You may have wondered, as we did, if LEADERSHIP cartoonists actually look like their characters. The answer is no-well, not exactly. Bron Smith’s head isn’t shaped like a cactus, Mary Chambers doesn’t have several chins, and Ed Koehler’s hair doesn’t look like a Brillo pad in a wind tunnel. So in that respect they aren’t as we had imagined. But they are funny-if not funny looking.
Recently, seven popular contributors to LEADERSHIP’s humor gathered for what Mary Chambers’s husband, Tim, termed “the first Christian cartoonists’ convention in two thousand years of church history.” The LEADERSHIP editors joined them for the historic occasion and came away with new appreciation for the creativity, humor, and Christian spirit of these gifted individuals.
Knowing how much you enjoy their work (If we hear one more “Oh, LEADERSHIP articles are fine, but it’s the cartoons we love,” we’re going to take drawing lessons!), we decided to introduce you to some of the people whose cartoons are taped to your study door.
Associate editor Jim Berkley wrote the profiles, and to give you better insight into their twisted . . . er, talented minds, we asked each cartoonist to draw a self-portrait, which you see with their photos. Mary Chambers worked into the night that evening to capture the gang in the accompanying group portrait.
Mary Chambers
“I had never met another cartoonist until today,” Mary confessed at the gathering. “I’ve always wondered how other people cartoon. I’ve never had any formal art training, so when I was told to bring a portfolio to this meeting, I wondered, What’s a portfolio? I keep my drawings in an olive oil can.”
That’s Mary Chambers-friendly, self-effacing, delightfully candid. And tremendously popular with LEADERSHIP readers. Her portrait of a preacher practicing a fiery “Brimstone!” in front of a mirror captured national honors a few years ago from the Evangelical Press Association.
Mary, Tim, and their four young children are well along in converting what Mary called “a pitiful old house” in Alba (outside Joplin), Missouri, into their home. Tim now divides his time between ministering and nursing, but back in his school days, Mary’s cartoons provided some of the diaper money.
Although she’s now been published in several other magazines, Mary’s first cartoons appeared in LEADERSHIP. Her father, Christian Church minister Boyce Mouton, talked her into drawing his ideas. Before long, Mary was coming up with her own gags. It came naturally for her.
“My father, my father-in-law, my husband, and my brother are ministers,” she explained. “I guess a lot of the people I bat ideas around with live through the ups and downs of church life all the time. You get together, and ideas start building. The humor just emerges.”
Tim added, “It’s a great way to make fun of the members of her family!”
The honor of being parodied isn’t confined to her family, however. “My brother will look at one of my cartoons and say, ‘That’s So-and-so, isn’t it?’ ” Mary smiled and added, “I’ll say, ‘Shhhhh!’ At times, my father has feared for my life had my cartoons gotten into the wrong hands!”
But Mary can laugh at herself. She described one cartoon she drew for Partnership: “It was a self-portrait of sorts, a woman in church with several little kids. One’s trying to pull up her skirt, one’s undressing, and one’s crawling away underneath the pew. Clear at the other end of the pew, someone’s holding out the Communion tray, expecting her to come and get it.
“Sometimes, I’d judge other women because their kids were so out of control. I’d think, I know what THAT kid needs! When I had children of my own, I changed my tune. Now I say, ‘Well, they’ve been playing with the elders’ kids!’ “
“I cut my own teeth on the back of the pews,” Mary said. “But there came a point when I noticed some of my ‘Christian teeth’ were getting loose. I started going through all the things I’d been taught and asking, ‘Do I believe that?’ I had to decide whether a belief was something I believed or something my parents believed.
“The thing my parents taught me was not so much what to believe but where to look. In the last ten years I’ve found my faith-my faith, not one handed to me. I have my permanent teeth now, and I can say about Christianity, ‘I believe.’ “
Mary’s church benefits from her talents. “There is such a need for artwork in churches,” she said, “an incredible range from dart boards for the carnival to illustrations for newsletters and Sunday school. I’ve done a lot of things like coloring books for children. It’s so much fun.”
