Be Careful What You Wish For
It’s a cliché you hear all the time, especially in fantasy movies where someone makes a wish and – oh no! – the result isn’t what they hoped.
I experienced that feeling IRL, as the kids say, when I was an editor at Welsh Publishing Group in the early 1990s. I’ve written about Welsh before, but as a quick reminder, they published magazines for kids starring licensed properties. A partial list of titles I edited would include Disney’s DuckTales, Superman and Batman Magazine, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I also edited special projects like a Pinocchio one-shot timed to the movie’s home video release; three activity magazines starring the mascots of General Mills cereals; a Ren & Stimpy magazine; a Tromafilms magazine that was completed but never printed; an issue of the annual Little League yearbook; and the souvenir magazine for Woodstock ’94. (More on that last one another time.)
Oh, and I wrote four one-page comic strips that ran on the back of Teddy Grahams cookies to the tune of four million copies each.
Nearly all of the kids’ magazines were highly formatted: 32 pages each, with specific departments, stories, puzzle and activity pages all tuned to the characters and their fans. The magazines were published quarterly, which meant my workload averaged out to about one magazine each month.
Sometime in 1990 my boss called me into her office and said that the company had two new licenses, and due to my workload at the time, she needed me to take on one of them. The two licenses were for The Simpsons and Garfield.
I had never been a particular fan of Garfield. Meanwhile, I loved The Simpsons and had watched the series from day one (“Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire”). I never missed an episode. In those pre-streaming days, that meant occasionally setting the VCR and hoping for the best. Naturally, I chose The Simpsons.
A flurry of activity followed. We brainstormed editorial concepts, designed big presentation boards, and before long, we – myself, my boss, the publisher, design director and a couple of others – all jetted to Los Angeles. The next day, we met on the Fox lot, where I saw Mel Brooks at a distance, which is better than not seeing him at all. We set up in a big conference room and made our presentation to Matt Groening and his team. They liked what they saw, and pretty soon we were back on the East coast and jumping into action on the newly named Simpsons Illustrated magazine.
(Side note: When the news of the magazine’s existence broke in the trades, we were slapped with a cease and desist from Sports Illustrated, which warned us in no uncertain terms that we were never to call our magazine “SI.” No problem.)
The first issue would include a poster of all the denizens of Springfield plus a newsprint replica of “The Springfield Shopper” newspaper. But the road from presentation to finished product turned out to be unexpectedly bumpy. Matt Groening’s creative directors had approval over the content, and they didn’t like much of anything once we started transforming those features from concepts to real stories with text, illustrations, and layouts.
We compromised and made changes. As the deadlines grew closer, the creative directors grumbled but allowed us to finalize the pages and, eventually, go to press. The debut issue went on sale in April 1991, with me listed as editor.
By the time we started work on the second issue a couple of things were clear: First, we were going to have to come up with a lot of ideas just to get enough past the creative directors to fill the magazine; and second, those creative directors wanted to be in charge.
After one more issue as editor, I was told that Matt’s team now had the equipment they needed to edit the magazine themselves, and so I would be moved over to another project. Simpsons Illustrated went on to run a total of nine issues plus one 3-D annual that you may remember if you bought a package of Butterfingers in the early 1990s.
That other project was, of course, Garfield Magazine.
I decided to make the best of things and dive into the world of Garfield, mostly by watching the “Garfield and Friends” cartoon on TV. The cartoon was written almost entirely by Mark Evanier, and knowing his writing style from comics helped me absorb the attitude and comedy stylings of the self-proclaimed lazy, lasagna-loving, Monday-hating cat. I came in late and took over for a freelance editor, so I missed out on the presentation process, but I quickly learned that Jim Davis’s team in Indiana was open to all sorts of ideas. Not only that, but they would take our concepts, improve them, and add great art. I found the covers charming, and I was delighted to learn that more than half of the magazine’s readers were girls. And I found that there was more to Garfield than I knew – like, the cliches about him being lazy and disliking Nermal and Odie were all in his own head. His dialogue is all an internal monologue – thoughts, not spoken words.
On this series I got to write some activity / puzzle pages, and I was especially happy with the USDA Food Pyramid parody and a page of puzzles that don’t exactly work the way you’d expect, both below.
I edited five issues of Garfield Magazine, and each was a pleasure to work on. I never did interact with Jim Davis, but his team was so generous and fun that I didn’t mind.
Was there something I could have done differently? I don’t think so. There wasn’t a way to know up front what it would be like to work on Simpsons Illustrated, but when it all blew up, I went on to a better experience than I could have imagined.