Wednesday, September 15, 1999
Artist of the 'Black Lagoon'
Children's series cartoonist has a lot on his Lebanon drawing board
BY OWEN FINDSEN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
On a peaceful country road near Lebanon, there's a black lagoon. It looks like a small farm pond, nearly dry from the summer drought. It's in front of an attractive brick ranch house with a pretty lawn and lots of flowers.
But it must be a black lagoon, because it is here, in this house, that creatures from the black lagoon are spawned.
If you're a kid you know all about them: The School Nurse From the Black Lagoon, The Cafeteria Lady From the Black Lagoon, and all the rest of those people at the local grade school who turn out to be not as bad as you imagined them to be.
“They come out every fall,” said Jared Lee, the artist who draws the creatures in a popular series of children's books. “The School Bus Driver From the Black Lagoon is the new one. I make the drawings and the writer is Mike Thaler in Portland, Ore. He's pretty prolific.
“It's the same kid in all the books, and it always starts the same — "I hear there's a new bus driver,' "I hear there's a new cafeteria lady' — and then his imagination runs wild.
“We've sold close to 4 million copies of the Black Lagoon series since the first one, The Teacher From the Black Lagoon, came out in 1981. We just found out we sold two more, so there will be a lot more creatures.”
Big-name clients
The tall, lanky 56-year-old cartoonist leans back on the stool at his drawing board, as relaxed and laid back as if he was lying on a sofa. Light pop music plays quietly in the background.
“If you ask kids on the street from age six to 10, most of them will have heard about these books. That's why Scholastic Press still publishes them.
“But I do a lot of other stuff too. I've done the cover of the L.L. Bean catalog.I've just finished a job for Hefty bags that will be in all the national magazines. I have different things going for me. We have our own line of products. I do tons of artwork.”
It all comes from the drawing board in the studio built on the side of the house he's lived in since 1972. On the drawing board there's an ink drawing of a comical orchestra and next to it a rough sketch of the same image. “I do posters. I do a lot of advertising. This is for a trade ad. I sent the sketch to the client for approval. They only changed the way the flute player is holding the flute. I'm finishing the inking now and then I'll add colors.”
The wall above the drawing board is filled with glamorous portraits of his wife, P.J., and his two grown daughters. Other walls in the room are covered with book covers and other publications and products produced by Mr. Lee.
“As with most illustrators or artists, I started very young — 6 years old — and never grew out of it. When I was 6, I had Bright's disease, a kidney disease. The doctor had me stay home for a year, and I did a lot of drawing. It's not that I could draw Donald Duck real good. It's that I could create my own little world.
“I hear a lot of people saying my kid can draw Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse. I'm not impressed. I'd like to see someone who created their own mouse. That's what I love about this. You're the director of your own movie.”
Started at Gibson
Mr. Lee grew up in Van Buren, a town of 800 residents in northeast Indiana. His parents drove him to Indianapolis for art classes at the John Herron Art School. He graduated from Butler University with a bachelor's degree in advertising and spent two years in the army as post artist at Fort Hood, Texas.
“When I was in the army, I did a lot of free-lance work at night, and I discovered that I was interested in doing greeting cards. A greeting card company will hire you and all you do is draw all day. I didn't want to work in advertising. I didn't want to be a designer. I just wanted to draw. Gibson Greetings hired me in Cincinnati and I worked for them for 13 months. Then I started free-lancing, and I've been doing it ever since.”
P.J. rushes through the studio on her way to the office room behind the studio. A furry Shetland sheep dog named Ginger trots at her heels and takes a sniff around the room. They leave quickly, careful not to disturb Mr. Lee and what he calls his “magic fingers.”
“My day is spent right here, and I like being alone. We have an office and warehouse in Middletown, and I go there once a week or so. The office used to be here, and some times during our busy season we would have four or five people going in and out.
“I got too involved. I liked the action but then again I didn't. I found it was taking me longer to get my work done.
“You stay focused when you're alone. When your working on this, you actually become part of that page ... like a good actor gets lost in his role. That's how I feel about artwork. I'm the director of the play.
“The fax machine opened the door to New York. You can live here and work locally but my goal is to work nationally. I like doing my own wheeling and dealing and my own quoting. I like that part of the business. I like the nitty gritty before the drawing starts. It's just part of the business.”
The business involves far more than the creatures series.
“Mike and I also do books like Cream of Creature from the School Cafeteria, and the Bully Brothers. We've got the Happily Ever Laughter series with Schmoe White and the Seven Dorfs, Hansel and Pretzel, The Princess and the Pea-no and Cinderella Bigfoot, but it's the Black Lagoon series that people really know us for.”
Mr. Lee also produces his own line of funny greeting cards, T-shirts, coffee mugs, cute stuffed animals and coloring books “geared to the horses and the equine business. I've had horses since I was 9. We used to raise them in Indiana. We had close to a hundred head. We have four horses right now. They're out in the barn.
“We used to go to tack shops and they sold everything with a picture of a horse on it but it was all so serious. So we started this business. We have reps all over the country. We sell wholesale probably in 1,500 stores throughout U.S. in Canada and in Europe. It's a very targeted market.”
Classic work space
Mr. Lee's drawing board is the classic cartoonist's work space: a board, a lamp, pens and brushes and a bottle of India ink, the same tools cartoonists have been using for over a century. The only computer is a new one in the office, used for business, not for art.
His drawings are distinctive. When you see one you know it's a Jared Lee. “I don't have a style. It's just the way I draw, and it's what art directors are looking at when they call me for a job. On the horse line, I do a lot of T-shirts, so I have a billboard look. I use a big fat line and flat colors so it can be seen from a distance. In my other work, I use a thin line and I don't use flat colors.
“What we want to do now is to get a Saturday morning TV show. We're trying to get The Bully Brothers on TV. We've had contacts with ABC and CBS, but nothing has worked out so far. Hopefully, I still think were going to get on the air with it.
“I really want a TV show. It might be on for six weeks or six years, but I want a shot at it. When you're on TV, you sell so many more books.”
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Artist of the 'Black Lagoon'
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