An Interview with Irv Oslin, Founder & Editor of HOOT
It began in casual chitchat at a comic show some years ago when we first began our own humble newspaper.
Me: “Would you like to check out a copy of the Columbus Scribbler? Central Ohio’s only free comic newspaper!”
Wise Passerby: “Oh! Cool! Like HOOT!”
Me: “Hoot?”
For years, a strata of locals that still hold fond memories for this mysterious out-of-print periodical would bring HOOT up in conversation. It wasn’t until earlier this year that in talking with none other than Gib Bickel of the Laughing Ogre, that the investigation commenced. Finally, I got a lead on someone who knows all about HOOT, the top guy himself, Irv Oslin.
Irv has been a writer for 24 years. Before retiring, he was a journalist covering criminal justice for the Ashland Times-Gazette. He continues to freelance articles for the Times-Gazette and its sister paper, the Loudonville Times-Shopper. Besides that, he was also the Publisher, Editor, Ad Salesman, and Copy Boy of HOOT, Columbus’ Humor Newspaper. The alt rag was chock full of comic strips from the likes of Ted Rall, Jules Feiffer, Bill Griffith, and Lynda Barry as well as art and articles from locals. Irv kept HOOT a fixture in the freebie newspaper racks of Columbus, churning out over 150 issues from 1986 through 1994.
JACK WALLACE: Give me an idea of the timeline for HOOT.
IRV OLSEN: It started in ‘86, I think. I started putting it together. It was bi-weekly. I was active with it until the early 90’s. The Alternative Paper picked up my writing. I was doing more and more of that and was really enjoying that more than putting out this humor tabloid, which was a lot of work. There was a circulation of about 20,000. Later, the count went back down to 15,000 when prices rose.
JW: I can’t believe you were doing 20,000. That’s an incredible amount of work.
IO: I was doing most of it myself. My wife at the time helped out. I had a couple of delivery people and a stable of artists that I didn’t pay a whole lot. They still razz me about that. It was a low budget operation. It actually made money after a few years. Lost money for a year, then broke even. After a while it started covering the costs of a computer and started making some money despite me being a terrible businessman.
JW: Congratulations. That’s a hard thing to do.
IO: It was a lot of fun. We did a lot of original covers, local humor, we tried to get at least one mock ad in each issue.
JW: Yeah, original covers?
IO: Yeah. There were a bunch of very talented artists that were working on it including Dan Collins. He was a top notch artist. Gahan Wilson (noted cartoonist whose work has appeared in Playboy, National Lampoon, and The New Yorker among others) did a cover for us once. I was totally shocked. Then I tapped the CCAD artists. Some of them just came up and asked if they could do something. Some of them ended up being pretty talented.
JW: How did you end up starting HOOT in the first place?
IO: I lived in Cleveland and there was a paper called Funny Times which was basically the same formula. They had gotten it from a couple out in California. So I paid them a certain amount of money to teach me the ropes because I was moving to Columbus anyway to get married. In Columbus, I started going door to door selling ads, getting distribution spots, and buying racks. This was all before computer layouts, so there was a lot of wax and exacto knives. I also made a light table myself, two feet by six feet.
IO: The original was Santa Cruz Comic Newz. Their niche was liberal politics. I’m fairly liberal, but more middle of the road on other things, like everybody really. So I just geared mine more to Columbus. It was very well received because it didn’t take too hard of a left slant. That played very well in Columbus. It was hard to find a distribution center as it’s scattered all over, you know. You’ve got Grant, Grandview, Campus, Westerville. Really had to work hard to get it out to all the spots. Put a lot of miles on my station wagon.
JW: What made you want to start it?
IO: I’d been involved with humor before that. I did some work for the Plain Dealer. I loved humor and just figured it was the way to go. In addition to publishing established syndicated strips, I could write my own stuff. Get a team of people together who didn’t mind working for next to nothing and do some funny stuff. Make people laugh. Make people think. You know we got a lot of wild ideas. We just rolled with it.
JW: What kind of standards did you place on your submissions?
IO: I just tried to make sure it was stuff our advertisers wouldn’t drop us for. I tried to grow advertisers, but of course, you aren’t going to appeal to everybody. One of my weaknesses was I couldn’t get the big corporate advertisers and get more solid support. I just nickel and dimed it. I went to all the ma and pa shops. They kind of became a downfall as an advertiser because you’d stop there to chat for an hour and then you’d go somewhere else and do the same thing. Then my rounds would inevitably end at the winemaker’s shop where I would proceed to go down to the basement and get hammered with those guys.
