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I was running round Artist Alley of Wizard World
Chicago and what do I spot, but this table with a "You
Damn Kid" banner on it. My curiosity was picqued and I
made my way over to the table. As I got closer I
noticed the title of the compilation was "Fun At A.A.
Meetings." This made it even more interesting to me
and I bought a copy. Later that evening I was sitting
in my family's hotel room reading it and found myself
laughing very hard. I left the book on the coffee
table when I went to take a shower and when I came out
I found my father had stolen my book and was reading it
and chuckling. The next day dad went and bought
himself a hardcover copy of it. Over the next day or
so, we went back and bought a third copy for one of
our reviewers. By that time, it struck me that Owen
Dunne was an extremely nice gentleman and we needed to
interview him. This interview was supposed to go up
last month, but I left the tape recorder in my dorm
over winter break and it got locked in with no way to
get it out. Owen has wonderful about how long it's
taken to get this interview up. And since I talked to
him at Wizard World, a family friendly version of his
strip "You Damn Kid" is running in some papers as "You
Darn Kid."
Sidra:
Have you always been interested in cartooning?
Owen Dunne:
A little bit, I started in 1996 just
doodling and it seemed to be a nice fit for
me--something to do. You can do it alone. You don't
have to be out in public. Before I did it, I enjoyed
the writing part of it. I sort of taught myself the
art aspect of it, and here I am.
Sidra:
What do you consider your art influences?
Owen Dunne:
In the beginning, I wasn't influenced so
much by anybody, but then you begin to think about
things that you've seen in the past. I would probably
say Charles Schultz was the biggest, because you know
he kept it simple. You don't need a lot of lines to
overcomplicate things. I liked reading, oddly enough,
Funky Winkerbean when I was a kid. I used to always
read the Harvey comics. I wasn't so much the
superhero guy, I liked to read Harvey comics. I got
into superheroes a little bit more when I was in my
teens. Probably Calvin and Hobbes and all the usual
people, that people say when they're listing
influences.
Sidra:
I noticed you started cartooning while being a
used cars salesman. Why trade one unstable career for
another?
Owen Dunne:
Well, the second one is much more
rewarding. I hate sales, especially car sales where I
was asked to do things that went against my grain. I
just couldn't stand that. I wasn't any good at it
because I couldn't stand it. I knew how to play the
part. I knew how to say all the things you're
supposed to say as a car salesman, but I hated it.
Yeah, this is probably a more unstable occupation than
a car salesman, but at the end of the day you've done
something that's, I don't want to say more worthwhile,
but that you enjoy. And then there's the feedback.
No one ever comes back and says, "You know I really
love that car you sold me," but in this you get
e-mails, and at shows like this you get people who
come up and say, "I really love your comic." I mean,
you've got to put a price on that. I don't think
anybody gets into this business, well they might at
the beginning, but after you've been in it for a
while, you realize you're not going to get rich with
this, or your odds of doing this are slim. I suppose
you try to be comfortable enough to keep doing it.
Sidra:
You sold your first strip very quickly. Do you
think this was a good thing or a bad thing and why?
Owen Dunne:
I have to say a good thing because I got
the part. If I had to do it all over again? I look
at my early stuff and go, "How did I send that to
anybody? How did I even think it?" But on the other
hand I'm glad I was naïve, because otherwise I
wouldn't have gotten the gig at the newspaper. What
they allowed me to do was to learn the craft of
cartooning. I always could write. When I work on
writing, sometimes I have to look back at my early
ones to get a feel for how I would like to write them.
The writing was always there for me, the art-I
suppose everyone always thinks they're okay at art.
That they're a decent cartoonist until they start
looking at other people's things up close, and then you
go,"No, I'm no good at this." As you get better, you
look back at you're earlier stuff and you go," I can't
believe I was doing this and showing it to people."
Being in there early enough gave me a reason to keep
doing it every week, keep practicing. Once you get a
little bit better you want to get a lot better. If I
had to do it all over again, I probably wouldn't have
the nerve. So I'm glad I did it, because it taught me
how to do cartooning.
Sidra:
It's obvious you've been scarred, in a good
way, by the Catholic Church and Alcoholics Anonymous.
Where does the autobiography end and the fiction
begin?
Owen Dunne:
Well, I went to catholic grade school, I
went to all boys Catholic High School, and I went to
Marquette University for 3 years which was also
Catholic. It's not so much you're scarred by it as
you get older, you get exposed to other things, and you
look back and you go, "That's kind of silly." I'll
get picked on by Catholic organizations, every now and
then they'll pick a strip out of the paper and hold it
out as example that this guy is anti-Catholic. It's
not that I'm anti-Catholic, because whatever someone
gets out of their religion that makes them happy, I'm
all for it. It's the organizational aspect of it.
George Carlin has a great line where he says, "The
world was fine until the high priest and the traders
came alone and screwed it up." As soon as you give
anybody power to make rules over other people, that's
when it gets ruined, and when you're looking at things
you couldn't do as Catholics thirty or forty years ago
that you can do now, obviously they've loosened up a
little bit. But then this all comes back to me and I
look at it and I go, "Well I thought when I was ten
that this was a law and you had to do this, and that's
it." Now, it's changed and you don't have to do that.
What I try to do in my comic is to ask questions and
I try not to be hurtful, except where occasionally
I'll pick on the whole priest thing in anger. It
never happened to me, but I know kids that it did
happen to. The parish I grew up in had a priest who
was really bad, course nobody found out until it was
too late. So for me that's a no holds barred type of
thing, but the rest of it, I just like to look at it
as an adult and ask the questions you couldn't ask as
a kid.
As far as the Alcoholics Anonymous, I suppose the
polite way to put it is I come from a long line of
happily imbibing Irish people, Irish Catholic people.
