The Monthly Aspectarian: Peter, as you know, I’ve been a big fan of yours for several years now and I love the strip. I hope that long-awaited success is about to happen for you. What’s the history of Alex’s Restaurant? How did this all start, how did it evolve over the years?

Peter Sinclair: I’ve been working on the strip for about ten years now. I started it after a period where I was doing political cartoons for my local newspaper and even had the offer to work at larger newspapers — which I turned down basically because I was feeling frustrated with the restriction of latitude that political cartoonists typically have. They are bound to work within the newspaper’s mindset of Left versus Right, good versus bad, Republican versus Democrat, etc. I felt that a lot of the issues that I wanted to speak to were much larger than that. So I evolved the idea of putting together a comic strip with characters that would address the giant culture shift that’s going on, that I was seeing all around me both explicitly and implicitly but not seeing reflected in the newspapers, particularly in the comics.

I worked on it for over a couple of years and in the fall of ’88 got a major cartoon syndicate interested in the strip. They saw it as something that might possibly lend some iconoclastic variety to their lineup.

TMA: You actually ran in some mainstream newspapers for a while.

PS: In March of 1990 it was running in about fifty papers, some pretty big ones, in five countries. In fact, the Chicago Tribune actually picked it up but never ran it. That’s pretty common practice — they’ll pick up a cartoon and sort of watch it for a while to keep out of the hands of a possible competitor, which is a frustration to the cartoonist. Of course, my goal with this cartoon was to kind of stir up some people and give some of them a deserved poke. What happened was — well, I had an astrologer explain all this to me much later but I didn’t know what was going on at the time — it turns out Pluto was jumping my Moon. Some people, I found out, were really quite offended by what I was doing.

But the bottom line was, one of the newspapers I was running in, the Detroit Free Press, ran a readers’ survey of their cartoons just shortly after my cartoon started up. The interesting result was that I beat Doonesbury. I was number one, and Doonesbury was number two in the category of cartoons that most people complained about. With cartoonists, first of all, you’re lucky to be on a list with strips like Doonesbury, Brenda Starr and some other highly successful cartoons. One would think you’d be happy to be on the top of that list. But my syndicate didn’t see it that way. Instead of recognizing that the cartoon was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, they began at that point to withdraw support. And so the cartoon kind of died off and I felt myself at loose ends, having to go back to my former profession, which was being a paramedic — which I quit when the cartoon started up.

TMA: You had "quit your day job."

PS: That added proof — don’t do it!

TMA: Not until you really have it all in the bag.

PS: That’s right. At that point I was prepared to let the whole thing just go, but people kept asking me about it and writing me and calling me. This is about ’91, ’92. In ’92, I found a small publisher who was interested in bringing it out in book form, which came out in ’93 and sort of instantly disappeared without a ripple.

TMA: I count myself fortunate to be one of the people who has that book.

PS: There are still a few copies left. I still hear from people who have found the book at a flea market or whatever, and most of the people are amazed to find out that there’s a cartoon that they’ve never heard of that deals with subject matter that they really care about on a very intelligent level. That’s what I’ve always tried to do — to give people something that really feeds their intelligence and doesn’t make them feel stupid for taking the time to read it. During this time I got a nursing degree and started working as an ICU nurse on the graveyard shift, which was really starting to kill me physically and emotionally. The Internet was sort of just floating at the time, and I had friends who urged me to get my cartoons out on the Internet. In the fall of ’95, I went from being a complete computer illiterate to a full-blown computer-dot-wannabe. I spent about six months in my basement climbing a steep learning curve of a graphic program and web design to get this thing up on the Internet.

At the end of ’96, I decided the only way I was going to get any serious attention was if I committed myself to refreshing it every day. It was always fresh content.

TMA: It’s gotta be a daily strip.

PS: That was about the time you and I were getting to know one another. Shortly after I started doing that I also started doing weekly animation, which, when I presented it to a mailing list of several thousand web designers, got an absolutely thunderously positive reaction.

TMA: At this point, let me insert that Alex’s Restaurant is available on a daily basis at our site, lightworks.com. I look at it almost every day.

PS: The strip started running in late ’96-’97. By August of ’97 I had secured a position on one of the largest news sites on the web, the Nando Times. My number of visitors started increasing rapidly at that time and I have a thousand to twenty-five hundred people a day who will drop in at least on the Nando site. All of the others on your site as well. I’m very close to getting some major media attention here. Sometime in the next week or two, I’m expecting a very large new source to be publishing. They’re very positive about the cartoon..

TMA: You’ve self-published a new book, The Universe is Made of Stories, which seems to include some of the best of the older strips with some new ones.

PS: There are still so many people out there that are coming completely new to the strip that I felt like I had to include some older strips as well. Some of the very few people who have read the older book might want to see more of the new ones, but that’s the balance I was trying to strike there. I’m hoping that as sales of the book pick up, I’ll be able to do an expanded edition and include more new material.

TMA: Alex’s Restaurant is so good that your perseverance will definitely pay off on this. There’s never been any doubt in my mind. It’s just too good not to make it.

PS: Will you call my wife and . . .?

[laughter]

TMA: You can tell her I said so.

Now in the promotional package that you sent shows that you’ve gotten some really pretty impressive reviews. I love this one here: "I don’t even miss Calvin & Hobbes anymore."

