Early Life

Cathy Guisewite grew up around persuasion and humor. In Dayton, Ohio, she was born to two parents in the advertising industry (“Cathy Guisewite”), which taught her important lessons about the effect images have on people. After majoring in English literature at the University of Michigan, she got a job in advertising (Lynch). Yet, she was unhappy with her job and her parents worried about her health. “I’d send drawings home to let her know I was coping,” Guisewite once told the Dayton Daily News. “They were very scratchy stick figures. It was humiliating because it was me at my worst” (Holdship).

Once Cathy began publishing her cartoons, she still harbored severe fears about how she was perceived in the industry. In an interview with the University of Michigan, she confessed, “I was so embarrassed somebody would see the strip and that the artists at the agency would ridicule my artwork.” After her first publications, Cathy couldn’t see a sustainable future in comics and believed that she would stay in the advertising industry forever (Holdship).

General Information

Cathy Guisewite grew up in Ohio to two parents in the advertising industry (“Cathy Guisewite”). After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1972, she followed in their footsteps and began her career as an ad writer. In 1976, she began cartooning as a way to express her irritations with her job and her personal life. She sent these drawings to her parents and her mom pushed her to submit them to a publisher. Later that same year, she was given a syndication contract with Universal Press Syndicate.

Cathy has been a staple in feminist cartoons since its inception. After becoming a daily strip in 1976, the publication soon gained popularity for its honest, sometimes jaded, view of the working world as a woman (Neary). Cathy focused on a female audience for the first time in comic history and gave a voice to many women who felt unseen by comic publications prior to the 1970s. Many other comics featured women as side characters or, when female characters were on center stage, their stories were adventures or soap operas, quite far from depicting the average woman’s life. Cathy was distributed to 1,400 newspapers worldwide and Guisewite earned an Emmy Award for the animated television series adaptation in 1987. Additionally, the merchandise supported by the comic strip became a multi-million dollar business. 

Comic Strip Profile: Cathy

In this comic image, Cathy is indecisive about ending an unhealthy relationship. In the thought bubble (Del Rey Cabero, 17) , she refers to herself in the third person which shows a divide between her intentions and her actions. Cathy’s eyebrows are slanted together to reveal that she is both deep in thought and deeply conflicted.

AACK! is the trademark phrase created by Cathy Guisewhite to express Cathy’s emotions. Cathy often exclaims when she is having difficulties making a decision. For example, a common theme in Cathy is Cathy’s indecisiveness around eating sugar, especially pastries. She cannot make up her mind about whether or not to eat the treats in front of her and will create excuses that send her into wacky adventures to fill the panels of the comic strip. This reflects a familiar trope in female lives. Women have traditionally struggled with body image and eating disorders, often triggered by companies marketing their items as “lean” or diet friendly. As per usual, Cathy works to show the audience that their struggles are valid and universal.

Later Career

Cathy Guisewite appeared on multiple late night TV shows to promote her comics and as a voice for a new generation of creatives. Most notably, she was a guest on The Late Show with Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. On The Late Show with Johnny Carson, she was introduced as a cartoonist with a comic strip that is syndicated in “over 1,000 newspapers” and a “very perceptive observer of the male-female relationships in our life”. Guisewite addressed the double standard placed upon women in the workplace. Women are expected to constantly have their hair and makeup done when that is forbidden for men. She counts the time men save per day not doing hair and makeup and calculates that men have “two and a half months” of extra time at the end of the year. Guisewite then goes on to ask, if men have such a wealth of free time, why can’t he “find three minutes to tell them how wonderful [women] are?”

On another appearance, Guisewite addresses Johnny leaving The Tonight Show. Again, she focuses on how his female audience will react to his absence. She states that Carson is “simultaneously dumping 150 million American women who go to bed with you three nights a week”. She speaks about how she brings real-life issues into her comic. When Carson and Guisewite are discussing commitment issues, she talks about how Cathy and Irving – the two main characters in her comic strip – are working to resolve their commitment issues in her recent publication. 

Post-Cartooning Career

In her post-cartooning career, Cathy Guisewite did not lose her creative edge. After she finished publication in 2010, she immediately began other literary projects. She published  “Fifty Things That Aren’t My Fault” in 2019 which she describes as “essays from the heart, soul and stomach of modern womanhood. Part reflection on how the world has changed for us in the last four decades”. The book is a collection of essays that share her frustrations with the world in a humorous, yet poignant manner. In a style very similar to her comics, Guisewite focuses on the the challenges of womanhood in a changing world. In what she refers to as “the panini years”, she struggles with being stuck in the middle, having to care for both aging parents and aging children. 

