Between the lines

May 17, 2008

Mike Moreu takes his job of raising a smile and making a point deadly seriously. He talks to Geoff Collett about his baptism in the often unforgiving world of newspaper cartooning. --------------------
In a womb-like shed out the back of a child and cat-strewn house deep in the heart of Nelson, a mild- mannered man sits, works and sometimes can't believe his luck.
Here he is, doing the best job in the world, and things seem set to only get better.
This is the lot of Mike Moreu, cartoonist - or perhaps artist, as he occasionally and (seemingly unwittingly) refers to his trade.
He is mild, in conversation anyway, but the word should not be confused with insipid or uncertain. Moreu is a man certain of many things and can certainly be driven, as aspects of his life amply demonstrate.
Once, he ran marathons and other epic road races. Today, he laughs off suggestions of the fame he earned within local running circles, but those who had to compete against him 10 years or so ago still speak with a measure of awe about the machine-like efforts of the young expatriate American.
He has started five novels, finished three and submitted one for publication (the response was encouraging). He has grand visions, such as that in his younger years of a 200-part graphic novel - a comic, in common parlance - which he started as a business proposition before cold reality frustrated him five issues in.
In the shed - his studio - the dominant fixture is the shelving, metres of it, groaning under hundreds of books, several lifetimes' worth of reading, surely. He claims to have read them all.
Moreu is 38. He uses a self-description several times and seems spot on: "diligent".
What he is actually known for is a daily cartoon, in this newspaper and a growing handful of others.
Little more than a year ago, he was the unknown, untested and unproven successor to, as he puts it, "a guy whose boots are about as big as they get in New Zealand" as far as newspaper cartooning goes - Garrick Tremain. To many of Tremain's more diehard admirers, Moreu still is all those things - an upstart who will never replace the great man of Central Otago.
The more vicious critics out there seem to sense that they will always be able to play on the idea that Tremain's shadow is forever cast across all others who attempt to replace him in the various newspapers left scrambling when he turned his back on daily cartooning early last year.
When a Moreu cartoon outraged the Family First lobby group and its supporters in their campaign to reinstate parents' right to smack children, the letters to the editors were immediate and pointed: as he ad libs now, "Dear Editor, whatever you do, please bring back Tremain - Moreu just sucks".
And as he observes drolly of his arrival in Tremain's footsteps in February last year: "Any sort of idea I had that I would be rapturously received was quickly dispelled."
And fair enough, he adds. Tremain was nothing if not an institution, a man who had built up a vast following for his particular and always reliable style of poking the borax.
Moreu stands in a degree of awe of his predecessor's technical skill and audience- building proficiency, but he would be the first to point out that his is a very different style of cartooning. To a trained eye, Tremain's deceptively simple drawings revealed a highly skilled artist; it takes less knowledge to spot in Moreu an artist who hides nothing of his enthusiasm for illustration.
The drawing is typically detailed, sometimes fussily so, worked through a process of pencil sketching, brushwork, cross-hatching with pen, then shading on his computer. But trekking back through his work in the Nelson Mail and the Press since last February, the most striking feature is that the inimitable grouchiness and cynicism of the man he succeeded are nowhere to be found.
Tremain's avowed foe was political correctness. Moreu says of himself that he strives to be an "equal opportunity" satirist.
He keeps his personal politics to himself. Maybe the safest thing to say is that his only real master is his cartooning. For a relatively young man, he is steeped, marinated, immersed and absorbed in his craft.
Moreu grew up in various southern states in the USA - principally Florida, North Carolina and Georgia. Raised by his mother and stepfather after his parents divorced, he absorbed - by osmosis, he says - the ways of his artist mother and her friends.
But whatever his early talent, journalism and writing was his first calling. He moved to the University of Georgia with that in mind - intending to major in the trade - before being diverted by the opportunity to draw editorial cartoons for the campus newspaper, the Red and Black, four days a week. He was only 20.
If both he and others recognised his talent early on, a circuitous route followed, through writing and comic strips, working as an illustrator for Seattle's growing Microsoft juggernaut, moving to New Zealand and Nelson (encouraged by his mother Princess Hart, who had settled here) to do some writing and book illustrating, and landing up in a part- time gig at the Mail as an advertising artist. That was around 1999.
