Cartoonist Has Generated Chuckles, Chortles, Guffaws, Giggles & Hoots for Nearly 42 Years
By Rodger Nichols
1 day in August 2008, a smiling, curly-haired gentleman visited the offices of The Dalles Chronicle and did what no one had done in decades—sold the daily paper a new cartoon.
Leigh Rubin wasn’t a newspaper syndicate salesperson or a friendly publisher making a suggestion. He was a cartoonist, and his single-panel cartoon, Rubes, was distributed to 400 outlets around the globe.
At that point, he had been a professional cartoonist for 24 years.
“I was always a doodler from the time I was 4 or 5,” Leigh says.
He remembers his father teaching him how to draw the character Goon from E.C. Segar’s “Popeye” comic strip.
Leigh was an advertising arts major in college and worked at his father’s print shop. But one day in 1978, he realized he could create greeting cards as funny as the ones he saw in shops. In 2 years, he had 64 designs and his own publishing company, Rubes Publications.
His next idea— cartoon characters based on musical notes—led to the self-published book “Notable Quotes.” Luck struck while he was promoting the book at a local bookstore.
“The entertainment editor of the Palmdale paper asked me to draw a cartoon for the daily paper,” Leigh says. “Nov. 1, it will be 42 years ago.”
Choosing a single-panel cartoon with no regular characters has advantages and disadvantages. Leigh starts every cartoon fresh from scratch, but he also has considerable artistic freedom. He has drawn not just people, but “talking” everything, from cows to clouds to bowling balls. His humor is laced with wordplay, puns, and clever twists on popular cartoon tropes.
Leigh often pokes fun at popular culture, recasting the Alien vs. Predator movie, for example, as featuring Warner Bros.’ Marvin the Martian vs. Wile E. Coyote. His work has been collected in more than 20 books, with such titles as “Twisted Pop Culture,” “Rubes’ Bible Cartoons,” and “The Big Book of Moo.”
The latter reflects his fondness for drawing cows.
“They’re the world’s funniest animal,” Leigh says. “They are big, easy to draw, and their black-and-white pattern looks really good on the comics pages.”
That bovine-drawing talent has led Leigh to market himself differently than other cartoonists. For years, he attended the World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wisconsin, where he entertained audiences with his cartoons and offered a behind-the-scenes view on the life and creative practices of a cartoonist.
Leigh was so impressed with a fundraising auction for veterinary students held at a similar visit to the National Dairy Herd Information Association that he collaborated with the group to issue “The Big Book of Moo” as a fundraiser for the same cause.
“The cause is near and dear to me,” he says. “My sister is a veterinarian.”
Leigh has the freedom to contribute in this way because he is signed to Creator’s Syndicate. Previously, cartoonists who signed with syndicated content distributors gave up the rights to the comics they created. Some of today’s comic strips have been around for nearly 100 years, continuing after their creators’ deaths and drawn by their third or 4th artist.
Creator’s Syndicate was founded in 1987 with the revolutionary idea that artists would own all the licensing rights to their work. That’s been important to Leigh, who has sold Rubes greeting cards, calendars, T-shirts, and other products.
He even provided the drawings for the animated title sequence of “Moola,” an independent movie directed by Donnie Most—known for his role as Ralph Malph on TV’s “Happy Days”—and starring William Mapother, Daniel Baldwin, Treat Williams, and Charlotte Ross.
Leigh has another unusual distinction. He is a cartoonist in residence at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, where he lectures on creativity, branding, and the business of cartooning. RIT Press published his latest book, “Think Like a Cartoonist,” in which he invited dozens of people to contribute short essays on a time when they used out-of-the-box thinking to solve a problem.
Though born in New York and raised in California, Leigh’s ties to the Columbia Gorge are strong. He and his wife, Teresa, were married in 1985 in an outdoor ceremony at Panorama Point in the Hood River Valley. They renewed their vows in 2021 in the same spot.
Another connection to the region is Leigh’s childhood friend Steve Ulrich, who settled in Odell. He was the best man at Leigh and Teresa’s wedding and their vow renewal. The strength of the men’s lifelong friendship was demonstrated in November 2022 when Steve, a receiving foreman at Duckwall Fruit in Hood River, had congestive heart failure and needed a new heart.
Luckily, a donor heart became available in early December. But to have transplant surgery, Steve needed a volunteer caretaker for 3 months of his recovery.
Leigh lives on the central California coast, but he came to Oregon to stand by his friend for his long recovery. While Steve was hospitalized at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center for 2 months, Leigh charmed the staff by posting cartoons commenting humorously about hospital life. After Steve left the hospital, Leigh handled the laundry, did the cooking, and wheeled Steve to his medical appointments.
The story was written about in the Columbia Gorge News and The Oregonian. In the latter, columnist Steve Duin said Leigh explained his devotion by quoting from the movie “Stand By Me,” which ends with the comment, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12.”
Leigh’s next project focuses on entrepreneurship and inspiring people to take control of their future, something he is passionate about.