PS: People consistently compare it to Calvin & Hobbes, Bloom County, Doonesbury, Pogo — all of those really great strips, ones that I have admired. One of the reasons I keep going at this is because even with the relatively small number of people who have seen the cartoon, the reactions have been so unbelievably, extravagantly positive that I just feel like there’s a very strong audience out there once there’s a critical mass of people who actually get to see it.

TMA: Yes, when you get it in front of enough people. I think the big handicap, especially in the earlier days, was the fact that it’s centered in a vegetarian restaurant and — to use the phrase that I’m not afraid of but that so many people have a bugaboo about — it’s new age.

PS: Basically, the idea of the cartoon is that so-called new age ideas like acupuncture and feng shui and taking care of one’s body and the power of the mind and alternative healing and things like that are not in the cartoon to be taken as some kind of fringe activity or something like, "Wow, here’s something for the weirdos" as they’re generally treated in the mainstream press. I’m just calling the fact here that forty to fifty million people in this country are now living in this paradigm. This is the cartoon that speaks right to them.

TMA: You needed for this change to seep sufficiently into the grassroots, which I believe that now it has.

PS: Without a doubt. You’re starting to see, finally, in the mainstream media, cover stories on a regular basis in such magazines as Time and Newsweek, issues like alternative healing, herbal medicine — Dr. Andrew Weil, Deepak Chopra — all these sort of things are becoming household words.

TMA: Meditation, prayer, all of that. What’s next for Alex’s Restaurant?

PS: I’m trying to get ready for some upcoming major media exposure — which has been a little frustrating in that they don’t tell me exactly when it’s going to happen. But I’ve been tweaking the home page, making sure that when people do come, there’s a lot for them there to see and do. I just have to recommit myself every day to stay after the thing because there is still, amazingly enough, nobody out there that is doing this. I have a commitment to these ideas and to serving this audience. I know they will be served. At that point, when that line is crossed, then this is really going to fly and I think all my efforts will be justified.

TMA: Give us a thumbnail of the major characters.

PS: The comic is based on Alex and JoAnn Riverside, refugees from corporate America, who have come to the small, sleepy middle-American town of Grassy Knoll, Wisconsin and opened a crunchy granola vegetarian cyber-cafe. They have other staff, Cranbrook Wilson, who is sort of the resident dishwasher-waiter-short order cook-poet, Zen-inspired-paranoia professional, and we also have Rosemary Goldenseal who is a massage therapist and Celtic healing harpist. Among the regulars they have a good ol’ boy by the name of Carl Kryzyziak —

TMA: Carl is great.

PS: Yes, everybody loves Carl. And we also have the local native American medicine man, Little Eagle, and advertising executive Chad Uplink, and occasionally new age products salesman Blaine Candy as well as several others who come and go. I’m constantly introducing new characters and situations. In Grassy Knoll if you want to find your car keys, check with the intuitive auto repair man. The local holistic attorney is Barry Runestone. And if you want pest control, there’s a natural pest control run by Audiophile Dundee. Remora Silverspoon finds a sort of yin-yang relationship with Alex. In other words, people can go to Alex’s and have a great big plate of seaweed pie or something and feel so good about themselves that they go over to her Katie’s Kountry Korner Kitchen Kookie Nook and fill up on her Chocolate Death cookies. Vice versa, they can go to her place, load up on chocolate and then feel so guilty that they have to run over to Alex’s and have a cup of herbal tea to make themselves feel better.

TMA: I love that strip where Alex is hiding under his counter eating one of her cookies.

PS: Part of the fun of the humor that the strip plays on is that we’re all human. It’s interesting to see some of the feedback I get from so-called new age people: when I make fun of their sacred cows, they get upset. When I have characters that are not one hundred percent pure either way, people take that on as if human beings are not that way.

TMA: There are new age fundamentalists just like there are all kinds of other fundamentalists. They need to get a sense of humor.

PS: That is exactly true. I hope that I’m going to be able to skewer fundamentalism in all its forms. In fact, some of the people who have enjoyed the strip the most are those who by no stretch of the imagination have new age-y experience or anything like that. They simply enjoy a good joke and a good point.

TMA: That’s one of the things about the strip — again, speaking as a fanboy here — your work is so good that it’s funny even if you don’t understand all the new age references.

PS: It’s aimed at general audiences and just simply assumes that you have an IQ above room temperature — which for cartoons these days is a pretty big creative risk. But I’m willing to take it because I know that the audience is out there. So many of the concepts that twenty years ago were considered woo-woo new age far out, are now part of almost every mainstream corporate culture.

TMA: The other way I like to put it is, the person you couldn’t pay a thousand dollars to read a book on meditation five years ago now comes up to you and wants to draw a picture of your spirit guide whose name is Zontar.

PS: [laughs] That’s basically what’s going on.

New York Times reporter Glenn Fleischmann set out to find the coolest, hippest, most interesting cartoon on the Internet. A new writer for the Times, he wanted to enhance his reputation by finding the "next big thing".

He found it in Alex's Restaurant, your friendly, neighborhood, over-the-counter-culture, cartoon for the coming millenium.

Glenn, a Gen-Xer, knows that Alex's subject matter - all things Organic, Herbal, and Wholistic, is an exploding mainstream cultural phenomenon in publishing, on Campus, and on Wall Street. It's where millions of readers are, and millions more are going.

So, visit the tiny Middle American cafe… www.alexsrestaurant.com

Next Article

Return to This Month's Index