As a successful animator for 35 years on feature films such as The Road to El Dorado, The Prince of Egypt, and more recently as a storyboard artist on Ralph Breaks the Internet, Scott enjoys the collaborative aspect of his job. But a craving for artistic freedom moved him to pursue a second lifelong passion a decade ago.
“I fell in love with animation as soon as I could be propped up in front of the TV,” he explains, “and comic strips hooked me once I learned to read.”
Originally titled Molly and the Bear, Bear with Me is about 800-pound Bear who flees the woods for the suburbs. There, he meets tween Molly, and she takes him home. Naturally, having a bear for a pet causes complications, and it doesn’t help that Bear is the Felix Unger of wildlife—he’s even allergic to his own fur.
“He doesn’t mean to be frustrating,” Scott says. “It’s just that he misunderstands almost everything … and he’s a scaredy bear on top of that. As a kid I was worried and afraid of a lot. It’s easy for me to tap into those fears and exaggerate them with Bear. People can relate to fear. We all have it.”
Scott began his education in the world of comic strips upon graduation from the California Institute of the Arts. Back in the 1980s, he and his friend Brett Koth, creator of Diamond Lil, were hired to pencil the U.S. Acres comic strip by Jim Davis of Garfield fame.
“I learned an amazing amount from both of them,” Scott says. “I had been submitting strips to syndicates pretty regularly, but working for Jim on a strip that had real deadlines was eye-opening. Intellectually I had known that 365 strips needed to be drawn a year, but when handed that responsibility—Wow! It gets real very quickly.”
Scott found his groove at Davis’s studio. He also learned that he’s devoted to the traditional structure. “I find a lot of freedom creatively when the limitations are so defined. For example, trying to simplify a joke into three or four panels is always a fun exercise for me. It’s like a puzzle.” He’s also a fan of classic methods. “I draw Bear with Me the old-fashioned way, penciled on Bristol board and inked with a Winsor & Newton brush. Over the years my day job has become more and more computer-based, so I really love putting pencil to paper for my strip.”
While Scott derives different satisfactions from each of his careers, they aren’t completely separate for him. “I would say my comic strip art and animation career have overlapped whenever I work in story. Both require writing, staging, and clarity to tell a joke.”
As for the jokes, they are at the heart of keeping Bear with Me fresh, and he’s always on the lookout for new material. “When something strikes me as funny, or I draw a funny sketch or I hear a funny story, I write all that down. That is a good habit to get into.” But keeping things fresh also requires another tactic: growing with his characters. “Over the years … as I know them better, I know how they will react to situations. Put Molly and Bear in a kitchen with a bag of flour, and the strip writes itself because the characters are so real to me. They don’t get stale; they expand.”
He adds that creating the strip is something he needs to do. “An itch that needs to be scratched. It’s also like spending time with old friends, so there is a pleasant quality to it. Plus, I have the constant challenge to improve, to get better, to make the perfect strip.”
A curated collection of Scott’s comic strips, Bear with Me (It’s Been a Rough Day), will be published by Hermes Press and feature an introduction by Jim Davis. It is available at here.
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