So, it's only reasonable that every once and a while
some of them needed some help. So, we'd go to a
meeting. We wouldn't be in the meetings, but we'd be
in the little side rooms, my sister and I, and we
wouldn't think anything of it. Once again, it's not
until you grow up and you look back and you go, "That
was a little odd." You hear stories, but you don't
think of the whole pain, the whole process, and why
are these people here, you just entertain yourself.
We were friends with the lady who was treasurer. She
collected donations and stuff. We helped count
quarters. You had no idea of the absolute horror and
pain and angst of what it meant to be an alcoholic
that goes on with these people. I've had alcoholics,
other than people I know, love the strip. Because
it's not making fun of that. If anything I like to
make fun of the disease or whatever it is I'm picking
on and I use the words that we heard when we were
kids. For example I use the term retarded, because
that's what we said. To PC my strip when I grew up in
the 60's and 70's would be silly. "When I was a
little boy there was a learning disabled child that
lived down the road." You wouldn't say that in 1968.
If I'm telling the story genuinely I have to say,"
There was a retarded kid that lived up the street."
There's nothing harmful intended in it, and I think I
get away with it more because I'm putting the words in
a child's mouth. That's part of why I do it, so I can
get away with a little bit more.
Sidra:
How did you get involved with Keenspot?
Owen Dunne:
The started up either March of 1999 or
2000, and they e-mailed me and asked me if I wanted to
be a part of it and I said," Yeah." That was about it.
Sidra:
How has being on the internet helped your
career as a cartoonist?
Owen Dunne:
Again, it goes back to what I was saying
about getting in the paper. It gives you a chance to
learn your craft and to grow. Once you get a little
bit of an audience, you have people who are expecting
to see your strip every day and you see those numbers
grow a little bit. You get twenty-five people that
come to your site everyday and you go, "Twenty-five
people in the whole world, how cool!" After that it
gets bigger and it gives you a reason to keep going.
It provides a little bit of income, not much, and when
Keenspot started it was on the cusp of the when they
whole dot com thing fell apart. Everybody had dollar
signs in their eyes because what banner ads were
getting at the time was fifty to eighty dollars per
thousand views. Now, it's down to five to eight cents,
but back then they were like," If you get a million
page views a month, you're going to be making
thirty-thousand dollars a month." It was like, "Sure,
sign me up." Now, a million will get you seventy-five
dollars. So, what it does is it gives me an audience
to sell my books to, and to make contacts with people.
You never know who's going to read your strip. You
always hope that today's the day that so-and-so is
going to see the strip, whoever so-and-so is, and
they're going to be the person who comes along and
says, "You know, I want to do this and we want to try
for this." And another nice thing is I get stuff from
Australia, Africa, etc. You know, places that ten
years ago you would have never been able to get your
stuff read by other people. I've got a couple of gigs
in Australia in magazines, stuff like that. It's nice
that way, especially now that more people are getting
highspeed access. Back in 2000 most people were dialup
and comics had to be really low bandwidth size files.
The movement there has allowed us to do a little bit
more detail in the artwork, color for example.
Probably the next thing is animation. Keenspot is
looking into getting animation. We'll see, you know.
Sidra:
Are you still running the strip in the
alternative newspaper?
Owen Dunne:
Yes, I have had a few people come up at
this show and tell me that that's where they found the
strip. It's been in there for seven and a half years
now. It's almost like I wake up on Monday mornings
and go mail it priority to the paper. I don't have
much else to do with the paper, but it's an exposure.
You never know if people are going to read it. That's
the great thing about the internet, you can check your
statistics, and know right away how many people read
my strips today, which strips they read, how much time
they spent looking at them. With the paper you don't
know, but on the other hand a web comic that has a
huge readership might get between forty and sixty
thousand readers a day, that's nothing to newspapers.
So when web-cartoonists talk about huge numbers, you
have to take that into account. So, I take that into
account. If I was in the Philadelphia newspaper or a
New York newspaper, that's the equivalent of every
website out there.
Sidra:
Do you have any plans to do any other kinds of
cartoon strips or are you happy doing what you're
doing now?
Owen Dunne:
You know I'm starting new ones and
stopping them all the time, because I'm a Gemini and I
get sick of things so quickly. Every now and then
I'll switch over to a three panel format, like a
newspaper comic. Sometimes I'll do it in color. But I
have an idea for something else, I run with it and a
week later I'm sick of it. I have about ten other
comic strips that I sometimes work on. A couple of them
have caught on online. A couple of months ago I did a
manga version of You Damn Kid and I called it
Troublesome Joe and it was kind of like a Speed Racer
type dialogue, but it was still the same sort of
thing. So I did another one a couple weeks ago. So I
was thinking about maybe for next year doing a
Troublesome Joe comic, self-contained, color cover,
black and white inside to sell cons, and online. And I
have another strip called The Beatniks. The
characters are all drawn by me. It's just something
with dialogue. It's a writing exercise. I try a whole
bunch of different comics to learn how to do comics
better. I did one called Dizzy Dustbin that I wanted
to be old school 30's and 40's Katzenjammer Kids type
of thing. That was a lesson for me on how to draw
hands. When I look at any comic, typically online
ones, first thing I look at tends to be hands, because
if you can't draw hands, you really can't draw. You
can look at that right away and say, "That's someone
who's relatively new to this," because there's so many
of them out there. I've always thought there has to be
some benefit to being different, because you don't
really see much stuff like I'm doing, so maybe there's
a market there. I don't know. We'll find out in the
next couple years.
Sidra:
Anything else you'd like to add?
Owen Dunne:
No, just thank you guys for getting the
book and liking it and talking to me I appreciate it.
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