Funny And Familiar New Comic ‘Tommy’ Pays Homage To ‘Calvin’ And ‘Little Nemo’

We start with a towheaded boy, 5 to 8 years old.

He is the only child of a typical, middle-class couple. He often interacts with an independent girl his own age, a girl who seems to have a much better grasp on reality than he does. He has a best friend who, though imaginary, seems as real as anyone the boy comes in contact with.

At times, he and his imaginary friend take on the guise of private detectives, and they speak in Raymond Chandler street slang.

“This dame walked in,” the boy says, “and I almost forgot about the pile of unpaid bills, parking tickets and popsicle sticks on my desk.”

He’s fond of sliding down snowy slopes, dashing between giant trees and, accompanied by his imaginary friend, shooting off great gaping chasms.

And most every night, he faces a lineup of anxiety-filled nightmares that would send Jung screaming for Sominex.

Quick, now, what comic strip are we talking about here?

Bill Watterson’s “Calvin & Hobbes,” right?

Could be. It does sound familiar.

But if that’s your best guess, then you need to check your cartoon thesaurus. Watterson quit his strip last December, and since it’s pretty clear that hell hasn’t frozen over, he hasn’t yet issued any statements about bringing “Calvin” back.

No, the above situations belong to a whole new comic strip, one that begins its run Monday in The Spokesman-Review and some 60 other newspapers across the nation. It’s called “Tommy,” and its author is a 22-year-old Chicago-based artist named Jay Martin.

And while Martin is willing to acknowledge a debt to Watterson, he insists that his influences extend much further back than just the late 1980s.

Ever hear of Winsor McCay?

Ever hear of “Little Nemo in Slumberland”?

Between 1905 and 1927, McCay drew his strip about the adventures of a boy, Little Nemo, who each night enters Slumberland, meets a gaggle of characters and enjoys one dream-world adventure after another, each of which ends when Little Nemo awakens.

“When I started thinking up the strip,” Martin said recently during a phone interview, “I thought a good combination would be, like, a monster and a kid. I wanted to do a strip that was very intense artwork, and I really liked ‘Little Nemo in Slumberland.”’

As in “Little Nemo,” dreams are the essential basis of “Tommy.” Each night the boy goes to sleep, and each night he is met by a scary-looking, overly muscular creature in black who is his dream guide or, if your prefer, “nightmare personality.”

But when it comes to this guide, appearance is the epitome of deceit. His name is Gus, and he is as much a puppy as Calvin’s Hobbes, under his toothy smile, is a kitten.

For a denizen of the dark, Gus boasts the soul of a slacker.

“You know what would make me a better nightmare creature?” Gus asks Tommy. “Yes!” the boys replies. “Discipline, focus, a sense of responsibility, pride in your work. … Some degree of creative drive!”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a tip jar,” Gus says.

The idea of matching childish innocence with monsterish presence is, of course, an old idea.

As Martin said, “I think it’s a good combination to have a kid and some kind of funky creature as a companion. It’s an old thing. I don’t think it began with ‘Calvin and Hobbes.”’

Another cartoonist of the late 1980s, Pulitzer Prize-winner Berkeley Brethed, mixed animals and humans, the innocent and the boorish, and even had a child character, Michael Binkley, who was tormented by his closet of anxieties.

The twist that Martin provides involves making the child more motivated than his guide. Tommy is thrilled at the idea of exploring his subconscious, but Gus would rather play foosball.

“He’s just a nice, typical, goofy guy,” Martin said of Gus. “You’ve got the reverse kind of role where the kid is the one trying to get the monster going. And I think that’s got a lot of possibilities.”

If all this sounds a bit sophisticated, well, it is. There is room on the comics pages for more than “Peanuts” and “Garfield.”

And if Martin sounds as if he knows his business, it should come as no surprise. His father, Joe Martin, is the author of two contemporary strips, “Willie ‘n Ethel” and “Mr. Boffo.” But it was on the elder Martin’s original strip, “Porterfield,” that then-10-year-old Jay got his start as an inker.

“All through college, when I came home for the summer, I always did the work - the inking, coloring and stuff for my dad’s strip,” he said. “I knew what I was getting into.”

Yet when he graduated from Lake Forest (Ill.) College, Martin didn’t initially intend to do a strip. For one thing, coming up with a saleable idea is no easy feat.

For another, he had other plans.

“I wanted to go to grad school and become, like, a fine artist and move to New York,” Martin said. But when he had sent out his graduate-school applications, he decided to follow his father’s suggestion about staying busy.

“So I did six weeks of ‘Tommy’ and sent it out to a couple of syndicates,” he said. “It got a really good reception (with the second syndicate, United Media), and they were ready to go with it. So I bagged grad school.”

Besides gaining the technical expertise, Martin learned something else from his father. It, he says, is the key to cartooning: how to write effective jokes.

“Basically, the trick is to leave your house and go to a coffee shop so you don’t fall asleep,” Martin said. “Then you just watch the people around you.”

And what does that teach you?

“I don’t know,” Martin said with a laugh. “The trick is not falling asleep.

“You can’t end up drooling on the counter at the coffee shop. They don’t like that.”

Even if your dream guide would.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 color)

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: COMICS CHANGES “Tommy” begins Monday on IN Life comics page, replacing “Close To Home,” which is being dropped. In addition, “Non Sequitur” will be printed as a panel instead of a strip. If you’d like to comment about our comics changes, please call our Cityline service and leave a message. A touch-tone phone is required. In Eastern Washington, call (509) 458-8800, and once the connection is made, enter category 9890. In North Idaho, call (208) 765-8811, category 9890. Cityline is free, but normal charges apply to long-distance calls.