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This chat with Michael Jantze (tall guy, left) took place at the San Diego Comic-Con on July 24, 2004, just a month before news reports began to circulate that Michael would end his strip, The Norm, on September 12. However, Michael tells us that while The Norm is ending as a newspaper feature, The Norm Magazine and his website, www.thenorm.com, will continue.
Thanks to Michael and Nicole Jantze. The GLyph and the GLC at large wish them the best of luck in their future plans!
- Craig Boldman
UPDATE 1/28/05
The Norm Is Back!As of January 3, 2005, fans of The Norm are once again enjoying all-new strips, five times a week, by subscribing to thenorm.com. Click on the link to read the details.
Craig Boldman: Does The Norm pre-date your involvement with King Features?
Michael Jantze: Just by a year. I was working at a newspaper, and to kind of 'round the edges off' the strip and get the polish on it that I'd always felt I didn't have for those samples I was sending in, I decided to just run the strip. I talked my local editor -- the editor on my paper, my boss -- into running the strip six days a week for me. For no cost.
CB: This was your local paper?
MJ: Yeah, the Marin Independent Journal, in Marin County, California. I was actually working there, I was the graphics designer. So it ran for about six months. And after that time we put together a package of strips and sent that in and got calls from both United Media and King Features.
CB: That's nice!
MJ: Yeah, it was a nice way to prove my point, which was I knew I was good enough, I just -- You get in a habit of creating a strip, writing, drawing and inking thirty-six samples, sending them in and then taking six months off while everybody gets back to you. And then if you do get the call, which I was getting in the past -- I'd had a previous development deal with United Media -- you're not ready when they call because you don't have any more strips. So this way I knew I'd have more material to immediately send them when they said "Hey, this is pretty good! Do you have anything more?" "Yes, I have four months more."
CB: So did the material that ran in the Marin County paper actually end up going into the syndicated run?
MJ: Some of it actually did because King thought the strip was so strong that they just wanted to go ahead and release it.
CB: I've talked to a number of cartoonists recently who started out doing a college strip or something in a local weekly, and parlayed them into syndication.
MJ: Not this strip. I had done a college strip, but I took some years off from that. I worked in the film industry, worked in newspapers as a journalist. So, I'd come back and was working at papers. Norm grew out of my greater sensibility of the world by working as a journalist for a while.
PROMOTION & PUBLICATION
CB: What I really want to focus on with you is, you seem to aggressively promote the strip, you don't just leave that to King Features. How essential do you feel it is to get out there and beat the drum for your strip?
MJ: That's a good question. I think it's a personality thing. I'm not the only one. Paige Braddock, who does Jane's World is here, for instance. Rick Detorie, who does One Big Happy has been at the Con for years and years, selling his greeting cards as well as his book collection. There are other artists out there who have been trying this stuff. Mine was never a publishing plan, it was meant to be only a marketing plan. The idea was, Norm landed in 45 papers to start, and we've made it up into 65-70 now. But we got stuck. So this was a way to help King deal with the problem of diminished newspaper sales. It's not just a cartoon problem here, it's just that the newspaper industry's declining. Their profits aren't, but the readership is. So there's been a real problem with competitive markets. There's only eight left in America where there are two newspapers that are actually buying comics. There are fewer comics on a page, they're cutting the count of the number of comics on a page. There's certainly less marketing. The book industry's not as hot as it was when Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes were going. When you look at the humor section in the book store these days, pretty much everything is spine out, no big displays. Dilbert was kind of a bump there for a little while, but it didn't drag anybody else along, and Foxtrot has always really good book sales. But as an industry it doesn't seem like that's been a big solution. So we decided not to go that way, working real hard to get that book collection in book stores, get our $2000 royalty and see nothing else. We decided it was better to get out and meet people, build it up through grass roots.
CB: Is the promotion you do coordinated with King Features at all, or do you just go your own way?
MJ: No, we've just done it as sort of a handshake. It's not for profit, so we're not making money. They don't bother me and I don't bother them. (laughs) That's the best way to say it.
CB: So tell me what you have here, these are all collections of the strip?
MJ: There's a box set collection that's coming to an end. That was our first attempt at creating a really interesting, "gotta have it" package that people would pick up. It's worked real well at conventions and done well on Amazon.
CB: Was it designed for conventions?
