GoComics Talks to Jim (Sherman’s Lagoon) Toomey

GoComics welcomes cartoonist Jim Toomey and his Sherman’s Lagoon comic strip
to the Andrews McMeel fold with an interview.

One of your favorite newspaper comics is now available on GoComics! As of this week, all the characters from Sherman’s Lagoon bring their under-the-sea shenanigans to the site, including Sherman the shark, his wife Megan, and son Herman, along with Fillmore the bachelor sea turtle, and Hawthrone the hermit crab.

Creator Jim Toomey dreamt up this fictional lagoon more than 30 years ago, and the strip’s been syndicated in more than 150 daily newspapers since.

Your love of cartooning and the ocean came about around the same time: when you were a kid, right? Do you still have the same kid-like love for both?

You have to have a fascination with the process of drawing that borders on the childish in order to do it well. As Picasso once said, “All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” That doesn’t mean that artists have childish minds—just the opposite. But the process is more play than work, and if you don’t go into it with a sense of play—a certain lack of awareness of time, a clear mind free of the day’s adult baggage—then your art will suffer. Regarding the ocean, my childish sense of wonder has never waned. Why do we obsess as a culture on the mysteries of outer space when we still know so little about 70 percent of planet Earth?

© Jim Toomey

How does your family react to seeing themselves in the strip?

Most of the family humor is written from the perspective of the clueless father, Sherman. So, most of the time, the joke is on me. I did a series where Herman tries to explain the phrase “Okay, Boomer,” to Sherman, as my son did to me. When my teenage son, William, read the series, his reaction was “you STILL don’t get it.”

Read the full interview at the GoComics blog.

disclosure: GoComics and The Daily Cartoonist swim in the same waters