One of the pleasures that comes with picking up The Daily Illini is a well-stocked comics page, including the strip Robotman, written and drawn by Jim Meddick.
Meddick, 36, currently lives in Connecticut and has been drawing since he was very young. He drew a strip for his high school newspaper and went on to draw various strips while at Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied illustration. One of the strips, Paperback Writer, won a Tribune Syndicate contest for student cartoonists.
After school Meddick began work at United Media doing paste up in the art department. This led to an editorial cartoon job, which in turn led to a syndicated comic strip opportunity.
Many a comic strip is developed with an eye on the toy and merchandise bonanza that can and often does follow if the strip is popular with the public. Robotman actually began as a toy for young children and Meddick was asked to make a strip that starred the toy. In that vein, Robotman was a robot from space who came to live with a family of four, hanging out with two boys and falling in love with appliances.
This changed. "The toy never went anywhere," said Meddick. "And the strip was still going strong, so I felt I had more control at that point. I started thinking, 'I'm going to make this more of my thing.'"
So Robotman left the Milde family and moved into his own apartment. The strip involved many parodies of TV shows and other elements of popular culture, and many characters came and went. Meddick introduced the character of Monty Montahue, not knowing at the time that Monty would be permanent.
The strip as we see it now involves the dysfunctional relationship between frequent inventor Monty and his robot creation Robotman, as Monty goes from job to job and woman to woman. The disparity between Robotman's current origin and former origin was humorously explained in a two-week parody of The X-Files, where Scully and Mulder appear on the scene to investigate Robotman. It was a hilarious wink to obsessive sci-fi fans and comic book junkies who demand rigorous continuity in what they watch and read.
Ironically enough, the strip has evolved into something very similar to Paperback Writer, which involved a hack sci-fi writer living with an alien, considered to be an unmarketable concept when Meddick originally shopped it to the syndicates.
Such a change in focus has precedents, some of which Meddick cites as influences. The classic comic strip Popeye, by E. C. Segar, actually started as a strip about Olive Oyl's family. At some point Olive began dating a sailor named Popeye, who went on to take over the strip. Another example is the classic strip Barney Google, in which a hillbilly relative Snuffy Smith was introduced, who grew in popularity and the strip eventually revolved solely around Snuffy.
Along with these strips, Meddick also listed George Herriman's Krazy Kat as an artistic inspiration and credits Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury for introducing an adult sense of humor to the comics page. This paved the way for Bloom County and the current incarnation of Robotman.
Meddick's strip is far from conventional. "I do run into people who don't get what I'm trying to do, and it bothers me...there's a certain insecurity in most artists...but at the same time it bothers me worse to do something that everyone will get but is not that funny. I'd rather do something really weird that people won't get and occasionally hit and have something more funny than have to rely on some standard devices."
Meddick usually writes in the morning, which he said does not come easily. He has to sit down, blank out his mind and just do it.
"Some people get confused and they think if they somehow learn how to draw just the right way they'll get a comic strip, but that isn't the emphasis. It's the writing and the ideas. That's the thing to concentrate on."
Discussing the ups and downs of syndication, the constant pressure of deadlines is a double-edged sword. He sometimes wishes he could really polish things up instead of in some sense "cranking strips out." However, "It's more suited to my personality, because I think if I were allowed to finesse, I would never do anything."
His editors at the syndicate also watch out for topics and jokes that might not go over well with everyone who reads the comics page, which might lead to a comic being dropped by a paper. In one strip, Monty gets out a blacklight poster and a lava lamp and puts Led Zeppelin on the stereo. As he muses over a missing key ingredient to his high school memories, a comic censor creeps up behind him with a mallet. When he names a bean bag chair as that ingredient, the censor puts down the mallet.
Other things that will always invite letters of complaint, according to Meddick, is the presence of a character smoking for no storyline reason. He said that recently Charles Schultz got some flak from readers when Snoopy was seen carrying a gun.
"Sometimes things go through that I wouldn't think would go through. I do them because of the practical joke side of me," he said.
"I'm always writing with an ear to keep things open-ended enough so that no one can say, 'Hey, that's offensive!' You have to inject your own thinking to make it offensive is what I try to do, like a double entendre. You have to bring something to it."
He also compared syndication to drawing for a university newspaper. Though there is much more freedom there, one encounters different reactions. When his male main character declared himself an average Wash U student, women were offended that the average Wash U student was a man. "I've never had that happen in the professional world," said Meddick, "In college people are really sensitive to the politics."
As for the future, Meddick has Monty and Robotman on an oceanographic research vessel and Moondog (Monty's college buddy who has never mentally left college) goes on a date with a woman recovering from double eye surgery. With the distraction of the holidays, Jim modestly declared there to be a few lame gags coming up. But as he stated, "I'd rather see a strip fall down trying to do something bizarre than get away with something simple." Amen to that.