MJ: Yeah, we designed it for a book expo two or three years ago, mainly to try and get it into libraries, and, we were thinking book stores at the time. We very quickly realized we had a product that had a problem. It needed to be shrink-wrapped. It's a very nice package, but it's not a book. So you can't pick it up and put it back down.
CB: Why don't you describe it for us?
MJ: It's four books in a box set. And the books are basically what they call in the industry an "ashcan." It's designed that way because that's what Norm would have made. We wanted to kind of continue the brand of what Norm's about. When you're touching the book you feel like, even before you read a strip, you know what the strip's about.
CB: And what is The Norm about?
MJ: Norm's a young guy. The strip started when he was in his mid-to-late 20's. He was single at the time; the strip stayed that way for about five years. He's married now, but more to the point: Rather than the strip having a large cast of characters, the strip's about Norm's large cast of thoughts. The strip's just about his take on the world. Obviously all strips are about that, from an author's perspective. But what I tried to do was use the comic medium to reinforce that kind of idea. So Norm talks to the reader. You actually get inside his head. He's never not in the strip. You're with Norm at all times, it's like you get to ride around in his head. So the strip does a lot of those synaptic jumps, and that's where I try to find a lot of the humor.
CB: Fantasy sequences and dream-type stuff?
MJ: Yeah, they come and go. Especially when Norm was single he had his inner child, "Boy Norm" manifested as a big Norm head on a little body. When he goes on dates there's "Crash Test Dummy Norm;" there's "Smart Norm" and "Old Norm." So there've been these characters of himself just to get him to have that internal dialogue. I made them external characters so he could talk to them. Or, actually, to himself.
CB: At one point, he woke up and he was married. Was that always in the game plan?
MJ: Yeah, I think I draw more of a For Better Or Worse strip than a gag cartoon, so I've always had in mind that the strip would move along with age, would grow with its readers. I've always meant for the strip to march along, and the idea of it just marching along on a daily basis, using some of the tricks that the comic strip form can do, such as jump forward in time.
CB: In that case it didn't really march along, it sort of lurched ahead.
MJ: Every year I pick a theme as a way to refocus the strip and have some fun with it. So what I did that year, I'd set it up that Norm and Reine were always friends in the strip, for about four years. So during the year of 2000, Norm accidentally fell in love with Reine. And there was something of a Mary Worth sort of long, 9-month storyline that was going on. And it culminated in them finally dating. And I very quickly realized that I'd sort of done the dating thing. Obviously that's what the strip had been about: Love life, work, technology. And of those categories, "love" had always been about dating. So I'd done a lot of those dating jokes, but where's the fun in that when people are happy? So it was coming up on the end of the year and it made sense to start the new year and make him married. So that's what I did, I just literally jumped a year of his life and moved forward.
CB: Had you foreseen that scenario?
MJ: I didn't see it when I started the storyline of Norm falling in love.
CB: You assumed you'd go through the whole process of the proposal and engagement and...?
MJ: No, I knew I wasn't going to do that. I knew that there was no sense in that. People don't stay engaged long, so you're not really hitting a large part of the population. People are single and then they're married. They rarely talk about how great life was while they were engaged. It's not something that people tell a lot of stories about.You'll hear about the single days, you'll hear about the married days before kids and then you'll hear about the kids.
CB: Interesting that you break things down into year-long chunks. You were telling me about the calendar earlier. You literally go by the calendar with your phases of the strip.
MJ: Yeah. The strip's certainly set in the real world and set in real time. When it's winter it's winter, and so on. I've always tried to make people think these characters are real. I think it's one of my strengths in writing the dialogue and writing humor from character.
So it makes sense for me to focus on those kind of techniques in the writing. So I look for what's going on in society a bit. You know, reading the headlines and so forth, so when palm pilots and electronic gadgets become a big deal, Norm's got 'em. When coffee became the thing that replaced everybody's disposable income habit -- I'm not sure what coffee replaced, but it took over the country basically as kind of a fashionable hobby -- that became a thing in the strip. Obviously I deal with some of the more mundane things in life. The waking up, eating breakfast cereal, the brushing your teeth. Some of the dumb questions we all have during the quiet moments of the day. There was a strip once where Norm wondered, "Can you brush your teeth twice as fast with both hands?" You know -- You don't get enough R.P.M's or something.
CB: Should we assume that's something that occurs to you while you're brushing your teeth, and you just transfer it to the strip?
