Meet Jenny Campbell | Cartoonist/Writer/Animal Advocate

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jenny Campbell and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jenny, what makes you happy? Why?

As a professional cartoonist for the past 35 years, happiness has been an essential part of my work and my life, both. I’m a very happy person, and I think that’s been key to making a success of my career. My favorite thing in the world is making people laugh and making people happy and cultivating a personal and professional reputation as a really fun and compassionate person and artist. The “why” of what makes me happy is very simple. Not only is there a lot of happiness missing in the world as a whole these days, but personally too. Our lives can get so bogged down and so busy, that it’s easy to fall into a routine of just getting through the day. Being an adult isn’t easy: jobs, finances, kids, aging parents, illness… we all struggle with those things. And sometimes the crucial element that falls by the wayside is a sense of happiness. I hate to sound like Pollyanna, but happiness and laughter and fleeting moments of pure joy, in my opinion, are the greatest and most imperative balms for what ail us. To send some ridiculous artwork out into the world that gives people even a momentary laugh or a genuine smile, feels like the greatest calling. And to hear back from those people — the calls, the emails, the text messages, the fan mail, the missives from total strangers — is the reason I do what I do. And it IS the thing that makes me happiest.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I suppose what sets my artwork apart from most others is that my artwork and my characters really do seem to come to life on the page. That sounds like a cliche, but I hear it all the time. I’m very particular about making my characters move the way people and creatures really move, in spite of the fact that they’re cartoon characters. I love watching dogs and cats (and pigs and goats and hamsters and all other creatures) move, and run and sit and behave. And I’m enchanted by giving animals human expressions, thoughts and mannerisms, while still keeping them canine or feline. I think I have a knack for drawing animals that really resonates with people. When I create drawings for animal welfare groups, the comments I get the most are, “Oh my gosh, this is SO my dog!” or “This is exactly what my cat does!” So I think people find my drawings charming and hilarious because they’re silly, they’re fun, they’re ridiculous and they’re also completely true to life.

And no, getting here wasn’t easy. I’ve been a freelance cartoonist for 35 years, but along the way, I’ve worked for $5 an hour under the table at a video store; I’ve run the Xerox machines at a college; I’ve had to supplement my income in a lot of different ways, because it wasn’t easy. Even after I began making a modest living at cartooning, I still wasn’t always doing the type of artwork I wanted to be doing. It took a long time to find my niche. I spent years doing B&W textbook art for K-5 publishers, until I’d drawn so many sets of nickels, dimes and quarters, and so many caricatures of Martin Luther King that I could do it in my sleep. But it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. Eventually, I started doing children’s books, and was getting closer to what I loved.

Then in 2001, I got a syndicated cartoon strip, but I’d started that with someone else and in the beginning, it was his vision, not mind. When he passed away suddenly, I inherited the strip and also began writing it. And only then it did it start to feel like mine. Today, my cartoon strip, “Flo & Friends” is near and dear to me, and I love doing it… because it’s my voice, and my humor and the characters feel like they’re all mine now. Charles Schulz’ widow once told me, “Sparky never bought a gag…” She told me he was fiercely proud of the fact that Peanuts was a direct reflection of him, and whether it succeeded or failed, it was authentically his. Those were great words for a new syndicated cartoonist to hear, and I took it to heart.

It wasn’t until I started drawing cartoons pro bono for Rescue Village that my career felt really fulfilling. Between the children’s books I was still illustrating; the cartoon strip which I’d come to love; this new opportunity to draw for animal groups all over the country; and the ridiculous animal art I started posting online and selling at art shows, I was truly having fun. Let’s face it, I went into the arts, and as an artist, I am NOT a savvy business person or a keen self-promoter, so my career has never made me a wealthy person. Most of the time, I still struggle to get my monthly bills paid. But I love what I do, and I’ve made a real name for myself, and at 68, I can finally say I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
When I moved to the Cleveland area, after growing up mostly in Arizona and then Los Angeles, post-college; most of my family and friends thought I was crazy. Cleveland? Really? The mistake on the lake? But I’ve now lived in an awesome little artsy suburb of Cleveland, Chagrin Falls, longer than I’ve lived anywhere. And my family and friends LOVE to come here to visit.

On my itinerary, the little town of Chagrin Falls is the first stop, with the Chagrin River and its falls flowing right under Main Street in the middle of town. We have a 100-year-old hardware store run by the same family who’s always owned it; with wood-plank floors and a million little drawers filled with everything from obscure washers and screws to BBs. We’ve also got a WONDERFUL independent bookstore that’s a mainstay of the community. And a whole slew of great restaurants has made our little burg a popular destination for Cleveland-area diners.

