Given its frequent focus on fraught mother-daughter relationships, it is perhaps unsurprising that Cathy the comic strip began at the relentless urging of Cathy Guisewite’s mother. Before her career as a cartoonist, Guisewite grew up in Midland, Michigan, graduating from the University of Michigan with a degree in English in 1972.
After graduation, she worked at the W. B. Doner & Co. advertising agency, where she became its first female vice president. It was at this time that Guisewite found stress release by sketching rough doo-dles and sending them to her parents. Guisewite’s mother urged her daughter to send her drawings out to publishers. In the Cathy Twen-tieth Anniversary Collection, Guisewite remembered, “I drew my first comic strip on the kitchen table in between bowls of fudge ripple ice cream. It wasn’t a comic strip, really, just as explosion of frustration that wound up on paper instead of in my mouth” (7). In The Cathy Chronicles, Guisewite recalled that, “anxious to have me do even bet-ter, my parents researched comic strip syndicates, sought advice from Tom Wilson, the creator of Ziggy, and, finally, threatened to send my work to Universal Press Syndicate if I didn’t” (18). Heeding her parents’ warning/advice, Guisewite sent some work to the Universal Press Syndicate, who lauded the work’s “honesty” despite the simple drawings and swiftly offered Guisewite a contract.
The pressure was intense. In Fifteenth Anniversary Reflections, Guisewite commented that she “quit taking art class when I was seven years old because I was planning a career as a cowboy and felt it would be a waste of time to learn how to draw” (vii). There-fore, upon receiving the deal from Universal Press, Guisewite “spent every night that followed frantically trying to learn how to draw on a drawing board under the stairway in my apartment” (Cathy Twen-tieth Anniversary Collection 7). It was a steep learning curve, though Guisewite found support from Lee Salem and Jim Andrews, as she explained in an interview with Tom Heintjes:
Lee told me how big to make the boxes. I was just drawing on paper with a ball-point pen, so Lee told me that some people use
Rapidograph pens on Bristol board. I bought those. Everything about the next couple of months was a constant panic and fun of learning to do everything completely from zero. . . . I bought a book called Backstage at the Strips by Mort Walker, and that book was my bible of how to physically do a comic strip. I got great inspira-tion from that. I bought tracing paper, and I developed a system of drawing the same picture on tracing paper over and over. Some-body told me about lightboxes, so I got a lightbox and developed a system that when I would get four frames that were decently drawn on tracing paper, I would use the lightbox to trace them in ink onto Bristol board. I never drew in pencil at all. That was the system I used to put together the first six weeks of strips, and that is the exact same system I used 34 years later when I drew the last strip.
Guisewite’s efforts came to fruition when Cathy the comic strip offi-cially launched on November 22, 1976. The creator, however, suffered a bout of nerves, and for her part, “hid in my office in the advertising agency where I worked as a writer, praying that no one would read the comics that day” (Cathy Twentieth Anniversary Collection 5).
Guisewite points out the pioneering nature of the strip, for, at the time of Cathy’s debut, “Pursuing a career was a new phase for women,” and “Except for Brenda Starr and Nancy, all the comic strips starred men” (Cathy Twentieth Anniversary Collection 5). In the early days, the strip struggled to find its footing. Guisewite posited that “the art was extremely primitive, and the comic strip editors were not used to seeing that kind of primitive-looking art. The sec-ond problem was that almost all of the features editors at that time were men, and it was a very different voice to be in the comics page”
(Heintjes “Cathy”). However, over time the strip gained a wider fol-lowing, eventually appearing in over 1,400 newspapers, and numer-ous merchandising deals and an Emmy-winning animated special followed. Guisewite continued working at the advertising agency full-time while working on the strip until 1980, when she decided to move to Los Angeles to devote her full attention into what was becoming a pop culture phenomenon. Guisewite also gained notori-ety as a public figure, appearing regularly on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
Interestingly enough, profiles of Guisewite from the early days of the strip seemed to miss the strip’s critique of the media promot-ing unattainable and unhealthy beauty standards for women, and instead, chose to focus on the creator’s appearance, such as the 1980
piece by Louise Sweeney for The Christian Science Monitor, which described Guisewite as a “leggy brunette who has not yet had to cope with a 30th birthday” and argued that “the Cathy you see in the comic strip, although named for her creator, doesn’t look much like her. Cathy Guisewite in person looks like a young doe, with large brown hair. She is 5 foot 2 inches, small-boned, slender, agile, not the lovable klutz that Cathy is” (Sweeney). Not only was Guisewite the creator likened to a small woodland creature, even her voice was scrutinized, for Sweeney noted that Guisewite sounded different than she had expected, for her voice “is not the breathy, little girl, early-Jackie Kennedy voice you might expect of ‘Cathy.’ It is the voice of an older woman.” Somehow, the author seems to feel it important to point out that the “real” Cathy is thin and attractive with a strong voice, and not at all like her creation, thus playing out the sexist obsession with stereotypes of female beauty that Cathy the cartoon figure lamented on a daily basis.
Over the years Cathy’s popularity grew, spawning greeting cards, dolls, and other licensed products along with numerous anthologies.
Yet over time, as the women’s liberation moment faded into the back-ground of national consciousness, admiration for Cathy also waned.
Rather than the purveyor of humorous quips, Cathy had become the butt of the joke, appearing as the punch line in various venues, including Tina Fey’s television program 30 Rock and various skits on Saturday Night Live. In 2010 Guisewite decided to end the strip to spend more time with her daughter, and the wave of scorn that met this decision surprised many, including Rosalind Warren, the editor of The Best Contemporary Women’s Humor, who exclaimed, “The reac-tion has been venomous . . . I was surprised myself” (qtd. in Zerbi-sias). While fellow creator Rina Piccolo recognized Cathy’s historical significance for female creators, she was also quoted in “Was Cathy a Voice of Female Progress or Stereotyped Neurosis?: Character was No Blondie, But Feminists are Happy to See Her Go” as arguing that the comic was stuck in a time warp: “She did it in the ’70s, and in the
’80s, and in the ’90s, and in the 2000s, and, at this point, women’s lives have changed quite a bit. She ran the gag into the ground. The crowd that says good riddance just got sick of it” (Toronto Star IN 1). In contrast, Guisewite maintained that the struggles of women in 2010 were, in fact, very similar to those of thirty years ago, declar-ing, “I don’t know, as women, what are we past? . . . When I write about dieting, I feel like I am writing as truthfully to women’s
pres-sures and concerns today as I was 34 years ago. The daily battle with self-image, self-consciousness and will power is exactly the same to me” (Toronto Star IN 1). Today Cathy’s legacy is unclear. Was she the embodiment of detrimental stereotypes of female neuroses or a femi-nist trailblazer? Is it possible to be both? Neither?