Being so intimately involved with the church, Mary also understands the down side. “We’ve come through some hard times in our congregation the last year,” she said, “and many things haven’t been that funny to me. People keep coming to me with ideas, and they’ll say, ‘Isn’t this funny?’ And I’ll think, No, that’s not funny; I just lived through it last week!”
After LEADERSHIP publishes cartoons, the cartoonists retain the copyright, and they greatly appreciate people requesting permission for reprints. “My favorite request came from a fellow who called from a church in California,” said Mary. “He said, ‘I really enjoy your work.’ And, being gracious, I said, ‘Oh, thank you so much.’ Then he asked if he could reprint some of my work in the church newsletter, and I told him to feel free to help himself to whatever he wanted.
” ‘Don’t you need to know which ones?’ he asked. I said, ‘If you’d like; it might be interesting.’ So he read off a caption. ‘That was Rob Portlock’s [another LEADERSHIP cartoonist],’ I told him. He read me another, and I said, ‘That was Portlock’s, too.’ He read me a third. ‘That also was Portlock’s,’ I informed him. Then with mock indignation I said, ‘You’ve been enjoying someone else’s work!’ He was mortified. It was one of the highlights of my career.”
Doug Hall
“I was a church janitor when I was in high school,” admitted Doug Hall. “It was a large church, and as janitor, you get to see everything-such as the different side of people who get locked out of their meeting rooms. You empty the pastor’s wastebasket, and ‘Oh my! What’s that I find?’ It gave me the backstage view.”
Doug, whose mother is a Christian education pastor and father a seminary professor, is no newcomer to church life. He became a Christian at ten, attended a Christian college, and served a stint editing Vital Christianity, the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) magazine. Now, rather than pushing a broom, he’s pushing a pen as a professional cartoonist. You may soon find “Simple Beasts,” his recently syndicated cartoon strip, in your newspaper. He and his wife, Cindy, live in Silver Spring, Maryland, and attend Third Street Church of God in Washington, D.C.
Doug is seriously funny. His strategy: “A good cartoonist really tries to understand people-why they do the things they do, even the irksome things. Once you understand, then it’s easy to forgive-and to find the humor in the situation. That’s what mellows cartoons, takes the jagged edges off sarcasm or parody.
“When I get an idea, I sit down and work on it with the white page just staring up at me. Often I come up with two or three horrible ways to take the idea, but I find if I stick with it and push past that barrier of stereotypical humor, there are better ideas beyond. The hard thing is staying on task past that discouraging beginning.”
Moving a concept from “pretty good” to “right on target” is Doug’s desire. “I once read an article that suggested that those who want to be cartoonists should draw their first five hundred cartoons and throw them in the wastebasket. [Some cartoonists cruelly suggested that the LEADERSHIP editors perform this service for them.] In a way that makes sense. Lots of times the ideas on the very surface are superficial, and they have so much less to say than the ones we really have to work on.”
Doug’s character Mrs. Thundermuffin comes to mind. This grandmotherly type has been seen standing on the pastor’s desk pulling his tie to get her way. After first invoking the Fifth Amendment when we asked if Mrs. Thundermuffin were anybody he knows, Doug replied that she “would be a composite of many of the strong personalities I’ve encountered, who on the surface seem meek and mild but pack a punch when you get right down to it. They’re the real power in some churches.”
Doug’s cartoon pastors, however, are no wimps. His own favorite cartoon depicts a stern pastor leaning over the pulpit, telling his congregation, “God loves you, but don’t let it go to your head.”
“Sometimes,” Doug explained, “that message does come across-‘Remember that it’s there, but don’t take it too far.’ We have a hard time accepting God’s grace.”
Doug doesn’t want his cartoons to be page filler. “Candor is one of the elements of good cartooning,” he said. “I don’t want people to say about my cartoons, ‘I’m not sure that’s the way things are.’ I try to be honest about my own struggles and the struggles I see my brothers and sisters having. Then if somehow I can make those struggles humorous, they’re easier to take.”
To test his effectiveness, Doug has a benevolent critic-his wife. “When I finish a batch of cartoons, I give them to Cindy. Then I go into the next room. If I hear at least two chuckles and a snort, I consider it a successful batch.”
