Don Bousquet's latest collection celebrates a long, drawn-out career

09:42 AM EDT on Sunday, October 2, 2005

BY BRYAN ROURKE
Journal Staff Writer

NARRAGANSETT -- Hang on. Don Bousquet's having a flashback.

Multimedia

Multimedia: Don Bousquet narrates a slide show of his favorite cartoons from his new book

"I'd like to show you some of my stuff," he says.

Bousquet has nothing in his hands, just a memory in his mind. The reenactment begins.

Bousquet softens his voice, turns his eyes down and slumps his shoulders. His confidence collapses.

"I'm a cartoonist," he says meekly. "I've brought some cartoons."

Bousquet's sitting in his garage. But somewhere in a 25-year-old recess of his brain, he's sitting in The Providence Journal. He's talking to a gruff editor with a cheerful name, Jim Sunshine.

It's 1980.

Bousquet's hesitant. Sunshine's impatient.

What, what, what? I don't have all day!

Bousquet continues the reenactment. Out go his arms. Up come his eyes.

Here.

To the imaginary Sunshine, Bousquet reaches out, submits make-believe drawings and then braces himself.

This could be it. A lifelong ambition -- the reason Bousquet quit his day job -- could blow to smithereens.

But it doesn't.

Hey, cartoons about Rhode Island. That's a great idea.

A career is launched. A living, breathing state institution is born: Don Bousquet.

If you don't know him, you probably know his art, famous for caricaturing Rhode Island culture, where the quahog is king.

"He's the granddaddy," says comedian and cartoonist Charlie Hall of North Providence. "He is to Rhode Island cartoonists what Salty Brine was to radio personalities."

With a few thousand cartoons that have appeared in newspapers, magazines and 18 books, Bousquet is one of the most published cartoonists in Rhode Island. And for that, he's celebrating, with, of course, more books.

His 19th book is Don Bousquet's Rhode Island Cookbook by Martha W. Murphy, which is a revision of 1998 publication. And his 20th is State Trooper on the Beach.

Released this month, it's a collection of Bousquet's 180 favorite cartoons from 25 years of freelance cartooning for The Providence Journal.

"These are the ones I'd like to be remembered for," Bousquet says. "These, I think, stand the test of time."

Bousquet has published the book himself through his QuahogMaid Books. It sells for $19.95 in stores in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut, in a few places in northern New England, and, through his Web site (www.donbousquet.com), to a few foreign countries.

But largely its appeal is in Rhode Island, which has inspired most of Bousquet's cartoons, and, according to Bousquet, accounts for 90 percent of his sales.

Demographically, the people who buy Bousquet books, according to Cisco Ripley at Barrington Books, are "everybody."

Bousquet's latest book, as its title would suggest, has a cartoon on the cover of a State Police trooper at the beach. He's wearing a bathing suit, flaunting flared thighs previously concealed beneath his equally flared riding breeches.

And there's a cartoon of a fire truck from Westerly's wealthy Watch Hill neighborhood filled with bottled water.

Then there's the more universal humor. A woman admires a man's garden. The caption reads, "Peonies envy."

"The reason I like it is so many people don't get it," Bousquet says. "Only the cognoscenti get it, those familiar with Freud."

In another cartoon, a Native American couple lies in a hotel bedroom. Someone's knocking on the door: "Open up. Bureau of Indian Affairs!"

"What?" Bousquet says. "Indians have affairs."

All the cartoons have a couple of things in common. They're done in one panel and depict fat-bodied, pin-headed people with enormous noses and unenlightened expressions.

"People who are heavier are funnier," Bousquet says. "They're also more realistic. It's something people can connect with. Not everyone looks like Paula Abdul and Tom Cruise."

Cartoonist's lair

Walk with Bousquet. See where he works.

Go to the back of his garage in his Bonnet Shores neighborhood. Pass his hobbies: his convertible 1997 Ford Mustang Cobra and radio-controlled model planes, which sometimes figure in his cartoons.

