By Tim Clodfelter
JOURNAL REPORTER
Writers often talk about their characters taking over and pushing stories in directions they never expected.
That is what happened to Matt Janz, a cartoonist whose 5-year-old comic strip Out of the Gene Pool recently underwent a transformation.
Some of the original lead characters vanished, replaced by supporting characters who proved to have lives of their own. On July 30, the strip was renamed Single and Looking. It takes a cynical yet (occasionally) optimistic look at the dating scene, from the perspective of two very different singles.
One is Jackie, a divorced, 40-ish single mom who has “Prada tastes on a Payless budget” and a precocious son named Travis. The other single is Jackie’s friend, Sam, a geeky but good-hearted 20-something bachelor with a party-hardy roommate, a cute little critter named Zoogie. Rounding out the cast is Madame Red, a cantankerous woman who gets many of the strip’s funniest lines.
Janz is now in a relationship, but bases some of his strips on his single days and things his girlfriend mentions - or on anecdotes he hears from single friends.
“Jackie’s a little easier to write for,” he said. “When I write about her dating, I need to write about what’s wrong with the other person, and I have her react to that…. Sam, with his social ineptness, he tends to scare people away.”
Single and Looking is the third in the Journal’s six-month comic strip tryouts. It will run for the month of October, starting Monday on the right-hand comics page in the daily paper.
Janz, 37, lives in the suburbs of Chicago. He became interested in cartooning when he was 8, after a friend of his mother gave him a box full of Peanuts paperbacks.
“By the time I was 10, I had put together a comic strip that was a total rip-off of Family Circus,” he said. The strip, Dumbells (sic), was even drawn in a single, circular panel.
He took a stack of cartoons to his local library in Franklin Park, Ill., and asked if they would put them in their inventory. “Then a few months later they actually made a hardbound copy,” he said. The library gave Janz, then 11, a copy, and put one in the library - where it is still in circulation to this day.
Janz knew that he wanted to become a cartoonist when he grew up, but also knew how hard it was to break into the comic-strip industry. He became a graphic designer when he was 19 and, every few years tried his hand at developing comic strips to send off to the syndicates.
He knew he was on the right track with his strip Out of the Gene Pool when he got personal responses back from the editors at the syndicates, instead of the generic form letters that most cartoonists get. He tried self-syndicating his strip for a time (“I was making hardly anything, just paying for the postage to send it out”) and honed his art and writing. Then he tried again and got picked up by the Washington Post Writer’s Group syndicate.
For its first four years, his strip focused largely on Rufus, a homely everyday guy and his family, with Jackie and her son Travis and some other characters. Eventually, Sam - Rufus’ brother-in-law - became part of the strip and proved so popular with readers that he became one of the stars.
In the early days, newspaper editors frequently complained about how homely many of the characters were, especially Rufus and Madame Red.
“I set out to give them a cute character, but, I said, he’s going to be a real jerk,” Janz said. The result was Zoogie, Sam’s roommate, who resembles a mix of a koala bear and teddy bear. “If you’re around him a couple of minutes, you’re going to want to drop-kick him somewhere.”
Last year, Janz realized that the supporting cast was taking over the strip and decided to drop Rufus and his family altogether. “I had already started shying away from Rufus, and most of my writing was going to these other characters,” he said.
Though the dating lives of Jackie and Sam take center stage, the strip isn’t just about the singles scene. “It’s not to dating what Dilbert is to office life,” Janz said.
Readers shouldn’t expect Jackie and Sam to ever pair off with each other. “That Ross and Rachel stuff (from Friends) drives me crazy,” he said. “I’m pretty adamant, there’s no storyline down the road that will ever bring these two together. I’m thinking of some future strips that make it obvious that they are not interested in each other that way.”