"How to become oneself, how to know the question and the answer of oneself..."

- D. H. Lawrence,
The Rainbow

Embarking on a life in the creative arts is like crossing a continent that is alternately jungle and desert upon a faulty unicycle. You try to maintain balance, eye on the prize, confidence firm; but monsters lurk behind every bush; storms sweep every gully; boils and leeches plague every infernal inch. Few sojourns end with the trophies of El Dorado; most points of termination are marked by their makers bleached and scattered bones, the stripped and rusted skeletons of the vehicles on which they placed their bets.

In 1983, Arn Saba, a 36-year-old from Vancouver, published the first issue of a comic book named Neil the Horse. Neil lasted five years and 15 issues. During its brief existence, it attracted a small but avid following, and it brought to the comic page a bubbly sparkle of idiosyncratic vintage that it had never before held and has yet to regain. Then Neil vanished; and, in a manner of speaking, more dramatically and more completely, so did Saba.

But then, to his thinking, Arn Saba had been a cosmic error from his inception. Replacing him -- through psychotherapy and hormone rebalancing and the creative cut-and-slice of the surgeon's knife -- with Katherine Collins, a 100 percent, true-blue, femme lesbian was due rectification.

I.

Saba's father's family owned a small chain of fabric and women's fashion stores. His mother was a cartoonist and writer. He had two brothers, one of whom would become a country music singer and one an organic farmer, and a sister who works in retail in Mexico.

As a child, Saba was fascinated by a collection of classic (1938-42) Terry and the Pirates strips his mother had compiled as a young woman. He poured over her scrapbooks repeatedly. He was equally enthralled by the comic books she brought into the home. His favorite moments were spent seated with his siblings on the floor, listening to her read: Walt Disney's Comics and Stories; Donald Duck; Uncle Scrooge. (His father thought he would be better off playing football.) As he grew older, Saba coupled this ardor for comics with a passion for musical comedies: Brigadoon; West Side Story; My Fair Lady -- all shows where better lands and better selves lay just beyond the barriers of mist or rooftop or muddled diphthongs.

In 1965, after graduating high school, Saba entered the University of British Columbia on a creative writing scholarship. He remained two years, with a third spent bicycling around Europe on $100 a month sandwiched between. At UBC, his prime interest was the campus newspaper, where he learned reporting, editing, and layout from professionals brought in from the Vancouver Sun. To the paper, he contributed his first comic strip, Moralman, about a self-righteous superhero who lacked any particular powers. Then, during his sophomore year, Saba took stock of his situation. By then, the counterculture lay full upon the land; and, by anyone's definition, a five-star hippie, he foresaw two options. Continue his academic career; obtain a degree; and become another academic, teaching others to do what he had already learned. Or drop out; take a lot of LSD; and draw comics. It was no contest.

Over the next several years, Saba lived the life of an artistic gypsy. He received a six month internship at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, where he wrote a short musical, "Euphoria," and took a lot of drugs. He co-authored, with Gordon Fidler, The Magenta Frog, a "children's book for adults," and its sequel, The Second Magenta Frog, and supported himself with the proceeds by peddling copies at student cafes and restaurants. He reviewed books for The Province, a Vancouver daily. He was awarded a grant by the Canadian Film Development Corporation for a never-completed, feature film, Birdland. He served as the art director for Pacific Yachting magazine. Between 1970 and 1972, he lived with a girlfriend, five miles from the nearest other person, on Cortes Island in the archipelago between British Columbia and Vancouver Island. (He chopped wood, communed with nature, rowed his boat -- a gorgeous, golden pine, 13-footer from Norway -- and took more drugs.) Between 1973 and 1976, he wrote songs and skits for and performed with Circus Minimus, a circus-theater which featured a strongman who lifted cardboard weights, an ostrich that was an obvious human being, and many, many clowns. Saba performed primarily as Professor Smoothie, whose act consisted of announcing he would sing the world's most beautiful song, which he happened to have written -- but instead comically alienating the audience, through boasts and insults, until he was good-naturedly booed from the stage. (Saba prided himself for never failing to bring about this banishing, though it was never announced as his goal.) He worked on other films, drew comics and spot illustrations, wrote songs, designed ads, took photographs and consumed still more drugs.

In 1974, Saba had decided to act on a long held desire and become a newspaper strip cartoonist. He needed, he realized, a set of characters who, like Carl Barks's ducks, could be transported to any setting, no matter how bizarre, have all manner of adventures, from the romantic to the swashbuckling, and retain throughout the freedom to react from their own, vivid, individualized personalities. He had to avoid characters whose nature imprisoned their thoughts and actions. He auditioned several; but his clown always behaved like a clown, his detective, a detective; his hippies, hippies.

