11am: Kelsey Hoon draws and signs in Red Room
Panel Debate: Taking Over the Old Strips, Green Room
Tyro draws and signs in Blue Room
12 noon: Leslie Parr draws and signs in Blue Room
I guessed I was to be in the Green Room at eleven the next day, and decided to attend a panel debate, to see what was expected of me. I was beginning to get excited — not just about the conference, but about cartooning and being a cartoonist. I was feeling, for the first time, a part of something.
I looked at my watch — my father’s watch. Ten o’clock. According to the schedule, no panel discussions were going on. All right, fine. Somebody named Sybil Schimmelpfennig was drawing and signing in the Blue Room, and since an open door nearby bore a felt-tip-markered sign reading “Blue,” I went in.
The room was not exactly empty, but it was far from its capacity of about a hundred and fifty people. There were maybe thirty gathered around a table at the front, most of them gnawing on donuts and sipping coffee from paper cups, chatting animatedly to one another. A woman sat at the table, her head of dark shiny hair bent over, twitching with the motion of her drawing arm.
It might have been a sixth sense, or perhaps just dumb logic, that made me realize this must be the Sybil, author of the strip “Sybil.” “Sybil” didn’t run in the Philly Inquirer, so I didn’t get to read it often, but it had spawned a fairly massive T-shirt and coffee mug industry and was therefore familiar. Its basic premise was this: Sybil was a thirtyish woman who worked in an office, and she complained about things. The main things she complained about were men, clothes and food. Recurrent characters were the coworker who always had good luck with men, the department store clerk who sold Sybil clothes, and the deli clerk who made the sandwiches Sybil ate and which made Sybil fat, or so she thought. Sybil always wore black: a black blouse with a white star on the chest, and either black pants or a black skirt. The oddness of the star — what kind of office worker wore such clothes, let alone all the time? — was lost in its ubiquity. Sybil posters were almost inevitable in any office. In them, Sybil was generally seated behind a desk, the papers in her “in” box towering unsteadily over the pile in her “out,” and she wore an expression of resigned exasperation. Or, in an alternate poster, usually hung in office break rooms, Sybil sat behind an enormous slice of pie, grinning coyly and saying something like “I shouldn’t…”
I walked to the front of the Blue Room, which was not blue, stepping over a crushed glazed donut that had been ground into the carpet by someone’s heel. I listened in for a moment to the conversation coming in stifled bursts through mouthsful of food. People were talking about other conferences they’d been to. Sybil herself finished up the drawing she was working on and handed it to a thickset woman with puffy yellow hair, who thanked her politely. Sybil nodded and grinned. “Any time,” she said. She was dressed exactly the same as her cartoon self, down to the white star. It wasn’t the usual pointy American-flag star, but a bulgy one, like a child’s toy.
“Hi there,” she said. “How do you want it?”
She was talking to me. I came to the table and rested my hand on the edge. Sybil Schimmelpfennig’s face, the thin, translucent kind of face you’d expect would flinch whenever it was looked at, was as twitchless and composed as a hunk of marble, and frozen into a grin so fiercely welcoming that I thought she must be mad. She had an unusually large chin. I said, “Uh, want what?”
“Your drawing. What do you want Sybil to be saying? Something about your girlfriend or boss, maybe? What do you do for a living?”
I considered my answer, as Sybil clearly grew impatient. “I’m a cartoonist, actually.”
“No kidding?” she said. “What strip?”
“I’m taking over the Family Funnies.”
Her expression at last changed, taking on a manipulative edge that unnerved me. She looked like she knew something about me I didn’t. “Ohhh. You’re Tim Mix.”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry to hear about your dad.”
“Yeah.”
“Right, so…” Expectant smirk.
“So what?”
“So what do you want here?” She swirled her pen hand in the air, pretending to draw. It was a felt-tip, which explained the characteristic fuzziness of “Sybil.” I was thrown, confused that she still assumed I wanted a drawing now that we had been established as professional equals.
“Uh, I don’t know,” I said. “Whatever you want.”
She raised her eyebrows, making my statement seem, in retrospect, provocative. Then her hand flashed into action, squeaking across the paper like a cornered rat, leaving heads, hands, faces in its wake. She was the fastest draw I’d ever seen. She talked to me as she worked. “I’ll make you as many as you want, Tim. I love doing it. I don’t feel like a full person when I’m not drawing.” I noticed now, clipped into her breast pocket beside the star, a row of fresh black pens. “I draw in the steam on the bathroom mirror. I walk past people’s cars and draw in the dust on their doors and windows.”
“Wow,” I said.
She finished with a bizarre flourish, continuing the tangled loop-the-loops at the end of her signature right out into the air, where she swirled the pen around for several seconds before showing me the drawing. It was rough, but looked right out of the “Sybil” strip: Sybil sitting on a bar stool next to a man, both of them with outsized martini glasses in their hands. Both figures had those bubbles over their heads that indicated drunkenness: squeans.
“Whaddya think?” she said, twirling the pen between her fingers.
“Great,” I said. “Nice squeans.”
“How about you?”
I looked up, feeling the conversation veer away. “How about me what?”
“You,” she said, pointing. I inspected the drawing a second time and recognized that the man on the stool was me, getting drunk with Sybil. She had rendered me with cruel accuracy, exaggerating the thinness of my face and the obstinate rumpledness of my hair, and had given my eyes and mouth the same puzzled anxiety they were likely to betray were the scene to take place in real life. “Let’s get together in the hotel bar tonight. A lot of the other cartoonists are going to be there. Besides, we have a lot to talk about.”
“Really?”
“Our common work, for one thing.”
“Cartooning.”
She handed me the drawing, which I didn’t want. I folded it as politely as I could and put it in my pocket, while she moved her head from side to side, indicating my failure to pick up my side of the conversation. “Not just.” When I didn’t respond, she threw up her hands. “Duh,” she said. “We both draw ourselves for a living.”
“Oh! I guess that’s true.”
“Duh,” she said again, and then it was someone else’s turn to talk to her.
* * *
I figured I should call Bobby, as I needed a place to stay. I found a bank of pay phones in the hallway, right in the middle of the sci-fi conference. It seemed the science fiction people, with their outlandish outfits and elaborate imaginary personae, were having a better time than the cartoonists. They all appeared to know each other from way back, perhaps from chance interactions at far-flung intergalactic spaceports, and greeted one another with everything from solemn high-fives to glottal sputterings in invented languages. Samantha answered my call with the strangely formal “Mix residence, can I help you?”
“Samantha, it’s your uncle Tim.”
“Hi…” She dragged out the word, filling up space.