[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] Article: Cartoonist's 'little guy' fights system with humor

[Shelley L. Rhodes]

Article about a blind cartoonist.


Desert Mountain Times, Texas
Thursday, March 03, 2005

Cartoonist's 'little guy' fights system with humor

By Tom Shuford, News editor


    There's a "little guy" spirit that permeates Gary Oliver's political 
cartoons.
    It's almost Don Quixote-like as his anti-hero characters - born of the 
60s anti-establishment attitude - tackle one hot-button issue after another 
in what Oliver likes to refer to as the "outrage du jour."
    Examples of Oliver's cartoon art are currently displayed at the 
Waterstop Gallery of the Marfa Studio of Arts, 106 E. San Antonio St., in 
Marfa as part of a two-man show with cartoonist Tom Curry of Alpine.
    Whether it's facing down the trucks of "La Entrada" or preserving West 
Texas from those who'd make it a receptacle for nuclear waste, Oliver's 
cartoon characters give voice to the belief that sometimes, just sometimes, 
persistent opposition by the little guy can defeat the forces of power.
    It's an attitude that comes straight from Oliver's life.
    Born in 1947, Oliver grew up in Beaumont, where doctors discovered 
fairly quickly he had problems with his eyesight. Oliver said he remembers 
numerous trips to Houston specialists, who determined that he was color 
blind, cross-eyed and the victim of a rare condition known as "nystagmus" 
that is marked by an almost constant, involuntary movement of the eyeball.
    In a phrase, Oliver is legally blind.
    But Oliver never has been one to accept other people's judgments. He 
tried playing baseball with the other kids, stepping up to home plate with a 
baseball bat poised for action. A wild pitch hit him square in the middle of 
his head.
    "Everybody else ducked," Oliver said. "They saw it coming."
    After that, he decided to do different things with his spare time - like 
drawing comics, a hobby since he was 5 or 6 years old.
    At school, he used binoculars to read the blackboard. He excelled 
academically; he had to because there always seemed to be some 
well-intentioned teacher who wanted to ship him off to a special school for 
the blind.
    "I don't belong in the world of the blind," Oliver said.
    Sometimes it took a bit of scamming on his part with the help of willing 
friends to stay one step ahead of the system. Getting a job was especially 
difficult for Oliver since he couldn't read the application forms very well. 
Friends applied for the same job and filched a blank application form that 
Oliver could study before going to a job interview.
    To this day, Oliver can still quote the letters in order on the 
standardized eye charts used by the driver's license bureau during the 50s - 
a skill he mastered so he could get a license for the motorbike he rode 
around town.
    But sometimes things almost backfired.
    As editorial page editor for his high school paper, Oliver won a 
University Interscholastic League prize for one of his editorial cartoons. A 
trip to Austin to collect his prize convinced Oliver that Austin would be "a 
cool place" to go to college - if he could find the tuition money.
    A teacher had suggested that one of the state agencies might help 
because of his eyesight. One afternoon, he came tooling up on is bike to his 
parents' house in Beaumont to find a black-suited representative of the 
Texas Commission for the Blind waiting for him to determine his eligibility 
for free tuition - a benefit given by law to the blind at state 
universities.
    "He didn't say anything about the bike till the end of the interview," 
Oliver said.
    "Normally, we send blind students to a special Braille camp," the agency 
representative said, looking toward Oliver's motorbike. "But I think we can 
forego that in this instance."
    Putting his hand on the bike, he added, "And take it easy on this."
    In 1970, Oliver graduated from UT-Austin with a bachelor's in English 
and joined two other students in opening "the only dive listed in the Yellow 
Pages" - known as One Knite, which soon became home to a burgeoning group of 
musicians, who performed for little more than money garnered by "passing the 
hat."
    Jimmie Vaughan and his band, The Storm, approached Oliver and his 
associates about playing on Monday nights, normally a dead night for most 
clubs.
    "We didn't even have a stage," Oliver said.
    So they quickly acquired lumber, built a platform and hung curtains 
behind it. For the next five years The Storm played Monday nights as more 
and more musicians walked through the coffin-shaped door of the club at 
Eighth and Red River.
    "We were booked seven nights a week," Oliver said.
    An audio enthusiast, Oliver recorded many of the bands' performances at 
the club on reel-to-reel - one such 1972 recording of the Flatlanders has 
been released recently on CD.
    By 1976, the Austin music scene was changing as country rock went more 
"upscale" and punk began filling in. Oliver was ready for a change and began 
a series of backpacking sagas through Latin America, Europe and much of the 
United States that lasted until 1983, when he arrived in Marfa in time for 
the town's centennial.
    An unpublished book, drawn during his backpacking years, features Oliver 
as a central character. A British publisher once expressed interest in the 
comic series and urged Oliver to hand-letter all of the "word balloons" in 
the strips.
    "A bad decision," Oliver said, "that cost me years of my life."
    Although the book was not published, a number of individual strips have 
been.
    The strips are a distillation of a journey Oliver made that was both 
geographic and psychological.
    "Before I went to South America, I was looking for points I wanted to 
make," Oliver said. "Afterward, I found that it gave me more of a voice."
    In 1983, he published his first political cartoon for The Big Bend 
Sentinel, an opening shot in the battle against the state's effort to put a 
nuclear waste dump in West Texas. In 1986, he began drawing cartoons for a 
high-end audio equipment magazine, Absolute Sound.
    In the mid-90s, Oliver was picked up by Copley News Service and asked to 
do a series of cartoons based around NAFTA issues as part of a package deal 
the syndicate was offering publications.
    "They thought there would be interest in Mexico," Oliver said.
    He drew two years' worth of cartoons for them in both English and 
Spanish.
    "It took a lot of reading, then distilling it into a gag and finally 
translating it into Spanish," Oliver said.
    Currently, he draws for a number of newspapers and journals but would 
like to have a chance to draw a political comic strip that would allow him 
to deal with on-going political themes - much as Walt Kelly did during the 
1950s with his comic strip, "Pogo."
    Oliver believes the present era is similar to the 1950s when one of 
Kelly's characters - Simple J. Malarky - carried around a list of "traitors 
to the swamp," a parody of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, then at the height of his 
power.
    "It was the greatest political comic strip and the best known before 
'Doonesbury,'" Oliver said.
    The market for political strips is shrinking, Oliver said, and the 
system is designed to "tame" the more politically volatile cartoonists who 
want to speak for the "little guy."
    "The trick is," Oliver said, "to get ideas through that they don't want 
you to."


http://www.dmtimes.net/blog/News/_archives/2005/3/3/392127.html




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