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.
MG: When was this? 1970? 1971
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