00;00;00;13 - 00;00;09;26 Kara DuQuette I'm Kara DuQuette. Deon Parson is a comic artist from Anderson, Indiana. You might know him as super D, and he prefers to go by Dee. 00;00;09;28 - 00;00;11;02 Dee Parson Good to see you, how are you guys? 00;00;11;05 - 00;00;14;04 Luke Jones How are ya? Nice to see ya. 00;00;14;07 - 00;00;17;07 Dee Parson I wasn't sure. Was this gonna be a video thing or just like. 00;00;17;09 - 00;00;19;08 Luke Jones Oh, goodness no. Just audio. 00;00;19;10 - 00;00;20;13 Kara DuQuette Audio. We’re the audio, folks. 00;00;20;14 - 00;00;28;16 Kara DuQuette We had him on our show in 2024. Back then, his comic strip Rosebuds was just entering the national newspaper syndication. 00;00;28;19 - 00;00;51;28 Dee Parson Yeah. So Rosebuds is a daily comic strip about three sisters, Rosa, Maria, and Marcella Gonzalez, and just the daily antics of their sibling hood together as sisters. It's a daily comic strip. Now, the last time we talked, it was Sundays only. It's in, you know, many newspapers across the country, and then it's now in Canada and Jamaica and starting to get into other territories as well. 00;00;52;01 - 00;00;56;15 Dee Parson I'm working on it every day. So it's, it's it's been a big fun project. 00;00;56;19 - 00;01;15;28 Kara DuQuette We met Dee at the Anderson Museum of Art. It's a former Carnegie library building built in 1905 with soaring stained glass ceilings and original hardwood floors. We met there because of their current exhibition and exhibition that was supposed to be all about rosebuds, until... 00;01;16;04 - 00;01;40;03 Dee Parson I got invited to Anderson University to do a presentation about Rosebuds. And back then, I like this was like a year or so ago, I learned that Charles Schulz had, Charles Schulz the creator of Peanuts, had history with Anderson University. And so knowing about Peanuts and all that stuff, like, you know, I wonder if you know, they have like any original Peanuts strips, you know, around their archives or something. 00;01;40;05 - 00;01;59;20 Dee Parson So we went to their archives, asked about that, and they're like, no, we don't have any peanuts strips, however, and they pulled out like three big boxes of his original strips from Young Pillars, which was a strip that he a cartoon he was working on for youth magazine in conjunction with Peanuts back in the 50s and 60s. And so they said, we have this. 00;01;59;24 - 00;02;20;17 Dee Parson And I looked through this. It's like, does anyone know this stuff is here? And they said, no, you're the first person like 20 years to know this stuff has been here. I just was jaw-dropped and it made me more think about how other hidden treasures that are around Indiana that people don't realize and that branched into. Wait a second. 00;02;20;18 - 00;02;48;12 Dee Parson You know, I know all these people here that are working on newspaper strips. Hi and Lois, Flash Gordon, Dennis the Menace, Marvin, they these guys are all based around here. And I was talking with Debbie Apple, my co-curator of this exhibition, who's the curator of exhibitions here at the Anderson Museum of Art. I went back to me, said, let's do an exhibition celebrating, you know, what we have here with cartooning. 00;02;48;13 - 00;03;08;04 Dee Parson Like we have a huge, you know, library of cartoonists here that are doing things that no one realizes are back here. And then when you realize, you know, not just current people, but past artists as well, you know how many people know that Norman Birdwell, the creator of Clifford the Big Red dog, was from Kokomo. And so. 00;03;08;06 - 00;03;10;13 Kara DuQuette ... how many people know that. I certainly just learned that. 00;03;10;15 - 00;03;21;09 Dee Parson So this is what this exhibition is to showcase that, you know, there's so much here that people don't realize. And some this is kind of was slowly starting to get lost to time. 00;03;21;12 - 00;03;34;22 Kara DuQuette There are over 40 artists with Hoosier ties featured in the galleries, including, yes, Jim Davis. Davis is a mentor to Dee and helped him get Rosebuds into its first newspaper. 00;03;34;25 - 00;03;49;01 Dee Parson It was important to me because you know who thinks of the funny pages without thinking of Garfield, and considering he's kind of a centerpiece of Indiana, you know, history, this exhibit really could not have happened without featuring him. 00;03;49;03 - 00;03;51;29 Kara DuQuette He walked us over to the wall with Davis's work. 00;03;52;00 - 00;04;01;21 Dee Parson One of the few that I really wanted to showcase was that John is a cartoonist. It's like one of the strips here. One of the Sunday strips here is John cartooning. 00;04;01;28 - 00;04;12;17 Kara DuQuette In addition to well-known artists, there’s some you might not have heard of. We asked Dee to show us his favorite artist, one that he learned about while putting the show together. 00;04;12;20 - 00;04;40;21 Dee Parson Yeah. Dahlia messick, who's the creator of of Brenda Star. She had to hide her identity as Dale Messick because back in the day, you know, there wasn’t such a thing as a female newspaper cartoonist. So she had to go by Dale Messick. So this was something that that was really fun to learn about. Learning about the history of Brenda Star in the cartoon, you know, in the cartooning that she did for this. 00;04;40;23 - 00;04;43;09 And what did she cartoon about? 