Yet even when he transferred to the editorial department in 2000, he - or the newspaper - wasn't prepared for a Moreu return to cartooning, certainly not with Tremain on the scene. He dabbled, and occasionally pushed the issue but retreated when his overtures weren't welcomed. Then, when an increasingly disillusioned Tremain pulled the plug, the Nelson Mail and the Press agreed that it was Moreu's turn. The Dominion Post, Taranaki Daily News and the Manawatu Standard have since agreed to run his work once a week.
Suddenly, he has found himself one of the rarest breeds - one of this country's handful of fulltime editorial cartoonists (you can count them all on your fingers).
He gives every impression of a kid who has just been given the keys to a Ferrari: awed by the possibilities, slightly freaked by the implications, and damned if he isn't going to take the thing for a ride.
About the wrongest thing you could say about Moreu's launch into cartooning is that he hasn't looked back. He has, and does - not obsessively but with his due diligence. He beats himself up a bit - mildly, but unmistakeably - about his first few months in his new job.
Maybe he was trying too hard. Maybe his American influences, the tendency of some of his heroes towards wordiness, showed through too much for Kiwi readers' comfort. He was still working part-time as editorial artist at the Mail before rushing home in the afternoon to churn out a 'toon for The Press's early evening deadline - that and helping to raise two small boys (since joined by a third). Maybe he was just nervous. Maybe he took some of the brutal laments for Tremain too personally.
Still, it would be wrong to think he is a tortured soul, torn up by self-doubt and crises of confidence. He gave up serious running when fatherhood arrived, but the determined, dogged, super-focused self-belief of the long- distance runner remains unmistakeable.
He reflects at one point: "That persistent deadline can be a bit of a grind, but I'm also really grateful for it, because if you do something every day, that's how people go to the Olympics - they train eight hours a day That's how people become the best at whatever they do - they do a lot.
"Talent only takes you so far. I consider myself modestly talented, but also a really hard worker. I have an abiding interest in many, many things and I'm really dedicated to what I do."
One thing he is not - perhaps surprisingly, or unconventionally, for a cartoonist - is cynical. He considers cynicism a trap, arguing that "whenever you get involved in political commentary, it's easy to pre-judge things or assume that all people's motives are base or corrupt or whatever".
He prefers to be informed and observant; he can be caustic, but he doesn't display the anger, cruelty or venom some might assume to be the lifeblood of the cartooning breed. He encourages debate and interaction about his work through his Tooned In blog on the Stuff website.
The two of his cartoons that have attracted the strongest reader approval to date were decidedly cynicism-free. When Sir Edmund Hillary died, Moreu's contribution - Sir Ed summiting a peak to be greeted by cherubs and St Peter on a cloud at the entrance to Heaven - earned widespread approval, including, apparently, from the great man's widow.
More recent was his response to the canyoning tragedy in the central North Island last month, which killed six children and a teacher. A father, a newspaper bearing headlines of the dreadful news cast aside, hugs his young son, "just because". The stunned and vulnerable dad was a self-portrait.
Moreu recalls learning of the tragedy during his routine trawling of news websites. "My first reaction was exactly what I drew - it was the reaction of any parent who would send their child off and expect them to return home safely, then learn that they're dead. How would you possibly deal with that? I just wanted to run inside and grab my own kids, and I probably did, actually." The personal touch "just seemed the right thing to do".
But he knows that for the vast proportion of the time, cartoonists have to have great gags. Near the very top of his "most admired" list is Tom Scott, surely New Zealand's wittiest cartoonist, possibly ever. He also loves Trace Hodgson's vicious caricatures.
"My goal is to be the complete cartoonist. Someone who can write really well, someone who has a really strong message, someone who has really good gags, and then someone who presents it in a way that really makes the reader want to linger over the drawing for a bit."
The point is that Mike Moreu knows he's got an opportunity he's determined not to blow. "For a guy who sits in a shed, takes his kids to school and gets to work around 10, finishes around six or whatever, and absolutely loves what he does - it's the best job in the world."
 Nelson Mail