Ed Koehler
The Book of Romans and some people who cared enough to share the gospel with him transformed Ed Koehler from a nominal churchgoer into an active layman. Here’s how Ed tells the story:
“Although I was raised Catholic, my faith wasn’t personalized until I was 19. Following high school, for some reason, I had become extremely concerned with reality. I wasn’t quite sure, believe it or not, that I existed. It sounds silly now, but this was a big question for me. I’d wake up in the middle of the night thinking, Am I here? For years I didn’t really live; I just existed. But then I began to worry that I wasn’t even doing that!
“God did what comes most natural to him: he stretched out his arm to save, leading me to the Bible. In Romans the idea of free salvation began to make a lot of sense. Soon after that I became a Christian. Or, in keeping with my Calvinist beliefs, the Holy Spirit opened my eyes. Through my wife, Judy, I wound up in the Presbyterian Church in America, in which I presently serve as an elder.”
Such service often provides Ed material for his cartoons. In fact, it sometimes gets him in trouble. “A couple of times,” Ed said, “people have been quick to point out that the cartoons originated in our congregation, and it gets a little ticklish. One man actually seemed offended.
“It involved the first cartoon LEADERSHIP used. It showed one person sitting in a large sanctuary and some new people being welcomed at the back. The cutline said: ‘Welcome to First Church, where we’re more concerned about quality than quantity.’
“The man said to me, ‘I certainly hope that’s not talking about our church!’ With all the innocence I could muster, I said, ‘Ohhh, no.’ The building, though, did look a little like our church . . .”
Although being active in his church and working for Concordia Publishing House in St. Louis, Missouri, certainly provide ideas and a strong dose of reality for Ed’s cartoons, some ideas simply pop into his mind. His creative technique? “Mostly I sit at the drawing board and start doodling, trying to come up with silly-looking people and pictures. Hopefully, somewhere in the process of doodling and thinking about the church, I come up with a cutline that brings it all together.”
Ed’s experience teaching children while still a young Christian provided the idea for his favorite cartoon. “I was about 21 years old, just beginning to attend church with my girl friend (now my wife), and they asked me to teach Sunday school. I did enjoy meeting the children, but I had no idea how to cope with a roomful of wild children-who probably knew more about the Bible than I did.
“It’s odd that immediately after you become a Christian or get involved in a church, one of the first things they want you to do is teach a children’s Sunday school class-probably one of the toughest jobs in Christendom. ‘Aw, he’s been a Christian a few hours. Let’s have him teach!’
“That’s why I particularly like my cartoon in which a man is climbing up a rough mountain, and a guru standing in front of a group of children at the top says, ‘Welcome, O weary searcher for truth. Have you ever worked with kids?’ “
Ed draws for more than laughs. “With my cartoons, I’d like to see the result that we would decrease that Christ might increase. What I mean is that we take some of the things about ourselves-our subculture, how we dress or talk or hang onto traditions-a little less seriously. As we begin to chuckle at ourselves, then, hopefully, we’ll take Christ and his gospel and the kingdom with a lot more seriousness.”
Ed is grateful to Judy not only for providing him with a church (and two daughters), but also for her assistance with his cartoons. “I usually type his gag lines,” she said, and then with slight exaggeration added, “but he pays no attention to my advice.”
Ed set us straight. “She has a degree in communication, so she’s a wonderful editor of my verbose gag lines. I’ll have paragraphs, and she chops them down to the bare minimum.” And then with a twinkle in his eye, Ed couldn’t resist adding, “Then it’s up to me to try to reinsert some humor!”
Bron Smith
In his church in Puyallup (pronounced Pew-AL-up), Washington, Bron Smith shares the children’s sermon duties. Usually he gets time to prepare, but not always. “One Sunday the youth pastor came up to me before the service and said, ‘All set with the children’s sermon?’ I looked at him wide-eyed, and then Jacquie, my wife, remembered she had forgotten to remind me it was my Sunday. So the youth pastor asked, ‘Well, are you gonna wing it or am I?’
