The Comics Journal #219 (January 2000), pp. 102-106

Life of Boswell

BY MARK HARRIS

As long-time fans of "the world's toughest milkman" know full well, Reid is back - with a vengeance. After seven years of enforced idleness, the whitesuited milk-chucker with the whirlwind fists is once again pissing on our flowers, getting Mr. Crabbe's goat, telling us to shut up, and generally behaving like a direct action anarchist in the milk truck that he rides like a skateboard. Chapter Two of Another Dawn, the eighth Reid Fleming book (or ninth, if you count the milkman's co-starring role in Heart Break Comics) is already on the rack, while Chapter Three is on the drawing board (the first five books, incidentally, were recently republished in large paperback format).

The drought, it seems, is finally over.

Impatient readers should not, however, assume that David Boswell, Reid's Vancouver-based creator, has in any way shared in the milkman's 84 months of enforced idleness. From 1990 to 1996, he provided the illustrations for Dave Barry's popular Province column, and he also worked on a number of screenplays, including one which deals with the misadventures of the only deliveryman in the world who is as wont to carry his milk truck on his back as he is to drive it. In addition to fulfilling these fairly straightforward commercial obligations, Boswell has also been absorbed in a project which makes no economic sense whatsoever, but which continues to exercise his imagination. For the past few years, the cartoonist has been attempting to peer through the mist of lies and half-truths that currently obscure the life and death of Pierre Batcheff, a once-popular European actor who played the male lead in Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's provocative 1929 collaboration, Un chien andalou.

As for the Reid Fleming movie, it has now been languishing in turnaround for at least a decade. Although studio executives appeared to be quite happy with the cartoonist's script - "At least 85% of it made the cut," this former film student reminisced, "and nobody asked for a re-write, which is pretty good by Hollywood standards" - the scenario remains unproduced. A number of actors, including Jon Lovitz, would still like to portray Reid, but nothing has come of their enthusiasm thus far. John Belushi, arguably the greatest potential kamikaze milkchucker of them all, died before he could consider the script, but his more restrained brother Jim is still eager to slip into Reid's Owl's Roost Rye-stained shoes. Boswell's personal preference was for "the Bob Hoskins of 10-15 years ago, but, sadly, in those days, Hoskins wouldn't even look at a script unless someone put a millon dollars on the table first."

End result: Limboland. Reid Fleming is still waiting for some energetic producer or director to pluck him from the ether and thrust him into the black-and-white blankness of a standard ratio film. Far from lusting after an A-list superproduction, Boswell would have preferred to see his movie made like a Depression-era Warner Brothers' picture, "where they chopped off the first and last frame of every scene, just to make things tighter."

This modesty of technical means is fairly typical of Boswell's backward-looking cinematic nostalgia. Prior to becoming a cartoonist, the artist was a film student in Ontario, graduating from Oakville's Sheridan College in 1974. His motion picture idols were Josef von Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim, F.W. Murnau, and Luis Bu�uel. In terms of period, the nascent cartoonist's aesthetic interests were more or less evenly divided between early Hollywood features and the classics of European art cinema. Boswell was particularly fond of the German and British directors who fled to the fleshpots of Southern California in search of new visions and expanded possibilities.

"In the 1920s and '30s," the artist recalled, "there were all these European directors - von Sternberg, von Stroheim, James Whale - coming to Hollywood to work. The tension between their culture and the culture in which they found themselves often produced a unique result, a result which was very different from all-American productions, such as those of John Ford. This tension is very similar to the one between classical music-loving me and Reid Fleming, a character who is the polar opposite of myself. A lot of times I find myself thinking that I'm not the right person to be drawing Reid, then I remember that this kind of tension often leads to interesting and creative results."

Growing up in London, Hamilton, and Dundas, Ontario, proved to be salubrious to the satisfaction of Boswell's cultural hungers, it would seem. "In Southern Ontario," the cartoonist enthused, "you've got more cable stations than anywhere else in the world. In the early 1970s, it was not unusual to see four or five features a day from the 1930s and '40s alone. Now, of course, they're never shown; all you get are crappy TV movies."

