NOTE: This is a text version (but not a verbatim transcript) of the 1995 Unions Seminar, with some
modifications and updates.
See the Unions Timeline for a chronological review.
People ask me all the time where the "Unions" name comes from, and I always say it's a long story, because the simplest answer inevitably leads to more questions. For those of you not familiar with the Unions, this page should give you a better idea of what they are all about, how they came into being, and why anyone would produce an extensive website about cartoon characters only a privileged few knew about...until now.
A Brief Unions History
The Unions date all the way back to 1973, when I was only two years old. At that early age, I had already developed a passion for drawing, and if anything in particular caught my eye, I would quickly doodle its likeness on paper. Needless to say, a toddler's imagination can be strange to adult eyes, and I had a definite fascination with the neighborhood service station signs we regularly walked by on our way to and from the supermarket.
The giant animated Union 76 sphere fascinated me, with its eye-catching revolutions and bright orange evening glow drawing attention from more than just the average motorist. With my imagination appropriately stirred, I began drawing the 76 sphere not as a moving sign mounted on a stationary pole, but as a full-fledged stick figure.
The other local oil company brands, such as Standard Oil of California (Chevron), Phillips, Shell, and Texaco, also made it into these primitive drawings, but Union always remained the center of attention. With the formation of this nuclear family, the Unions were born.
Before long, I started adding other characters, mostly based on simple geometric shapes (hey, remember, I was still two years old), and the Unions soon became a full-fledged gang in the Peanuts sense of the word. The rest of the 1970's would see extensive development via numerous drawings, picture books, and short stories, each depicting the Unions embarking on another fantastic adventure.
The idea of a large ensemble cast appeared at this time, as I introduced well over 100 characters, most of whom were quickly forgotten or eventually discarded. I also conducted my initial experiments with the comic strip medium, with mixed results.
But by 1981, I decided that a comic strip would indeed serve as the most viable medium for the Unions in terms of tracing and exploring their daily lives and exploits, as opposed to continuing with books full time and coming up with increasingly more contrived ways of getting the entire gang together for some big dramatic escapade. The modern day "Unions" comic strip debuted in book form only, not as something drawn on a daily basis, but at the same time, it consciously avoided the traditional DC and Marvel-esque colorized superhero comic book format. By late 1983, "the Unions" would become a bonafide daily comic strip, and I did one strip a day without fail through 1988.
The 1980's emphasized both publication and publicity, as the Unions reached new and larger audiences with more sophisticated books and other media. The founding of the Unions Membership Club in 1982 acknowledged the growing number of Unions fans, many of whom would become directly involved in the massive "NO SO FO" Super 8 movie project. Publication of Unions strips and cartoons in both elementary and high school student newspapers garnered unprecented attention. Meanwhile, self-publication and distribution of Unions books gave enthusiasts more tangible means of showing their interest, along with the mostly manual production and sale of assorted merchandise.
Currently, the Unions appear primarily in books and on higher quality merchandise such as silkscreened T-shirts, while the strip continues sporadically when time permits. Brand new endeavors focus primarily on desktop publishing and the ongoing development of this website.
Basic Unions Philosophies
The underlying idea I continually emphasize in the strip, broadly speaking, honors the slogan "Don't Think Trite," which I adopted in 1988. Execution, style, plot treatment, and other variables make "the Unions" nothing short of unique. This holds true whether a given storyline gets its inspiration from entirely bizarre and foreign concepts or follows a tried-and-true common theme of human existence.
While inspired in many ways by other strips during its development, "the Unions" has now transcended that simple characterization. It functions like no other strip in history, and that is for the best.
The strip demonstrates complexity and dichotomy within a unified whole. All characters and storylines do not interact on a regular basis, yet themes, approaches, visuals, and the mere fact that they are Unions tie everything together.
Themes: Ideas and Storylines
Despite its daily four-panel comic strip format, "the Unions" exists as a serial strip, something few syndicated strips ever do or do well. Lengthy and detailed storylines typically span 2-3 weeks. Few single strips can completely stand alone and be comprehensibly read and fully understood without any background knowledge, unlike the typical syndicated strip, which thrives on this format.
Most strip titles which do so must rely on lowbrow slapstick or shtick with throwaway gimmicks. This standard strategy proves very simple-minded and perpetually disregardable. Coming up with a good, effective punch line day in and day out poses extreme difficulty to cartoonists, and more often than not they fail miserably, often without realizing it.
The serial nature of "the Unions" also forces readers to pay close attention daily. Rewarding the audience for paying attention is a straightforward but seldom-used concept elsewhere.
