Panopticist: Something Cool Comes From Cancer

March 14, 2006

Something Cool Comes From Cancer

Posted by Andrew Hearst

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My old pal Rob Harrell—whom I wrote about in this post and this post and this post—is scheduled to be featured in a CBS Evening News segment tomorrow or Thursday, and it’s not just because he’s talented.

Rob and I have been friends since we met in the sixth grade at Binford Middle School in Bloomington, Indiana, our hometown. Even in the sixth grade, he was a precocious illustrator and artist, and he went on to get two or three art degrees. These days he is, among other things, the creator, writer, and illustrator of Big Top, a daily comic strip from Universal Press Syndicate—the company that distributes Doonesbury, The Boondocks, and many other nationally prominent strips. Big Top appears in about 40 papers around the country, including the Boston Herald and the Detroit Free Press. In 2004, The Onion’s culture section had this to say about Big Top: “Rob Harrell possesses a classicist’s sense of comic timing … using panel space as well as any comics-page humorist since, yes, Berkeley Breathed.”

Rob moved with his wife, Amber, to Austin last year, after having lived in Indianapolis since college. A few months ago, he was experiencing constant headaches and some unusual pain behind his right eye, so he went with Amber to have some tests done. Eventually the doctors determined that he had a malignant tumor behind his right eye. Did I mention he’s only 37?

After speaking to a few different doctors who told them that radical surgery would be necessary, Rob and Amber found a highly recommended surgeon in, of all places, Bloomington. This doctor assured them that he could get rid of the cancer without extreme surgery. The doctor performed the procedure a few weeks ago, and it went great: The tumor is now gone, and Rob is recovering nicely. He has to go through a few months of radiation therapy, and he’ll have to be vigilant for the rest of his life, but right now it’s such a relief.

And now something really cool has come out of it all—hence the scheduled CBS Evening News segment. Rob prepared several weeks’ worth of extra strips before having the surgery, because he wasn’t sure how long he’d be out of commission. But his syndicate helped give him two more weeks to recover: They arranged for 15 UPS cartoonists to draw one Big Top strip each. The first batch of strips ran last week, and the rest of them are running this week and next. Among the guest cartoonists drawing Big Top—and this is awesome and hilarious—are Garfield creator Jim Davis (who is also a Hoosier) and Ziggy’s Tom Wilson Jr. Even Ruben Bolling, the creator of Tom the Dancing Bug, is having a go later this week. It’s really fun to see other cartoonists interpret Rob’s characters.

Here are a few of Rob’s own panels:

Here’s part of Jim Davis’s strip, which appeared yesterday:

And here’s part of the strip by Mike Baldwin, whose own strip is called Cornered:

You can access the rest of the strips through the main Big Top page. The guest strips are running Monday through Saturday from March 6 through March 23; reruns of Rob’s own strips are running on the Sundays. And the CBS Evening News segment about all this is scheduled to run tomorrow or Thursday. Check it out.

UPDATE, Tuesday, March 21: The segment was broadcast tonight. You can watch it here.

The first Big Top collection was published last year, and you can buy it here.