Everything Under the Sun--Even Laughs : Cartoonist’s Career Takes Off After Moving to San Diego

San Diego has been good to Rick Geary, a nationally published cartoonist. After moving here from Wichita, Kan., 12 years ago, his career began to prosper.

“The best thing I ever did was move to San Diego,” Geary said.

Author of “At Home with Rick Geary,” a collection of cartoons that were published in various magazines and newspapers over an eight-year period, Geary regularly submits work to National Lampoon and the San Diego Reader. He also has a cartoon syndicated through the Copley News Service every week called “Excursions,” which announces an off-the-wall event happening somewhere in the United States, such as a chicken flying meet in Columbus, Ohio.

Sitting at his drafting table recently, Geary was fervently working on his newest graphic story book, “A Treasure of Victorian Murders.” The book, which will be published by Mantier, Beall, Minoustchine, is 60 pictorial accounts of humorous Sherlock Holmes-type murder mysteries and is due on the market in the fall, Geary said.

Fan of the Dark Side

“I’ve always been interested in crime and murder and the dark side of people,” he said. “I’ve been trying to do two pages a day. My work is very detailed, so it takes a long time to do one page. Sometimes I work so tight that my hands swell up at the end of the day.”

The 41-year-old artist, who turned a spare room in his rented Pacific Beach house into a studio, explained that the foremost importance of his comics is the statement.

“I work from the verbal part of the story first,” he said. “I try not to just illustrate the words. But I do try to make them (drawings) more oblique.”

In person, Geary seems shy and reserved. His serious and mild-mannered demeanor could easily throw off someone who follows his work, which often depicts zany-looking animals and people with unnaturally long faces and large protruding ears. In many cases, his work is reminiscent of a spacey version of Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman.

Unlike some other cartoonists, Geary is more interested in the drawing than the text.

“My style doesn’t go for the belly laugh,” Geary said. “It’s more whimsical and goes for a chuckle. There are a lot of them (cartoonists) that don’t concentrate on the art, but they have good senses of humor.”

Geary said he is not interested in making political cartoons or doing a daily strip.

“At one time, like in the ‘60s, it appealed to me to be a political cartoonist,” he said. “But now I don’t think I could feel comfortable opinionating. My mind is not equipped for the daily grind of doing a strip. I don’t know how someone like Garry Trudeau does it.”

Plenty of Deadlines

Geary does, however, have plenty of deadlines to meet. Besides finishing the book--by the end of this month--he also illustrates a column and sends several comics to National Lampoon at the beginning of every month, and illustrates some of the magazine’s articles.

He is working on a six-minute animated film that he hopes will be shown at an upcoming animation festival.

The artist said its more difficult to do graphics for someone else’s text and prefers to do his own thing. However, his illustrations in the Reader and the drawings he does for advertising agencies help put food on the table, he said with a laugh.

Geary works in three stages, and uses only pencil and ink. First, he loosely sketches out his entire drawing. Then he does the preliminary inking, and finally he adds the detail. Geary said he likes to keep his workday traditional, 9 to 5, so that he can spend time with his wife when she gets home from work.

“If I feel drained or depressed I usually go to a movie,” he said. “I’m a movie junkie.”

The cartoonist, who studies commercial art at the University of Kansas, said he’s wanted to be an artist for as long as he can remember.

Although he has found success in San Diego, Geary said he would like to move to New York in a year.

“I have become a little disillusioned with Pacific Beach,” he said. “It used to be so quiet, and now it’s quite the night spot. Not that New York is going to be quiet, but right now in my career it could really help. But San Diego was definitely good for me. I’ve succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.”