Reader awareness as an ideal strongly discourages skimming over the strip the way people love to skim over the comics page. This doesn't mean that every strip contains a heavy-handed moral; nonetheless, one must read closely for maximum enjoyment.
The Unions' approach to humor assures us that humor is not a universal constant, something most strip cartoonists would find implausible. Inherent humor exists in the way the characters are drawn, but that does not mean hilarious comedy in the "ha-ha" sense constitutes a daily ingredient. The strip balances humor with drama, suspense, and occasionally pathos. This should not be confused with the poorly executed TV "dramadies," which appeal to no one.
The Unions also reject the popular philosophy of humor and the human condition, as championed by Chuck Jones and his Looney Tunes cartoons. By his definition, humor only allows for two basic types of characters. Comic heroes are ordinary men or beasts, like Bugs Bunny, who typically prevail under extraordinary circumstances; these characters enjoy a popular following but are rare. In contrast, comic losers have big dreams and aspirations but always fail. The public loves them best because they can identify more closely with Daffy Duck, Charlie Brown, Al Bundy, Chaplin's Tramp, and so on.
The Unions approach rebukes this. While both prevailing types remain common within the lineup, the main characters generally are heroes or superheroes, succeeding on a regular basis without being criticized or dismissed for being so. They enjoy fame within their cartoon universe (the only other strip which does this to any extent is "Doonesbury"), and they stand out as the most popular Unions characters.
These characters derive humor from confrontations atop the pyramid - Rover vs. racing politicians, Damson vs. network censors, Peter vs. Garfield - and/or some other aspect of their lives in which they have less success and control; for instance, Rover as a doting father.
The Unions also emphasize the drive to succeed and staying on top once you've achieved it, and the characters show great extremes in this theme.
The strip celebrates TV as a dominant but imperfect medium. It provides a view of the outside world and often provides the impetus for participation within it (if the characters are not already doing so). TV links the Unions together despite the geographic dispersal of the characters. While the strip shows an appreciation of the medium, it heaps criticism when it runs afowl from good taste: Damson's commercial parodies, attacks on Milli Vanilli, and so on.
The strip also serves as a promotional tool for auto racing, using a yet-unexplored medium to help popularize the sport through the efforts of Rover and his cohorts. It takes a nonfictional (but fictitious) and professional approach, yet without being one-dimensional like "Tank MacNamara." The popularity of Rover works hand in hand with these efforts.
Another big "political" cause the Unions promote is Garfield-bashing. Garfield exists as the manifestation of 99% of all cartoon evil, without a single redeeming quality in his bloated body (any greeting cards or other occasional displays of "genuine" affection are anomalies conveniently hashed out by Jim Davis and do not disguise Garfield's true emotions). Besides Garfield's repugnant traits and behavior, which Davis portrays as being good and noble, the strip itself, while not being trite in itself, popularized banal pseudo-humor for dimwits, making the formulaic "cute and stupid" approach the winning combination for a universally popular and massively hyped strip. The formula became popularized and made trite by better but still vastly inadequate syndicated strips.
These factors make Garfield himself most undeserving of fame and fortune. This is not a matter of jealousy (after all, many other well-known syndicated cartoonists also attack Garfield publically and privately), but one of intense hatred and injustice. The annual UMC Garfield Barbeque sprang out of this blight as a means of graphically confronting and publicizing the problem.
People often remark that the Unions are "cute." The strip demonstrates that while they may be cute in appearance, that does not mean the characters are innocent by any means. They are potentially violent like anyone else (of course, some are more prone than others). For the most part, they will destroy you if victimized; few Unions are considered meek and profoundly vulnerable to victimization.
Unions Characters
The current Unions gang totals 55 characters in all, whose abstract geometric and animalistic renderings make them 99% human, 1% whatever. Only about a dozen or so main characters appear on a regular basis, and most of the publicity revolves around them. The others are treated much like the peripheral characters on the Simpsons, of which there already are about a hundred recognizable ones.
While the Unions appear in black and white within the day-to-day activities of the strip, color remains a key feature; often it proves the only way to physically recognize them at a glance.
Immediate and Future Goals
I had not planned on doing Web pages for the Unions until very recently, but its operation now stands as a top priority - not just in the sense of reaching a global audience in a manner not possible before, but also for making the resumption of a daily strip production schedule a necessity (after all, people need reasons to keep coming back).
This website should help establish a foothold among the public first - previously a very difficult prospect if not in a widely and regularly circulated newspaper - prior to open-ended media saturation. In 1996, I will work towards resuming a regular publication schedule for the Satellite newsletter as well.
On a larger scale, the destruction of Garfield and reclamation of the 76 logo down the road would also be nice.