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Photo Sally Rose
Howie Schneider still has plenty of creativity up his sleeve after 35 years of doing Eek and Meek (left) as a daily strip. |
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Thinking outside the boxes
Schneider ends Eek and Meek comic strip after 35-year run
Sally Rose
BANNER STAFF
Humor has long been a tool through which Howie Schneider has expressed his passion for the goings on around him. For nearly four decades Schneider has funneled his humorous, oft acerbic commentary on life via the mouths of Eek and Meek, two sharp-tongued cartoon men-née-mice. But soon, after 35 years, Eek and Meek will play for the final time in the funny papers of newspapers across the country. Schneider has decided to put to rest the syndicated comic strip in favor of new explorations.
'I'm giving up a lot, but I'm also opening a window, releasing myself,' Schneider says. 'Who knows what will come out of this. I find it very exciting.'
Already, his creative juices are percolating. He's got a children's book due out this fall (he's already published six); he just sent another to his agent and has two more in the works.
But Schneider says he will miss having a weekly forum to contemplate society's foibles out loud. He long ago found his preferred vehicle for that expression in comic strip format. In a cartoon, Schneider explains, you have one shot to say it all. 'That really impressed me. It was a tiny, little finished piece of entertainment, and you could sell it. It was like magic,' he says.
Schneider always enjoyed other forms of artistic expression but his confidence in his ability in those areas was not as strong - 'though I loved painting, I never thought I could really be a painter. ... All of your top artists were brilliant,' he says. 'I always thought that cartooning suited me more. It's where I thought I could shine. And I always wanted to be a writer, too. And I was funny. Compulsively funny.'
As a young man living in New York City, Schneider says being funny was his saving grace in social situations, but sometimes he got carried away.
'It turns out I developed a very, very fierce, caustic wit,' Schneider says. 'And I would hurt people. If I had a few drinks, the night after a party I would actually make myself call these people and apologize because I was tearing them apart while other people laughed like hell. I knew that was not a nice way to be. I made a concentrated effort to change that.'
Cartooning was an ideal avenue to channel his caustic wit. 'It was writing, it was drawing, and it gave me a place to use my wit and my sense of humor,' he says.
In fact, Schneider was criticized at times over the years of the comic strip for his cynicism. 'And they're right, I am very cynical,' he concedes. 'My humor comes from my cynicism, which hides kind of an anger at the way things are going.'
During the tumultuous '60s, when dissatisfaction with the status quo rose to a zenith, Eek and Meek turned out to be a perfect forum for Schneider to air his feelings. In the guise of Meek, he could walk up to 'Outburst Mountain' and sound off about something, anything. 'It was a time in the '60s when everything was going wrong,' he remembers. 'It was a chance for me to actually get angry without necessarily having to couch it in humor.'
During a period of high unemployment, one of his characters, perpetually unemployed, goes into a bar: 'The bartender says, 'Still not working?' The guy says, 'Wait a minute, I'm unemployed. It's the economy that's not working.''
Channeling his biting observations in the form of Eek and Meek paid off, literally. In 1965, he sold the comic strip into syndication, which he says almost tripled his income and enabled him to live where he wanted, which eventually became Provincetown year-round in the early '70s.
Prior to cartooning Schneider made a living writing greeting cards, as art director for a television production company, and owning with two partners a small advertising agency from 1952-'56. He used his comic, illustrative talent in all these capacities. And he sold the first cartoon he ever submitted - to Playboy magazine, soon after it began publication.
But Schneider points out thoughtfully, success can be confining. And although Eek and Meek did evolve over the years - they were created as mice and evolved into men because it provided opportunity for more expression - Schneider began feeling limited.
'I felt somewhat restricted within those same characters,' he says. 'I felt a little restricted within the same scenarios that I was using ... and found myself trying to search for still another reason why Eek is unemployed and yet another reason why Monique won't marry Meek.' (For more on this, tune in in these final weeks of the story line.)
Schneider says he will miss having the platform for a running commentary, especially during this election year. 'Of course I'm sad, I've done this for 35 years, they're like friends of mine,' he says.
He's still making notes, though, in response to news reports. In fact, he can't help himself. 'I tend to express myself in these little snippets, so there I am, I find myself writing all new characters.' Schneider says he may even develop another strip with new characters.
Schneider is enthusiastically looking forward to focusing on his other forms of artistic expression. 'I just thought I would release myself creatively for a whole bunch of other stuff that I haven't done yet,' he says.
In addition to writing children's books (and doing his weekly panel for the Banner), he says, 'I'm building a sculpture studio next to my house, and [I'm] getting excited about painting. Maybe I'll do everything. The feeling of being a kid in FAO Schwartz is nice. At the moment, everything is open to me, and that's a nice feeling.'
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Provincetown Banner News
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Mar 17th, 2011