“I told him, ‘Tell you what: Just before it’s time to do the children’s sermon, I’ll nod yes or no.’ I didn’t get a lot out of the early part of the service as my mind raced to come up with something, but I finally nodded yes. I used a series of vocal sound effects that went with various animals. I said something about the traits of the various animals, amused the kids with the sound effects, and then told how those traits were God’s special way of taking care of the animals. Then I said God gave us a soul as a special way of adapting so that we can spend an eternity with him.”
When we pressed Bron about the sound effects, he demonstrated a couple for us. We can’t spell them for you, but let’s just say that one sounded like a cross between an owl taking flight and a motor scooter with a flat tire.
Such creativity is typical of multitalented Bron. Now a free-lance illustrator and the father of two sons of his own, he achieved Northwest fame as “Captain SeaTac,” the host of a children’s show on a Tacoma television station.
Sequim (pronounced Skwim-really, we’re not making these up!), Washington, where Bron’s father is a long-time church elder, was Bron’s childhood home. After a tour of duty in Vietnam, he settled in Los Angeles, where he began his work as an illustrator. There he became involved in a Christian and Missionary Alliance church in Pasadena. He has been active in churches ever since, teaching and leading in worship.
Bron enjoys sharing his talents with budding cartoonists. For the last few years he has taught cartooning for Sunday school teachers at the Greater Tacoma Sunday School Convention. “Every year I have three or four cartooning workshops. They’ve been well attended, because people like to get a shake-and-bake cartooning course. Then they can go into their Sunday school classes and do whatever’s necessary to increase the attention span of their students.”
Bron has two favorite places to go for inspiration: a coffee shop and his parents’ orchard. “Maybe I’ve got a morbid sense of humor, but the last batch of cartoons I sent LEADERSHIP all got rejected,” Bron told the other cartoonists, who all laughed a knowing laugh. “To conceive them, I went out in my parents’ orchard. The way I do it is to take my mind into the sanctuary and examine with my creative imagination everything I envision. I try to twist it around-such as the pastor doing something familiar, like saying, ‘Next Sunday, I’ll be on vacation,’ but his wife is the only one in the congregation. I’ll tumble those ideas until nothing more comes to mind. Then I take my thoughts into the boardroom and try to juxtapose situations. If you have a sense of humor and sensitivity to the ridiculous, something funny will click.”
Then Bron turned to the editors: “Of course the ultimate judges are these four people here. I’m glad they enjoy what I call zany art. Only in the last few years have I been able to draw the way I really enjoy-and still find a Christian market for my work. It’s a rare privilege to be able to use an out-of-the-ordinary gift for God’s glory-and for it to be a ministry.”
Rob Suggs
When Rob Suggs was in seminary, he had a recurring fear that he would sabotage his own sermons by hesitancy and indecision. “I was afraid I’d so want people to see both side of issues that I would never really say anything strongly,” Rob confessed.
That fear helped Rob produce one of our favorite cartoons. A despondent preacher sits at his desk in front of a plunging attendance graph. His associate is consoling him. The cutline: “I’m no expert, Joe, but perhaps you shouldn’t close each sermon with ‘But then again, what do I know?’ “
“I couldn’t decide if it was really funny,” Rob recalled, “but since it was so autobiographical, I was pleased when LEADERSHIP used it. I like my cartoons to be funny and say something at the same time.” But Rob cherishes no pretense.
“In the great scheme of the kingdom of God, the work we do is rather insignificant. It has little to do with evangelism or missions or anything truly important. However, the Bible presents mankind in a totally realistic way, more so than any other piece of literature. Maybe as cartoonists we’re helping affirm the fact that man is fallen-and yet there is hope. That’s where the laughter is. It wouldn’t be funny if there weren’t hope. We look at life from the perspective of redemption despite being fallen.”
Rob stopped at this point and asked, “Am I sounding too pretentious?”
Somebody responded, “But then again, what do I matter?”
Being the product of a southern church subculture, Rob considers himself at somewhat of a disadvantage. “I’m a Southern Baptist,” he said, “and as such was saved in the womb! And because we’re such a big denomination, I’ve found I tend to think the way Southern Baptists do things is the way everyone else does them. I’ve had to broaden my terminology for a wider audience.
