The mystery man behind "Tom the Dancing Bug"

Has there been anything that you stopped drawing because it was deemed too controversial for readers?

My goal with this strip was always to do whatever I wanted, and not worry about the consequences. I really think it's the day job that allows me that luxury. I don't have to worry about the economic consequences of feeding my family because I'm hedged with a day job. It's certainly a lot of work to maintain that hedge, but it gives me total freedom. I don't know if I would write the same way if the success of the comic strip was going to be the determining factor of whether or not I was going to be able to feed my family.

What has been the most memorable response you've gotten to your work?

After 9/11, there was one particular comic I did using the Super Fun Pack comic format, where I had random jokes, but the punch line to every strip was, "Terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and killed thousands of people." I have such an ironic stance in the strip, it's not apparent when I'm actually expressing something heartfelt. I was extremely emotional when I drew that particular strip. It was how I was feeling: Everything was interrupted horribly, and everything was about that. The people who responded to that were very warm in their response.

Most of your strips play on current events, cultural controversy. One notable exception is Charley the Australopithecine. What is an australopithecine, anyway?

It's an ancient ape. The species that led to Homo sapiens. He's an ancestor of man, an ancient extinct species of ape. I'm always happy when I think of an idea for Charley because it means I can spend more time with him. I use him to make a comment on how we can forget that we are really animals. He's not that different from us.

Where on earth did he come from?

I started him in the late '80s when I was trying to get a syndicate interested in a daily comic strip before I started "Tom the Dancing Bug." He was going to be my character for a daily comic strip that never worked out -- thankfully. I think I would hate doing Charley every single day. But I love drawing him on occasion. I enjoy the surreal, absurdist humor stuff (like Charley, or Schluff the Alien Who Naps) a lot more than anything that's in response to a current event, or my political cartoons.

With a good political strip, or a topical one, the ideal response would be, "Wow, how did he think of that? How did he think of that take on that subject?" My goal for a general humor one is, the reader would say, "Wow, why did he think of that?" That's the higher calling. When I see that in other comic strips or comedians, that's what I'm most impressed by: something that you don't know why he thought of it, but it just seems so right.

I noticed, as a female reader, you have very few strips about women, or about sex. Is that conscious?

For some reason, when I started the strip, even though it was in an alternative weekly and only one paper and they would have loved me to do something sex-related and controversial, I always thought that the standards for the strip should be what could appear on television. So I don't have any cursing or nudity or strong sexual content. Maybe it's just modesty or puritanical outlook, but I just always thought, that's not for me. I'll leave it to others.

I admit that the strip is very male-centered. And I think that it's common among male humorists to leave out the female point of view. I just saw a documentary about the TV show "Seinfeld." Did you know they had to be told to put in a female character? The network told them to add in Elaine, as the writers had originally forgotten to include a female character. It didn't occur to them that a female character would be advantageous for the show. I think the same thing sort of happened with my work. Then again, Charley has some gender issues, and Louis does, too 

True, but they both act like 13-year-old boys.

I think that's where I'm stuck from a gender perspective.

One more thing: It seemed like God-Man got meaner and less compassionate over time. Did that parallel any occurrence in your own life?

I think on a superficial level I found it funnier if God-Man would step into disputes and then not resolve them in the way that people expected him to. Why I found that juxtaposition funny, and increasingly so over time, maybe that's due to a changed outlook on life. Things have changed in my life, and also in our country, so maybe I unconsciously found that later approach to be a more truthful way to deal with God-Man.

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