Hilary Price is reading the comics pages at a table in her studio at the old Prophylactic Toothbrush Company factory in Northampton, Mass. A cartoonist herself, she's searching for a strip worthy of her admiration. Her eyes fall on "Doonesbury." But it's not Garry Trudeau's social and political satire that she praises today. "He draws really good clouds," Price says as she points to his spectacularly fluffy sky. "And look here," she adds, gesturing to Lynn Johnston's "For Better or For Worse." "She does great sides of houses."
Price, '91, an untrained artist, happens to be looking for drawing tips. But she's also demonstrating how she has become the rarest of breeds in the cartooning world, a woman in her 20s with her own syndicated strip: she revels in the details the rest of us ignore.
In her refreshingly off-kilter comic strip "Rhymes with Orange" (so named, Price says, because nothing does), she asks questions few people consider. The Seven Dwarfs, where are they now? (Happy: got over it. Now goes by 'Jaded' . . . Dopey: in and out of rehab. . . .)
Price's irreverence recalls some famous cartoonists, notably "The Far Side" creator Gary Larson and The New Yorker's Roz Chast, who may be the closest thing Price has to a professional role model. "She is an incredible humorist without being a great artist," says Price. "She gives me hope." But most of the time, Price's "Orange" defies classification or comparison. It depicts a world where the Grim Reaper soothes a baby Reaper squalling in a crib beneath a mobile of lethal weapons; where bogey monsters gather for group therapy; where parking gets validated with the words, "You made a really good choice parking here."
There are few recurring characters and fewer recurring themes; indeed, there is little that's predictable about Price's daily offerings other than her use of a title box, which allows her to dispense with traditional setup and elaboration and instead go straight to the punch line. In a strip titled "Bathtub Inventory," Price's accounting includes "yucky, stiff washcloth," "gross clump of hair," "$12 conditioner bought in that weakened, insecure, post-haircut daze," "really dull razor (rust optional)" and "most recent shampoo, upside down to catch dregs." In "Diary of a Sport Utility Vehicle in the Suburbs," she offers, "Monday: Excitement! Splash in puddle!! (Then go to carwash.) . . . Sunday: Quiet time in cul-de-sac. Get college alma mater sticker on rear window." (Similar parodies: "Diary of a Very Expensive Mountain Bike," "NordicTrack -- My Lonely Life" and "Reflections from the Basement -- The Life & Times of a Bread Machine.")
Indeed, any scrap of everyday life is fair game. "I get ideas from everywhere and everyone," admits Price, who carries around a little black book that she fills with observations and anecdotes. "I remember going through the J. Crew catalog with Hilary once," says her friend Rachel Ehrlich. "I was ignoring the sweaters and saying, 'I want the dog, I want the boat.' And that turned into a cartoon."
Producing six daily strips plus a full-color installment for Sunday is "a constant battle," says Price, who works from 10 to 6 daily plus many nights and weekends. "Believe it or not, I pull a lot more all-nighters now than I ever did in college," she says. On Mondays and Tuesdays, she sketches out two or three ideas, often consulting her two favorite reference books, The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy -- "a great reference for poking holes in accepted wisdom" -- and The Way Things Work, an illustrated encyclopedia that shows her what, say, a toaster looks like. As the week progresses, she runs her penciled work by friends. On Fridays, she inks and scans a week's worth of cartoons into her computer and, with luck, e-mails them to an editor in Orlando, Fla., to meet a 5 p.m. deadline. (The strips will run four weeks later.) Says Price: "By Friday I'm a wreck."
Though she loves her work, it's not exactly the career Price envisioned. She grew up the youngest of three kids in Weston, Mass. She liked to write, so she thought she'd be a novelist, maybe a journalist. (As a teenager, she spent two summers interning at the daily newspaper in Falmouth, Mass.) Her dad describes the young Price as curious and maddeningly persistent. "Hilary was inquisitive as a kid -- 'til you wanted to rap her upside the head," says Michael Price, a retired women's clothing merchant. "She'd question and question and question you, and if she didn't get a satisfactory answer, she'd rephrase her question until she had wrung every bit of knowledge out of you. She could have been a great lawyer, except she doesn't like dotting her i's or crossing her t's."
Precision, especially artistic precision, has never been Price's strong suit. Her style today is not much different from the drawings she did as a child, when she spent hours doodling on telephone books, scraps of paper or, when nothing else was available, herself. She has long felt kinship with other practitioners of the simple line drawing, particularly Sandra Boynton, whose greeting cards of cats -- signed only "Boynton" -- were all the rage when Price was in junior high. "Her cards had an enormous influence on me," says Price. "I always assumed Boynton was a man. When I found out she was a woman, it was a very big deal to me. It was just the beginning of an idea of a possibility."