Unsurprisingly, Boswell's cinematic interests have spilled over into his draftsmanship. "I do see comics as movies on paper," the artist admitted. "I made films before I made comics. But it soon became clear that getting the financing to make movies was a lot tougher than simply drawing what you wanted. When I finished film school, the only career advice they gave us was to apply for a job as a truck driver at the CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation]. After about 50 years or so, you'd presumably work your way up to producer. I wasn't about to do that."

Instead of following the CBC's Horatio Alger-like bootstrap trail, the artist-to-be accepted a number of odd jobs before gradually drifting into cartooning. "At the time, my rent was $45 a month, and you could get $600 for a single panel cartoon at The New Yorker. I thought if I sold only one comic a month, I'd be able to live well."

While editors often wrote him encouraging rejection slips, Boswell made no sales. The first periodical to actually bite was The Georgla Straight, Harold Hedd's alma mater; the alternative weekly accepted a full page strip called Heart Break Comics. "I think the only reason it was published," the author laughed, "was because the advertising manager was of the same ethnic strain as the protagonist. He was a man named Vents Baumanis. Had it not been for him, I would probably not be here now. He made it sound like he was more or less running the show."

On November 1, 1977, the cartoonist-to-be landed in Vancouver with $32 in his pocket. He's been here ever since.

Through trial and error, Boswell found "that you can get the effect of movies in comics. True, there's no movement in comics, just a bunch of still pictures, but you can move the reader's eye. You can do this through drawing and through text; you must think out every scene in terms of character placement and depth. In my latest book, there's never any doubt about where to point your eyes."

Heart Break Comics, Boswell's immaculately produced chronicle of the erotic misadventures of "Laszlo, the Great Slavic Lover," contains the artist's most elaborate "cinematic" set-up to date. "I've always felt that tonality could be an element in comics," the cartoonist explained, "although it seldom is. The line is really what's all-important in comics. But tone was a filmic element that I wanted to include in Heart Break Comics. I kind of wanted to make it look like a 1934 Paramount film. In fact, the [book's final words] "The End" are a copy of the old Paramount logo - but don't tell Paramount that. The drawing that you see was made out of three separate elements. First, I set up the shoes as you see them, lit them, and drew them; then I draped my tuxedo pants and some of my wife's scanties over the chair in the foreground; then I drew the background detail to get all the elements to match.

"On a very obscure, filmmaking note, this panel illustrates an anecdote from which Josef von Sternberg learned a great deal. One day, one of his teachers turned the camera on a chair so that only three legs were visible, saying, 'Most people won't notice, but there'll always be some idiot in the audience waiting for that chair to fall over.' What he meant was, everything you see through the camera's lens is all-important, so if you don't attend to the smallest details, you'll detract from what you're trying to do.

"The fact that all four legs are showing in this panel is a sort of homage to von Sternberg. Actually, there's quite a bit of filmic homage in my work. For instance, I drew into the background a little house which was the home of Zerkow the junkman, a character in Greed whose part was totally cut out of the release print of the film. There's many things like that in my work, things that most people won't pick up on, but a handful will."

Even the creation of Laszlo, it seems, owes a great deal to archaic Hollywood stereotypes. "Laszlo," the director confessed, "was in some measure inspired by the character played by Erik Rhodes in Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies - you know, the ludicrous Latin or continental lover type, who would mangle the language and always get the short end of the stick. I thought this was a great stereotype, even though it had pretty much died out by the late 1930s. My initial reaction was to see what would happen if such a person existed today, how contemporary people would interpret his old-world manners and attitudes, his tuxedo, etc." Laszlo, of course, is not really a Slav but a Hungarian - which is one of Heart Break Comics' many running gags. "In the book," the cartoonist explained, "Ken makes that mistake, and Laszlo explains that there's a big difference between Slavs and Hungarians - which there is. But somehow, Great Slavic Lover has more of a ring to it than Great Hungarian Lover. In a way, this misnomer kind of describes the guy."

