Portrait of the Cartoonist as a Middle-Aged Bear
An Interview with Tim Barela
By Ron Suresha
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Ron: You live in a fairly remote town, a far cry from Leonard and Larry's Melrose Avenue life.
Tim: We're not that remote: we do have a freeway running through the middle of town. That's why the town is here, because the freeway's here.
Ron: You've never really lived in West Hollywood?
Tim: No. Just visited, just passed through.
Ron: Yet you manage to depict your characters' lives with such dead-on cultural accuracy. How do you manage to stay in sync with what their lives would actually be like? For example, how did you get to know so much about what Leonard's Jewish family must be like?
Tim: Well, about the Jewish influence: as a child and into adulthood, my family has always had Jewish friends, neighbors - I had two Jewish brothers as employers - we even have Jewish neighbors here in Temecula now! So all these people have influenced me a great deal. When I invented the characters of Leonard and Larry, I knew that one of them had to be Jewish. It's just a reflection of my life experience.
Ron: Is there any conscious effort on your part to try to incorporate current events or political topics into the strip?
Tim: I like to do that, but it's difficult because I like to give myself a certain degree of lead time. I once read how Garry Trudeau actually reads the Congressional Record and he keeps right on top of current events. He only draws his comic strip something like two weeks ahead of the time it goes to press. I don't have that luxury, or at least I wouldn't want to be that way because I like to give myself much more lead time than that. If I tried to do something topical it wouldn't be topical any more.
Ron: You wouldn't want the pressure, nor would you want to be that topical?
Tim: Yes. It's really not a political strip. It's more about the relationships and the interactions of the characters. Yes, the politics and events in the world, insofar as it affects them, but it's not directly about politics. Besides, if I were going to be that topical and have that short a deadline, my editors and the art department at Frontiers would be tearing their hair out waiting for my next strip, wondering if it's going to be on time for the next deadline.
Ron: Aside from political content, in an ensemble strip like yours or Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For or Eric Orner's Ethan Green, there's an underlying feeling of the continuity and strength of gay community that comes across. Is this sense of community - a very Bearish one, at that - among your characters something you intended to achieve?
Tim: I've seen that a great deal in real people that I know, especially ones that do not have good relationships with their family, their parents. Their group of friends becomes their family and community. Although Leonard and Larry and everybody else in the strip enjoy really good relations with their parents and family, I do want to reflect this reality in the greater gay reality: how we come to depend on our friends as extended family, as community.
Ron: It seems that quite a few cartoonists admire your work. How do other writers influence your work?
Tim: I love Alison's and Eric's cartoons. I can't catch them regularly because I live way the hell out here in the country; the closest gay bookstore is about sixty miles away. I really don't get any gay or Bear publications. The most often I see Alison's strip is when my friend from Oslo sends me copies of the local gay newspaper from Norway, which publishes Dykes to Watch Out For on a regular basis. Unfortunately, it's all in Norwegian! So I can see her stuff but I just can't read it. I rarely see other cartoonists' stuff. I love their stuff when I see it but I don't really want other cartoonists to be that much of an influence on me. Nor do I read mainstream comic books. I don't identify with that whole scene at all. I just do my little thing. I draw my little comic strip, write my illustrated story, my Bearish soap opera, and I'm happy. And I hope I'm making other people happy.
Ron: Eric Orner said to me that he thought your story lines were "very engaging, compassionate, and insightful." I associate this comment to my feelings about Armistad Maupin's books. How has the Tales of the City series influenced your writing?
Tim: Tales of the City, I have to tell you, was a really significant influence. I was one of those obnoxious fans who used to go to poor Mr. Maupin's book signings every time he was in town. I've always wanted to apologize to Armistad, if I ever have the chance of seeing him again, for being one of those gushing fans in line at one of his book signings - because now I know what it's like! People do that to me. It's come back to haunt me. Not that I despise my fans - I appreciate them - but now I know what it's like, I understand what those exasperated expressions on his face were all about.
Anyways, Armistad's books were a great influence - I read the entire series - especially insofar as relating to the gay experience and extended families and relationships between friends and pulling together an ensemble cast and keeping it interesting and so on.
Ron: One of the great things about Leonard and Larry is that they actually age in real time. In the new book you have a fresh surge of childbearing that occurs within a nine-month period. More or less.
Tim: Well, I tried.
Ron: Is this abundance of new births significant?
Tim: It's significant to me in that I've gotten tired over the years of constantly hearing from the "religious right" that they're the only ones with "family values," that they're the only ones who know what raising children is all about. I guess that reflects my idea of extended family within a group of friends and the good relationships that my characters have with their families. This is a comic strip of family values. It just happens to be a strip about a lot of gay people, but we know about the importance of having families, having children, and raising them right. It's about standing up to all that bullshit from the religious right.
Besides, when I first started doing the comic strip, I knew I had to have this situation in play, because, after I first came out of the closet and started meeting people, I got to know so many people who had been married, who had children and families of their own, and I wanted to reflect that in the comic strip. Just about everybody else out there who was doing a gay comic strip out there was doing stuff like coming out stories and a lot of sexual innuendo type stuff, a lot of tricking and bar scenes and stuff like that. I wanted to have a completely different focus in my work.
Ron: You're rather modest in your depictions, not only graphically but also in terms of the kind of scenes you choose to include in the strip.
Tim: I don't want to be known for doing a sex strip. I do not want to be known as a cartoonist who does X-rated material. That will follow you around for the rest of your life. I'm very proud to say that I do a PG-rated comic strip. Occasionally, something might be a soft R, but never an X! Besides, I've always contended that, as in comedy, comics work better if you leave things up to the reader's imagination. I think that some things I've done in the past are sexier and more exciting because I don't show everything. I have gotten comments from readers saying that they also feel that way. So, I don't intend to change. You're not going to see full frontal nudity on any of the characters or any sexual scenes. Definitely no penetration!
Ron: Do you receive any responses or pressure from readers to spice things up?
Tim: Not really. Every once in a while, somebody will ask, "Have you ever drawn them . . . naked?" And no, I haven't.
I'll never forget doing a book signing with some other cartoonists who were in Gay Comix, up in West Hollywood's A Different Light bookstore. One of the other cartoonists did really explicit stuff. A friend of mine, who had come to see me at the book signing, gravitated over to this other guy along with all these other people who were crowded around him, looking at samples of his stuff, because it was very sexually explicit. And everybody was sort of ignoring me, including my friend! So I know that people expect to see that, they want to see that, but I want to do something different, I don't want to do the same thing as everybody else.
Ron: This sensibility is also reflected in the kinds of situations your characters get into. Or don't get into, as the case may be.
Tim: Yeah, they're a boring bunch. They're generally monogamous, they don't trick around. Like I said before, everyone else has tackled the open relationships and the tricking in bars and the one-night stands and lots of explicit sex - and I just want to tackle something else. These are boring, middle-aged guys who've settled into their boring, middle-aged monogamous existence, and they're happy and confident about who they are and what they are. So, my feeling is, let's move on from there and find the comedy in some other aspect of their existence.
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