MJ: Yeah, I've always tried to capture those little thoughts. And, remembering here that the strip is written from inside someone's head. So it makes sense that I'm looking for those little personal, quiet, private but silly thoughts. The dumb ones that we probably all have. And the influences for the strip grew out of a couple of things. One was that I had decided to keep a daily journal -- that was visual. I'd never kept a journal before that, ever.
CB: I know there's Norm's Journal. But you mean you mean, you personally?
MJ: Yeah. The idea was that I'd just finished up a development deal with United Media, and we'd really gotten off track with that property. It ended up that I was writing a strip that I didn't know how to write. They had made so many changes and I had been so willing to accept that they knew what they were talking about, I'd gotten so far off track that I created this journal only as a way of saying 'I need to write every day, I need to touch something.' It was kind of like knocking on wood, or you know, your teeth will rot out of your head if you don't brush every day. And your writing will rot if you don't write every day. So I figured, just to capture something, and not put it on me to write a gag, I'd just sit down and try to write these thoughts.
There was a show on back in the 80's called It's Garry Shandling's Show, where he broke the fourth wall. I always liked that, because there was this tension of, you'd never know when he'd do it. You know, he'd add it to the whole drama of the show that he could literally stop the motion of the characters with a (snap's fingers). "Look at how these people are behaving?" "Why are we even talking about this subject?" I'd always really liked that. Woody Allen had, obviously, done that so well in Annie Hall, which I thought was such a great film. Watch the first ten minutes of Annie Hall, and it's The Norm, basically. Especially the kids in the classroom talking about psychotherapy. You know, they talk about themselves as adults. Hilarious scene.
And then, stand-up comedy was very big. Seinfeld was on television, but more importantly, you know how a stand-up comedian works, which is, "What's with these crazy drivers?" "Why do my socks disappear?" Taking some of those things from other media, trying to put that into a comic strip, because comic strip readers today have been raised on television, not really comics a lot. So it made sense to try to imbue, or pour into the mix, some of the rules people know from television and other comic mediums. I don't know if it's successful always. It might take a little longer to read the strip sometimes than trying to read a three-panel gag. But it's at least kept me interested in the strip, focused on it and enjoying it.
PLOTLINES
CB: Is he (Norm) still unemployed?
MJ: Yeah, that's this year's theme. Right around Christmas last year he was downsized. Literally downsized. And so he walked around for a week or two trying to figure that out, talking to other cartoon characters, and Snoopy, I think, was the one who finally set him straight on, you know, take your time, don't worry about the details so much.
I've been touching that once or twice a month, I'd come back to that unemployment theme. And I had a huge response from readers who had just lost their jobs. So as much as the economy's supposedly getting better, this is really the issue. "How can we spend this money? You give us a tax break..." I'm not trying to be political. I try to only go so far as where the social part of it is, which is, there are a lot of people out there not working. Not everybody identifies with it. I get a lot of people saying "Please -- Give him a job! You're killing me!" But they have a job. They're generally the people I always ask, "Do you have a job?" And they go, "Oh yeah." The people who want to see more of it are the people who can identify with that.
But you know how a comic strip works, writing one yourself. You can't get a lot done in one strip, so when you pick up a theme like this it takes a while to get it finished. You go on and on. I could never have him employed again and never run out of material. But that wouldn't be any fun. So in late August there's a Sunday strip where I ask folks where he should work next. We'll do another little poll. I have a real good idea where I want him to go.
CB: How much weight do you give the poll results?
MJ: I did a poll for who Norm should date next, and left Reine off the list intentionally. And she was the write-in, knowing that's what I was doing. But I use it more as a kind of -- it's fun to see where the people think the characters in the strip should be going.
CB: Could you be swayed by a strong response?
MJ: I haven't been yet, but I imagine I could, yeah. But you know your characters better than anybody.
CB: Sure. But maybe somebody will bring up an idea that hadn't occurred to you.
