Cartoonist Stephen McCranie has a pointy, kind face, and is dismayingly tall. His name is just as unwieldy.
“And the second ‘c’ is capitalized,” he said. “So it’s kind of like the classic Irish spelling — Or maybe it’s Scottish.”
McCranie’s first graphic novel, “Mal and Chad,” is on the verge of publication. It began in 2007 as a comic strip that ran in the Daily Lobo five days a week. On Saturday, he will hold a pre-release and signing of his work at the UNM Bookstore from 1-4 p.m.
But his career didn’t start with Mal and Chad.
“It was pretty bad,” he said, laughing. “It was a bad comic. This was five years ago. It was called ‘College 101.’”
He smiled warmly at the memory.
“It just centered around the lives of these childhood friends who were going to college together,” he said. “It was an outlet for me to express my experiences as a freshman and what life was like.”
So, how much did it suck?
“It just got kind of weird,” he said. “There was a mad scientist, and he goes back in time. And gets a dinosaur. And there was a duck! There was, like, a robotic duck who had, like, an alternate dimension inside of him so he could swallow anything, and it was just really weird.”
A week before the following school year, McCranie drafted the guts of what would be “Mal and Chad.”
“For Mal and Chad, since I conceived it in such a short time, I never really had time to define who the characters were,” he said. “I’m still not quite sure who the characters are. And I’ve only recently started to realize is that, basically, it’s just me.”
He did not lose his ease or humor, but it was visible that these new thoughts wreaked havoc in his head as he was asked to articulate them.
“This makes me terrified almost talking about it because it’s causing me to realize how little I know my characters,” he said, laughing. “It was just a guy trying to write what I think girls think.”
He said his career has been with him since childhood.
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“I’ve been drawing comics since before I could write,” he said. “I would draw the comics and have my mom fill in the speech bubbles.”
McCranie invented his first characters when he was five or six, striving for the silliest thing his young mind could muster. Thus, Fat Hat and Doopie Head were born.
“Basically just a circle with a hat on was Mr. Fat Hat,” McCranie said. “And then a hot-dog-shaped guy was Mr. Doopie Head.”
A native of Los Alamos, McCranie graduated from UNM two years ago and has already had offers for books two and three in an ongoing series. Book two is finished in story and sketch, and looking through his pile of pre-inked pages, his art had improved drastically from the first graphic novel.
“I haven’t done anything since I graduated,” he said. “’Cause I graduated and then I sat in my room for about two years. That’s the way it feels, anyway.”
In the face of a daunting career path, McCranie said he hasn’t lost sight of his childhood dreams.
“I’ve had this dream of becoming a cartoonist since I was a little kid,” McCranie said. “And making comics that change the world sounds like something you’d think of in high school. But I do. I still want to do that.”
It’s not like he was ever not enthusiastic. But when asked about his post “Mal and Chad” goals and dreams for comics, there was something boiling and itching he wanted to say.
“I want to talk about Jesus!” he said, bursting. “I’m really excited about Jesus.”
McCranie’s passion for Jesus is the only thing that rivals his passion for the artistic medium.
“What amazes me about Jesus’ sacrifice,” he said, “is that it takes the issue of sin and human evilness off the table. And most people stay there. You know, ‘You are a sinner!’ You know, ‘Oh you’re evil!’”
McCranie said he wanted to express this without compromising what he believed.
“I think as far as Christian media goes, a mistake that they often make is — they either disguise what they believe as current pop culture and they’ll try to repackage it in those forms,” he said. “Or they just come out and be super blunt and both of them of don’t really hit the mark because they’re not honest.”
