Cathy Guisewite

Early life

Guisewite was born in Dayton, Ohio to William L. and Anne Guisewite. She was raised raised in Midland, Michigan with older sister Mary Anne Nagy and younger sister Mickey. Guisewite graduated from Midland High School in 1968.

She attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she was a member of the Delta Delta Delta sorority. In 1972, she earned a bachelor's degree in English.

Career

After college, Guisewite followed her father's vocation and began working in advertising at Campbell-Ewald, then Norman Prady before settling at W.B. Doner & Co. near Detroit. She became a vice president of the firm in 1976.

She continued to draw funny pictures as an "emotional coping mechanism" to events in her life and work, and she would forward them to her parents. Her mother kept urging her to send them to a publisher, so finally, she did. "My entire goal with my submission package was to get my mother off my back. My goal was not to do a comic strip. It was to make Mom quit telling me I could do a comic strip."

Guisewite was flabbergasted when the company sent her a contract to produce a comic strip. Cathy was syndicated to 66 newspapers in 1976 by Universal Press Syndicate, now Universal Uclick, and Guisewite did both—her advertising job during the day, and comics at night. By 1980, the strip was carried by 150 dailies and she was earning $50,000 per year for Cathy, so she finally quit the advertising business to work on Cathy full-time and moved to Santa Barbara, California.

The comic strip was a "running social commentary" for her confusion. Guisewite explained, "You were a liberated woman or you were or a traditionalist. To even voice vulnerability if you were a feminist was wrong and to voice interest in liberation if you were a more traditional woman was wrong. So I believe the women I was speaking to in the early years of my strip were women like me, who were at that age in our 20s where we were kind of launched into adulthood with a foot in both worlds and no way to really express it.”

Guisewite appeared several times as a guest on the late night TV series The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

At the peak of the strip's popularity in the mid-1990s, it appeared in almost 1,400 papers. However, on August 11, 2010, Guisewite announced the strip's retirement after 34 years. Its run ended on October 3, 2010 (a Sunday strip).

Awards

In 1987, she received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program for the TV special Cathy, which aired on CBS.

Guisewite is a member of the National Cartoonists Society and received their highest honor, the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year, in 1992.

Guisewite has been granted three honorary degrees from Russell Sage College, Rhode Island College and Eastern Michigan University.

Personal

Guisewite adopted daughter Ivy in 1992, then married screenwriter Christopher Wilkinson in 1997. Wilkinson has a son, Cooper, but the couple had no children together. Guisewite and Wilkinson divorced in 2010.

One of Guisewite's classmates at University of Michigan was screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan. When Kasdan's movie The Big Chill (1983) opened, Guisewite devoted an entire week of Cathy strips to it, with Cathy and her co-workers enthusing over the film and seeing it repeatedly.

Publications