Sixtysomethings Spark Comic Strip : 'Pickles': Artist makes stars of aging couple, divorced daughter, grandson, a perplexed dog and a Rubenesque cat.

Sixtysomethings Spark Comic Strip : ‘Pickles’: Artist makes stars of aging couple, divorced daughter, grandson, a perplexed dog and a Rubenesque cat.

By TOM GARDNER

Oct. 3, 1993 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

SPARKS, Nev. — Artist Brian Crane has admired older people since he was a youngster, so when he decided to try his hand at a comic strip, a story line focusing on a retired couple was natural.

“When I was a teen-ager, I used to draw pictures of what I thought I’d look like as an older person,” he said. “I look forward to old age.”

Eventually, his sketches became the comic strip “Pickles,” which appears daily in 64 newspapers in the United States and Canada and in 31 on Sundays.

It centers on sixtysomething Earl and Opal Pickles, their career-minded daughter, Sylvia, her son, Nelson, a chronically perplexed dog named Roscoe, and Muffin, a Rubenesque cat with an attitude.

“Muffin is by far the most popular character in the strip. Roscoe’s probably second,” Crane said. “I just kind of put them in as an afterthought. I thought an old person might have cats and dogs.”

Opal, a Barbara Bush-like woman named after an aunt of Crane’s wife, was the main character in the strip at first.

“Originally, I wasn’t even sure if she was going to be married or widowed,” he said. “I saw her as kind of a cantankerous old woman with cats and dogs living with her. She’s evolved. She’s not turned out to be as cranky as I had planned. Earl’s turned out to be the cranky one. And Muffin. So I get my crankiness out on them, I guess.”

Earl, retired and often underfoot, frequently shares Roscoe’s bewilderment about his role in the family.

“He’s my favorite character. I have the most fun with Earl,” Crane said.

“In a way, he’s a man that’s kind of lost. He spent his whole life working for a living and now he’s at home most of the time. That’s his wife’s domain. He doesn’t have a domain any more, other than maybe the park bench or out fishing.”

Opal, he said, has become the focus of the strip and the anchor of the family as Sylvia, who is divorced, and Nelson both rely heavily on her, and Earl and Muffin can use her to vent their frustrations.

“Even though we think we live in a patriarchal society, in the home a lot of times it’s the mother, or the grandmother in an extended family, who is the pivotal person,” he said.

The characters, whom Crane refers to as if they were family, come to life in a cramped studio that takes up half of a two-car garage in his northeast Sparks home.

Unlike some cartoonists who use submitted gags or rely on other artists to ink the final drawings, Crane’s panels are entirely his.

“I write all my own gags and draw my own strip. I’m a one-man show,” he said.

Although readers sometimes suggest story lines, Crane said they don’t meet his criteria for the strip.

“They’re usually just cliches about old age, making fun of the age spots and wrinkles and achy backs and stuff like that. I try not to spend too much time on that in my strip.

“I’ve tried to make it less a strip about old people as much as a strip about people who happen to be old. That’s kind of a fine line there, I guess,” he said.

He also smoothed a few of Earl’s and Opal’s earlier wrinkles.

Crane, 44, said his characters are not based on any one person.

“It’s kind of a conglomeration of my grandparents, my parents, old people I’ve known.”

He began pitching “Pickles” more than four years ago and quickly learned that a comic strip about old people is a hard sell to editors and newspapers.

“All they want to hear is youth. Everything’s so youth-oriented in our society that we look at youth and kind of brush away the old people. I just think that as a category, as a group, old people have a lot of humor that goes untapped.”

Three tries and six months after he first tried to sell the strip to a syndicate in 1989, Crane put his samples in a file drawer to concentrate on his job as senior art director for the Doyle McKenna Bayer Brown advertising agency in Reno.

His wife, Diana, urged him to try one more syndicate. The strip clicked. “Pickles” made its debut in April, 1990.

Crane has reduced his agency work to four days a week and is thinking about trimming it to three; however, he’s not ready to quit his day job.

“I’m not making enough on the strip yet to support me in the manner I’ve become accustomed to,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. “I’m making more every year, but with seven children, I couldn’t live on it totally yet.”