Although with women Laszlo is invariably courtly, with amorous rivals, such as Reid, he can be downright obscene. During his epic fistfight with the cuckolded supermilkman, this embattled womanizer spits out one choice Magyar epithet after another. "In the book," the cartoonist chortled, "you might notice a number of Hungarian expletives. My wife, who was working for the city at that time, knew this young Hungarian lad named Andrew. He got his parents, real old country types, to sit down in the kitchen and make out a list for me. I still have that list, and I only used about 10% of what was on it. Their curses are more imaginative by far than our pathetic pantheon of invective; they've got three or four different words for 'cunt' alone!" (If you're really cruising for a bruising in Budapest, you might try saying, "Baszd meg a bubanatos anyadat"; my Hungarian friends assure that those five words are good for a dust-up, any time, anywhere.)

Of course, fluent swearing isn't the only Hungarian attribute to which the cartoonist feels drawn. "Both my wife and I have always had this incredibly strong response to Hungarian culture," the artist said. "Hungarian food; Hungarian music. I don't know where this comes from, since neither of us have a single drop of Hungarian blood."

Constance, meanwhile, the woman of mystery who creates tension between the unexpectedly smitten Laszlo and Ken, his Clint Eastwood-worshipping detective agency boss, had more concrete origins: "The thing about Constance is that she's highly unconscious. That's something not too many reviewers have picked up on. To them, she's just a cipher. In fact, she was inspired by a woman with whom I had a frustrating, six year long relationship. She, too, had a high degree of unconsciousness about her. That's why Constance appears nude, not to titillate, but because she's genuinely unaware. The whole point of her running off with a barber who's made of wood is to perplex Laszlo; he loves her but he can't understand what she's about."

Somewhat surprisingly, the flattopped, .44 Magnum-flaunting Ken turns out to be Boswell's favourite character. "Onginally," the cartoonist elaborated, "he was just a face that I'd doodled in 1975. He only became Ken later, somewhere down the road. As a character, he's emotionally slack, but scheming; there's something dead inside the guy, but he's also kind of likable in a strange sort of way. He's my favourite character, actually, although you could never do a Ken comic; I've thought about it, but you can't make him the hero of anything. He's the only one of my characters whom I've ever dreamed about. In the dream, he was incredibly malevolent - very, very angry with me."

Alas for many Boswell readers, Laszlo and company now seem to belong irretrievably to the past. "I think that Heart Break Comics is pretty much self-contained," the cartoonist mused. "I can't imagine what else I'd do with Laszlo. While it might be fun to try, I think that Reid has more audience appeal."

On the technical level, though, the Laszlo saga is still the artist's most daunting project to date. According to Boswell, "In most comics, the original drawings are 50% larger than the final reproduced size, but in Heart Break, the art was twice as large, 15" by 20". Because so much of the action takes place at night, there was a massive amount of shading and toning to do. Still, the end result looks really nice; I think it's the comic equivalent of using fine-grained film in photography."

Heart Break Comics took three and a half years to complete. "That was a killer to draw," the cartoonist recalled. "Ordinarily, it takes six months to a year to finish a book. There was a many a time when I thought that I was going to get hopelessly lost in a morass of black-and-white lines. Maintaining the internal pressure from beginning to end was really tough. When I finally finished Heart Break Comics, I had postpartum depression. Women who've had babies will tell you that that's exactly how they feel. I thought I'd be ecstatic when I finished, but I was just bummed out."

Once upon a time the events of Heart Break Comics were supposed to interface with the plot of Rogue to Riches (the collective title for the first five chapters in the chronicles of Reid Fleming), but that was not to be. "My original plan," the cartoonist sighed resignedly, "was to link the books together, but the more I wrote the more I found the writing didn't want to go that way." Aside from two panels in which he says nothing, the Great Slavic Lover is entirely absent from the pages of Rogue to Riches.

Although Reid has been known to do things like kick garbage cans so hard they damage orbiting telecommunications satellites, his surroundings are by no means as bizarre as his actions. "Reid can only exist," his creator explained, "because he's in a unique situation regarding his company. The real power, Mr. O'Clock, is totally ineffectual, whereas his subordinate, Mr. Crabbe, has no real power. If he did, he'd fire Reid in a millisecond. This situation is strictly to Reid's advantage. That's why I try to draw a fairly normal world around him - everything looking very '50s and whitebread - so Reid's abnormalcy will stand out in contrast. If the backgrounds were in any way bizarre, Reid would just die."

