Arts

Talk ‘They Can Talk’ with local cartoonist Jimmy Craig

Viral animal cartoonist Jimmy Craig will join "Off the Mark" creator Mark Parisi to talk about his new book "Are You Gonna Eat That?" at Harvard Book Store April 6.

Jimmy Craig at his home studio. Courtesy Photo

6 minutes to read

When most comic strip animals talk, they don’t exactly scream “realism.” It’s hard to imagine that Garfield is speaking for most cats when he declares his hatred of Mondays or his love for lasagna.

But the animals that populate “They Can Talk,” the wry, brilliant weekly webtoon by local cartoonist Jimmy Craig, don’t just sound authoritative — they’re downright relatable. Whether it’s a frantic golden retriever entreating household residents to “STAY CALM!” as someone walks by the window, or a shark named Kevin explaining that most people call him “AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!,” these animals have a lot to say, and for animal lovers, what they say resonates. And that could possibly be because of their Boston-area heritage.

“I think that the biggest thing of being from this area is kind of sarcasm and attitude — maybe like pessimism — that I think is maybe different than people on the West Coast,” says Craig, a lifelong Mass. resident and Emmanuel College graduate, who has also been told his humor has a British sensibility. “It’s dry, but I think the more sarcastic, almost dark humor that comes through maybe one of every five or 10 comics, that’s very New England to me.”

And if the animals — drawn in Craig’s distinctive almost-realistic-but-slightly-off-kilter style — look familiar, it could be because you’ve seen them before: “Typically, the animals are mammals and pets and stuff that you’d see in New England,” he says. “Observable animals that I have seen … I’m saying this as I just wrote a lion comic. But I would say those ones are very rare.”

Regardless of where they’re from, fans of both comics and animals are clearly listening to what Craig’s creatures have to say. In the seven years since he launched the strip, it’s amassed 615,000 followers on Instagram, 658,000 on Facebook, and has spawned two books; the latest, “Are You Gonna Eat That?” from Ulysses Press, hits shelves this month.

To mark that occasion, Craig will be sitting down for a Q&A session at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge on April 6 with another local cartoonist who’s no stranger to talking critters: Mark Parisi of Gloucester, creator of the comic panel “Off the Mark.” “Every time I have an idea, I Google it to see if that comic has been done,” Craig explains. “Nine out of 10 times when someone else [already] did that joke, it was Mark.”

In the meantime, Craig sat down with Boston.com from the home he shares with his wife, his two kids, and (no surprise) two cats, to talk about talking to the animals, and about how they talk back.

(Some responses have been edited for length and clarity.)

Boston.com: First I have to ask you about the origins of your animal mind meld. Were you a zookeeper in a past life?

Jimmy Craig: I really have always loved animals — like, my parents as a kid used to joke that [someday] I would just live on a farm and have a bunch of animals. But actually, when I decided I wanted to start chipping away at a comic project, the first idea was doing inanimate objects, and having inanimate objects talking. I drew a couple of them, and I felt like it was just going to be a struggle long term.

And then, when I thought to do animals, it was just so easy — it was so easy to come up with ideas, and it was fun. I try to always somewhat base them in reality … If, like, an animal’s eating, I’ll try to read about what those animals eat. You know, what trees are these animals’ habitat — all that stuff is interesting to me, too. So none of the comic felt like work for me.

How did you get started in cartooning?

I grew up on the classic comic strips like “The Far Side” and “Calvin and Hobbes” and “Mother Goose and Grimm,” and a little later on, I was really a fan of “Monty” … I would copy the strips before I even understood the humor. So I’ve just always been surrounded by comic strips.

I was always a doodler in school, and always drawing stuff, and in college a couple of friends and I started a comic strip that was more college-, adult-oriented that ran in a bunch of university papers. We ended up doing comics for Cracked.com and College Humor and sites like that. And when that fizzled out, I focused on different things until a couple of years later, when I was like, “I miss doing a comic.” It’s just something I’ve always wanted to do … I just wanted a book, like a collection of my comics. [laughs] I have so many comic collections on my shelf, and when I go to bookstores that’s the first thing I run to and look at, and I just had that long-term goal.

And then, when I posted my first [“They Can Talk”] comic, it was, like, instant. I knew right away that this is the path to go. I could do this long term, and I would enjoy doing it. So that was over seven years ago.

What was the animal in that first comic?

It was actually a chicken. [laughs] I don’t think the first comic was great by any means, but it was a chicken — sorry, it was a rooster, and the sun was rising, and the rooster is saying, like, “What is THAT?” It was like, what is the rooster actually saying when we hear it crow in the morning? I think it would have made more sense to have the rooster complaining that it was morning. But anyway, things have improved since then. [laughs]

But I just could tell from the first comic that people enjoyed it. I got an instant response from it, and I was probably four or five comics deep into it when it was like, “Oh, wow! Not only do people like this, but I think this might do really well.” I was like, I’m gonna do one a week. That’s it. Very small commitment. But I’m gonna stick to that schedule, and for seven years now I’ve done it — some weeks for better or for worse. But I think really sticking to that helped me get to the point that I’m at now.

And the current book is actually your second one, right?

Right. The first one was … I’ll say it was a little premature. I didn’t have as deep of a catalog to pull from for that book, and this one, I felt like the comic as a whole was at a much better place, and I’m so proud of this collection. It’s a hardcover book, it’s got about 100 to 130 comics in it. I’m really happy with how it looks, how it feels. You know, all those weird book things that make us book people happy. [laughs]

The comics are mostly ones you’ve drawn since the last book?

Maybe there’s like 10 comics that overlap. Those were like the fan favorites from the first book that made it in the second book, but primarily it’s new comics, maybe four years worth of stuff — just trying to pull ones that did the best online, sold the best as prints, and then the ones that were just my personal favorites was how I picked what went in the book.

So when we see two cats in one of your cartoons, how often are they your two cats?

I have two cats that are so different that, between the two of them, I feel like I can cover every cat comic. I have one cat that’s scared of everything and one cat that’s kind of fearless and a brat. So yeah, 90% of the time, if it’s two cats it’s very inspired by my cats. But kind of by default, like, the cat is the cat, and the dog is the dog — I still lean on those personalities that we expect from those animals. It’s easier to write a joke when you can go in with a character that the reader already has an idea about.

In addition to your comics, you’re also a story artist for the animation studio Illumination. How did you get into that?

I’ve been doing work for Illumination now, for I think almost six years, five or six years. The exposure from the “They Can Talk” comic got me an opportunity to do punch-up gags for “Secret Life of Pets 2,” because it was like, “Oh, this person writes animal jokes.” So [I wound up] doing gag writing for that movie.

And since then I’ve just been put on different projects, and it’s primarily like gags and punch-ups where I get a scene, and then I just submit a bunch of … basically it’s [like] doing comic strips, but for specific scenes and specific setups. I’ve always wanted to do something in animation, and it was really the comic that opened those doors. I’ve been working on the “Despicable Me” franchise now for over two years, which has been just awesome.

So do you see Minions in your sleep?

Basically.

Listen to the full interview with Jimmy Craig from “Strip Search: The Comic Strip Podcast” below, or on Spotify.

Peter Chianca

General Assignment Editor

Peter Chianca, Boston.com’s general assignment editor since 2019, is a longtime news editor, columnist, and music writer in the Greater Boston area.

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Talk ‘They Can Talk’ with local cartoonist Jimmy Craig