By Tim Clodfelter
JOURNAL REPORTER
Most of the time, cartoonist Tony Carrillo said, the responses that he gets to his comic strip F Minus are favorable.
“It’s about 90 percent positive,” he said by phone from his home in Tempe, Ariz. “The other 10 percent, it’s interesting what people will find to get upset about. No matter what topic I touch on, there’s bound to be someone out there to get upset.”
Take, for instance, clowns.
Yes, clowns.
“I did a couple of comics with a clown in it, and a clown wrote me and said I had offended this clown and all of clownkind by doing this. This image I had of a clown, sitting at home in full makeup typing a letter to me, just blew my mind.”
Starting Monday, readers of the Winston-Salem Journal will get a chance to see Carrillo’s work. F Minus is the second strip in our six-month cycle of test strips. It will run on the top right-hand corner of the comics section, with an e-mail address for reader response. Readers can also write in through “snail mail” or post comments on the Journalnow.com comics blog.
Carrillo, 25, lives a mile from the place he was born and raised in Tempe. “I’ve traveled around a bit and I haven’t found any place I like better than Arizona yet,” he said.
He created F Minus in 2003 while attending Arizona State University, where he was an art major. He saw an ad in The State Press, the student newspaper, looking for a cartoonist. “I hadn’t done any sort of cartooning prior to that,” he said, “but I thought it sounded like a fun job.”
He had already had more than his share of not-so-fun jobs, working as a portrait painter, insurance salesman, custom framer, waiter, camel-ride attendant and a dancing costumed character at an amusement park.
“I don’t know why, but I tended to go for unusual, tough jobs all through school,” he said. “I actually got punched in the head while wearing a bear suit. I’m glad I ended up in cartooning. It’s a lot safer.”
Rather than create a strip about a character, Carrillo decided he would rather draw a single panel with a self-contained joke each day.
“I really enjoy the freedom of the single panel strip,” he said. “A big influence on me was The New Yorker. You have a single panel and get straight to the joke.” But instead of drawing a square cartoon, the way most single-panel comics are done, he put his single panel in a long panel (“widescreen,” as he calls it), to fit in the space the State Press needed to fill. He has kept that format. “I was pretty sure from the start what I wanted my comic to be like,” he said. “And I don’t think it’s changed that much. I’m better with the art side than I used to be, but the style and content haven’t adjusted too much.”
He also decided that he couldn’t worry about comparisons to other cartoonists, such as Gary Larson, whose Far Side comic was one of the most popular single-panel cartoons in comics history.
“Gary Larson did have topics he touched on a lot, like biology and science,” Carrillo said. “Mine are more about your average Joe, people and life in general. I don’t try to not do an idea because I’m afraid someone will compare it to something else. If I think it’s funny, I will do it.”
There are pros and cons to having a self-contained strip. “Not having a regular character means each panel has to stand on its own,” he said. “I can’t rely on previous stories to set up a new joke. But on the plus side, I can set up any situation, any person to tell whatever joke I want to tell.”
Carrillo made the transition from college cartoonist to national syndication after entering the 2004 mtvU Strips Contest, in which online voters and judges, including Dilbert creator Scott Adams, voted for their favorites among 12 comics. Adams selected F Minus as his favorite.
“That was definitely a great foot in the door,” Carrillo said. “It was my senior year, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my art degree after college.” F Minus won with about 200,000 votes. Carrillo got a six-month development deal with United Feature Syndicate, after which the syndicate would decide if it wanted to carry the strip. The strip started in 2006 in 75 newspapers, and has expanded to 125 papers.
The title for F Minus came about after Carrillo tried to settle on a name among five or six candidates. “F Minus just kind of felt right,” he said. “Just the idea of a failing grade and then a little bit worse, that summed it up.”
And it gives his detractors an easy target. “That’s their favorite way to criticize this strip,” he said. “I can tell they think they’re being very clever, but I’ve heard it countless times, so I don’t mind.”
Readers can expect surreal jokes and gags about luckless characters in F Minus. “The workplace will come up often, and kids at school, because any time you draw a kid doing something out of the ordinary it’s funny,” he said. “And there are a lot of nerds, because I was a big nerd growing up, and still am.
“And then of course, clowns, because I hate them so much.”
■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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