Heading into Cleveland itself, there’s no better event than taking in a play at one of the several theaters that make up Playhouse Square. The refurbished Art Deco theaters are gorgeous, and they’ve made Cleveland the hottest first-stop for Broadway shows outside of New York City. While downtown, I’d definitely have to take our visitor to have a photo taken at one of the iconic “Cleveland” script signs, with a backdrop of the lake and the city behind them. And if the weather is accommodating, a must-see is also The Flats — a refurbished former warehouse district along the Cuyahoga River near where it meets Lake Erie, which is now a Mecca of fabulous restaurants, a music pavilion, rowing clubs and walking paths. And, a couple of times a day, you can enjoy watching the kayakers and pleasure boats hug the sides of the river so a trawler the size of a small mall can navigate its way south to the steel mills further down the river.

There is so MUCH to do in Cleveland, it’s hard to just pick out a few things: summer concerts in the pavilion on the beach at Edgewater Park; visiting the original “Christmas Story” house; checking out the world-famous “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame” on the lake next door to the Great Lakes Science Center (also worth a visit); grab lunch from a vendor or shop for everything from tapioca to ribs at the West Side Market; enjoy an authentic Italian meal in Little Italy; or take a drive through gorgeous Lakeview Cemetery, where you’ll find not only the James Garfield Memorial, but the headstones of Elliot Ness, DJ Alan Freed and Ray Chapman, the only Major League Baseball player ever killed during a game (hit by a pitch)!

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I call my business Campbell & Co. because I feel like I’d be nothing without the “& Company”: those are my friends, my family, my dogs, my cats… everyone who’s had my back for these past 35 years while I’ve struggled to make this love of cartooning a full-time career.

But I do need to make a special dedication here, to an organization without which my life might have been very different. I got acquainted with a local woman, Timy Sullivan, about 25 years ago who had been tasked with raising the money to build a brand new state-of-the-art animal shelter for the current 800-square-foot hovel of a humane society here in our community. My partner and I met her and offered our services in any way we could help: me as a cartoonist and my partner as a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer. She took us up on it, and along with a really talented designer, we became the creative team for the new shelter, which was dubbed “Rescue Village” (still officially the Geauga County Humane Society in NE Ohio). We created all the artwork and photos for the shelter’s fund-raising appeals, newsletters, invitations, posters, promotional pieces and annual reports. In addition, I designed the new shelter’s logo, and painted murals on some of the walls. And I still draw for them today.

In 2021, a new executive director came in to Rescue Village, Kenneth Clarke. Ken was poking around in the storeroom one day and came across some binders stuffed full of 24 years’ worth of original cartoons, and he said, “What is THIS???” We met, he was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of art I’d created since before the shelter was even built back in 2001 and he declared that it all needed to become a book. So he went to work looking for donors and found an older couple, Karen and Richard Spector, who were excited about funding a cartoon book for the shelter. Shortly after starting work on it, Ken handed me a stack of more than 250 Xeroxed cartoons and said, “Here! These need captions!” So I wrote funny captions for all 250 cartoons, many that I didn’t even remember drawing! We worked for a couple of years pulling it all together, and in the spring of 2023, Rescue Village published “The Cartoons of Rescue Village, 20 Years of Love and Lifesaving Through the Eyes of Cartoonist Jenny Campbell”. It’s a gorgeous 200-page coffee table book of my cartoons, and it has gotten glowing reviews from NPR, all of Cleveland’s local news outlets and Publishers Weekly.

It’s the most beautiful thing that’s ever had my name on it, and I’ve been reveling in the attention it’s been getting nationwide. But the thing I love most about the book is that my artwork is donated; all costs to design and publish the book were donated; so all of the $25-per-book price tag goes directly back to Rescue Village. I’m not taking a dime, which means that it’s allowing this often-barely-scraping-by cartoonist to give a huge monetary donation to her favorite charity that she would NEVER have been able to make on her own. And THAT makes me very happy.

Website: www.campbellcartooning.com

Instagram: instagram.com/campbellcartooning

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/jenny-campbell-390aa8b

Facebook: Facebook.com/CampbellCartooning1

Other: creators.com/read/flo-and-friends

Image Credits
mugshot photo by Amy Sancetta