MJ: Sure, there's always been a couple of those where somebody says, not so much a gag, but more of a, "I thought this would happen." For instance, the only reason Ford ever left the strip was, I didn't like drawing him. I never liked the character design on him. So I first fattened him up, tried that, and I didn't like that either. Finally by shaving his head and giving him a goatee I had a character that I love drawing now. I found that I hadn't been putting in the strip because I couldn't stand drawing him. The chin was too big for the neck, so the face hung down on the chest, and it didn't look real. Norm's a nice design. I could draw Norm all day. I can draw Reine, with several of her different haircuts -- and I do that in the strip, I tweak the designs here and there because people change their looks. We go bald and women change their hair three and four times a year. So with Ford it was just fun to keep changing him, but I finally found a place I liked. And I'd literally had him move away because I didn't want to draw him any more! (laughs)
There was a writing issue there too. I realized that, once I got rid of Ford in the strip, well, who's Norm's new friend? And that's actually what started the idea that Reine would come in. And they'd start being pals more. Sometimes when men and women become pals more, they change their, uh -- Well, they're not pals. They start dating.
PUBLISHING
CB: After Norm and Reine were married, you later went back and filled in the gap that led up to it in one of these books.
MJ: Actually I didn't do it in the books, I did it in the Sundays. I ran two pages of this comic book called The 12 Steps of Marriage in the Sunday strip for that whole year. But they ran so small that people were complaining how little they were. You can imagine how big a comic page would have to be. By the time you printed it in the paper it was, what, four inches high? Pretty small. So they were coming to the website -- actually we hadn't thought of that, but it was a great way to bring traffic to the website.
CB: Have you ever done new material for the books, then, or are they strictly reprints?
MJ: The first book was called "The 12 Steps of Marriage," it was kind of a Number Zero. We printed it so it'd be printed at a decent size. The new books, with issue number one, start in 1996. And they are just reprints of the comic strip. But they're also paired with 'Norm's Daily Journal.' At www.thenorm.com Norm keeps a journal with each accompanying strip, so if you read in the paper, and you've been to the website, you know there's more to today's strip, to bring you to the web.
Instead of just creating a website where people come read The Norm that they could have read in the paper today, and then play a game or go do a coloring book sort of thing, I've always tried to create features on the website that either Norm would have created himself if this was his website, or create something that continues the content of the strip. because in the end, what everybody wants is the strip. T-shirts, hats, books and so forth, that stuff's fine, but I've always tried to focus on creating something that extends or broadens the understanding of the characters for the reader.
CB: Are the books periodicals? Do you put them out on a regular basis?
MJ: Yeah, we're doing them bi-monthly. They were quarterly this year but we go bi-monthly in October.
CB: How are they distributed? Strictly mail order?
MJ: Actually, distributed by Diamond Distribution to comic shops. They'll be on Amazon and Barnes and Noble by October or so. There will eventually be a trade paperback, and that will most likely be distributed by a book company into book stores. That'll be our venture into publishing.
CB: Are you reprinting the strip from the beginning?
MJ: Yeah. We started from the beginning, and the new content in the book is the Journals, because those didn't exist in 1996 when the strip started. I only started that idea in about 2000, 2001.
CB: How's the experience of being a publisher as well as a cartoonist?
MJ: It's all right. We don't consider it a publishing plan, so we still don't feel we're publishing anything. It's been more a matter of, I'm a designer from eight years of newspaper experience, working in QuarkXPress. Creating newspapers and books to me is an afterthought. Having the skill set and having it beat into me by working in a daily newspaper makes it go quick.
CB: Do you do the website yourself?
MJ: I don't. I have someone who helps me now, but originally I had set it up myself, designed it, did the coding. That was another skill that came from newspapers. Having worked at newspapers I was setting up websites and stuff before I quit, so I thought, "eh, I'll set up my own site."
NCS - NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
CB: When we spoke earlier, you mentioned your NCS chapter website. Why don't you talk about that?
MJ: Oh yeah. I, and my wife and our kids had just moved back to San Francisco about a year ago. And since we came back, I was asked to be on the board of the Cartoon Art Museum. And Norm Felchle, also, begged me to take over the Northern California Chapter on the NCS. Norm's a comic book artist, worked on Spider-Man back in the 90's. He now works at Electronic Arts, designing video games. As well as the other work. None of us ever do one thing. So we took over the Northern California Chapter, basically with the idea of supporting the two museums. We have the Schulz Museum, and the Cartoon Art Museum. The idea was that the museums weren't really connecting with professionals. In the Bay Area there are a lot of people in comics. We have quite a few syndicated comic strip artists, but we also have the animation houses, Pixar, PDI, which did Shreck. Wild Brain, Electronic Arts video games, Sony's there, so we've got a lot of cartoonists who are working, not necessarily in that mode, but they're still cartooning. There's obviously greeting card people there, we have a lot of alternative press cartoonists there like Keith Knight and Paul Madonna and Lloyd Dangle. So we're trying to bring in these disparate groups to support the museums as professionals. We've created a Cartoonist-In-Residency program, where once a month a cartoonist sits in the museum and works on his projects to the people can ask questions. We're doing get-togethers. Sergio (Aragones) came up for a talk at the Schulz Museum so we had a dinner as well. Tom Richmond's coming in August. Any time someone comes to the Bay Area we'll create an event and a dinner, or at least a beers and chips get-together so we can talk cartoons.