“As a member of large churches-four or five thousand members-I always enjoyed hanging out with the staff members. Other kids liked football players and policemen and cowboys; I liked youth directors, church janitors, secretaries-whoever would talk to me. They helped get me interested in the church subculture.”
After eight years in a family manufacturing business, Rob joined the ranks of the church-employed in 1987, serving as a singles pastor. He’s now splitting his time between cartooning and singles ministry at First Baptist Church of Jonesboro, Georgia. He and Gayle, his wife of a year, live in Atlanta.
Being involved in church work has changed his outlook: “For me, most of the fun in cartooning is not the drawing process, which is rather agonizing; it’s that process in which I try, like a computer hacker, to tap into the unique thought processes of a pastor. I think, What would be the frustrations of someone on church staff? That’s hard when you haven’t been there.
“I used to sit in the pew as a cartoonist (They haven’t yet made us sit anywhere else!) and tend to visualize the pastor as someone who stands behind the pulpit, because that’s all I’d seen. But during the last year on a church staff, I’ve begun to see things from behind the scenes.
“One of my recent cartoons had to do with all the ministers in town gathering in an abandoned warehouse on their day off, until they were found by a band of villagers and their dogs. I never would have thought of that if I hadn’t experienced Mondays when the phone kept ringing, everyone assuming I want to continue to talk about church work instead of cartoon on my day off. So I drew that cartoon out of frustration.”
How else has being an “insider” in church life changed his viewpoints? “I think I’ve become less pointed-especially from being in counseling situations and seeing people as individuals. That’s made me think twice about some kinds of humor.
“For instance, some of the singles in my group are 95 years old-at least-and one of our favorite stereotypes is little old ladies. I’ve begun to see them as unique individuals rather than stereotypes. I’ll probably continue to use the stereotype from time to time, but knowing some grand old ladies will make me use it more carefully.”
Cartoonists learn to dispense knowledge of their talents cautiously, as Rob found out a few years ago. “One summer when I was a youth director, word got out that I could do chalktalk Bible stories for the children. I was immediately drafted for vacation Bible school. I’d walk into a room, the teacher would say what the Bible story was for that day-such as Noah’s ark-and I’d have to tell the story and draw it. After the first couple of classrooms that morning, I began to pray, ‘Dear Lord, don’t let the next class be studying Malachi!’ After that, I began to keep it a secret that I was a cartoonist.”
Sorry, Rob. Word’s out.
Larry Thomas
When LEADERSHIP was launched in 1980, cartoons-effective, insider-perspective cartoons-were to be a mainstay. But there was one problem: Where do you find such cartoons?
Larry Thomas was one of the answers. The launch team came up with many of the first cartoon ideas, and they counted on Larry to make them work visually. He was an obvious choice, well known from his work with Christian publishers in the area.
But Larry was a little wary about the arrangement. “I wasn’t too impressed with what I’d seen of Christian cartooning. I expected it to be a rehash of dreary, trite humor, badly drawn. But that’s not at all what happened. I’ve seen such growth in the LEADERSHIP cartoonists. They’ve displayed drawing skills that match what I find in the secular world.”
Larry lives in Elgin, Illinois, with his wife, Jeanne, and two daughters. There he operates his own graphic arts studio. Like many others, Larry grew up in the church, “but I didn’t particularly buy into it. But through various experiences, I discovered the kind of faith I had wasn’t real, and somehow I was going to have to develop one I could live with. Finally I did find my faith, surprisingly enough, when I was teaching a Sunday school class. It was crazy: I was the one who supposedly had some answers for the kids, yet only in that experience did the facts finally mean something for me.
“What I now do in the way of humor comes out of what I know and can appreciate and love. I’m not out to make fun of people; I hope to be laughing with them at the things we all recognize as funny.”
Larry provided an example from his own teaching experience: “I once had a class with twenty-eight seventh- and eighth-grade boys in a room a little larger than a broom closet. I remember how inept I felt as a teacher as my style swung between lenience that led to pandemonium and Nazi-style control by intimidation.
“So I drew a cartoon with the teacher utilizing what looked to be a subtle disciplinary measure: under each kid was a trap door leading to places unknown if they but opened their mouths. That was fun to draw because I thought that teachers would definitely understand. I was actually making fun of myself.”
