Don Bousquet - South County Independent

Cartoonist celebrates 25 years of lampooning the 'cultcha'
South County Independent
June 2005

Cartoonist celebrates 25 years of lampooning the 'cultcha'

By Doug Norris/Arts & Living Editor

BONNET SHORES - This is what it's like to have a conversation with Don Bousquet:

One moment, standing under his garage roof, the sounds of a B25 bomber rumble and roar, shaking you to your toes. The next, he's flipping through pictures taken with a digital camera affixed to a remote control aircraft that he's flown over Jamestown earlier that morning. Or he's pulling out a dollar bill to illustrate the regular Sunday game of Liar's Poker he plays with friends and locals in his garage. Or he's showing you the carcass of a dead deer - which he thought at first might be human - that a fox dragged off the beach at Bonnet Shores.

If there appears to be something just a little off kilter about it all, well, it's his world, and you're welcome to it.

"Even if I weren't being paid as a cartoonist, I'd still have to do it," said Bousquet, who this year will celebrate his 25th year as an ink-stained chronicler of Rhode Island culture and oddities that sometimes (but not often) spill beyond the border. "It's a way of life."

This week and next, the Independent is running a contest in conjunction with Bousquet's anniversary in which readers are invited to choose their favorite cartoon out of the artist's hand-picked selection of 25. (See pages C4 and C5.) The cartoons will be part of a larger collection of 200 cartoons Bousquet will publish later this year in a book called "State Trooper on the Beach, 25 Years of My Favorite Cartoons" by Don Bousquet. The title is the caption of an old cartoon spoofing one of Rhode Island's most familiar characters.

"The state trooper is a Rhode Island icon," Bousquet said. "One year they were voted as having the best looking uniform in the country. They've become as much of an icon as the quahog, the Independent Man, Claiborne Pell. A lot of it has to do with those jodhpurs. So I thought, what if the state trooper goes to the beach and wears a bathing suit instead of a uniform, and come to find out, their look has nothing to do with the uniform, it's just the way their legs are shaped?"

The troopers are familiar targets for Bousquet's prodding pen, but the artist admires that they have a sense of humor, to the point where they've even put out their own collection of trooper-only cartoons by Bousquet in a state police publication. Not everyone is so forgiving.

"There's been controversy over the years," he said. "I've had death threats, lawsuits, hate mail. Buddy Cianci once gave me the key to the city of Providence. Then I did a cartoon: "Vote Cianci. A Man of Conviction." He didn't like me as much after that."

Another time The Providence Journal received a nasty letter from a reader, referring to a Bousquet cartoon.

"I did this cartoon with a guy lying in bed watching TV," he said. "The announcer says something like, 'This just in, a Poland Spring truck loaded with 250 gallons of fresh water crashed into Exxon, completely contaminating the super unleaded tanks.' The reader wrote a letter that just tore me up and down. Fortunately, the Journal had the good sense to run the letter next to my cartoon. She wrote 'I'm outraged at the callousness and insensitivity of the bigoted Don Bousquet and the Providence Journal that you would make fun of Polish people like that.' Some of this stuff, you can't make up."

Bousquet was 32 when he began his cartooning career, a fact that he attributes to his success.

"I wouldn't have been able to do it if I was 17 or 22," he said. "By the time I started, I had worked in business. I was married. I'd started a family. I had life experiences and I knew it was what I wanted to do. So I was ready for rejection. I went to newspapers and magazines and said, 'I know you don't have a budget, I know you can't pay me anything, but my whole life is wrapped up into wanting to be a cartoonist, so don't say no to me.'"

He sold his first cartoons to a now-defunct Rhode Island magazine published out of Newport. Then Bousquet's comic drawings started appearing in The Narragansett Times, The Providence Journal and a few of the East Side newspapers. Within two years, he was being published in Yankee magazine and in several other publications, and his career path was set.

Some of the cartoons in the next collection will be plucked from those early years.

"Most of the cartoons in the collection are representative of the kind of cartoon that people have liked and I've liked to draw over the last 25 years," he said. "I go off on tangents sometimes, but really I keep coming back to anything Rhode Island and especially South County."

