Mr. Boffo Speaks Out

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Courtesy of Mr. Boffo Archives at MrBoffo.com

Want to be at least a bit astounded at one man's productivity? Take in what one-time Lake Geneva resident Joe Martin says about his career as a cartoonist. 

“My 50,000 comics would be at least 50 novels and 60 TV episodes worth of dialogue,” declares the syndicated illustrator whose Mr. Boffo and Willy 'n Ethel appear in newspapers throughout the U.S.

Martin was already declared the most prolific published cartoonist ever in 2001 by the publishers of The Guinness Book of World Records, so he has more than doubled his output between his debut with Tucker, a strip about a man running an employment agency, as Martin did at the time, and the turn of the century. But even with the single-to-two panel nature of Martin’s current two features in their Monday through Saturday iterations, how does one mind remain so fertile with verbal gags for consumption on the funnies pages? 

“It just seems to work on instinct,” Martin observes of his creativity. “We rarely duplicate a joke, and when it happens, it’s a clerical error of a recent joke that I didn’t check off.” And though the culmination of all those jokes would make for fine TV sitcom fodder, that’s one way he has yet to exploit the humor of Boffo and Willy. “I wish I was more active in the early days with licensing to TV,” recalls Martin. "If you look at Willy 'n Ethel, it’s a lot like “The Simpsons” only much earlier,” he says, adding that “Universal Pictures optioned Boffo.” 

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Courtesy of MrBoffo.com

Joe Martin

Getting Lucky

That’s a long way from Martin's schoolboy beginnings discovering his facility for caricature. He says of his first steps toward those 50,000+ published cartoons. “As a kid, I had a knack of drawing funny pictures of the other kids and, especially ,the teachers. I would draw the principal’s picture—with fangs—when she would pass out the report cards. Everbodyy laughed, it was fun.” That fun combined with good fortune when he submitted Tucker to the first newspaper to publish one of his features. “Years later a friend told me that his uncle was the editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. My friend’s uncle turned out to be a dispatcher, but I submitted to the Sun-Times anyway. And I got lucky!”

That favor has extended other ventures outside cartooning to which Martin has set his hand. For instance, he knows of the TV and movie writing of which he speaks from firsthand experience, having dipped into television screenwriting for the ‘90s-‘00s hospital dramedy “E/R.” Of that opportunity he explains, “My editor, Sherwood Kiraly, and I wrote the ‘E/R’ episode, George Clooney’s first TV performance.” Martin has since indulged narrative more verbose than comics with his comedic 2020 science fiction novel series, The Young Sue Chronicles. A couple years earlier, he published a cartoon book featuring Mr. and Mrs. Boffo’s children, Felix and Siena, but one of Martin’s first books lands further afield from his cartooning, though abetting results as amusing as his 'toons. 

Of 1985’s How to Hang a Spoon, Martin offers, “My brother-in-law, Dr. Mac Terzich, was the world champion spoon hanger. He hung over 25 on live television on one of the biggest shows in Japan.” Martin presumably keeps his face free from hanging eating utensils at his current residence on the Outer Banks of North Carolina (“where I can walk 20 miles of beaches,” he notes) as he works on his latest project incorporating Willy, Ethel and the Boffos. 

“I will be doing a podcast soon, combining Boffo and Willy ‘n Ethel as neighbors. Maybe a ‘pod-com’ if there is such a thing. Remember Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice?” He would also still like to bring his characters to the small screen. “The future, I think, is adapting my work to television where spin-offs are big.” 

Most everything related to Martin, including a sampling of the many songs he has written, may be found at www.MrBoffo.com.