00;04;43;11 - 00;04;56;22 Dee Parson So it was about a reporter named Brenda Star and just the adventures that she would go through. It was like a serialized strip story akin to, like, Flash Gordon and like Mary Worth and things like that. So this was like a story that she was doing. 00;04;56;27 - 00;05;00;23 Kara DuQuette The Funny Pages features artists from the past and present... 00;05;00;24 - 00;05;25;13 Dee Parson But I also wanted to showcase future as well. So here we have six Anderson high school students plus the arts, the art teacher Will Foster to showcase their work as you know, their first steps of professionalism. Because Anderson High School was where I got my first start doing cartooning, doing our local news, doing the school newspaper, and various other little things I did with art. 00;05;25;17 - 00;05;39;00 Dee Parson And I have grown so much from from there that I wanted to pay that forward so they can get an opportunity to showcase their work and feel the same thing I felt when I first started. 00;05;39;05 - 00;05;45;03 Kara DuQuette Right. How cool is that, that you've given them an opportunity to show at this stage in their career? 00;05;45;04 - 00;05;56;27 Dee Parson Oh yeah. In fact, in fact, each of the each of their pieces have, you know, you can buy their work and it goes towards the Anderson High School. I already bought one. There was one. 00;05;56;29 - 00;05;57;12 Kara DuQuette Can we see? 00;05;57;14 - 00;06;23;02 Dee Parson Yeah, there was one here I just loved so much that I just said I have to buy this. So this was by Olive Weston, who is an Anderson High School sophomore, and just this comic of a girl so nervous to, smile for school picture day. It was the smile was just so contagious, I just, I, I needed this. 00;06;23;04 - 00;06;29;01 Kara DuQuette There’s a girl practicing in the mirror to smile or attempting to smile. (laughs) 00;06;29;04 - 00;06;39;10 Dee Parson And so, yes, I just was, so. I loved it. I loved the smile at the end. It's just. It just captured me. I just said, I mean, to make sure no one else gets this. 00;06;39;12 - 00;06;43;09 Kara DuQuette If it's not obvious, Dee really cares about cartooning. 00;06;43;11 - 00;07;03;24 Dee Parson This is actually one of my favorite pieces in this exhibit. What I love to do is when I see the strip in newspapers, I love the, the the the newspaper look. So this is actually a high quality scan of one of the panels from the newspaper, on display here. 00;07;03;26 - 00;07;09;25 Kara DuQuette Yes. And it's got a different look. It's got that registers slightly off. 00;07;09;27 - 00;07;29;17 Dee Parson It's so cool, I love it. Yeah. No, I love I love that aesthetic And it's just a natural thing to have too. So every once in a while I'll, you know, share this stuff. I'll do like a, I'll cut out one of the panels and I'll just release it on social media just to kind of let people see, see it in a different light. 00;07;29;20 - 00;07;34;13 Kara DuQuette Yeah. I don't think there's any quite any way to duplicate that. Right? 00;07;34;17 - 00;07;39;05 Dee Parson Well there is you can definitely duplicate this digitally, but. 00;07;39;07 - 00;07;41;25 Kara DuQuette It's not going to have that same vibe. Right? 00;07;41;26 - 00;08;00;14 Dee Parson Yes. Seeing it, seeing it firsthand in the papers, in the Sunday papers and, just the way that this stuff is naturally done, like, it's it's so it's so cool to have Rosebuds be a part of that and, you know, having a part of its, you know, its identity as well as a newspaper comic strip. 00;08;00;15 - 00;08;10;04 Kara DuQuette What do you feel like the role of cartoons are in the newspaper these days? When you talk about the shift in media and the decline of the newspaper. 00;08;10;06 - 00;09;21;12 Dee Parson It's it's it's a very it's a very nuanced conversation because because also, you know, the newspaper syndicates are also pivoting to having their features online as well. So people, you know, can still read newspaper comics online now through Comics Kingdom and Go Comics, and whether comic locations have this sort of things for them. But with newspaper comics, it's kind of hard because when people think of them, they're thinking of comics from the 20th century, and it doesn't feel like that, you know, newspaper comics has evolved too much outside of, you know, very few circumstances. So it's really hard to, you know, when people talk about, oh, yeah, I've read the comics when I was a kid growing up or, you know, “They’re still making this comic strip here,” you know, so things like so conversations like that are hard to have because people, you know, eventually kind of with the rise of, you know, social media and the cell phones and the digital age of, of, of media, you know, comic strips are still very traditionally based and people have kind of left that behind a bit. 00;09;21;19 - 00;09;40;22 Dee Parson And it's it's something that, you know, I try to be a proper advocate for and let people know, like, you know, there's still life happening in here. You just have to be willing to allow that to come and allow that to, to be apparent and, and support that. 00;09;40;23 - 00;09;48;27 Kara DuQuette The Funny Pages is open at the Anderson Museum of Art through October 31st. This is Pop of Culture from IPR.