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September 8, 2008
Why I'm Ending Denver Square
By Ed Stein
[Editor's note: on May 21, Ed Stein ended his long-time local comic strip "Denver Square." Here is the article he wrote for the Rocky Mountain News about his decision.]
A number of readers have expressed concern about the direction I've been taking lately in my Denver Square comic strip. Friends have called to ask me what's going on. Well, they're on to something. The fictional family really is going to move out of town. And, yes, the strip is going to end [on May 21].
Twelve years ago I came up with a crazy idea. Why not create a daily local comic strip, a feature just for readers of the Rocky Mountain News. Brilliant! It would be one of the only things like it in the country. In the giddy frenzy of creation, I didn't stop to ask why nobody else was doing anything like it.
After many false starts and much tinkering, I decided to draw a strip about an average middle-class family living in Denver. I'd comment on anything and everything going on in Colorado. Because I was already doing editorial cartoons, the focus of the strip would not be primarily political.
The first six months of a comic strip are its shakedown cruise. Only when you see it in print can you really know what works. Denver Square began running in the Rocky in January 1997. It took a while to find its footing, but then something genuinely spooky happened. The characters started talking back to me; they took control of the dialogue; they demanded that punch lines I wrote for others be given to them instead; they insisted that certain gags were out of character and refused to participate. Sam, Liz, Nate, Irv and Sarah developed personalities of their own, ones I didn't originally intend for them.
Over the next eleven years, and some 3,000 daily strips, they lived through blizzards, floods, forest fires, CSAPs, the building of T-REX, Columbine, 9/11, two Super Bowl victories, two Stanley Cups, two presidents, two mayors, two governors, Y2K, the home renovation surge and the home foreclosure crisis.
I say lived, because I almost think of them as real people. I know them as well as I know my own family. Which makes it hard to think about killing Denver Square. Yet, I think it's the right time to bring it to an end.
Denver and Colorado have changed dramatically since I began drawing the strip. Our politics are more complicated and more interesting. Our issues seem bigger and more difficult. The strengths of Denver Square are also its weaknesses. In sticking to a policy of not including politicians in the strip, I haven't been able to caricature such fascinating and complex figures as John Hickenlooper, Bill Owens, Bill Ritter, Bruce Benson and others, and there are issues I haven't been able to fully explore.
Other reasons are more personal. When I started drawing Denver Square, my children were in elementary school. They are now college students, and I've lost my insider knowledge of Denver Public Schools. My father-in-law and my father, two models for the irascible Irv, are no longer with us. Many of the strip cartoonists I know tell me that, despite the longevity of Dagwood, Beetle Bailey and Peanuts, ten years is the functional lifespan of a comic strip. I'm beginning to understand why. The grind of producing a daily strip is starting to tell. I both love and hate the characters. Some days I'm so sick of drawing them, I daydream about doing terrible things to them. Liz joins a polygamist cult. Sam is eaten alive by giant mutant pine beetles. Nate is abducted by cattle-mutilating space aliens. This alone should tell me that it's time to move on.
If you haven't noticed lately, the newspaper business has changed. We are now a multi-media information source with an increasingly dynamic web presence. I can no longer think of myself as just a newspaper cartoonist. The internet gives me a chance to write as well as to draw, to blog and to podcast, to add motion and sound, to make videos, to create a comic world I never could have dreamed of making in print, to interact with readers in new and more intimate ways. I have plenty of new ideas for projects to fill the time that drawing the comic strip takes up now.
Some of them might be just as crazy as Denver Square.