The Customer Is Always ... Well, No, Not Really

Norm Feuti

By Rebecca Buchanan
June 15, 2009

I discovered Norm Feuti's Retail thanks to a devious co-worker, who had a copy of Pretending You Care: The Retail Employee Handbook. It was hilarious — and when I found out that it was based on a real web comic, I tracked down Feuti for an interview. Retail drones take heart! Your pain and humiliation has not gone unnoticed! Payback is here!

Sequential Tart: Were you a comic fan as a kid? If so, which titles did you read?

Norm Feuti: Not really. I loved animation like all kids do, but I wasn't introduced to comics until I was about 12. My mom's boyfriend at the time gifted me a copy of Loose Tails, the first Bloom County collection, and I was hooked from then on. For whatever reason, I never really got into traditional superhero type comic books, but I've always admired the artwork.

ST: What about now? Which titles are on your must read list?

NF: Oddly enough, the older I get the larger my appetite for comics has become.

In the world of newspaper comics, some of my current favorites include Cul De Sac, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, Pros and Cons, Watch Your Head, Rip Haywire, Scary Gary, My Cage, Candorville, Dog Eat Doug, Cow & Boy, The Pajama Diaries ... just to name a few.

As for webcomics, some of my favorites include Barkeater Lake, Imagine This, The Super Fogeys, Pinkerton, Toby, The Legend of Bill, Imy, Broken, Girls With Slingshots, Xylia, Monster Commute, Broken Things ... again just to name a few.

ST: What kind of formal art training have you had, or are you self-taught? Or a bit of both?

NF: No formal training. I've always liked to draw and taught myself cartooning by copying characters from various cartoons and newspaper strips. Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, Opus, and Bill the Cat ... you name it. When I got bored with recreating other people's characters, I started creating my own and developing my own style.

ST: How do you create the art for Retail and Gill? On a computer? By hand?

NF: I create the art for both strips by hand. I pencil the artwork onto Bristol then ink on top of it using a Kuretake brush pen and Rapidograph pens for some details.

I use a computer font for the lettering in Retail, but I hand-letter the dialog for Gill using the same brush pen I use for the art.

ST: Did the characters for Retail and Gill appear fully formed, or have they undergone changes? Are there any characters you would like to use, but haven't been able to work into the strips?

NF: The original submission to King Features contained a lot more characters and the main cast got trimmed down on the advice of my editor at the time, Jay Kennedy. He suggested I start by focusing on a handful of strong characters and introduce the more ancillary ones slowly over time. That said, I think the four main (and most important) characters — Marla, Cooper, Val, and Stuart — that I ended up with have always been pretty well formed in my mind.

ST: Considering your fifteen years in retail, how much of the strip is autobiographical? Have the names been changed to protect the stupid and self-absorbed?

NF: Certainly the concepts are based on my experience working on the "front lines" for so long, but I can't recall a time that I recreated a true story verbatim the way it happened to me ... although I include plenty of real-life anecdotes in my book, Pretending You Care.

I should also note that none of the characters are based on real people. They generally just represent aspects of my own personality, or archetypal sucky people.

ST: What has the reaction been from real life retail employees? Do they ever share horror stories that you incorporate into the strip?

NF: I get emails from retail employees all the time telling me how close to home the strip is, and often they'll share a story that is eerily similar to a recent strip. I see those as the best compliments.

On a few occasions I've run what I call "fan week" where I turn some of the humorous situations people email me into daily strips. Then I send the original artwork out to them as a thank you. I did one week that focused solely on bookstores a couple of years back. It got a huge response.

ST: You maintain two blogs, one by the real you and one by Retail character Cooper. Why a "fake" blog? Is it easier to say some things as Cooper?

NF: Actually, I recently launched a new web site to replace Cooper's blog called The Retail Forum. It's a social networking site for fans of the strip where they can share their own stories and create their own blogs.

Originally, Cooper's blog was a fun way to develop a web presence around the strip and speak through Cooper's voice, but over time it became an impractical amount of writing for me to pile on top of my other work. People became (understandably) annoyed when I stopped updating regularly, so I decided The Retail Forum would be a way to let the fans contribute content and conversations instead of having to wait for me to get around to it.

Cooper has a profile on The Retail Forum, and he'll post there in the future ... just not as often.

ST: You recently published Pretending You Care: The Retail Employee Handbook. Uh, should management be alarmed?

NF: Yes.

ST: Where can fans find Retail and Gill? What about print collections?

NF: Retail runs in about 70 newspapers throughout the U.S. and Canada. If the local paper doesn't carry it, I urge people to email the editor and suggest they pick it up. If they absolutely can't convince them, they can read Retail on the web through King Features' new Comics Kingdom portal. More and more online papers pick it up every month, but the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is one of the first to add it to their site.

Gill can be read on its own website five days a week. I've just compiled the first 107 Gill strips into a collection entitled I'm not retarded, I'm big-boned! It will be available for sale through the Gill website soon.

ST: What advice can you offer comic creators who are just getting started — and may be working a "real" job at the same time?

NF: Building an audience takes time, whether you're doing a print comic or a webcomic, so I guess the best advice I can give is to be patient and find a routine that works for you. Nobody in this business should count on being an overnight success. Anyone who decides to turn cartooning into a career will likely be working that "real" job at the same time for many years to come, so it's going to take some real balancing to keep it going. If you can go into it with those realistic expectations, then you might just make it.

ST: What other projects are you working on?

NF: I have an idea for a graphic novel for kids, as well as a comic designed for mobile devices. Not sure if anything will come of either, but I'll keep you posted.

ST: Which conventions, book fairs or other events will you be attending this year?

NF: I am going to try my darndest to make it to APE in October. Other than that, I don't have anything lined up.

Retail
Feuti's Blog
Retail on Wikipedia
Cooper's Retail Blog