Bystander Talks with…Shary Flenniken, part 2

Part 2 of my chat with Bystander cartoonist Shary Flenniken.

[On June 4, 2023, I sat down for a long talk with my friend and longtime Bystander contributor, cartoonist Shary Flenniken. Part 1 of our conversation is here.]

MG: In another interview, you mentioned sign painting—around this time in Seattle, there was a renaissance in old-fashioned artistic sign painting?

SHARY: Doug Fast was here in Seattle—he later designed the Starbucks logo. He was also a marvelous person that I dated when I was 15; he came to my house and my mom cooked dinner for him. In the late 1960s, he was part of Splendid Sign Company with Gary Hallgren, who I later ended up with in the Air Pirates down in San Francisco.

Splendid Sign was this groundbreaking sign-painting group—they revived beautiful vintage designs.

Before art school and the underground paper, I'd done things the way kids do things, you know, not like professional people do things. I had written a few comic strips when I was a kid. I started writing a science fiction novel. And a few short stories—I would just write things. But to get into cartooning…? Ted Richards came up here and worked on the underground newspaper that I was with, called Sabot. I was doing big drawings, illustrating poems, things like that. Ted said to me, “You should do comics.” He told me some basics about how to do it.

MG: Do you have any material from that underground paper? How does it feel to look at it? Do you see your future artistic self in it?

SHARY: I photographed a lot of it a couple of years ago, and I liked it. I liked the art a lot. I used to take the anti-war posters back then and copy them into my sketchbook… I looked at the stuff that was in that newspaper —all of the undergrounds—they're just great to read. They're so funny. “Sisters unite!”

MG: I remember when I came up to visit you in Seattle in 2019, you’d dug a lot of your stuff out and you were photographing it. I'm so glad you've done that—that you have a personal archive that is well maintained. There are very few people—

SHARY: —who are packrats?

MG [laughing]: Yeah, exactly. How was it in the underground press? I know you found it very sexist; a lot of people have said that to me.

SHARY: You mean like down in San Francisco? In Seattle, I just worked on an obscure underground newspaper with people who were my friends. Until the Weathermen took it over. The Weathermen were not my friends.

The staff of the Seattle Sabot, 1970. [© Shary Flenniken]

MG: When was this? 1970? 1971