IO: Distribution was great, though. I had subscribers in 45 states. They would just cover the postage and I’d cram it into an envelope and send it. At one point, it ended up going to a dozen foreign countries.
JW: How were you able to build all of this up? You were doing it bi-weekly, which helped.
IO: Bi-weekly and by myself, ha, ha! A lot more ambitious than I am now. It was a tremendous amount of work.
JW: Were people submitting whatever they wanted to?
IO: No. Sometimes I would get random submissions, but most of the time I knew what I wanted. Like I used to work with some of the artists. They would pitch ideas and I had friends and family that would pitch ideas too. Some of them were pretty good, too. Like the last temptation of Gandhi where he’s holding a cheeseburger and sweat is pouring off of him. I think I made a t-shirt of that one.
IO: One of my friends, Bill Breitbart, had an idea. Big Bear (a local grocery chain some years ago) had an ad campaign, “Give them a Big Bear hug.” Well, we came up with “Give them a big dead slug.” It had a big dead slug coming out of a Big Bear shopping bag. Those folks were pretty mortified, but everybody else found it pretty amusing.
IO: It was doing stuff like that, that we were really capturing people’s imagination. Sometimes I pushed the envelope too far and lost advertisers or subscribers.
JW: That’s bound to happen.
IO: Well sure. I wanted it to have some edge to it. I didn’t want it to be too tame.
JW: So you were running it from ‘86 to when?
IO: I was into it through the early 90’s. I think about ‘94. I was into it for about 7 to 8 years fully, and then after I was doing freelance writing, it was more of a hands off approach and I had other people try to sell it to two guys in German Village. They were supposed to buy it from me. They never sent me money, but they did keep it running which was okay.
IO: They were supposed to send me $50 a week for my column and that’s what kind of springboarded me to the Guardian, then I got a column for the statehouse at an alternative paper. I just got into journalism a bit when the Guardian folded up. I used to come up here to the Mohican area in 1980 to canoe and fell in love with the area. It got to the point where I was driving up here every other weekend anyways so, when I needed a job again, I applied to a small town conservative newspaper up here. Low and behold they hired me. Got up here, got divorced and have been up here since ‘97 or ‘98.
JW: Was HOOT just comics and how many pages did you have?
IO: It ran 16 to 20 pages. Sometimes we did concept issues which made my ex-wife cringe because she knew I wasn’t going to make any money on those. Generally, it involves fancy footwork you know as far as covers. On one of them, we had a split personality issue where we had four different artists draw covers and split the press run into four. So we had 5,000 each with different covers.
JW: Wow! That is unreal!
IO: We had a dyslexia issue which ran from back to front. We would occasionally plug things like the Drexel shows. Or the sci-fi marathon. Did a couple photographic covers. I think the most ambitious thing we did was, is “The Other Paper” still out?
JW: It was. I don’t think it is anymore. (The Other Paper stopped publishing in 2013)
IO: That was Max Brown’s baby. We did a parody of that called “An Other Paper.” They had news stories and stuff. At the time, there was someone going around to toy stores and slashing the crotches of Barbie dolls. At the same time, there was a product called the Gay Bob doll. So we went up to Sandusky and we staged this whole thing with Gay Bob repelling down this rope with a knife in his hands, peeling off in a Barbie car with his legs splayed out. We went to the nth degree to make it look like the Other Paper. We did not have the typeface, though. I tweaked in one dimension type to get as close as we could. If you put it in the stand one way, it was “An Other Paper”. If you put it in the other, it was a legitimate issue of “HOOT” with a cover by John Bailey.
IO: Max Brown dashes me off a letter that says “If you ever make a dime, I’m gonna sue the pants off of you.” “No danger of that, Max.” He got a kick out of it too. That was the sort of thing we’d do.
IO: We had Mayor Rinehart at the time. He had allegedly molested the babysitter he’d hired to watch his kids. He was later arrested for driving drunk and his excuse to the cops was that he was “inspecting the city.” So we had a cartoon that said “I’m inspecting the sitter.” His family didn’t appreciate that.
JW: You were doing all of this on a light board that you made?