One evening, returning home from work -- he was then art director for a magazine in Vancouver -- the faces and figures of a horse and an alley cat appeared like a thought bubble above his head, along with their names and the nature of their relationship. Neil, the former. was a happy-go-lucky, good natured, if somewhat dopey kid, with no ties, who could wander into any situation; and Soapy, the latter, was a shrewd, street-wise, cynical, though soft-hearted, entrepreneur-wannabe, who would accompany him, hoping to turn each new adventure to their financial advantage.

Over the next few months, Saba drew twelve weeks of strips in a style influenced by Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse dailies of the 1930s. He put them in booklet form and sent them, accompanied by publicity material he had authored, to every weekly newspaper in British Columbia. That summer, while touring with the circus, between performances, he visited each of them, promoting his strip. Eventually he placed Neil in about 30 papers.

Neil was a humor strip. Sometimes, it was a one-shot offer: a gag; a philosophical instruct; a visual trip. Sometimes it strung out a surrealistic adventure: One involved Neil, whom Soapy had inflated with helium in order to promote him as "The World's Largest Elephant" for a circus whose owner had been driven mad by nicotine deprivation after giving up smoking, breaking loose from his moorings and floating off collide, first, with a "World Famous Aviator," who never traveled without his ancestral tuba, and, later, a flight of Opera International Airlines, which was in the process of being simultaneously highjacked by, among others, Armenian freemasons, an elderly woman bound for Miami, and a member of the Book of the Month Club. Neil's prospects seemed endless, limited only by Saba's ability to keep ink in his pen.

A few years into the strip, Saba introduced Mam'selle Poupée, an aspiring singer-dancer, who happened to be a wooden doll. Originally conceived of as a minor character who would appear occasionally, Poupée's presence proved compelling. For one thing, her metier opened Neil to Saba's love of theater. And her constant, unrequited search for love allowed him an outlet for his own emotions, which were being buffeted by a series of unsatisfying, short term relationships. He would not understand until later that Poupée never found love because he could not, and that the reason he couldn't was because he was in the wrong body.

Saba had hoped his nationality alone would attract a Canadian audience to Neil. But, he learned, readers did not want characters with which they were not familiar. They wanted Blondie. They wanted Nancy. They did not care if characters were drawn by Martians as long as they knew them. Too few papers ran his strip to make it profitable. And if his lack of income wasn't depressing enough, market forces were making newspaper strips less gratifying artistically. Papers were shrinking their size and eliminating those which required an attention span much longer than an eye's blink. If he was going to continue, Neil would have to be a postage stamp-paneled, gag-a-day strip. Saba, who aspired to be Lyonel Feininger or George McManus, was repulsed.

While working towards Neil's breakthrough, Saba had been a freelance broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Beginning in 1975, he produced and starred in fifty half-hour radio shows about newspaper comic strips. He offered history lessons, critical insights, dramatizations of episodes, and clips from interviews he had conducted with significant creators. The complete transcripts of some of these -- Milton Caniff, Hal Foster, Floyd Gottredson, Russ Manning -- published by The Comics Journal over the next several years, through the questions he asked and the essayistic remarks with which he introduced each interview, sketched a portrait of Saba as an emerging artist who was marked by a seriousness of purpose and an uncertainty about his actual worth. He approached his subjects almost as if he was from a lower caste or species. They were "gods," and "heroes," creators of "landmarks of popular culture," "impossible to dislike." He applauded their "sense of humor" and "old-fashioned morality," their "decency," "enthusiasm," and "tenderness." Meeting them was "a dream come true," " the most treasured hours of my life," rendering him "fascinated and awe-stricken." They were "true" gentlemen.

In his prefaces, Saba demonstrated a clear, clean prose style. He showed a historian's command of comicdom's past and a scholar's ability to penetrate into and declaim about the technicalities of the cartoonist's craft. He also revealed a philosophical and intellectual depth absent from his fictional work. The major question of his inquiry, to which he repeatedly returned, was whether comics could be a serious literature addressing serious ideas, or if there was "some flaw inherent in the medium... that necessarily limits the subject matter?" Could they "throw off the shackles of commercial restraint and artistic conventionality" and attain "the brooding allusiveness and universal depth of Moby Dick," or must they continually fall back on someone demolishing a building or clobbering a rival? (He would conclude that comics could achieve artistic greatness, but his subjects continually disappointed him by dismissing their own work. We're only there to sell newspapers, Caniff said. We're too rushed to be artists, Gottfredson added.) Despite his faith, Saba found himself "over a barrel about cartooning. I don't know what direction to go," he told Manning, "because the things I do best are not wanted by anybody."

By late 1982, however, Saba's future in radio looked no better than his career as a cartoonist. Budgetary cutbacks had forced the CBC to reduce work for free-lancers, and the new executive producer for Morningside, the daily, three hour show which had given Saba the most work, was not his fan. Saba disliked the parry-and-thrust competitive struggle now required to have a project green lighted; but, before he left radio, he had one last, bright, shining moment.

[To read the rest of this essay, please see The Comics Journal #255.]

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