Every now and then I do one of those vanity searches on Google. You know, the kind where you look around to see what people are saying about you. I like to think, given what I do, it's a little more constructive than when random people type in their names. I also get a fairly huge amount of e-mail--it's still a lot to answer, even after I delete all the mail promising me money or the enlargement of any part of my anatomy.I am, however, quite terrible about answering mail. I think there's some sort of pathology involved here. In any case, I apologize to anyone I should have gotten back to and didn't. Maybe some day I will, accompanied by an apology for being extremely late.
In any case, there are certain statements, perceptions, etc. which do seem to be so widespread as to deserve a reply. So I'm going to use this space to say something that's long overdue:
I do not hate you or your comic.
Browsing with Google for the phrase "Ozy and Millie," I find that even a lot of people who link to this site think of me as some unholy cross between Bill Watterson, Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Puritan villagers from "The Scarlet Letter." (The Watterson reference being to his famous anti-merchandising stance, not his talent.) That's an excessively verbose way of saying I've managed to acquire a reputation as not only starkly anti-commercial, but also rabidly elitist--someone who hates any comic that doesn't match my own expectations of what a comic should be like.
People who think that may once have had a point. As the proprietor of one site on Keenspace put it, after heaping praise (of a sort) on me: "looking at his essays, I'm fairly sure my own strip is the type this guy would despise." For the record, I think his strip is perfectly respectable. I don't see anything in it that I would ever have hated. But that's irrelevant anyway, because I want to formally declare that I am not currently in the business of hating comics, nor have I been for some time.
I mean, they're comics. It's not like any of them are being drawn by third world dictators. If I don't like them, I won't read them, and that's the end of the story. I said in this space, previously, that I believe in only one absolute principle: you have a right to do whatever you want so long as it isn't hurting anyone else. It's unfair to declare that, and then harbor self-indulgent ideas about artistic purity that completely undermine it. I draw the strip I want to draw; other people can do the same, and it's all fine.
I suppose I ought to take down some of those older essays. I still get compliments on them, but they reflect a bitterness I no longer feel. I'll decide later.
I was born in Pullman, Washington, on April 23, 1977. This means I share a birthday with famed English bard William Shakespeare, extremely cute child actress and later political figure Shirley Temple, and convicted murderer-turned-cause celebre Mumia Abu-Jamal.
By most accounts I was an odd and intensely serious child. Which more or less paved the way for me to become an odd and intensely serious adult. I'm not a lot of fun at a party.
I graduated from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, in 1999. Ozy and Millie's two-year run in Evergreen's Cooper Point Journal earned second place for the Scripps-Howard Charles M. Schulz award in 1998, the final year that Schulz actually judged the contest (and may the George Washington of cartoonists rest in peace), as well as the 1999 College Media Advisers' award for Best Cartoon Strip.
Following my graduation I became a reporter/editorial cartoonist for the Puyallup Herald, a local weekly paper. This lasted six months. The experience was a very valuable one--a lifetime of English classes had emphasized all the wrong traits in writing, and a crash course in the "shut up and get to the point" style that is journalism will tighten anyone's language. I highly recommend it. These days I'm preparing to study journalism again, at the graduate level.
So, now here I am, a wannabe professional cartoonist, adrift on life's tide. Like Jack Kerouac but less sweaty.
Peace love empathy,
Ozy & Millie, and everything related, © 1997-2002 D.C. Simpson. Etc. etc. etc.