'Rhymes With Orange' creator thinks big to build small comedies
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NORTHAMPTON - Summer is long gone by in Hilary Price's studio in the Arts & Industry Building in Florence. Because she works four to six weeks ahead on "Rhymes with Orange," her nationally syndicated cartoon strip, it is September in Price's twisted imagination.
A woman who once dreamed of getting paid to write has been at it for 15 years now for King Features, making her living, and making people laugh, with choice words and simple figures. This summer, she passed cartoon number 5,500, having stared down a decade and a half of daily deadlines. Cartooning isn't for cowards.
This spring, Price, who has lived in the Valley since 1998, earned one of her field's top prizes. The National Cartoonists Society voted her strip, syndicated in more than 150 U.S. newspapers, the best "newspaper panel" of the year. She's come a long way since creating her first cartoon character - a friendly monster that looked, she recalls, "a little like a sitting-down hippopotamus. I used my mother's blusher from her cosmetics bag to paint' it. That's probably the last time I have touched a cosmetics bag for any purpose."
We caught up with Price to talk about where she gets her ideas, the nature of her sly humor, her relationship with her audience, why so few women work as cartoonists and why she takes the comment "That's so true" as perhaps the highest compliment.
Q: Anyone who has to be creative on demand, on a schedule, must develop ways of ensuring the rain will fall. How do you do that?
a: I read a lot. I read newspapers; I read the Gazette and I read the Globe. I'm thinking not about stories, specific stories, so much as I'm thinking about topics. I'll make lists sometimes. I'll put "people," or "animals" or "occupations" down one side of the page and on the other side of the page I'll put, "at a bar," "at a dentist's office" and then look at them and try to see, "Well, why is the monkey at the dentist's office?" And then try to justify why that might happen. That's one of the tricks that I'll do to jog my memory.
Q: Is that something you devised?
a: Oh, no. It's something that I learned about doing improv theater in college. You walk on stage and you think you're eating an ice cream cone, and someone says, "Nice hat," and you say, "Oh yes, of course, it's a hat." I once read an interview with Johnny Hart, who created BC, and he talked about that. And that put it in a very describable form.
Q: So it's occupations and places, and you just mash them up and see what silliness ensures?
a: Sometimes I do that formally, with actual words on either side of the page, and sometimes I do that informally. I take one word and just do some brainstorming.
Oftentimes, someone will say something that's just the nugget of the idea. And I'll work that until it turns into something that works as a cartoon. That's when I'll write a "thanks to so and so" (on the strip).
Q: Do you ever struggle with having to be family-friendly with these ideas and rein yourself in?
a: Yes, I feel like there's a certain line. I feel that my readers expect that what they're going to see in "Rhymes With Orange" might be some edgier content than what they might see in a different strip. People have the option to either read it, or not read it. It can be sick and twisted. It's not always. Sometimes it's just about pets or relationships.
But I do feel that I have a Charles Addams side of me that enjoys that kind of humor - and wants to do strips like that.
Q: Have you ever considered having a different outlet, or using a pseudonym?
a: Schmilary Schmice?
The demands of the strip take up all of my time. There's a few cartoonists who, in addition to their strip, have "Playboy" as a client of theirs. I feel like the material I come up with isn't blue, it's just slightly more twisted, or something like that.
I feel like if I get the idea and it might not be appropriate, I still have to draw it. Otherwise, it just knots around inside and doesn't make room for something else. I'll make a sketch of it, and that clears the way for other stuff to come.
Sometimes, with things that are completely inappropriate, I have taken the time to it write down, then can look back on it later. I remember one. A few weeks later I could bring it up to printed snuff by changing things around.
Q: Do you have a little reservoir of pieces that aren't quite done yet or need some doctoring?
a: No, not right now.
Q: Do people come to you with great ideas that aren't so great?
a: I hear the gamut. I hear that "I love your work," which is great. I hear from people who have too much time on their hands. "I've been meaning to write you for years to say how much I hate you ... or how terrible you are." And what is curious is that what I always write back, now that I've kind of learned, is to say, "I understand my strip doesn't appeal to your tastes. So what do you like?" And one of two things will happen. Either I will never hear from that person again, or between 24 and 72 hours later I will get an email in which someone says, "Oh, you're a person, you read your email. Gee, sorry." But you know how criticism can stick to you, like gum on your shoe.
Sometimes, somebody will say something off the cuff, not thinking that it was funny. Sometimes people will think, "Oh, I have this great idea for a strip" but it turns out to be something that I've done or seen done before. Or the idea is just kind of the collective consciousness now. Or someone will send me something specific that's just right on and I can build from there.
There are certain friends who have known me for a long time that have been trained. I'll call and be like, "Got any cartoon ideas?"
Q: Like phone a friend?
a: Yeah. There's definitely that aspect to it. Regular friends.
At family events, if families are having a good old time, someone might say, "You can make a strip out of this." But you can't, because it's something happening over a time and a place. There's nothing specific happening. I feel that I have to start with a very small, specific thing and work from there. It's not topics. I don't work in topics. I work in details.
