About Dan

 

I was born and raised in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. As a kid I spent parts of my summer drawing pages of cartoons with my best friend. We had read a lot of Peanuts and Bloom County (the storylines of which often went over our heads) and got much of our inspiration from those comic strips. I tried drawing exact copies of Peanuts characters, but could never get Charlie Brown's head round enough, and could never quite master the shape of Snoopy's nose, which got bigger and bigger through time. So, often my friend and I would make up our own characters and most of them were patterned after a certain style. We called these characters Heffers, because the morning news program we watched before school always announced the market values of heiffers, which we later learned were young cows. I guess knowing the market value of young cows was still incredibly important to people living in the greater Cleveland area, where farms had long since been replaced by suburbia. Anyway, the characters in The Whitebreads are sort of an evolved form of Heffer.

My upbringing in the suburbs was overall happy and secure. Kids in my neighborhood always played in The Woods, a large wooded vacant lot at the end of our street. There I learned my appreciation of nature by catching garder snakes and harvesting wild blueberries, blackberries and grapes (The Woods had long ago been a Concord grape vineyard), things few suburban children are exposed to. Later in my childhood, the greater part of The Woods were developed into houses in an effort to eradicate the last remaining bastions of nature in our city. By the way, in a neighboring city not too long after, a huge section of woods was torn down to make way for a walled affluent subdivision called The Woods.

I did a lot of artwork in high school and it was by far my greatest interest at that time. I was considering studying art in college, as my grandfather had been a commercial artist and I thought maybe that was what I wanted to do. It was some time during high school that I developed a concern for the environment. I used to watch the TV show Nature on PBS and it was always documenting the beautiful and the incredible in nature. At the end of nearly every show it would report essentially, "This is the last you'll ever see of this place and these creatures because some corporation has since gone in and destroyed it, or poachers have gone in and killed everything." Sometime late in high school I learned (of course not in any class) that styrofoam never biodegrades and contemplating this reality caused a revelation that blew me away: Humans do really stupid things that doom their future, without thinking twice about it. Boy, was I naive. I just couldn't imagine people would create something disposable that would never go away. For me, a major paradigm that almost everyone in the US still lives in knowingly or unknowingly, was shattered. It started me thinking from a new perspective, one that included the possibility that people would doom their future and that of others in the interest of their own short-term gains, whether they were acting out of necessity or just simple convenience. As I reread my Bloom County cartoons the subject matter and punchlines began making much more sense. I decided art would remain a hobby and I would study environmental science.

In college, I did learn about environmental issues in my classes but I learned much more outside of class through my involvement in environmental and social justice organizations. I learned that although my upbringing in the suburbs was secure and lavish with material goods, all of this affluence came at the expense of the majority of the people in the world and particularly at the expense of the planet. My senior year I began to express my political opinions through art by drawing a comic strip in the school newspaper. I called the strip Free Market and I'm sure the majority of students who read it had no idea what I was talking about. Many of those strips are on this website. My art in the strip started out really shaky, but as the year progressed it got better. I realized that if I just invested a little more time in the drawings and in outlines, the quality improved greatly.

After college, I worked on an organic farm in Michigan and did volunteer work in Nicaragua, a country I felt had gotten the brunt of idiotic US foreign policy and that was in the process of being converted back into an oligarchical puppet regime. I got more fuel for my political cartoons from those experiences but I didn't cartoon again until the mid 90s, when I half-heartedly and unsuccessfully tried to get my comics published in local publications. Only in the past year have I learned to draw with a paintbrush, to letter more legibly, and in general worked on making my cartoons look more professional. Have you ever seen early Doonesbury or Far Side cartoons? I think I'm doing alright now.

I'm trying to do something new in political cartooning in placing blame on American consumers. Like newspapers and other businesses, cartoonists try to court their readers and shy away from criticizing them or offending them in any way. Cartoonists don't want their stuff pulled from a newspaper so they keep their criticisms to public figures, and often even these criticisms are couched so as not to offend readers. Americans love to blame all their ills on figureheads and rarely take responsibility for societal problems-either that or they just don't give a shit. Most political cartoonists play along with this, sympathetically consoling the victimized citizen. It's a lot easier to point the finger at a corporation or a politician than it is to point it at the myriad of ways the American citizenry contributes to the destruction of the planet so much more than any other group in the world. I think there are a lot of victims in this country (people who have excuses for not being able to take responsibility for their actions) and many figureheads deserve blame, but rarely are any media brave enough to take on the affluent middle and upper classes. Why? Because these groups have economic clout. There are some cartoons these days that take on affluent America, such as Aaron McGruder's Boondocks and Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World, and I'd recommend these.

The Whitebreads may seem harsh, but the crisis our world faces at the hands of the world's affluent is too serious to pull any punches. Winona and Wilbur Whitebread bear the burden of embodying everything that I think is destructive about the suburban and urban affluent American way of life. More than anything I want to bring to light the truly evil aspects of our American lifestyle, the ones we try to cover up with entertainment and self-justification. At the same time I'm trying to take the edge off the cuts with silliness and humor. You can't really hate the Whitebreads, but you can be disgusted by what they're doing. Woody Allen is always poking fun at his Jewish heritage and in a similar way I poke fun at my suburban heritage. The only difference being I guess that I'm not just making fun of the culture of affluence, I'd like to see it change.

I hope to someday make at least a partial living from my comics, but as long as people are reading them and being entertained I'll be satisfied.