Santa: “What would you like for Christmas?” Girl: “My own credit card.” - Brazil

Pink Raygun: Could you tell me about your strip?

Lloyd Dangle: I’m Lloyd Dangle and I draw the strip Troubletown. It runs in Tucson, where you guys are from. It runs in weekly newspapers around the country and I’ve published a number of collections of the cartoons.

PRG: How long have you been working on Troubletown?

LD: In 2008 it’s gonna be my 20th anniversary. Can you believe it? That means 2008 is a big year for me.

PRG: Do you have big plans for your big year?

LD: Yes, because I have a new book out, Troubletown Told You So, and I’m going to be doing a big push. As you can see, I have a cottage industry and we do specials. This week it’s an Alberto Gonzales special and we can’t quite recollect what that was. We don’t remember if we were in the meeting or not. The other exciting thing about me is that I designed the package for Airborne.

PRG: Oh! We love Airborne! We forgot to take it before the con. . . When you were first starting out, how long did it take you to break into syndication?

LD: I’m syndicated by myself, so I don’t have a syndicate. What I did was start out with one newspaper, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and then I built it from there and got it into Seattle and San Jose and a bunch of other cities. Eventually it became a national feature.

PRG: And you did all the footwork for that yourself?

LD: Yes. The weekly newspapers aren’t used to dealing with big syndicates, so individuals can actually syndicate to them.

PRG: Do you do any collaboration with other underground artists?

LD: I’ve done different collaborations with people, yeah. In fact, this year some friend of mine and I did a collaboration where we designed an attraction for a theme park and we were one of the finalists, but we didn’t end up winning in the end because I think we made ours too elaborate to get it in under budget.

PRG: Who did you work with on that?

LD: It was Michael Wertz, Dave Warnke, and a bunch of friends of mine from Pixar. And also I got some friends of mine who do construction for movie sets. We had put together this multidisciplinary team and it was pretty cool.

PRG: Do ever do any design work for other media?

LD: I haven’t done any animation. I’ve been sort of down the road of doing animation a couple of times. But, I haven’t actually gotten anything out there I do all sorts of commercial stuff and illustration and you know, I’ve done some really weird things.

PRG: What kind of weird things?LD: I did this one where we did a package for a company that designs software where you put your parakeet in front of the computer and and tun this program and it would teach the parakeet how to talk. That was a strange one, but it was good for my business because it got a lot of media attention.

PRG: One thing that caught my eye as I was walking by your table is your Real Recipes for Causal Cooks. Is there a story behind that?

LD: A friend of mine who had an office in the building I was in was a book packager and we came up with the idea together. She did the recipes and got them tested and everything, because you have to do that with a recipe book to make sure nothing explodes or poisons someone. It was just a fun project. It didn’t sell as well as it should have because people didn’t know where to put it. It didn’t get marketed quite right.

PRG: Do you ever get any flack or feedback from people who don’t agree with your political views?

LD: Yeah, I do. A fair amount. With a lot of them, when you get an email from someone who’s just ranting or venting it doesn’t give you too much information. I have a son, and when he was born I did a few cartoons about having a child, which was a bit off of my normal topics. And I got a lot of hate mail for that. People didn’t want to read about kids in their weekly newspapers. I’d get people writing and asking “What are you gonna do next? Write about minivans?” That was one of the more strange experiences I had with feedback from readers.

The wierdest thing is when you get mail from someone who totally missed the point of the cartoon. And they get pissed off about something, but it’s not something that really exists in the cartoon I wrote. That seems to happen a fair amount.

PRG: People who were angry to begin with, I guess?

LD: They were angry at something and somehow you trip it off, but it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what you’ve done.

For weekly strips and syndication information, visit Lloyd Dangle’s website.

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