Kansas City News Blog

​Picture the young artist, dreaming of becoming an editorial cartoonist. He's working hard: drawing for a weekly newspaper in the Omaha suburb of Bellevue, placing his pieces in a few small-town papers around Nebraska, constantly submitting his work to the Omaha World-Herald, only to be rejected. With encouragement from Kansas City Star cartoonist Lee Judge, at the time practically just a kid himself, our artist has started doing an occasional sports cartoon for the Star.

Until now he's had a weird life. His loose-hinged father is, among other disturbing things, beset by nervous tics that our cartoonist has inherited. As a child, our man had a tendency to poke his pinky into gooey cracks in the floor or lick window glass on the bus. He still must exert heroic effort to keep from sticking out his tongue at inappropriate times.

A Kansas City Royal comes to his psychological rescue.

The cartoonist is in the darkroom at his little newspaper, studying the Royals' roster, when he comes across the story of outfielder Jim Eisenreich.

After he was released by the Minnesota Twins, his contract was picked up by the Royals for one dollar. A bargain, as my father might say. What gives me pause is the mention of his tics. Although Eisenreich was a talented player, his symptoms were so bad that in Minnesota he was often booed off the field. As I read about his vocal tics and strange head and arm movements, I marvel at our similarities.

After Eisenreich's arrival in Kansas City, the story goes on to explain, a doctor diagnosed him with Tourette's syndrome.

Over the next few days in his darkroom, the cartoonist -- Jeffrey Koterba, now full time at the World-Herald and author of the gorgeous new memoir Inklings (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 288 pages, $25), can't stop thinking about Eisenreich.

I imagine him living in a modern, sprawling house, tootling around Kansas City's boulevards, dining in fancy restaurants, managing his syndrome as best he can. And like Kansas City, this syndrome that plagues him seems remote. My cartoons, my signature, "Koterba," may appear in print in Kansas City, but I exist in Omaha, struggling in my new marriage, taking care of a sick baby, paying hospital bills, making ends meet. Yet on deadline nights, when I climb into bed next to Joni with my smudged fingers, only to wake three hours later, I remind myself there was a time when I believed no woman would ever love me. To have this, at least, is nothing short of a miracle.

There are other miracles, too.

Jeffrey Koterba

​Like the time Koterba is struck by lightning and lives to tell the rest of us what it feels like (even though his father believes the best response is not to take his son to the emergency room but to pour Jack Daniel's down his throat).

Or the time Koterba, 18 years old and taking medication for a supposedly jaundiced liver, discovers that his parents covertly asked his doctor to prescribe Diazepam to treat his "anxiety." The doped-up Koterba flushes the pills, "watching them spiral away like a school of tiny fish."

The biggest miracle might be that Koterba survives this childhood so intact. Certainly drawing is his escape, metaphorically in the early years and literally in adulthood. Music provides a way out, too, when he becomes the leader of a blues and swing band called the Prairie Cats. And now, Inklings makes an accidental argument that he might even write better than he draws.

For example, his description of a backyard scene in which his father, testing a new invention, warns his kids to be still, contains this frozen moment: "We don't move. I allow a mosquito to needle the skin of my neck." 

Another example: the classically Midwestern storm that gathers on the day he gets hit by lightning. First, "It's early evening and my bedroom is sticky with late-summer mugginess.... From my window, I can see the sky is chopped in two. The eastern half is blue and endless, the western half a ceiling the color of pencil lead." The weathermen issue a warning. Koterba goes outside. 

The sidewalk is warm against my bare feet, and the weedy lawn is cool and comforting. I crane my neck, circle around as water drips from my hair. Our maple trees. The neighbor's trees. The roof, the apex of our house. The sky is completely painted over in a spectrum of gray hues.

Koberta observes history as keenly as he watches the weather -- cartoonists are serious journalists, after all. And because television plays an inordinate role in the family's life, we get to experience the moon landing in what feels like real time (complete with a Chef Boyardee pizza afterward). Other pop-cultural moments pass through these pages like the drawings on Koterba's Etch A Sketch.

So Inklings ends up being about more than a kid's dream coming true. It's also about channeling obsessions into productivity. Certainly Koterba's ex-wife might have a different view of those obsessions, but it's easy enough to forgive Koterba for not delving too deeply into the end of his marriage. And for going perhaps a little too easy on his father at the end. Because ultimately this book is also about love and forgiveness. But the dream-coming-true part, that's more than enough.