Point Reyes Light - October 7, 2004
Light cartoonist draws alter-egos in Feral West
By Jacob Resneck
Cartoonist Kathryn LeMieux of Tomales will be giving a live demonstration of cartooning from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 9, at the Charles Schultz Museum in Santa Rosa. LeMieux is the creator of Feral West, a weekly comic she draws for The Light which recently marked its 10th anniversary. Since 2000, LeMieux has also been one of six in a cartooning team that draws Six Chix for King Features Syndicate. The comicstrip’s name came from a flippant remark of LeMieux’s when the syndicator first approached her with the idea.
"What are you going to call it, ‘Six Chicks’?" she reportedly asked.
The other five contributors to Six Chix are: Isabella Bannerman, Margaret Shulock, Rina Piccolo, Ann Telnaes, and Stephanie Piro. Scattered around the country, the six cartoonists have only managed to gather in the same room together once, while at a New York City comic book convention in 2001. LeMieux’s contribution appears on Fridays and she draws the Sunday strip every six weeks.
LeMieux said that she enjoys the challenge of cartooning because it combines the creative artwork with sharp writing. "The best drawing in the world isn’t going to carry a poorly written [cartoon] strip," LeMieux said.
Began with Barons of B Street
Before Feral West, LeMieux drew a strip called Barons of B Street which ran in The Light from 1982 to 1987 and centered on happenings in and around Point Reyes Station, her home for 14 years before settling in Tomales in 1994.
LeMieux first arrived in West Marin after her husband Don Armstrong of Los Altos was offered a teaching job in the Bolinas-Stinson School District back in 1980. He is now the superintendent of Twin Hills School District in Sebastopol. Armstrong is also a sportscaster, covering the baseball games at Point Reyes Station’s Love Field for KWMR.
LeMieux, a native of Longview, Washington, was raised not far from Mount St. Helens, which as of press time appeared ready to erupt.
"I have my volcanocam on my computer, so I can watch," she said. There are currently rumblings from the volcano that last erupted in 1980.
LeMieux first became interested in comics while studying at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Cartoonist Ray Collins, who drew a strip called Cecil C. Addle for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, served as an early inspiration, she said.
Went national via the UAW
In the early 1980s, LeMieux began cartooning on a national level after meeting a big wheel from the United Auto Workers Union, the editor of Solidarity, the UAW’s in-house publication. Surprisingly, the meeting occurred one evening in the then-rollicking Marshall Tavern.
"I was excited," she recalled. "I was young. It was my first national thing to be published, it emboldened me to keep trying." Which she did, contributing editorial cartoons to the Marin Independent Journal while trying to get a syndicate to distribute her comics.
In 1990 LeMieux debuted with Little Women, distributed nationally by King Features Syndicate. At its height, LeMieux said, it was carried by 130 newspapers across the country. Its success didn’t meet the expectations of her distributor, and King Features pulled the plug two years later.
"I didn’t maintain enough papers, I guess," LeMieux explained.
LeMieux continues to draw Feral West each week for The Light which is more fun, she said, than working for the big syndicates that dictate her comicstrips be drawn five weeks in advance for weekdays, nine weeks in advance for color Sunday strips. This type of arrangement, she said, makes it nearly impossible for newspaper comics to be topical.
"That’s why the comics are so boring. The humor has to be so broad and generic," LeMieux said, noting that Feral West often goes to press in The Light literally hours after the ink dries on her tablet.
Cartoon character alter-egos
Each character from Feral West represents an alter-ego from her own personality, at least on some level, LeMieux freely admits. "Though I think Mavis [the Milk Cow] is the closest to my alter ego," she said.
One set of recurring characters in Feral West are the two gin-imbibing California Mermaids, whom LeMieux said was her answer to Walt Disney’s sanitized Little Mermaid character.
"I felt like the Little Mermaid was way too stereotyped in typical Disney fashion," she said. "I wanted to make my mermaids into big girls who were full bodied and had some bad habits and good humor."
She said that most female cartoon characters are females first and characters second, so they must fit into easily categorized stereotypes.
"Many females in comic strips have to fit in certain guidelines," she revealed. "They either have to be mothers, little girls, or frustrated single women. There’s not a whole lot of room for female characters that have strong personalities."
LeMieux said she enjoys using the California Mermaids to challenge this stereotype because as anthropomorphic sea creatures they aren’t as easily stereotyped.
"The mermaid is a universally known archetype which transcends normal stereotypes that we usually find in the normal media," she said.
Last weekend, LeMieux had a gala in Toby’s Feed Barn’s Gallery, celebrating 10 years of Feral West. Along with strips that reflect West Marin in various years past, she is also showing her oil paintings which are sold solely through Bodega Landmark Studio in the town of Bodega.
At Saturday’s opening reception in Toby’s, "people were really reading the stuff, and laughing and pointing," LeMieux said. "That made me feel good. A lot of people kept asking when I would have a [Feral West] book out, but there’s a limited market for local humor. When I can figure out a way to afford to print one, I probably will."