The World's Toughest Milkman lives in a city that looks like a strange hybrid cross of Vancouver and L.A. "I guess the main confusion is the palm trees," the cartoonist chuckled. "I put those in because they instantly denote a sunny, tropical climate. I think that's a better setting for Reid than one of Vancouver's typically dark days of rain. Aside from that, it's not supposed to be any place in particular. It does have a name now, though. Reid lives in a place called Shovelton, which is very close to another place called Levelberg."

Aside from Reid's regular displays of superhuman strength, practical jokes, and bad temper, the strangest things about Shovelton and environs are its television shows. The milkman is addicted, for instance, to a soap opera called The Horrors of Ivan, an afternoon serial in which the hero languishes in a coma for half a decade: "It was originally called The Dangers of Ivan," Boswell pointed out. "Even after Ivan drives off a cliff and slips into a coma for six years, Reid continues religiously to watch the show, always believing that Ivan will make it, because Ivan's his hero. Unfortunately, after he wakes up, Ivan falls out of his hospital window, but manages to come back as a sort of life-in-death skeleton and continues to have even more peculiar adventures."

The other program of note is Commander Bob and Betty. Lena Toast, the apple of Reid's bloodshot eye, is co-host of this weird talk show which is shot on a floating house that comes complete with a 12 mile long rope ladder which drafted guests must ascend when asked if they'd rather not be zapped by Commander Bob's ray-spitting hands.

"I had the Commander Bob idea even before I'd thought of Reid," the cartoonist said. "The original Commander Bob was someone who zooms around in his flying house and focuses his Amazing Mediocre Rays on people, thereby turning them into Canadians. That was a sort of a rip-off of a Monty Python sketch where aliens turn ordinary people into Scotsmen. As for Lena, she needed a career, so l thought I'd make her co-host of the show."

Some of Commander Bob's truculent guests are decidedly tony. One of them, in fact, was Paul Newman, a reluctant participant who earned himself a zap when he warned his host against showing a clip from his early stinker, The Silver Chalice.

"I was delighted to see," the cartoonist snickered, "that the week in which that strip came out was also the week when Newman won an Academy Award. I've always thought he was overrated."

When it was pointed out to Boswell that Lena's demeanor was awfully similar to that of Jean Arthur and the other hard-as-nails heroines of Hollywood's 1930s, the cartoonist thoughtfully replied, "That's an interesting concept. I never thought of Jean Arthur when I was thinking up Lena, though she was quite a decent comedienne. What I wanted was someone who would be a match for Reid. Lena's my ideal woman: someone who can play ball with the guys - she's got a sharp wit, she's tolerant up to a point, she's got a lot of spunk, she'll take a little bit of guff but not too much - come to think of it, that does sound a lot like Jean Arthur."

Despite his fondness for popular culture, Boswell tries always to be original, believing that there's a very thin line between paying someone a compliment and ripping them off. "I won't even quote someone's idea if l think there's the slightest possibility of plagiansm, and then, years later, I'll look back and say, 'Wait a minute; didn't I see something very similar to this in Un Chien andalou?' This is something I try to remain conscious of all the time, but unconscious influences keep slipping through."

When writing comics, Boswell always tries to keep three precepts in mind - two of his own, and one originally coined by the stonefaced master of silent comedy, Buster Keaton. The self-generated mottos are "Thwart expectations" and "Context is everything," while the Keatonian rule of thumb is, "If you take care of a story's beginning and end, the middle will usually take care of itself."

Essentially, Boswell writes for two different audiences at the same time. Those who read his comics quickly will guffaw at the broad humour which provides the story's impetus and superstructure, while more discerning readers will sip the panels slowly, like rare wine, extracting more refined pleasure from the Latin puns, familiar faces, and other sorts of injoke. This double-barrelled approach has resulted in no fewer than six Reid re-printings [of #1] during the past 17 years, an astonishing total for any sort of comic book. "Reid is very anti-authoritarian in his movements and actions," the artist elaborated, "but I make a point of never getting too specific. The moment you react to a particular slogan, policy, or politician, you can count on being forgotten within the year."