For Larry, that gentle, often self-effacing feel is one of the distinguishing marks of Christian humor. “We’re not trying to hurt someone when we expose the humor in some event or relationship. Ultimately we’re using humor for all the right purposes: so that people can enjoy what’s around us. We don’t try with a feeling of superiority to stick it to people.”
Most cartoonists labor in obscurity, their pens and drawing boards (and occasional royalty checks) their only companions. Months after ink was lovingly applied to paper, people open a magazine and break into laughter. But the cartoonist doesn’t often receive the satisfaction of hearing it. Living nearby and being able to deliver his cartoons to the LEADERSHIP offices in person gives Larry a unique pleasure: actually hearing the guffaws produced by his work.
“I get immediate feedback. When they like it, that’s great. Of course, it also can be difficult when I get the feeling I should have left some of them home. But talking with real people makes it easier than getting it through the mail.”
Jeanne offers Larry a primary screening method. “She’s kind about the cartoons she doesn’t like,” Larry noted. “She has a sound that goes ‘Ummmmmmm.’ When I hear that, I know it’s a loser. I’ve got piles of ummmmmm cartoons at home.”
Ron Wheeler
“I’m still searching for the perfect place to be creative,” Ron Wheeler lamented. “I can’t find it.”
He has, however, found a career in Christian cartooning. But getting to where he is now-husband to Cindy, father, active churchman-wasn’t all that easy. Ron described the bumps and turns:
“When I was growing up, my family went through a church split and then just didn’t go to church. I came to Christ later at a low point in my life when I really needed him. I had been working in the business world, but things fell apart there. So I went back to the one thing I knew I could do: cartooning. I’d had a successful comic strip in college, so I moved to Kansas City to camp on the doorstep of a syndicate there to sell my strip. After initial interest, they told me it ‘wasn’t marketable.’ That was the low ebb of my life.
“I’d begun going to church and praying by that point, but I didn’t have much understanding of who Jesus was. I was trying to tug him on a leash, saying, ‘Make me a cartoonist. I want to go this way!’ But circumstances pushed me to the point where I said, ‘God, I give up.’ The next day I applied for a job sweeping floors at a company across the street from my apartment, because I couldn’t find work anywhere. It turned out to be an audio-visual production company. When they asked me what I’d been doing and I told them about my comic strip, they said, ‘We’ve been looking for a cartoonist for three months.’ They sent me home to do a test drawing and hired me later that day. I’ve been doing cartoon work full-time ever since.
“I think God wanted to answer that prayer for me to be a cartoonist, but he wanted something more. He wanted me. And he couldn’t get me until I came to the point where I had no other choice but to submit to him. It’s been exciting to see how God moves, opening doors where he wants me to go.”
Besides LEADERSHIP cartoons, Ron has many other irons in the fire, including a regular cartoon strip in Teens Today, a weekly Nazarene youth magazine. Through his work, Ron hopes to accomplish more than a few laughs. Ron caught an interesting angle on spiritual gifts recently in the cartoon he picked as his favorite for LEADERSHIP. One man is shaking another’s hand and saying, “Hi! I’m the chairman pro tem. of the church bulletin selection subcommittee to the worship commission. What’s your gift?” With a friendly grin, Ron, an elder in his local church, has successfully kidded us about one of our churchly idiosyncrasies.
Ron has another trick for finding church humor. “Frustration,” he claimed, “serves as a good indicator of hidden humor. If you’re frustrated over a situation, chances are you can relieve that tension by laughing at it. So I recall frustrating situations from the past and see where in them the humor is lurking.”
Where does cartooning stand in the great scheme of things? “Cartoons are a tremendous communication vehicle. We live in a sensory-oriented culture-the information age-so there’s a lot of competition for people’s attention. Cartoons can more than hold their own in that marketplace of attention. Everybody likes to laugh. And no matter what their age, people read cartoons, whether they admit it or not. It’s the first thing they read. So I’d like to see more Christian cartoons. I see cartooning as a way to bring back values so lacking in our world today.”
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
