A Snapshot in Words & Pictures

C. Tyler

By Bruce Chrislip
March 1, 2006

Carol Tyler is an American cartoonist born into a working class family in 1950s Chicago, Illinois. She attended Catholic school for K-12, went to college in Tennessee and finally received a Masters degree in Fine Art from Syracuse University in the 1980s. Her work has appeared in many publications since that time. Late Bloomer, her most recent book, was published by Fantagraphics in November 2005. Bruce Chrislip interwiewed her at 2005's SPACE convention.

April 2005. C. Tyler and I are sitting at a table at SPACE — the Small Press & Alternative Comix Expo at a Columbus, Ohio Holiday Inn. Our table is set up with her exquisite original cover art to Late Bloomer, a book of short stories in comix form.

Fantagraphics has promised an August publication date. There is also a small stack of Justin Green's Musical Legends books for sale. Underneath it all is a tablecloth of Elvis Presley images, taken from some gift-wrapping paper. The audience is young. We are mostly ignored.

Flash forward to August 2005. Late Bloomer misses its initial publishing date due to complications with the color printing in South Korea. Book tour plans put on hold.

September 2005. Ms. Tyler, Justin Green and yours truly appear on an underground comix panel at the Cincinnati Public Library as part of the Comic Revolutions event. Tyler talks about the late-blooming Late Bloomer (still hasn't seen print).

November 2005. Late Bloomer finally published. C. Tyler does book signing session at Joseph-Beth Books in Cincinnati, Ohio. The promotions person at the bookstore pairs her with Julie Larson, cartoonist of the syndicated panel Dinette Set. Not exactly the same audience. Most in the crowd seem to be there to profess admiration for Dinette Set and its "ingenious character insights." Oh well. There are a few true believers in the crowd who stick around to hear what the ingenious character Carol Tyler has to say.

November — December 2005. Promotion copies of Late Bloomer are sent to book reviewers with special packet of flower seeds grown by the artist herself.

Late Bloomer at 138 pages is a collection of 35 short stories that deal with different stages of Carol's life and of her family — parents, siblings, relatives and her current household of husband Justin Green and daughter Julia. The early work is presented in black & white and the color pieces are beautifully presented. Over a third of the book contains previously unpublished material. It is entirely hand drawn.

Here are a few thoughts on the book, Late Bloomer.

On the significance of the title: "A term that means it took a while to come into one's own. The idea of delayed flourishing was what I was after. Not so much in terms of plants, although that turned out to be a wonderful kind of extra bonus thing since I am a gardener and I do like plants."

C. Tyler grew up in and around Chicago and went to Catholic schools. Her mother was from Tennessee, her father from urban Chicago. "The city mouse and the country mouse," as she put it. Carol's was a blue-collar upbringing. "My father was a construction plumber. He was taking after his dad, and his dad before him. Grandfather and great-grandfather. The Tyler men were responsible for building the infrastructure of Chicago — either through pipes, bricklaying, smokestacks, water mains…"

Early art instruction: "I took art in high school. That was serious business. These were people who knew about museums and stuff like that. There were kids in my class who had been to Paris. I hadn't even visited the Chicago Art Institute!"

Ms. Tyler attended college in Tennessee — Tennessee Tech in Cookeville - while commuting from an aunt's house. It was there that she met her first husband, Bob. "I was the good Southern wife," the former Mrs. Carol Anne Alexander reports. "I did everything I was supposed to do." But after a few years, the marriage ended and she returned to school, this time for art at Middle Tennessee State University.

Husband #1 can be seen in the story, "Why I'm A-Gin' Southern Min!"

"When I went down South, people were talking about a lot of things that I'd never heard of — like the Bible and all that. I mean I was Catholic. We didn't talk about the Bible, we talked about Catholic doctrine."
1980 Olympics. Her older brother is competing on USA bobsled #1. "Who could miss that?"
Then it was on to graduate school at Syracuse University where Carol got an MFA (Master of Fine Arts). "Grad school was competitive. The other students took my eager country girl attitude all wrong. Some teachers even felt threatened by my work. The pressure was on to 'make it big in New York', and so there was this intensity. Get into the Whitney or else! It was an exhausting, relentless drive for validation."