Nevertheless, on very rare occasions the cartoonist admits to using the darker side of his imagination to wreak symbolic revenge on his enemies. Thus, a grumpy neighbour who "dissed" the cartoonist's then two-year-old son wound up getting a virtual toe cut off by a lawnmower on the blurry page of a newspaper in Reid Fleming #2. In similar fashion, an avaricious second-hand clothes salesman saw the World's Toughest Milkman stuff an overpriced jacket down his cartoon facsimile's throat with the aid of "a $35 broom," while, in the first installment of Another Dawn, the Three Tenors are comically taken to task for chronologically stiffing Vancouver with their very ungenerous New Year's show (in Shovelton's tiny civic center, conversely, La Luch impresses the miniscule crowd by belting out one aria while pedaling a tricycle on a tightrope).

"This is not a noble thing," the cartoonist conceded. "It would be very easy to have Reid deliver milk to people I don't like, but I would never do that. That would be an abuse of the medium; that is not what comics were meant to be. Still... it is tempting."

A certain sense of moral responsibility attends even the cartoonist's treatment of Reid, one of the most Rabelaisean, anti-social characters ever to grace a panel. Heart Break Comics, the cartoonist explained, was completely unbuttoned and unfettered, but "with Reid I'm a bit more careful, because I know he has a lot of young readers. So l imply a lot. In any case, I think it's more fun to suggest these things than to flat out say them. You're outwitting those who would really like to come down hard on comic books. There's a lot of naughty stuff in Reid, if you look under the surface. I've managed to sneak in a number of archaic terms for various sexual practices, but they're usually disguised as names."

Despite his cult success, Boswell is clearly not entirely enthralled by the ways in which his work has been embraced by the general public. The Reidisms that once blazed lewdly from a popular line of t-shirts - "I thought I told you to shut up;" "78 cents or I piss on your flowers" - are not the bons mots by which he wishes to be remembered. "I don't know," the cartoonist said cautiously, "but they sound sort of dumb to repeat. They're so blatantly obvious. I mean, I don't want to sound as if I'm disrespectful of my readership, but it seems that if something sounds a little bit corny it's likely to get a big response out of a lot of people. Readers seem to glom onto things that are a little too obvious. I mean, Reid's a blatant character, but I like to think that the writing is subtle."

Of course, not all, or even most, Reid Fleming readers fall into this category. As the cartoonist himself proudly asserts, "Doctors read Reid, and students, and people working for NASA, and people who are sophisticated enough to recognize the Berlioz passages played in Heart Break Comics. One conundrum I'm trying to solve is finding the readers who like this stuff. After all, I don't go into comic shops, I don't buy comics, I don't read comics, I don't even read my own comics. And there are a lot people just like me who have this - it's not a prejudice, exactly, but a feeling - that this is a world where they don't belong. I think those readers would like my comics if they only knew they existed."

The cartoonist himself, predictably, is no fan of his own draftsmanship. "I don't look at my work once it's done," Boswell claimed. "If I did, I'm sure I'd be brought up short time and time again by the inadequacy of the drawing."

Even now, Reid's creator does not think of himself as a natural-born cartoonist. "I'm a lot lazier than R. Crumb," the cartoonist confessed. "If he doesn't draw every day, he gets sick. Not me. I'd be happy to sit under a tree all day and do nothing, even if I got a bit bored. I was a late starter, anyway. In the 1960s and '70s, I missed out on the entire underground comic thing, because I was too busy watching old W.C. Fields and Marx Brothers' movies. I have no compulsion to draw whatsoever; I only draw when I have to. Actually, it's the writing that's murder. Like John Updike said, "there is no writing - only re-writing."

Having been unlucky with a number of producers, publishers, editors, distributors, and manufacturers almost from the day he started, David Boswell has finally become his own publisher. "In a way, that's a good thing," the cartoonist suggested cautiously, "even though it's an enormous amount of work and it's kind of scary living exclusively on your wits. I still don't know if the well is bottomless, but it's great to finally be in total control."