Q: You're working with specific moments and exact language?
a: Right ... you have to get everything into that moment in time in the fastest, most concise way. You don't have a character to fall back on. If I said "Linus" to you, that brings up an entire cloud of personality traits.
Q: You have no recurring characters, correct?
a: No, but I have a narrator-esque everyperson. I say everyperson because she happens to be female, but she functions as the everyman.
Q: How often would you say there is a topicality about the whole country - rarely or never?
A: It's got to have legs. I came up with one after Bush's "axis of evil" speech. First I said, well, let's see if this sticks. And when it did stick, then I did a mechanic talking to a woman about her car and have him say "What you have here is the axle of evil."
I kind of sit back and wait. We know that this tragic oil spill is going to be around for a while. That's something that will filter to the daily comics because it's got, very unfortunately, a staying power.
Q: But it's hard to be funny about it.
a: It is. It is. You can do environmental cartoons. Are they funny "ha-ha." No, but are they commentary? Yes.
Q: Your work has a lot of commentary in it. It's about little truths that sneak up on people and almost go unnoticed. Trend points, maybe, or signs of the times. In a small space, with very few words, isn't it asking a lot to do something memorable? It's really a great challenge.
a: It's always the highest compliment. when someone says "That's so true."
Q: Truth is one of your targets, then. Social truths?
a: Certainly, or the truth about what our garages look like, that kind of thing.
Q: Is this an all-consuming occupation?
a: Yes, as a matter of fact. The deadline is seven a week. I would say that I can structure my week however I want, which is a good thing, but there's that sense that there's always a deadline. There's always tomorrow's paper. I'm four weeks ahead with the dailies and six weeks ahead with the Sunday strips. So it kind of changes how I experience holidays.
Q: On your walks with your dog, you're still working, right? Still looking for the ridiculous out there?
a: If I'm hanging out with friends or my sweetheart, then it's a break and I'm just focused on hanging out with her. That's when problems get solved, because your subconscious takes over and gives your conscious mind a rest. If I have the luxury of sleeping on something, it will come to mind.
Q: Does your work come more out of your conscious, or subconscious ... or paraconscious, whatever that is?
a: Oh, conscious mind. I think there is this myth that creativity visits you. I think you visit it. You have to.
Q: Because you'd need to have seven visitations a week .
a: Exactly.
Q: Is there a problem of theft of ideas in cartooning?
a: I'm so glad you brought this up. I think people assume that when they see an idea, something that I've done, and when they see it in another strip, they jump to the conclusion that it's theft.
Instead, what cartoonists understand is that we are all digging in the humor mine and we're going to come up with some similar jokes - and that it's not theft.
If I trust my integrity, then I also have to trust their integrity. There are some people who aren't being honest, but I'd say the majority are being honest.
Q: As a fellow Stanford University grad, did you do anything in "Rhymes with Orange" about Tiger Woods and his troubles?
a: No. Because I couldn't think of anything funny for it that hadn't already been done by other people. And part of it is ... why should I give him any more attention?
Q: When you hear from people, do you detect regional differences in the way your work is perceived or appreciated?
a: My stuff does well on the coasts and in bigger cities. That's where it has thrived. ... I guess I would call my audience a reflective audience. To me it doesn't have to be college-educated. But reflective.
Q: How many women have syndicated cartoons at your level?
a: More than the count of my hands, but less than the count of my hands and my toes.
Q: Why is it that people still often assume that a cartoonist will be a man? How can that be addressed? Are women not funny enough?
a: No!
"Why I oughta !!!!"
It's a larger question. It's not why aren't there women in this field. It's why are there many fields, such as science or the trades, that women aren't in? ... You see very few construction trucks that say, "Price and Daughters." It's "Price and Sons." It takes a long time for traditions to change. That's why modeling and mentoring are very important.
Q: What did you come out of college thinking you would do?
a: I wanted to get paid to write. This is getting paid to write, but just fewer words - which is nice.
I was an English major. I started out freelancing and thought I could write advertising. I put a book together, a portfolio of fake ads. I showed it around to this one place. Someone happened to be going on vacation. It was perfect timing, so I slid in.
The attention I got was for the cartoons I'd thrown in there. And then I got some strips in the San Francisco Chronicle in their book review section. I got hold of a book, "How to Syndicate Your Cartoon," and put together samples and sent them off. Pre-Internet.
Q: What kind of response did you get?
a: I sent them out to five or six syndicates. I got rejection letters expect for one, from King Features, which said "I'm interested, please send me more. Why don't you send me 14 in two weeks?" Well, OK. And then that happened maybe three more times and then my editor at the time sent me a development contract. "Would I do seven strips a week for nine months?"
Not for publication. This was for three grand. Would I work for nine months for three grand?
I'm like, OK. So I would send him the work and we'd talk on the phone and I would either get a "check," a "check-plus" or a "check-minus." And then we'd discuss them. It was about a year later that they launched "Rhymes With Orange."
Q: Were you able to use the development work as a big archive?
a: Yes, it's a distant, distant, distant memory. It was a smart thing for them to do because you have to work up the stamina to do seven a week - and know that you can do seven a week. So I might do four and then dip from the well of three.
They're so long gone now.
