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SKIP MORROW & THE ART OF LOVE, LIFE, AND HUMOR

by Stephen R. Bissette

      There's no doubt about it: musician and cartoonist Skip Morrow has a few things to smile about these days. With two new calendar and a companion duo of books hitting bookstores this month - "The Art of Smoking" and "I Still Hate Cats" (published by The Ink Group) - Skip has wholeheartedly entered the digital age, enjoying an almost unprecedented control over the quality of the final printed product. That he has done so with his usual aplomb, wit, and grace is a testimony to the man and the artist many area residents have come to know and love as a friend. Cartooning is usually a solitary art, a private labor of love.
    Thankfully, Skip has nurtured a communal existence that balances his long hours at the drawing board (and, these days, at the monitor); "I'd go nuts if I just did drawing," Skip asserts, "I think I need the balance." In partnership with Laraine, his wife of over twenty years, Skip enjoys a rich creative life remarkable for its diversity and autonomy. Together, they've been weaving their distinctive voices and music for over a decade, playing live almost every Saturday night at Fennessey's in nearby Dover, Vermont. They recently issued their first CD, "Partners" (see sidebar), gathering some of their favorite musicians to perform with them. They're also partners in "The Art of Humor Gallery" and other ventures.
    It's been a long, sometimes rocky road, but Skip and Laraine (and their two daughters Megan and Lindsay) have managed to carve a living and home out of it all. This ongoing wedding of creativity, ingenuity, and domesticity informs every nook and cranny of Skip's studio, which forges a remarkable collective of high-tech and home-made tools, equipment, and furnishings into a highly-efficient work space. Downstairs, Skip and Laraine have converted what was once their garage into the "Art of Humor" private gallery dedicated to Skip's original art, prints, books, greeting cards, and cartoons. Open to the public by appointment, guests and patrons often savor the gallery while their host sits upstairs, laboring over whatever current project demands his attention. "It's the best of both worlds," Skip explains, "when I'm upstairs working and I can hear people downstairs chuckling. Cartoonists usually don't get to hear their audience respond to their work. It's a good feeling." Listening to his audience is what put Skip on his current path.
    Throughout the 1970s, Skip played guitar and sang in a procession of bands on the road; between sets, he'd sketch and share his cartoons with band members and patrons. Among those who laughed at Skip's shorthand sketches was a connection to the New York City art scene, prompting Skip to brave the Big Apple with portfolio (a garbage bag folded around his unpolished cartoons) in hand. Though he secretly gets along with cats, Skip's private amusements yielded unexpected fruit when his first collection of cartoons, "The Official I Hate Cats Book," hit bookstores in 1980. Skip hit a collective funny bone with a vengeance: "I Hate Cats" rocketed up the sales charts, landing on "The New York Times" best-seller list and holding its place long enough to stand alongside Skip's 1981 follow-up, "The Second Official I Hate Cats Book." Over the next three years, Skip completed no less than seven books (including one he co-edited, "Drawn Together," and his first illustration gig on "The 300 Pound Cat," both published in 1983) while lucrative commercial art jobs offered fresh pastures and bigger canvases. By the mid-1980s, Skip launched a line of greeting cards he continues to produce to this day, tapping an even wider audience who embraced Skip's barbed sense of humor as an ideal seasonal spice for holidays, birthdays, and special occasions.
    Though Skip was incredibly prolific throughout the 1990s, continuing his greeting card output while drawing and painting for high-profile corporate clients like Coors, he disappeared from book stores for almost a decade. Wilmington and Brattleboro area residents savored a steady procession of calendar, posters, and cartoons for local businesses and benefits, but to the international cadre of "I Hate Cats" fans, Skip seemed to have vanished. In 1992-93, Skip's illustrations graced a quintet of titles, including his first full-color work between two covers (for Judith Freeman Clark and Stephen Long's series "Awesome/Gross/Scary" and "Weird Facts to Blow Your Mind"). With the blossoming of his cartooning career, Skip evolved beyond sketching on bars, restaurant tables, and drawing boards to assemble an impressive home studio. His carpentry skills, inventive streak, and ever-restless imagination prompted Skip to experiment with rudimentary animation (at one point, one room of his studio housed a complete animation set-up, including an elaborate rig designed to move an animation camera over an oversized Morrow color composition).      As the field of computer art emerged as a viable tool, Skip was there, too, testing the capabilities of each new graphic program. "I saw the writing on the wall then," he says, noting the potential of animation via digital imagery is most likely the next step for him now that he can "work comfortably in the digital realm." "The first step, for me, was making sure I could work comfortably in the digital realm," Skip explains, "because you have to be able to work in a digital medium prolifically before you should try to animate what you do." A personal visit and invitation from Jonathan Lee, the personable publishing mogul behind Australia's internationally-renowned The Ink Group, prompted Skip to jump back into the marketplace that had provided such a spectacular springboard for his art career twenty years before.
