Contribution to “The Book of Weirdo”
Robert Crumb was shown a few examples of my weekly comic strip in the East Bay Express by Terry Boyce, a cartoonist who contributed her own Peter Penis strips to Weirdo. She later became a devout Christian of some kind and renounced cartooning, and perhaps also penises, in a long angry letter she wrote to Weirdo. Which, of course, they printed. In any case, Crumb ran a few of my weekly Express strips. They were formatted horizontally, unlike a comics page, and he ran them one-up on a page, sideways for maximum size and confusion. Was it issue #6? I haven’t the energy to look it up right now. The one with the odd photo-collage cover, “Toys in Babeland,” I think it was called. “Very Devo,” I thought at the time.
Later, when he was stepping down as editor of Weirdo, Crumb sent me a postcard, which I still have pinned up on my wall. In it he was kind enough to say that “I think you are probably the best ‘young’ cartoonist to come into print on the West Coast in recent years!” He also said he would pass on my work to Peter Bagge with a “high recommendation,” but I never heard from Bagge and Weirdo never ran my work again. In later years, I was introduced to Crumb at several cartoonist get-togethers and he seemed not to know who I was or care.
And that’s my Weirdo experience! Truth be told, I never really cared for the magazine when Crumb was editing. Too many weirdos, I guess. Bagge’s version was much more to my taste, though maybe this is my version of Groucho Marx’s old joke about not wanting to join a club that would accept me as a member. Anyway, that editorial version of hardcore “outsider art” Crumb was pursuing was not for me. But I always bought it for his work, which was the best of his career, and maybe ever. Really, that’s the only reason anyone bought it, right?
About Terry Boyce: I didn’t know her very well. At that time, a man named Barry Gantt used to organize these semi-regular events called “The Loonies,” which would be hosted at some San Francisco bar, and cartoonists and writers were invited to show their portfolios, drink, and mingle. This is how I met most of the people in the local cartoon scene, including Terry and Dori Seda. It never occurred to me that Terry’s abrupt turn to Jesus may have been inspired by Dori’s death, though I suppose it’s possible. Everyone who knew Dori was shook up when it happened. I know I was. Apart from her rare talent as a cartoonist, she was a total sweetheart, with this great goofy laugh, and everyone loved her. The first time I met her (at one of these Loonies events) she was showing her portfolio, and interspersed with her marvelous drawings and cartoons were nude photos from her modeling work, which she (rather disingenuously, I thought) presented as just another aspect of her multi-faceted career. It certainly left an impression. Terry, not so much. All I knew was, she liked my work, lived in the East Bay, and drew penises.
When I decided to be a cartoonist, I realized I needed a better name. My given name is fine, but not memorable, and people always spell and pronounce my last name wrong… LaRat, Larue, Lariat, LaPrett, Laurent… Sometimes the L is mistaken for a C and I become Carrett. For years, my own paper the East Bay Express, mailed my contributor copies to Raymond Garrett! I needed something easy to remember and hard to misspell. Norman is something people tended to call me for some reason, and Dog is short and catchy, like Crumb (best cartoonist name ever!). And I think someone yells “Norman Dog!” as an insult in What’s Up Tiger Lily? What I didn’t realize is that people would call me “Norman the Dog,” which is so wrong. And if you Google “Norman Dog,” you get endless listings for something called “Clifford the Dog,” which should burn in Hell.