And that's all it would remain for the next eight years. At Concord Academy in Massachusetts, a private school known for fostering student creativity, Price discovered her simple drawings wouldn't cut it in art class. "I was just blown away by the talent," she says. "So I decided, I'll be a jock instead."
At Stanford, Price co-captained the ski team, played briefly on the varsity soccer squad, majored in English lit, hashed at Branner and continued to entertain herself by doodling -- "especially during hum bio slide presentations." The doodles evolved into a few primitive, single-panel cartoons. She submitted them, unsolicited, to the Stanford Daily, but never heard from the editors. Price had better luck in Dublin during a year off after her junior year, selling three cartoons to an Irish political satire magazine called The Phoenix. "That may be where I caught the cartooning bug," she says. "Seeing your work in print is neat, but getting a check was something else.".
Still, writing seemed a more reasonable -- and better-paying -- career path. After graduating from Stanford, Price moved to San Francisco and found work as a freelance ad copywriter. Six months into an 18-month stint in the advertising world, Price was certain her happiness lay elsewhere. "It was very challenging, but you're facing so inward," she says of writing ads. "All you're trying to do is make toothpaste funny. It's not a very fulfilling job."
So she started peddling cartoons again. Just as Larson had done some 15 years earlier, Price got her first big break at the San Francisco Chronicle. "I thought her stuff was fresh and original," says Rosalie Muller Wright, the former Chronicle features editor who is now editor of Sunset magazine. Wright purchased some of Price's cartoons in 1993 for the paper's now-defunct Sunday magazine. Says Wright: "She had a distinctive voice and consistency; she could keep it coming." That opinion was shared by King Features Syndicate editor Jay Kennedy, who liked what he saw in the samples Price sent him later that year. After a nine-month trial period, King launched "Rhymes with Orange" in June 1994.
At 29, Price is already a veteran cartoonist completing her fifth year of syndication. She stands out for both her age and gender. Of some 225 major cartoonists in syndication today, only about 20 are women, notes Kennedy. "To give you an idea of what Hilary has accomplished, every year we get 6,500 new submissions, and we take three," he says. "Out of those three, one usually fails, one does just so-so, and one shows the promise to keep growing -- and that's where Hilary is right now." In fact, the circulation of "Orange" has doubled in the last five years, from 50 to 100 newspapers -- including the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News and Boston Globe.
After spending a decade in the Bay Area, Price moved back to her native Massachusetts in 1997. California felt "geographically foreign," she says, and she wanted to be closer to her family. She lives in Northampton with three housemates and a 6-year-old pit bull/husky mix named Doxy; her studio is just a mile and a half away. "Northampton is a great town," says Price. "Somebody just voted it 'Best small artsy-fartsy town in America.' "
Like many successful cartoonists, Price is trying to expand her reach. In 1997, she put out a book-length collection of her favorite strips. "It did fair," she says, "but not well enough to put out another book right away." She has a deal "in the works" with Recycled Paper Greetings, the company behind the Boynton cards. And she recently launched a website (www.rhymeswithorange.com). The real money, Price knows, is in calendars, mugs and stuffed animals, but the lack of recurring characters in her strip makes such merchandising a bit tricky. Nonetheless, Price allows that she makes a "comfortable" living -- there's a modest base salary from King Features, plus a commission-style formula pegged to the circulation of the newspapers that run her strip. Still, she says, "I'm not walking around in a smoking jacket."
Price writes the strip primarily with young adults like herself in mind, but has been pleasantly surprised to find her audience extends to readers both much younger and much older. She gets several dozen letters each week, mostly by e-mail; she knows immediately when a strip strikes a nerve. "Every once in a while I happen to tap into some really deep, broiling rage," she says. In a cartoon titled "Overlooked Summer Injuries," she noted that getting bug spray on your lips will make them numb for two hours. "Some very concerned mother wrote in to say that I was encouraging kids to suck on bug spray," recalls Price. Another strip, "Learning to Appreciate the Fashion Statements of the Middle-Class White Guy," landed her in trouble with, well, a middle-class white guy. He didn't appreciate Price's satirical commentary on khakis, blue denim shirts and baseball caps.
Then there are the strips that really resonate with readers. In a December cartoon, she described the "Hanukkah Shelf" -- that blue-and-white area in the far back of the gift shop, beyond the sea of Christmas cards and Santa decorations. "I must have received 30 or 40 pieces of mail on that; everything from 'Oh, my god!' to 'That has been my experience,' " she says.
Every once in a while, she'll get a note that energizes her for weeks. "Some guys wrote that they have one of my comics on their refrigerator," Price says. "That's like the MoMA for me."
Read a September 2010 update on this story.
Kelli Anderson, '84, a Sports Illustrated writer, lives in Sonoma, Calif.
