Wild Greens

R: When did you make the next one?

L: The next one I think was “The Resume.”

R: That one made it into our issue!

L: Yes, although I did redraw it for you guys. That was the feeling of being part of job prep conversations, and feeling so inadequate. Even though the truth of the matter is that we're all hares. We're all super capable. And it's not that turtle isn’t capable either, it’s just that he’s undervalued.

In the initial draft, the speech bubble was different. Turtle is sitting and looking at Hare’s resume with a dark cloud over his head and he says something like, “Freakin overachiever.” For Wild Greens I wanted it to be family friendly, something for all ages, so I rewrote the caption.

R: And the third one?

 L: The third one definitely had some swear words in it. It was about Hare sharing good news with Turtle, and Turtle’s like, “I'm so happy for you.” But it’s clear that he isn’t. [The caption in the comic is: “Keep yr progress to yrself, bitch.”]

 R: I see the thread connecting all three of those.

 L: It’s about grad school! It’s about surviving a highly competitive environment. All of those are on the theme of the race. The race to something. And how do you compete, and how do you survive a competition that's crushingly hard and emotionally hard, and your self-hatred and your hatred of your competitors? Dark. Heavy. Totally different. And not sustainable. You don't want to live in that. You don't want to live there. I didn't do any of those with Frank, either. This is so much more fun.

R: When did Frank get involved?

 L: Frank, my husband, got involved in comic three for Wild Greens, the one with the face masks and running the race. A direct nod to Aesop's fable. The theme was “Audacity.” We asked ourselves, what comes to mind first when you think of audacity? What if we did something topical like the audacity of confronting someone who's wearing their mask wrong?

R: Or the audacity of *wearing* your mask wrong.

 L: Yeah, it goes both ways. That comic really did go two or three ways with it.

R: So much of the humor comes from where things are placed, like where the lines come. How do you figure that out?

L: First I draw a sketch. The sketch tries to get things legible and placed right: where the thought bubble will go and who needs to be in the foreground and what needs to be in the background, as well as how simply can I draw it.

I have to be willing to scrap it and start over. I do a lot of Undo [laughs].

R: How do you make their faces so funny? They have the best facial expressions!

L: Oh, that took a lot of practice. I've gotten better at it. Readers probably have noticed that the way I've drawn both characters has evolved. I started by looking at pictures of turtles and pictures of rabbits. The initial drawings were extremely realistic, and I realized this is never going to work. This isn't funny. I had turtles that looked like sea turtles, more than land turtles. I didn't really want to go the sea turtle route because how is the sea turtle going to talk to a hare? He'd have to be in a scuba suit or something.

R: Hare in a scuba suit with a sea turtle? There’s something there.

L: We can work on that [laughs].

L: So then I literally — This is the level to which I cheated. I googled comic drawings of turtles and saw the things people did to simplify turtles’ features.

R: That’s not cheating! That’s research.

L: I noticed that for a turtle to read as a turtle, there has to be something with the nose where it looks almost like a beak. Beyond that they're kind of amorphous. They don't have much of a neck. You can do a big eye or a beady eye, which I prefer. And then you just need the shell. If you don't draw it up high to the neck, it can look like a different animal—like a lady bug or something.

L: So you have to get the shell right and then you have to get to the beak right, and then beyond that, you really can't go wrong. It’s much, much harder to draw Hare. I also didn't want to draw Bugs Bunny.

Hare has evolved most of all in my drawings. I decided to establish one key feature that makes Hare, Hare, which is that the ears are back and together. Whenever you see a rabbit in the comic that has the ears relaxed and back, that is Hare. I tried to make that consistent.

So Hare has ears that are back and together, big feet, and his eyes are expressive, because I think hares are more human-looking than turtles, and Hare’s energy requires a more expressive eye. Turtle on the other hand is kind of like Eeyore. I could almost copy and paste him in there, because there’s much lower energy. There isn’t as much range.

R: So the key features of making the drawing funny are…

L: It’s simplifying the drawing, exaggerating the feature, and deciding the way the font is written. The way the font is written can communicate a lot.

R: Now I'm trying to picture what the font looks like. So you handwrite the script? You don’t use a font?

L: Right, I typically don't use a computer font. The T-shirt that says, “Im not slow Im retro”—that's a font. But the speech bubbles are hand drawn. I've experimented a ton with that. At first I thought I’d always make Hare’s speech in all caps and Turtle’s in lower case. But then I realized that I wasn't really happy with that. So, I vary. Though I think Turtle’s speech has always been in lowercase.

When I did the kids, I tried to make their speech look less like an adult wrote it. I don’t think I’ve been 100% successful, but the way that you write the text communicates something. It communicates a tone of voice, and then it also communicates childishness, or seriousness, or authority, or powerlessness. Humor.

R: This gets me to my next question: the punchlines. Where do they come from?

L: The process is we talk it out first, me and Frank. We wait to see what the new theme is, and Frank’s always like, “Have they announced the theme? Have they announced the theme yet?” Because he’s ready to go. And I’m like, “Yeah the theme is… ‘Nostalgia,’” and usually our reaction is, “Oh that’s hard.” [laughs]

Then we talk it out, usually on a walk. I know that if something Frank says makes me laugh, then it’s a good idea. And if something I say makes Frank laugh, it's a good idea. We can read each other and be pretty honest about it. If it's not quite there yet, then okay, let's think about it a little bit.