Enter his studio, simple and modest, essentially a desk. This is where Bousquet toils, or, as he says, "sits around drawing and faxing."

But even Bousquet can only stand so much of that, defined as two or three days a week.

"The rest is thinking time," he says.

Bousquet smiles. Even he can't believe how far he has come, from a struggling artist pitching cartoons for $25 apiece to a guy who now gets $1,000 for originals, sold to collectors.

And none of this would be if Bousquet, 57, hadn't taken a midlife risk, dismissing the discouragement of a college art instructor.

Bousquet's up. He's searching his studio. He wants to show you something -- not another reenactment, something real this time. It's something he's saved for decades: a piece of paper preserved in plastic laminate.

Bousquet finds it and waves it like a courtroom lawyer producing physical evidence. In this case, it's self-incriminating.

It's Bousquet's 1971 report card from the University of Rhode Island. Follow his finger.

Check the course: Art 103. Now look at the grade: C.

"This is truly ironic," Bousquet says.

R.I.'s Margaret Mead

Cultcha

Bousquet arrived at URI intending to major in art. Why not? He had promise.

At Chariho High School, Bousquet says, "I was this art star. I was king of the hill." He was voted "most artistic" by his 1966 graduating class, an award he seems to have merited, judging by all the caricatures he created for the yearbook.

Intro to Art at URI, Bousquet thought, that would be a breeze.

"It was supposed to be art for everyone," Bousquet says. "If you couldn't draw a straight line, that was no problem."

Still, Bousquet had a problem: the instructor.

"I drew things that looked like things," Bousquet says. "She said, 'No, that's representational. You can't draw things that look like things.' "

Bousquet switched majors. He took up anthropology. You see that in his art. William Turnbaugh does. He's a professor of anthropology at URI.

"Some of Don's cartoons actually feature cave men and other obvious references to archaeology and anthropology," Turnbaugh says. "But even those that star quahogs and New Englanders of the two-legged variety are often pretty anthropological in their approach."

The Gary Larson of Rhode Island, that's how Bousquet's sometimes seen.

"There's a definite Larsonesque look to his work," Hall says. "I can see the influence."

Larson, who created The Far Side comic series, also specialized in one-panel cartoons that poked anthropological fun at big-bodied, small-headed humans, and other animals.

"You don't have to go far to see something interesting," Bousquet says. "Look at the people around you as exotic Rhode Islanders. I'm doing my anthropology here."

Native son

Rhode Islanders talk funny, Bousquet says. They eat peculiarly. And they act strangely.

Bousquet can say that. He's a Rhode Islander, born in Pawtucket, the second of seven children. His parents worked at the University of Rhode Island, his father as a janitor and his mother as a union representative and police station employee.

Bousquet has lived in Central Falls, Richmond, and now Narragansett.

"I wasn't one of those people who wanted to see the world," Bousquet says. "I wanted to stay around here."

Bousquet has always lived in Rhode Island, except in the late '60s, when he was drafted into the military and then signed up for the Navy, and for a time was stationed in San Francisco.

"That was a system shock," Bousquet says.

On Bousquet's first "liberty", which sailors called "Cinderella time" since they had to return in 12 hours, he went to a diner. He ordered a cabinet and a grinder.

Knock it off, the waitress said. What do you want?

An Italian sub and a milkshake, Bousquet replied, translating Rhode Island to English.

"I figured out then that we really talk funny in Rhode Island," he says.

The Navy wasn't what Bousquet hoped: an entry into professional cartooning. He chose that branch of the armed services because of its illustrator program, which he later discovered didn't exist.

Once again, Bousquet's art ambitions were curbed, as they had been as a teenager. But that was self-inflicted. Friends encouraged Bousquet to visit his cartooning idol, the late Chon Day, who lived in Westerly and worked for The New Yorker.

Bousquet declined.

"I didn't want to lose the dream of becoming a cartoonist," he says. "I figured if I didn't go see him, he couldn't say, 'Give up.' "

Leap of faith

After returning from the service and before enrolling in URI under the GI Bill, Bousquet got a job as a private detective.