After graduation, Tyler went to New York to try to get into a gallery. Common-law husband #2 from Tennessee (called Roy in Late Bloomer) came up with her to NY. "The competitiveness was so much more intensified from what I had experienced at Syracuse. Incestuous, political, sales-oriented ... what I understand now is that they were looking for product to sell, a painted product line."

With her one grad school pal, Judy, she finally scored a show — a group show. They did it by pretending to be six different women artists. "Ladies Who Paint" is recounted in the story "Pork Chops." (One of the imaginary artists was one R. Rock, an ex-nun who painted pork chops on headscarves that were designed to be worn in church.) The reception to their deception was amazing. " We even got a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts! For a totally bogus group show!"

When C. found her art interests moving into more of a narrative direction, the path led to comix — which she rendered with a painter's sensibility. "I got interested in comics because of the people I hung out with. You know how it is."

Through the Art Spiegelman/Raw magazine/SVA comix scene in NY, she scored contact information for underground cartoonists out on the west coast — people like Bill Griffith and Justin Green. "Before I even knew him, I told friends 'That Binky Brown is the man I'm going to marry' — and eventually it happened." Their daughter Julia, also known as Binka, appears often in Late Bloomer. "She's the child growing up under the drawing table at each chapter heading."

"Migrant Mother" is a good example of the trials and tribulations of being a mom. Carol suffers crisis after crisis while trying to get daughter Binka through an airport in Phoenix. "I love being a parent. It's very fulfilling but it can also be very, very exhausting. Any mom or dad out there could attest to that!"

Tyler's first published comix story, "Uncovered Property," was the result of a turning point in her life. Feeling isolated in Sacramento, she started drawing comix.

"I had a baby in 1985 in a town where I didn't know anyone. Before, I was havin' a ball in New York and then here I was with a toddler day after day — with no friends or family around.

"I poured my energy into looking at my family and childhood dynamics with my older sister — who was always bossing me around. The result was the story "Uncovered Property." It was the real beginning of an attempt to express myself in a new medium. And I tried to be just as clear and focused as I could. Kept the dialogue short, economical. Almost by necessity. It's an incident that happened in the summer of 1960. I don't remember the dialogue exactly. But I tried to capture the nuances.

"You know, I couldn't paint with a little baby around — I didn't want her sticking paints in her mouth. But I was able to work on "Uncovered Property" in the kitchen in a relatively small space and I was able to draw on a high four-foot platform. Julia could be playing at my feet and not be bothering me. So the story was created at this time when I was a home with a toddler, and there was hardly any money around."

Late Bloomer offers a look a C. Tyler's life in 35 tales ending with a cliffhanger of sorts — a story called "The Outrage." The story almost takes us up to the present day, but not quite. "Oh yeah, one reviewer called that story a cliffhanger because it ends with the words 'To Be Continued'. But I didn't really mean it that way. I don't want people to be waiting around for the concluding chapter or whatever. There's a lot more to that story — it's an emotionally difficult subject for me to recount. I'm preparing for battle, psychologically. I do feel, however, that 'The Outrage' tells quite a story as is."

March 2006. Daughter Julia is now in college majoring in fashion. Husband Justin is still cartooning and painting the occasional sign. His handiwork can be seen on the facade of Shake It Records in Cincinnati's Northside neighborhood. And C. Tyler is busy on her next book, which will be based on her father's remembrances of World War Two experiences. The walls of her studio are covered with research materials, storyboards and old army photographs.

C. Tyler will be appearing at APE 2006 (Alternative Press Expo) in San Francisco on April 8th and 9th. If you can't make it, copies of Late Bloomer are also available through her website or at finer comic book shops and bookstores.

C. Tyler's Website