PANORAMA CITY : Drawing From Life to Create a Cartoon Success

While hiking in a canyon above Pasadena at age 16, he fell from a cliff, broke his back and lost the use of his legs for life.

For Doug Lamarche, now 44 and living in Panorama City, it has been a long, uphill climb to regain his sense of wholeness. But, he says, he is almost there.

His own art and creativity, born of desperation, frustration and pain, provided the catharsis. Two years ago, while sitting in his wheelchair in a computer laboratory at a business college, he seized upon a seedling idea for a cartoon or comic strip character called, simply, Able.

He doodled and sketched a little, and began pitching his idea for a comic strip or a cartoon, based on a physically disabled 8-year-old boy who triumphantly hurdles the obstacles of everyday life, to a number of studios and production companies.

There were no takers until a friend at Universal Studios, where Lamarche worked as a ticket-taker, suggested that he submit a short comic strip to the employee newsletter, called Studio Insider. Lamarche and a cartoonist friend named Ray Huerta came up with a simple four-box strip introducing Able to Universal Studios employees. More strips followed.

“They loved it,” said Lamarche, a slender and soft-spoken man with sunken eyes and a talent for creating colorful, Escher-like engravings.

Now, Lamarche’s comic strip character could be on its way to becoming a nationally recognized figure in the campaign for disabled persons’ rights.

A Beverly Hills production company plans to develop Lamarche’s comic strip into a series of television cartoons as well as live, interactive shows that would incorporate children from the audience in performances.

“We see it as a kind of Peanuts for the ‘90s,” said Ben Mittlemen, president of Action for Kids, who is negotiating a co-ownership agreement with Lamarche.

“We’ll call it: ‘Able and His Friends.’ We’re looking at a cartoon program, live productions, possibly an interactive CD-ROM. I don’t think there’s anything else like it out there. It’s not an easy sell. But we’re convinced that parents want programming that’s exciting and that’s about something.”

For Lamarche, who has had a series of recent misfortunes, including a car collision with a motorist who has no insurance, the timing couldn’t be better.

“You see, I am really Able,” said Lamarche, speaking from his small one-bedroom apartment in Richview Manor, a 40-unit building on Gledhill Street designed to accommodate disabled people.

“The character is based on me--but it’s about a little kid, and life is his nemesis but he overcomes it and wins in the end. Some people think the disabled are weak--so the idea is to raise awareness and gain acceptance of people with disabilities. That’s one message. The other is that it will reach out to children. He’s going to be an upbeat character, and we’ll pair him with a deaf character and possibly other disabled characters.”

Lamarche also has created a boxed set of poetry and engravings designed to help victims of childhood abuse or physical disabilities speed the recovery process.

“It’s what I do,” he said, his arms clasped tightly around the box on his lap. “I’m trying to help.”