Bousquet even includes one cartoon that he doesn't like anymore. It's one of his earliest, featuring two waiters from a fancy restaurant talking at the service entrance. One says, "Believe it or not, some guy from Rhode Island ordered a grinder and a cabinet."

"This cartoon went all over the world," Bousquet said. "We put thousands of them on T-shirts. I don't even draw in that style anymore. It's like somebody else did it."

But Bousquet had struck a chord. Rhode Islanders by and large have a pretty good sense of humor about themselves, at least when compared to the Puritan strain that runs through so much of America, and residents immediately responded to the skewed look at their culture. Bousquet's scenes and people were exaggerated but recognizable. They were caricature, but they had the ring of truth.

It could be argued that Bousquet, in his cartoons, and Mark Patinkin, in his early columns, did more to define the Rhode Island sense of identity than anyone since Roger Williams abandoned Massachusetts for a strange, little peninsula south of Boston.

It also could be argued that a show like "Family Guy," the wildly popular set-in-Rhode Island animated series on the Cartoon Network, might not have been possible without Bousquet's twisted chronicling of Little Rhody life.

At any rate, he was on to something.

Occasionally his cartoons are universal. One in the collection shows an elderly man and woman approaching each other, one using a walker, the other a cane. Thoughts bubble out of their heads. "Barbie?" "Ken?"

But most explore the specific and quirky culture of Rhode Island and the New England region, celebrating a world of Swamp Yankees, state troopers, beehive-haired moms, quahoggers, corrupt politicians and local personalities. Another of his personal favorites shows Channel 10 anchorman Doug White getting out of bed in the morning, his familiar plastered hair all akimbo, like a mop-top Beatle. It's the kind of joke only a Rhode Islander would really understand.

"Almost every one of my cartoons have something biographical or autobiographical about them," said Bousquet, including the "grinder and cabinet one," which happened to him when he was 18 at boot camp in the Midwest. "My whole world was Rhode Island, southern Massachusetts and Connecticut. It never occurred to me that other parts of the world might think that the way we talked, the words we used, the things we cared about, might be considered kind of strange."

Bousquet generally works in the morning on his cartoons.

"It's a lot of reading, a lot of thinking," said Bousquet, who completes about 180 cartoons for newspapers each year, between publishing a new collection each year, illustrating for other publications, freelancing for advertisers and contributing to charities. "Sometimes it hits me like a light bulb. Sometimes you have to manufacture it and it becomes kind of formulaic. That's part of the craft of it."

Bousquet points to a cartoon on the table.

"I had this idea about Watch Hill," he said. "It's kind of a ritzy place, you know? So what would a fast-food joint look like there? I had to dig out some old cookbooks, and came up with a guy in front of a blackboard that says, 'Seafood Soup Provencale, Chevre Florentine, All You Can Eat, 4.25 . . . and so on. But my favorite cartoons are the ones without any words. No captions. Just an image. Generally speaking, the more words, the less I like it."

Another cartoon came from a Sunday morning looking at the car ads in the sports section, when he saw an advertisement for The Foxy Lady that read: "Suzi B. 56 EEE."

"I'd seen it when I was sitting at a table with my sister-in-law, Nancy Jean," he said. "So in the cartoon I changed Suzi B. to Nancy J., and you can see on the poster that she has enormously big feet."

In addition to his new collection, Bousquet is keeping busy working on a revised edition of "Don Bousquet's Rhode Island Cookbook," by Martha Murphy, due out later this summer. He's also illustrating a book for Jamestown lawyer John A. Murphy, who is mixing Bousquet cartoons with interesting quotes from different people. Otherwise, you can find him most mornings flying his remote-controlled aircraft over Jamestown, or on Sunday pre-Liar's Poker breakfast gatherings at The Whale's Tail in Narragansett.

What you'll discover amid the banter is that for all the years that he has made fun of Rhode Island, Bousquet is a confirmed Rhode Islander himself, who knows how to take a joke.

"My son started working at a local market," he said. "So the owner of the market tells another worker. 'His father is the guy who does that clam #$*@!' How's that for a way to be remembered?"