left a message for me that they intended to reprint one of my cartoons.  I hardly believed it when my Editor-in-Chief gave me the news.  But later that day, a person from Newsweek called me to work out the delivery of the art and payment for my services.  Payment?  They were going to pay me?   I couldn’t believe it.  Being published in a national magazine was thrilling enough, but to be paid for it was a whole other ballgame.  I had turned pro.

That one phone call from Newsweek seemed to reinforce everything I’d hoped for about my talent and my prospects for the future. Now I was convinced it was all going to happen for me and I would knock old Sabin Streeter from his perch as the voice of college America.  Surely a book contract and a national syndication deal would follow.

Soon, thanks to my publicist (also known as my mother), my entire family, friends, neighbors, and even some strangers, knew that one of my cartoons was going to be published in an upcoming Newsweek.  I was mildly annoyed by my mother’s bragging, but secretly happy that she was letting everyone know about my accomplishment.

One week prior to the issue coming out, I received my first check as a professional artist.  I can’t remember what the amount was, maybe $50 or $100, but it seemed like a fortune.  I had been paid to do something that I would’ve done for free!  What could be better?

One week later, just two days prior to my big publication day, Newsweek called again.

“The magazine’s decided not to run your comic strip.”

“What?”

I must’ve misheard him.

“Yeah.  I’m sorry.  The issue got really full.  It didn’t fit the layout anymore. These things happen.”

Over the next 30 seconds, I felt like vomiting, crying, lying in the fetal position and sucking my thumb, and/or screaming.  But instead I just stood there, phone in hand, mouth agape, wondering how my mother was going to retract her global notification.

Finally, I recovered my composure enough to ask.

“Can I keep the check?”

“Sure,” he said, with touches of both sympathy and pity.

I hung up the phone a broken man.  Not only did I feel my Doonesbury dreams evaporating, but I would now face years of friends and relatives asking, “So when is the Newsweek with your cartoon coming out?”   The agonizing answer was, Never.

I continued to write Feedback until I graduated, but something had been taken out of me.  All of the doubts I had about my ability to draw seemed to be reinforced by Newsweek’s supposed formatting crunch.  In truth, drawing was always a struggle for me. I never really buckled down and took art classes like I should’ve.  So I never had a great command of the discipline of drawing.  I frequently felt frustrated because my illustrations never seemed to match my imaginings.  I always seemed to be writing dialogue and characters that outpaced my ability to draw them.

Writing was the part of the process that always came easier to me.  But to be a novelist or any kind of writer seemed like an even more absurd ambition, given that I had never taken a writing class and was not a particularly gifted student.  Also everyone at Brandeis seemed to want to be a novelist. While being a cartoonist was a relatively unique ambition, with a thinner playing field of competitors.   If I couldn’t win that race, how would I ever get a novel published?

More than twenty years have passed since the Newsweek debacle.   In that time Charles Schulz died, and the golden age of the newspaper comic strip died with him (as did the golden age of newspapers).   I’ve had the great good fortune of having two novels published, two more than I ever expected.

When I first conceived The Berlin Boxing Club and the character of Karl, I thought about illustrating the book myself, and I was seized by the same insecurities that had plagued me as a college student.  But then I bought a sketchpad and pen and started to draw again.  I was still not a very good artist, but I could not believe how much fun it was.  How could I have let so many years go by without doing this?  Soon, if my daughters asked me to play with them, I would ask them to draw with me instead.   I quickly filled several sketchbooks with comic strip ideas, caricatures, and cartoons in much the same way I had when I was a kid.  But now, the drawings were all done from the perspective of my character, Karl.

Some critics have praised the illustrations in the book while others have thought them to be crude and not very good. I believe they are very authentic because I still possess the skills of a 15-year-old, self-taught artist, which is what Karl is too (funny how it worked out that way).

One of the harsh truths of adulthood is that you stop doing many of the activities that gave you pleasure in your youth.  I don’t play baseball, stuff quarters into pinball machines, or jam with my old band mates anymore.   And I may never illustrate another book.  But through The Berlin Boxing Club, I learned to love drawing again; and I enjoy it without any of the frustration, ambition, or bitterness that I used to feel creating Feedback.  So I have to thank my character, Karl, because without him I may never have picked up my pad and pen again in the first place.   I may even try to find Sabin Streeter’s book and give it a read.

I for one thought the cartoons in the book were an excellent enhancement, further I thought their style fit the age and advancement of Karl’s character.  Thank you Mr. Sharenow for sharing with us your personal experience and the meaning behind the cartoons in The Berlin Boxing Club.