IO: Oh yeah. It was grueling. A lot of tape. You had to do it by hand. Technology was pretty ancient too. Very primitive, but it worked. We never laid out anything by computer. When I started we didn’t even have block type. We actually had to have the type set for us by a commercial printer, which was incredibly expensive. Once we got it to where I could print that myself and strip it in, it saved a lot of money. It was a lot of work, selling ads, and billing, and people wouldn’t pay. I sucked as a businessman. I’d get out there and play and talk with people, but it was such a good idea. Can’t miss even for a guy like me that doesn’t know the first thing about business.
IO: I had a fortune teller try to stiff me once. She lived way out on the east side. I drove out there. She says “Oh, I wasn’t expecting you” and I said “Oh, some fortune teller you are.” Out comes a hairy ape of a guy and I thought I was going to get killed. She paid up.
JW: Obviously, you were able to make it for 8 years, that’s a long time.
IO: Yeah, 8 years on my watch and I think they kept it alive for a while after that. I don’t know what happened to the equipment or anything.
JW: Were you a writer and an artist, or just a writer?
IO: No, never an artist. But I did work as a photographer. At the newspaper, a photographer got laid off and they never replaced him. I started shooting some of my own stuff and started enjoying it. Now, I’ve got stuff in galleries and I just shoot stuff with my cell phone.
JW: Are you still working on personal projects?
IO: Not comics. I do some photography and I started editing video. I thought about making a Best of HOOT, but I’m close to 70 and don’t have time to do anything.
JW: Do you have boxes of old HOOTs in your basement now?
IO: I’ve got some there. There are some at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library. They should have some. I’d like to donate the rest of it too, if I could.
JW: None of it made it to the digital age?
IO: No. It could be and should be. We have a Facebook page, but it’s been a while since it’s been updated.
JW: What kind of syndicated work were you running?
IO: Let’s see. We used to have Zippy the Pinhead, Bizarro, In the Bleachers, Joe Bob Briggs Movie Reviews, Russell’s Political Humor. Those were editorial cartoons. Eighty percent of it was syndicated comic strips. I got into it with the Dispatch, once. They thought I was competition for their advertisers, but I had locked in enough artists that they couldn’t really hurt me. They once bought the rights to some work from Berkeley Breathed (creator of Bloom County) and sat on it, just to mess with me. Little rivalries like that.
IO: Life in Hell was another good one. I wanted to get that. Matt Groening called me in the middle of the night after I’d included it in the layout and said “Oh, I’m already committed to the Columbus Alive.” We ended up doing a parody of it.
IO: The Charles Schulz Association threatened to sue me because we neutered Snoopy. Under fair use, we were really allowed to do it anyway. So we did a cartoon called Nutz about a kid whose mouth was a butt.
JW: I can’t believe it was all on you.
IO: A lot of it was. We had a couple delivery people who came and went. Some of ‘em stuck around for a couple years. I did most of the layout myself.
JW: Where were you getting printed?
IO: The Athens Messenger. Madison Press was one I worked with as well.
JW: You would take the handmade layout to the location?
IO: There were a couple ways, but yeah. There were times where the paper would have a truck coming through on a day. My two car garage became a distribution warehouse. That’s where we had a skid loader. A big semi would back up on Indianola. The neighbors loved me.
IO: One of the delivery drivers was a deadhead. Every time there was a Grateful Dead concert he’d just leave across the country. I’d have distribution spots that would call me and say “We didn’t get our HOOT.” I’d call him and his roommate would say he’d left for a Grateful Dead Concert. I’d have to drive over and deliver them myself. I told the guy, just let me know next time.
JW: Who was your target market?
IO: Campus, Grandview, Bexley, That was the hard part. Columbus is just really spread out.
JW: Was this your full time job?
IO: Yeah. My daughter was born in ‘89. I was a stay at home father. Hard to take her on an ad route. You could milk her for the cute angle until she fills her diaper on somebody’s counter.
JW: Probably more than full time.
IO: Oh yeah, 60 to 70 hours a week.
JW: What advice would you offer to someone who was trying to do a HOOT-like thing? Would you tell them not to do it?
IO: No, I would just tell them to be aware and be willing to put your whole life into it. Not to have a life of your own. I still have nightmares, you know. “I’ll never be able to sell these ads.”
Special thanks goes to Gib Bickel of the Laughing Ogre for connecting us for this interview.