Liza Donnelly

Ink runs deep in Liza Donnelly's blood. As a child, she taught herself to draw by tracing James Thurber cartoons. "I've been looking at the New Yorker since I was a kid," she recalls. "I'm visually oriented...I love the beauty of cartoons, the drawings as well as the ideas." She drew her first cartoons when she was seven, to entertain her mother, and she's been drawing ever since.

Originally a biology major at Earlham College, Donnelly also studied drawing under Garret Boone and painting under Mitsu Kakitani. Boone remembers Donnelly as a conscientious student, who invited "brutally harsh" criticisms. She also made her own opportunities, as when she arranged an internship for herself with The Saturday Evening Post, then published out of Indianapolis. "By the time she graduated, she already had had a drawing published in the Post," Boone recalls. Another Earlham internship, a trimester spent at New York's Museum of Natural History, led to her first and only "real" job as an exhibition preparator at the museum.

But always, Donnelly was still cartooning, still trying to find a personal style. She took art courses at Parson's Institute and the School of Visual Arts. Her professors introduced her to cartoonists and to the Cartoonist's Guild. She found an agent who represented her as a book illustrator but not as a cartoonist. "Not enough money in cartooning," Donnelly admits. She began the excruciating ritual of sending work to magazines, and in 1979 she sold her first panel cartoon to the National Lampoon. Soon after, she realized her childhood dream: after weekly submissions for more than three years, she sold her first comic to the New Yorker. It was six months before she sold her next comic to the magazine. In the years following she had work published in The New York Times, Playboy, Audubon, American Photographer, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, and The Nation.

Donnelly's taste in panel cartoons is self-admittedly "old-fashioned." "I'm more in the Harold Ross camp [of cartooning]. I'm not against breaking out of that a little, though." James Thurber, William Steig, Robert Blechman, Saul Steinberg, and Robert Weber are among the many cartoonists she admires, and it's easy to see their influence in her deceptively spare drawing. She works in flexible pen and ink wash, and her drawings have the kind of solidity and charm which can only come from careful technique. Donnelly says she's always trying to loosen up, to draw more spontaneously. Her cartoonist friend Edward Sorel has encouraged her to try drawing directly on the paper, without preparatory sketching. "It actually works. I can visualize the drawing in my head, sometimes, and put it on paper and draw. I've never done a finished piece that way, but I have done submissions."

In spite of a constricting market for panel cartoons, Donnelly stays busy. In addition to her work for the New Yorker and its reprint service the Cartoonbank, Donnelly has found a new venue for her work on the Internet: ParentTime (www.parenttime.com), which publishes her weekly panel "Family Follies." She has edited and co-edited (with husband, New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin) several collections of panel cartoons: Mothers and Daughters, Fathers and Sons, Husbands and Wives, and Call me when you Reach Nirvana. She's in the midst of putting together a book proposal for a new collection. Donnelly has also drawn upon her background as a biologist to write six Dinosaur books for children, starting with Dinosaur's Halloween. She continues to paint abstract canvases ("to clear up my thinking").

A day's work for Donnelly begins early. As a mother of two, she has all the usual domestic affairs to tend to. After the morning chores are done, she studies the newspaper, looking for ideas. Then she doodles for a couple of hours, looks at old work or rejected work to recycle. She calls her hours "inconsistent." She may do most of her drawing in the evening, after the children are asleep. She's fortunate in having another cartoonist for a husband. Since both have flexible schedules, the parenting and housework can be more easily juggled around the drawing.

What is her goal as a cartoonist? Donnelly laughs. "No one ever asked me that before." She pauses, then says, "to make people laugh. When I left Earlham I wanted to be a political cartoonist. And I wanted, like all young people, to change the world, to make it a better place. And there's still some of that in me. I hope I can make comics that can make people think, but I'm less idealistic...I'm happy if I can make people laugh."

Back to Pathetic Fallacy