In 2021, Guisewite published another collection of essays titled “Scenes from Isolation”. The first line of the introduction gives a good overview of the book, “I’ve worn the same pair of sweatpants for fourteen months.” The essays provide a blunt, honest look into the life of a funny person in isolation. Published for solace during our darkest times, Guisewite is the pandemic buddy we’ve always wanted.

Cathy Guisewite cherishes the idea that she can make any of her readers laugh. Reaching beyond the comic strip, she endeavors to bring joy into the lives of as many people as possible by publishing work in as many mediums as possible. From the strip, to the page, to the screen, Guisewite has become a welcome companion in all of our lives.

TimelineJS: Cathy Guisewite

[timeline src=”https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YShebeH7ejy0ETeniduyaVsfB3C7llbi-zZUXyvGCJU/edit#gid=0″ width=”100%” height=”650″ font=”Default” lang=”en” version=”timeline3″ ]

 

Timeline Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YShebeH7ejy0ETeniduyaVsfB3C7llbi-zZUXyvGCJU/edit#gid=0

Timeline Link: https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1YShebeH7ejy0ETeniduyaVsfB3C7llbi-

Timeline Reflection

Cathy Guisewite has led a unique life. Through her comic, she has touched the lives of millions of Americans who read her comic, “Cathy”. In putting together this project, I was given the opportunity to explore every aspect of her life and career that is available online. I learned about her childhood, early career, and post-cartooning experiences. She is open about her life’s changes, failures, and successes on her personal website. Guisewite originally planned to follow her parents into publishing but had the drive to move in a completely different direction and pursue comics. This change is inspiring to a young student who isn’t sure about what they want to do in life. Life can have many ups and downs and decisions don’t always have to be made early on. Another aspect of Guisewite’s life that impressed me was how she was able to become a bigger figure than her comic. Many other cartoonists are only known for their sole creation and rarely experiment with other mediums. Guisewite, on the other hand, was a returning guest on late-night shows and her television show was wildly successful. 

Using Timeline JS was another fun opportunity to learn about another visualization tool. The website explained exactly how to create and embed a timeline (except for the link issue). This taught me how important the user interface and instructional section are for a new website/digital tool. Before this process, I had no idea how to copy image addresses and I was able to teach other students how to do the same. In the future, I would like to learn how to create a Google sheet template and retrofit it like the TimelineJS template. TimelineJS’s suggestion of less than 20 slides was an interesting addition. While, at first glance, I thought this suggestion was simply a way to get users to make more timelines, it encourages the user to streamline their information on the slides. If the timeline was too expansive and each slide showed a small amount of information, the reader could get bored and confused. The suggestion also pushed the creator to carefully choose what information is included on the timeline. The inverse is also true. If the timeline was compressed and each slide encompassed years of information, the user would have a difficult time following the subject’s path.

This project taught me the importance of aesthetics in digital design. I spent a large amount of time picking background images and fonts that accentuated the information I presented. If the picture had a white background and I used a bright background color, the picture would pop. If the picture had a transparent background, however, a bright background color would render the picture unreadable. By looking at the example timelines, I could gauge how my interest changed based on the effort put into the aesthetics of the presentation. While other aspects of the timeline, such as typed information, number of slides, topic, and organization, played a large role in my response, the aesthetics are just as important. 

 

Sources:

Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (2023, September 1). Cathy Guisewite. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cathy-Guisewite

Holdship, Deborah. “The Accidental Cartoonist Grows Up.” Michigan Today, 20 Dec. 2021, michigantoday.umich.edu/2020/01/23/the-accidental-cartoonist-grows-up/.

Lynch, Greg. “Aack! The Dayton-Born Woman behind ‘Cathy,’ a Beloved Comic Strip for Decades.” Dayton, Dayton Daily News, 8 Sept. 2023, www.daytondailynews.com/local/aack-the-dayton-born-woman-behind-cathy-a-beloved-comic-for-decades/3GXNZFG5JBBYHHS5HZVRXPCWFE/.

Thompson, Megan. “‘Cathy’ Comic Strip Creator Looks to the next Chapter.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 21 Apr. 2019, www.pbs.org/newshour/show/cathy-comic-strip-creator-looks-to-the-next-chapter.

Student Bio

Holden Habermacher is a freshman studying at the University of Richmond. Hailing from Montgomery, Alabama, she plans to major in Global Studies with a minor in Data Science. Through the RHCS 245 course, Holden has enjoyed learning about the world of comics creation and marginalized creators.