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(RIGHT:) Former President Ronald Reagan holds a 'Crock' cartoon during
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Rechin and Wilder are developing
ABOVE: The late 'Peanuts' cartoonist Charles Schulz (right) visits with Bill Rechin (left) during a party at Rechin's home in Spotsylvania County.
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Pat Rechin (center) and Bill Rechin (wearing Washington Nationals baseball cap) gather with their seven children and extended family
Don and Angie Wilder (left) enjoy a vacation with Pat and Bill Rechin
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POTSYLVANIA COUNTY residents Don Wilder and Bill Rechin are developing a new character for their syndicated comic strip "Crock," which appears in newspapers in 10 countries--including The Free Lance-Star.
It's a young woman named Megan.
Soon she'll be joining "Crock's" French Foreign Legion, becoming the first woman soldier in the history of the three-decade-old strip based on the film "Beau Geste."
When "Crock" began in 1972--with gags like soldiers lost in the desert crying "Deodorant!" instead of "Water!"--women weren't put on the front lines in real life.
Things have changed.
And women are not only risking their lives in combat in the desert--which has always been the setting for "Crock"--but have too often had to battle sexual harassment while doing it.
That makes it difficult to stay current and be cute at the same time.
Wilder said gags he wrote years ago, before the war in Iraq, now seem too sadly on the mark.
One had a trooper being kidnapped by the enemy, and Commander Vermin P. Crock saying he'd send a $5 bill as ransom, but wanted change back.
One idea that writer Wilder and artist Rechin are kicking around has Crock, the crusty commander, questioning whether Megan is up to it.
"You realize you'll encounter all types of undesirable situations," Crock says in the strip idea.
Megan replies, "I've experienced those."
Crock says, "I doubt that."
"Obviously," Megan responds, "you've never been to a frat party."
In another idea, the vain Capt. Preppie counsels Megan, "Being a sex symbol is difficult to overcome."
"I can do it," Megan says.
"Not you," Preppie says. "I was talking about myself."
The 71-year-old Wilder and the 75-year-old Rechin--pronounced "WRECK-in"--are under the gun to keep "Crock" relevant in a changing culture and make it funny during a time of war.
It's a difficult balancing act, especially considering what they've been through in their personal lives since the turn of the 21st century.
This is pressure: paying the mortgage by being funny.
This is more pressure: paying the mortgage by being funny on deadline.
And this is nearly inconceivable pressure: paying the mortgage by being funny on deadline while your wife is fighting for her life.
Over the last five years, Rechin and Wilder have carried the kind of weight on their shoulders that would make most people buckle.
In 2000, Wilder's wife, Angie, died of cancer at age 62.
In 2001, Rechin himself had surgery for colon cancer.
In 2003, his wife, Pat, was diagnosed with both breast cancer and a tumor on her spine.
Around the same time, Wilder's son Mike developed an operable brain tumor. He survived, but it left him unable to continue his work as an executive with Nextel.
Through all of this, they cared for the wives at home while working in studios in their houses. And they kept meeting deadlines for their comic strip, day after day.
Wilder kept writing gags for the strip and Rechin kept drawing Crock, the megalomaniacal leader; Quench, the dry-humored camel; and Grossie, the put-upon-but-never-beaten wife of legionnaire Maggot, the ultimate lazy slob of a husband.
At one point, doctors didn't think Pat Rechin would make it. But, with plenty of support from Bill and their seven grown children, she fought and fought until the cancer went into remission.
The marked improvement in her condition since a harrowing Christmas 2005 has been like a cartoon cloud clearing from around the heads of Rechin and Wilder.
Friends marvel at the way Wilder and Rechin have come through their trials by fire while managing to continue to make hundreds of thousands of readers laugh every day.
They're working on a book inspired by the challenges of the last five years. It's titled, "Between a Crock and a Hard Place."
"It's a tribute that the two of them can collaborate and be funny under all this weight on their shoulders," said Oakton resident Bud Grace, creator of the syndicated strip "The Piranha Club," formerly known as "Ernie."
"When Angie passed, Don was devastated," Grace said. "From what I understand, it was life-shattering to him. But I actually thought the jokes got better. It's a tribute to them, and it's a mark of professionalism."
Charlottesville resident Art Wood, a political cartoonist for 50 years at papers including the Washington Star and the Richmond News Leader, said: "It's amazing to be able to turn out humor as they do under those circumstances, [because] they don't have the kind of staff some cartoonists do. Bill does all the drawing and Don does all the gags. And yet they've maintained a very high standard through all of this."
