"The first book that they gave me was Jeannie, a young teenager. I went on with her maybe ten books"
About this Quote
A working cartoonist admitting, almost offhandedly, how assembly-line and oddly intimate commercial art can be. DeCarlo’s “they” is doing a lot of work: publishers, editors, the whole midcentury comics machine that didn’t ask for a personal manifesto so much as a repeatable product. “The first book that they gave me” frames creativity as assignment, not confession. It’s labor, clocked and delegated.
Then he pivots to something stranger: “Jeannie, a young teenager.” The character is introduced like a coworker you got paired with, and his phrasing lands with the casualness of a studio anecdote. But the subtext is about tone and market calculus. A “young teenager” signals a specific register: clean, cute, lightly flirtatious, always on the edge of adolescence without tipping into anything that would scare advertisers or parents. It’s a genre of girlhood engineered for mass consumption.
“I went on with her maybe ten books” is the quiet punchline. “Went on with her” reads almost like a relationship, which exposes the odd emotional entanglement of serial commercial storytelling: you “stay” with a character because the job stays, because the audience stays, because the character sells. The vagueness of “maybe ten” also hints at disposability. In that era, creators were often encouraged not to count too closely; intellectual property and cultural credit tended to flow upward.
DeCarlo’s line captures the paradox of pop-cartoon production: the work is industrial, but the bond to the invented person can still sound disarmingly human.
Then he pivots to something stranger: “Jeannie, a young teenager.” The character is introduced like a coworker you got paired with, and his phrasing lands with the casualness of a studio anecdote. But the subtext is about tone and market calculus. A “young teenager” signals a specific register: clean, cute, lightly flirtatious, always on the edge of adolescence without tipping into anything that would scare advertisers or parents. It’s a genre of girlhood engineered for mass consumption.
“I went on with her maybe ten books” is the quiet punchline. “Went on with her” reads almost like a relationship, which exposes the odd emotional entanglement of serial commercial storytelling: you “stay” with a character because the job stays, because the audience stays, because the character sells. The vagueness of “maybe ten” also hints at disposability. In that era, creators were often encouraged not to count too closely; intellectual property and cultural credit tended to flow upward.
DeCarlo’s line captures the paradox of pop-cartoon production: the work is industrial, but the bond to the invented person can still sound disarmingly human.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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