CB: A very active chapter.
MJ: Well yeah, but at the same time, I'm sure people are busy everywhere, but people are especially busy out in San Francisco. We didn't want to create a society where this is your only set of friends. We're trying to keep things focused to maybe one thing a month. And you don't have to come. One of the editorial cartoonists, Mark Fiore, used to do cartoons for the San Jose Mercury News, but now is doing animated cartoons on-line at www.markfiore.com. He set up a once-a-month, Thursday night get-together, somewhere out on the town in San Francisco, and that's gone really well. When Hillary Price ("Rhymes With Orange") came in and signed books at the museum, she did it on a Thursday, so we had a little get-together with her, and met at the museum and so forth. I've tried to set up our little group not to be a top-down organization who's telling people where to be and when they're going to do it. It's about, "It's you're society, we'll support you when you come up with an idea." The only thing we're doing from the top down is this museum stuff, trying to get people to volunteer to come in and sit down and populate the museum. So no, we're not trying to make it too many events.
CB: It sounds like fun.
MJ: Yeah, it is so far, it gives me an excuse to call anybody! (laughs) I've always been one of those people who's a little trepidacious to call some folks.
CONVENTIONS
CB: Are you doing more conventions, or is this the one for you?
MJ: Obviously San Diego is the biggest one, so we do this one and we pay for this one. Generally now the policy is 'we go if you pay.' So we'll be at the Minneapolis Fall Con this year as a special guest, they'll be flying me in. We'll be at a Dallas convention in October as well. In the past we've done Atlanta. I did WonderCon which is San Francisco. So we did that but next year we're actually going to do it as an Northern California NCS booth instead of having us all over the hall. We'll try to get a bigger space and maybe even set up a table where we review people's work and then have a professional talk, because that's what of here, "Can you look at my work?" The better to set us up as 'the older brother,' professionals helping professionals.
CB: So while you're here you're doing a lot of sketches, shaking a lot of hands...
MJ: Yeah, there's a lot to do at this show. The first three days seemed to be a trade show and today will be more of a fan day.
CB: Does it seem odd, where everything else is mutants and super-heroes and killer robots and you're sitting here with this Norm guy who's pretty benign?
MJ: We're a pretty calm feature to be at this San Diego Comic-Con, but there are others out there. Terry Moore, Strangers in Paradise, Paige is here with Jane's World. If you look around you'll find more kid-oriented, family-oriented stuff, and with the in-flow from Hollywood now you see more and more mainstream stuff.
***
CB: In closing?
MJ: One thing I've noticed is that we're all doing two or three things now, and I'd like to see the NCS recognize that a little more. I know it's more of a social society, but I think cartoonists can use all the help they can get with their professional lives. There are organizations for that, the Graphic Artists Guild and the Society of Illustrators, so I don't mind that the NCS is what it is, but I can't imagine that, down the road, to be viable, and syndication and newspapers continue to fall off, that we don't recognize these other deals, especially as animation becomes the 500-lb. gorilla that it's become, regardless of Disney falling apart this year. Pixar and these other cgi houses are picking up the slack and there's going to be just as many animated film releases as there have been in the past. And I think that especially Pixar's The Incredibles will probably change the direction of film again. It's hard to make a Pixar film, but the Incredibles is promising in that it's not like a Pixar film. It's their first PG film, and it's a movie more about human characters that about a high-concept. And the Pixar model and PDI/Dreamwork's Shreck have proven that family entertainment sells a lot of tickets. And we're all family entertainment in the NCS. So it would behoove us to at least look at it.
Every member I've talked to is usually doing more than just drawing a strip. They're juggling a lot of balls.
Michael Jantze's "The Norm" site
