Rina Piccolo, Creator of Tina's Groove and one of Six Chix
Recently, I picked up a big city newspaper to check out their weekend colour comics. The section held many of the same strips and panels as my small-city newspaper, but one that I rarely see caught my attention. The star character had big eyes with long lashes, a tray of dinner plates in one hand and a sassy restaurant customer looking for trouble on the other. Deciding to check further into this intriguing strip, I surfed to the King Features site to find Tina's Groove, created by Rina Piccolo. The first strip in the archives made me smile, the next produced a chuckle and by the time I had read back a couple of weeks to March 19th's installment, I was giggling out loud. Tina has her groove and Rina has found her niche.
Raised in Italian family ("every one of them is born a comedian" she noted), Rina Piccolo was able to see the funny side of life. She drew on the walls at home and pored over the comics in her childhood home in Toronto, Ontario. She began her career in cartooning in 1989, her very first cartoon submission was accepted by "Now" magazine. "That early acceptance gave me a false sense of how hard the next years were going to be. It was followed by trillions of rejections," said Rina on Washington Post's Online Chat in June, 2003. *(1) But, she didn't give up.
Canadian publishers were unreceptive to Rina's cartoons, finding them funny but never getting back to her. She turned to the US market and received a positive response.
Rina's next success came with "Comic Relief," a magazine that published her cartoon work for several years in the early 1990s. In time, a small-press publisher reading "Comic Relief" noticed Rina's distinctive wry and uproarious sense of humour. She was given opportunity to publish her comics in a book. Laugh Lines Press published "Stand Back, I Think I'm Gonna Laugh" in 1994. Following its success, Rina created two more books, "Kicking the Habit: A Collection of Cartoons on the Catholic Church," published in 1996 and "Rina's Big Book of Sex Cartoons" in 1997, also through Laugh Lines Press.
Along with the books, Rina's cartoons have appeared on greeting cards and in a number of magazines. Her work made a big impression on King Features editor-in-chief, Jay Kennedy. He enlisted Rina along with five other talented cartooning women (Isabella Bannerman, Kathryn LeMieux, Ann Telnaes, Margaret Shulock and Stephanie Piro) to form Six Chix. The idea was to feature "the work of one cartoonist every day of the week," said Kennedy. The women chosen "each have a strong voice coupled with a distinctive drawing style. They're definitely contemporary cartoonists," he said. Six Chix was a hit from the start, picking up 110 newspapers on its debut in January, 2000. According to Kennedy, it was the most successful launch since Scott and Borgman's "Zits" debut. But Rina has too much of a funny bone to settle for making readers laugh only one day a week...
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