    Their initial collaborative ventures tap into the rich vein of sardonic humor that made Morrow a cartoonist to be reckoned with in the 1980s, while allowing Skip to fully embrace the computer as a drawing tool. With "I Still Hate Cats" and "The Joy of Smoking," Skip applied his long-term exploration of digital art technology and techniques to produce an eye-popping collection of finished works perfectly in tune with his familiar cartooning skills and sensibility. "I Still Hate Cats" book and calendar are utterly self-explanatory. Both collect the best from Skip's debut 1980 and '81 collections, refining and spicing those time-tested cartoons with his tempered drawing abilities and a fresh splash of computerized color. Skip also adds a peppering of fresh gags to the stew, including a titillating triple-page fold-out piece that must be seen to be appreciated. Once again, Skip's woefully hapless felines are subjected to a dizzying (and hilarious) array of abuses, from the slingshot-into-a-brick-wall cover gag to a sure high-tech cure for cat-scratches on the furniture. But these are never gory setpieces, the crass domain of lesser cartoonists: an impeccable sense of expression, timing, and engagement of the viewer's imagination is key to Morrow's cartooning as he urges us to follow the cause-and-effect potential suggested by each drawing. Skip carefully, lovingly renders his gags so that we complete the events in our own mind's eye, provoking chuckles.
    However imaginative Morrow's brand of slapstick may still be, there's no doubt that the "I Hate Cats" cartoons pushed the envelope -- that was, after all, key to their immediate appeal and devilish charm. While the current collection included most of Skip's personal favorites from the original books, he did address the sometimes caustic extremes of his crueler sight gags. "In looking back at the old cat books, there were things that were funny in a real humorous sense," Skip explains, "and there were things that some people found really funny that were, in retrospect, seemed mean to people. There's a difference between 'funny-funny' and 'funny-mean'... The level of humor in the best of them is more sophisticated than jamming a cat on to a bellows. Twenty years later, people are more sensitive to violence. I culled out things that might be misconstrued as being instructional; if they are mean, they are so outrageous that they simply can't be imitated." Not to imply "I Still Hate Cats" is a timid tome: with its procession of cats about to lose one of their nine lives to fryers, blenders, weights, fans, cannon-fire, and jet engines, the new collective certainly lives up to the ravages of its precursors. The crucial addition of color also informed Skip's editorial process: "Some of the decisions were strictly graphic as far as which images I would enjoy turning into full color."
    "The Joy of Smoking" calendar and book boasts a fifteen-year history. Reflecting on his rib-tickling collection of cartoons depicting smokers indulging their habit to surprising extremes, Skip recalls that "right after the end of the 'Cat' books, they [his publishers, Holt, Rinehart & Winston] were saying, 'Okay, what's next, what do you want to do?'" Skip prepared a sketch treatment of "The Joys of Smoking" (including its current cover image of a happy smoker sprouting cigarettes from every facial orifice). "But they didn't go for it," Skip chuckles. "They were doing a coffee-table book at the time about all the wonderful art of the tobacco industry. It was not socially acceptable to bad-mouth the tobacco industry back then. I had no idea! When I showed it to them, they said, 'No, I don't think so.' They just nixed it." With subsequent social and political reevaluation of (and litigation against) the tobacco industry, the pendulum has swung and Skip's wicked, witty lampooning of nicotine addiction is perfectly attuned to the new Millennium.
     Five years ago, the timely studio visit of a Manhattan Morrow fan who happened to be a prominent cardiologist prompted serious reconsideration. Delighted by Skip's original concept sketches for the proposed book, the doctor begged Skip to sell him the originals; unwilling to let ago of unfinished work, Skip instead sold the cardiologist top-quality photocopies of the concept sketches. "He framed them and hung them up all over his office," Skip explains. His patients' delight with the drawings prompted Skip to reassess the project. "I thought, 'You know, maybe it's time, maybe I should dust this thing off,' and I did one print," Skip continues, indicating the now-familiar image from the book and calendar depicting a group of cigarette-puffing runners at the starting line of a race. The print was a success. Just as Skip was toying with resurrecting the rejected book proposal, the timely interest from Ink Group publisher Jonathan Lee opened the door anew.
     The fact that both projects (as calendar and books) were completed digitally afforded Skip a fresh measure of control. Though the 'roughs' (concept sketches) and black and white drawings were done by hand, the 'clean up' of his inked drawings via computer refinement offered an invigorating new dimension to the artist. "One of the things I found was a new sense of freedom when I went to ink," Skip enthuses, "because I knew I could fix anything that went wrong."
    Coloring the completed drawings is a whole new ball game, allowing Skip to pinpoint the precise colors and percentages that will appear in the final printed version according to the contemporary color selection process used by printers around the world. The use of traditional means -- watercolors, dyes, colored pencils, markers, etc. -- never afforded such vivid results in print, though Skip has never allowed the tools to distort the esthetics of his work as an artist. "For myself, I needed to bridge into the digital realm by first making sure that I could maintain whatever style that I have -- bridge that, and still have myself on the other end."
     Sure of his path, Skip embraces the new technology for all it's worth, pleased with the fresh vigor it has brought to his work. Having adjusted to this new set of tools, Skip concludes, "It becomes as second nature sketching with a pencil -- it does, it really does, except you don't have any boundaries any more. I don't fret anymore about having to be really careful, that I might screw an entire illustration up with a single misstep. You can be fearless." Just as Skip has always been in his life and cartooning. ("The Joy of Smoking" and "I Still Hate Cats" are on sale at bookshops. You can visit Skip and Laraine's gallery on-line at "theartofhumor.com" or call 802-464-5523 for an appointment to visit the real-life Art of Humor Gallery in Wilmington.)

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