Sometimes I read turtle and hare facts online to get ideas. I'll just feed Frank this information. Like, “Oh so the most interesting thing I found was that turtles live really long and hares live really short lives. So, they're not just opposites in the way that Aesop trained us to think— you know, that one is fast and one is slow— but they're also opposites in terms of longevity.”

Someday when I'm smart enough I’ll come up with something funny on this idea that they're also opposites in their reproduction. Hares—you know, they multiply like rabbits. So, their lives are abundant but short. And it's the opposite for turtles, so I'm intrigued by that.

R: Tell me about the process for the October comic.

L: It was a classic Lauren and Frank breakdown. Find out the theme. Talk it out. Sketch it out. Frank suggested that I read about turtle and hare behaviors to see if there is anything ritualistic they do. And then we can play them off of each other. They each sort of make fun of each other for their characteristic behaviors.

I learned a lot. I found the most interesting thing about each of them and told Frank yesterday on a walk.  

I see him think for maybe a minute and then he goes, “Oh I have something.” I'm like, “Oh my god, amazing.” He spits out this funny scenario and punch line, and I was laughing. He's so good at this. He makes it funny. I was like, “That's great. Let's do it.” It’s first thought best thought, usually, once we get to that phase. I usually don't go back to the drawing board again. Instead, I refine that idea. So that's my task for the next week: to make it into something.

If you’re a fan of the show, you might disagree a bit with my analysis of characters on these axes. But regardless of whether or not you agree with my analysis, it’s clear that while the y-axis is extremely subjective and entirely based on my own feelings, the x-axis is somewhat objective. Intensity, or lack thereof, is undeniable. But no matter where you place the characters, the concept remains constant: there are four main categories of Gilmore Girls characters. 

The Four Types of Gilmore Girls Characters:

1) Cool Cats:

These characters are chill and grounded, and we love them for that. Best exemplified by the Troubadour, Morey, and Dave, they add a refreshing note of calm to an otherwise chaotic universe. 

2) Lovable Lunatics:

Overwhelmingly high-energy characters whom we love both because of and despite their intensity. They give life to the show, and create a universe we want to be a part of.

* the Sherman-Palladino Threshold:

Characters past this threshold have big main character energy, and are the heart and soul of any Amy Sherman-Palladino show. Any of these characters could absolutely hold down their own spin-off. 

3) Nightmare Psychos:

These characters use their intensity for evil and need to take it down a notch. They cause mayhem in the lives of the people around them by stridently asserting their own harmful preferences at all times. Jackson, you are dead to me.

4) Toxic Cowards:

Passive, cowardly, and apathetic, they make themselves and others miserable through their inaction or quiet, simmering destruction. They slouch into roles that others impose on them, and choose the easy way out of most situations, even if that leads to resentment later on. 

* The Unconcerned Center:

These characters are so close to the love/hate line, I feel pretty much indifferent towards them. And they’re not really intense or chill enough to notice in any meaningful way.

What does this all mean?

Here, I’ve drawn some observations about what all this data means. 

Frenemies:

It seems that the most compelling frenemy relationships come from opposite quadrants. The Paris/Rory frenemy relationship has sparks flying, with a lovable lunatic squaring off against a toxic coward. Likewise, Luke (a moderately cool cat) often finds himself at odds with family members and neighbors who are nightmare psychos (e.g., Taylor and TJ). 

The least interesting frenemy pair on this list is Sookie and Michel, because we’re rooting for both of them equally, and they’re both a similar degree of intense. If Zack somehow managed to take over Sookie’s job at the Inn, the ensuing face-off between him and Michel would be electric.

Like Sookie and Michel, Richard and Jason’s very dynamic work relationship is just not compelling enough to care about—even though Jason is an absolute shit-stirrer and Richard is a relatively grounded person, neither he nor Richard is likeable enough for us to care very much either way. But the more you like Richard as a character, the more compelling their relationship will be to you.

Romances: 

Secondary characters: 

Secondary character romances are all over the board, with almost everyone finding a partner who is at least a couple degrees more or less intense than themselves (with the exception of Lindsay and Dean). 

Main characters:

Lorelai dates from pretty much all four quadrants. Max is most similar to herself, Luke is much less intense yet similarly likeable, Christopher is detestable and less intense, and Jason is detestable and more intense. Rory, on the other hand, dates almost exclusively from within her own quadrant. (This is directly mocked in the reboot by the introduction of the oft-forgotten boyfriend character.)

Gender and Sexuality:

In Gilmore Girls, if you are a straight man, you will only be likable if you are extremely chill (e.g., Luke, Morey, Dave, Brian, and the Troubadour). But just because you are not intense does not mean you will necessarily be likable (e.g., Zack, every single one of Rory’s exes, her father, and her grandfather). 

If, however, you are a straight man who passes the intensity threshold, you will almost certainly be a total psychopath. Indeed, while you can find them all across the board, straight, white men are the sole inhabitants of the nightmare psycho corner of Gilmore Girls.

Queer and queer-coded characters (e.g., Gypsy, Taylor, Michel, and arguably Paris and Kirk [hat tip, Margie Housley]) are placed all over the board, except absent from the Rory corner. 

Female characters are generally placed on the intensity-side of the spectrum, with male characters more on the less-intense side of the spectrum.

Conclusions:

There’s so much more to say, but at this point, I invite you to draw your own conclusions, and fill out your own Gilmore Girls character alignment chart. Print it out, or sketch out your own.