The 2024 season of KPBS’ Comics culture has kicked off by interviewing Heathcliff cartoonist Peter Gallagher.
Famed for weirdness, Peter discusses how the weirdness must be a natural occurrence, not forced.
Also Peter talks of cartoonists block, his preference to physical (pen and paper) over digital, his love of being able to draw backgrounds in the daily panel, that in the Heathcliff universe cats and dogs don’t talk though all other animals do, and more.
Watch Episode 1 of the 2024 Comics Culture season here. (Transcript available there.)
D.D.: Maybe you know the answer to this question that came up in a discussion between me and my fellow cartoonist/comic-strip enthusiast John Wells just the other day: Whatever happened to the remarkable Mike Peters PBS cartoonist-interview series, THE WORLD OF CARTOONING from the late ’80s? I’m sure it exists in some archive somewhere, but can we unconnected fans, who didn’t have the forsight to videotape them, somehow view the 14 episodes? And how do we convince somebody to produce a present-day version (with Peters, or perhaps another erudite and humorous cartoonist with the requisite connections to line-up a dozen or more interview subjects)? It’s rather astonishing the the Peters show didn’t become a regular network series, given the multiple boxes it ticks (then and now) in the PBS playbook.
As you say, in this time where everything is on the internet,
where is “The World of Cartooning with Mike Peters” archived?
I found four interviews (Mort Walker, Chuck Jones in two parts,
Paul Conrad, and Jeff MacNelly) at the bottom of this page:
https://www.youtube.com/@theworldofcartooningwithmi3171/videos
Mike Lynch presents the two part Tony Auth interview:
http://mikelynchcartoons.blogspot.com/2019/11/video-tony-auth-interview-on-world-of.html
But where is the rest of the series?
And why aren’t they all on that YouTube channel?