His first assignment was at a manufacturing company in East Killingly, Conn.

"Someone was stealing metric tons of sanitary napkins," Bousquet says. "Well, it seemed like a lot, anyway."

At the time, Bousquet's wife, Laura, was pursuing a master's degree to be a high school teacher and librarian.

"I had to get a real job," Bousquet says. "I couldn't futz around with cartoons."

Even when Laura finished with her schooling, and Bousquet completed his, he didn't pursue cartooning. He took a job as a vocational counselor, commuting to Providence, giving himself lots of time to question his own work.

"It's great to spend your life making people happy," Bousquet says.

With his wife's encouragement, Bousquet quit his job. Laura worked. And Bousquet devoted himself to creating cartoons, and shortly thereafter, to caring for their soon-to-be born first child. (The couple's two sons, Nathan and Michael, are now 24 and 20, respectively.)

Bousquet committed six months to creating his cartooning career.

"How do you become a cartoonist?" Bousquet says. "You go sit in a corner under a bright light and look at a piece of paper. An idea comes to you and you draw it down. There's not even a pattern of behavior."

What there needs to be is a buyer.

Breaking through

In the summer of 1980, Bousquet went looking. Actually, he went mailing. Out went submissions. Back came rejections.

"It was like getting a paycheck," he says. "Every week I got pink rejection slips in the mail."

Bousquet went big. At first, he tried to break into the top-tier national cartoon market, sending out 12 cartoons a week -- every week for four months -- to The New Yorker.

"Something snapped," Bousquet says. "I decided I had to find something locally."

Bousquet found his first sale at the now-defunct Rhode Island magazine. The cartoon, which earned Bousquet $25, shows a young man bidding a middle-aged man farewell, telling him nothing interesting ever happens in Rhode Island. In the background, a giant octopus rises out of the water.

"I was so excited," Bousquet says. "That gave me the confidence to call The Journal."

The Providence Journal began running Bousquet's cartoon not in the Sunday comics section, but on the inside page of its former Rhode Islander Sunday magazine.

The rest is state history, filled with honors and citations, school and festival guest appearances, and a few formal recognitions by government officials. While Bousquet has never been published in The New Yorker, he has been in Reader's Digest, and his work runs regularly in Yankee magazine.

At least once, Bousquet received a public proclamation of praise from former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci. Then Cianci's crimes crept up on him, and Bousquet depicted him as the conviction-resistant mayor who each morning sprayed on Teflon deodorant.

"He didn't like that one," Bousquet says. "He said it made him look fat."

Someone's being mocked

In every Bousquet cartoon, someone's being mocked. That, Bousquet says, is simply comedy.

"Somebody's going to get hurt," Bousquet says. "Rarely do you say something funny without hurting someone."

But Bousquet has tried, and failed, to be funny without offending someone. Somehow, some readers managed to find unintended offense, which still dumbfounds Bousquet.

There was a cartoon in The Journal a dozen years ago showing a TV news report of a Poland Spring water truck crashing into a gas station, contaminating the super unleaded gas.

One woman strongly objected.

"Was she a super unleaded nut?" Bousquet says. "No, she was Polish."

And in 1997 there was a cartoon of a guy walking on Federal Hill, Providence's Italian neighborhood, wearing a Federal Witness Protection T-shirt. Some people were offended at the suggestion that Italians might be involved in the Mafia.

"The last place a criminal would hide would be Federal Hill," Bousquet says. "That got ugly."

The same could be said about a Bousquet cartoon about a Budget Pest Control business, which prompted a law suit by a business with a similar name. Ultimately, the state Supreme Court found only humor and not bad intentions in the cartoon.

While not always pretty, Bousquet says, the truth is frequently funny. People need to recognize Rhode Island's brand of it, and celebrate it.

That, he says, is what he's doing -- not making fun of Rhode Island, just enjoying it.

"The last thing we want to lose is our individuality," he says. "That's all we have."

Bryan Rourke can be contacted at brourke [at] projo.com and at (401) 277-7267.