Pen pal

America finally gets The Big Picture

by John O'Neill

Life, for most of us, is that almost-daily ritual of waking, grooming, and scooting out the door with a mouthful of toaster cake so we can hop on the corporate treadmill. After five (or six) days, we're given some time off to hunker down in front of the TV and feel good about ourselves via the local sports team. Then it's back on the horse for another week. But then there are the artists. Those are the guys who still hold on to, however tenuously, that dream the rest of us traded in for the Volkswagen Passat and the Visa at 18 percent. Usually a musician, often a painter, maybe a ballet dancer, the artist sweats and strains, starves and stresses under the delusion that, if they dedicate themselves to their (poor-paying and health-care-less) vocation, maybe, just maybe, the cosmic tumblers of fate will click into place. Or they finally give up and go manage a music/art store. It's a combination of determination, talent, self-promotion, and a little bit of shit-luck that determines who'll make it, and who'll eventually spend Friday night singing karaoke. If you ask illustrator/ trombone player Lennie Peterson, chasing the dream is worth it just for the dreaming part, everything else is gravy.

"I don't have a memory of not drawing, it's always been this way," says Peterson. A local illustrator (check out this week's Worcester Phoenix "Best" covers), cartoonist of The Big Picture, and horn player for the immensely popular Clutch Grabwell, Peterson has always been high profile. Now he's suddenly in demand. Grabwell, after years of ruling the region through a non-stop, grassroots movement, have caught the interest of eight record labels, with a showcase set for late November at CBGB's. And, as if that's not enough to make a self-employed man cry, Peterson, after years of getting the starving part down, is on the verge of becoming one of the country's hottest serial cartoonists with his autobiographical Big Picture, which is being picked up by a slew of the better dailies across the country. But it's been a long time coming for a guy who ditched a 10-year career and steady paycheck as a Berklee music-theory professor. A career, wife, and mortgage down the drain, Peterson endured the naysayers who were sure he'd stripped his gears.

"[Drawing] was a thread through the music thing. I've always kept sketchbooks of funny things that had happened to me. I figured I'd put out an [autobiographical] underground comic. They're just edgy enough that you can get away with that," says Peterson who signed with a small Boston publisher in the early '90s. "The funny part was my stuff wasn't racy enough for the underground and not mainstream enough for [newspapers]. But I could see the potential because you don't see autobiographical comic strips."

Filled with plenty o' Lennie, The Big Picture features Peterson and his everyday life. His love of coffee, his cat Ginger, his late-mom's spirit, his bald pate, a gig with Clutch Grabwell, a parade of ex-girlfriends, even a less-than-kind music reviewer have all been fodder for Peterson's pen and ink renderings. An acquired taste for sure, and one that Peterson had to build from the ground up.

His work regularly appeared in Worcester Magazine, and Peterson picked up several smaller newspapers along the way, but he couldn't capture that elusive syndication deal he so wanted for his still-developing strip. "I could wallpaper a room with all the rejection letters I got," he chuckles. "King Features sent me a hand-written note saying they loved my style, but I should write more of what I know. I took that to heart."

The first hint that he wasn't wasting his time came in '95 when the industry mag Editorial Humor named Peterson the winner of their "Best Unsigned Comic Strip" contest. Universal Press (the syndicate that gave a start to Doonesbury, The Far Side, Cathy, and Calvin and Hobbes) flew Peterson out to the cooperate office in '96 for what seemed like a done deal, then dropped the strip because execs couldn't figure out how to sell it. It was a decision he says "was devastating. I was eating potatoes and doing heavy soul searching trying to figure out who I am. I found on the worst days it was still better than any job I could think of. So you're hungry and your bills are a little late."

With a hardcore belief that Universal was the right home for him, Peterson swept rejection under the rug and began faxing a strip every day to one of Universal's vice-presidents, vowing he wouldn't give up until the company sought a restraining order. Consequently, the industry giant decided to put The Big Picture on its Web site where it immediately became the most popular comic. And Peterson suddenly had a book deal. The local-boy-made-good made good just in time to get dropped by WoMag, which was redesigning its editorial layout after editor Walter Crockett (who brought Peterson on) resigned.

But since, and almost immediately after, The Big Picture has gone through the roof. Fifteen papers (including the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Sun Times, the Hartford Courant, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Orange County Register) have picked up the strip with another 15 papers estimated to be signed on by the time his work debuts November 28. Lennie Peterson is on his way to not only paying his bills on time, but also actually affording to eat meat.

"It's weird; the band and this going on, they're so parallel. Like some flood gate is opened," he says with a bit of awe. He plans to continue with the band (who appear this Saturday at the Plantation Club) no matter how the showcase shakes down. "It would be like choosing between having my heart or my stomach cut out! I can draw anywhere I go. I wouldn't know what to give up, especially after all the shit I've [been] through over the last five years!"