Cartoonists are generally friendly, outgoing people who are isolated in their work, scribbling away in little workplace rooms in their homes.
To deal with the sensory deprivation of their work environment, cartoonists burn up phone lines and e-mail servers sending jokes to one another.
Even though they live in the same county, Wilder and Rechin do most of their work together via e-mail, telephone and fax machine, sending gag ideas and rough sketches back and forth.
In person, Rechin can't resist telling one over-the-top joke after another. Wilder is quiet and reserved, with a dry wit.
Throughout the difficulties of the last few years, Rechin said, other cartoonists around the country have been a bottomless well of support, often calling and e-mailing to make him laugh at the most difficult times.
Wilder, who spent 17 years in the CIA before leaving to do "Crock," said: "It's not easy. You just gotta hitch up your pants and go on and concentrate. Bill's a big help and support, and I'm trying to be that way with him now."
As an artist, Wood admired the fact that the stress involved didn't cause the quality of the drawing of the strip to decline.
"Bill had a very clean style of drawing that's easy to look at," Wood said.
Rechin grew up in Buffalo, where nuns at his Catholic school confiscated his drawings in the 1940s and said, "Put some clothes on those people and you'll become famous."
He was drafted during the Korean War. In 1952, shortly after induction, he married Patricia Telfer, a fellow art school graduate.
He was stationed at Fort Belvoir, where he worked doing cartoons for Army training aids. There he met the great artist and writer Shel Silverstein, who influenced him.
After being discharged, Rechin made his home in Springfield and worked for 20 years as an artist doing projects for NASA and the Department of Defense.
He created the "Johnny Horizon" campaign for the Interior Department, working with Burl Ives.
In 1970, he syndicated his first comic strip, "Pluribus."
In 1975, "Wizard of Id" cartoonist Brant Parker introduced Rechin to Wilder, who had been writing "Crock" with Parker.
After the CIA, Wilder had worked for Lockheed, General Electric and RCA before going into the comics business full-time.
Parker wanted to devote more time to "Wizard of Id," and Rechin and Wilder hit if off and bought out Parker's interest in "Crock."
In 1989, Rechin moved to Spotsylvania, and Wilder soon followed. The two men have always been close, and their wives were best friends.
In 1983, the National Cartoonist Society nominated "Crock" as America's best humor strip, along with "Doonesbury" and "Garfield." "Garfield" won. When Rechin got home from the awards banquet, he found a Garfield doll hanging in effigy in front of his house. A note read: "Dear Dad--We hung this little sucker nine times."
In the late '80s, President Ronald Reagan honored Rechin and Wilder during a ceremony in the Rose Garden at the White House.
But Grace said political correctness has made it much harder to be funny lately.
"Crock" is a strip about the military written by white men in an era when many newspaper editors are looking for material about families and children done by women and minorities.
Grace said doing a comic strip today can be difficult because women readers want women characters, but don't want those female characters to be the butt of jokes.
"Crock," he said, is about "misfits and losers out in the middle of the desert."
But, he said, people don't like it when you make a woman a "misfit" or "loser."
Grace said he loves the strip, but thinks his favorite "Crock" character, Grossie, probably bothers some women readers.
Grace has a similar problem with Effie, a funny female character in his own strip.
"I'm just trying to say it's very difficult doing a politically incorrect strip," Grace said. "But we try to break out, we try to break through those barriers."
Rechin said: "I've never felt threatened by anything like that. You have to make the characters work with the gag."
He said there's been only one complaint about Grossie, from an obese female reader.
"She wanted Grossie to go on a diet, and that's just not gonna happen," Rechin said with a chuckle.
Still, Wilder said, cartoonists do feel pressure to make women and minority characters smarter, "and have them get the best of things."
He said Grossie's husband, Maggot, is the butt of jokes more often than she is.
"We're trying to work both ways and not patronize women--point out the good and bad things."
Rechin said he sees Grossie as the strongest character in the strip.
"She comes in and solves problems the men can't," he said.
"And at the same time, she's making hamburger hash and thinking she's the best cook in the world."
Rechin said it's important to avoid overanalyzing things and remember that the work is published on what used to be called "the funny pages."
"We have this whole little world we've created," he said.
He said he draws the angst-ridden Trooper Figowitz, "and I look at him and he looks up at me from the paper--and I laugh at that."
MICHAEL ZITZ is a staff writer with
