Jan Eliot, Creator of Stone Soup
An art major at Southern Illinois University, the young Jan found the arts scene at that time to be a man's world. The teachers were men, the students were mostly men, and neither was particularly welcoming to women in class. She happened across a different arts group working in pottery and found her niche as a ceramics major. Jan took an intermission in her schooling to become a wife and mother at age 19. The young family moved to Oregon to live and work on a farm where they opened a pottery. A few years later, Jan gave birth to a second daughter. *(1) Along the way, Jan also returned to school, earning her degree in Women's Studies and English from the University of Oregon.
After nine years of marriage, Jan and her husband divorced. Jan worked at different jobs, from car sales and bookmobile librarian to copywriter and designer, to support herself and her girls. She happily worked for seven years at an advertising/design agency. In the meantime, surviving and laughing through the turmoil of family life, she decided to become a cartoonist, sending in freelance work with great hopes. She found some work with greeting card companies, magazines and through book publishers who needed illustrations for textbooks and computer manuals. *(2)
Developing her first comic strip, Jan created "Patience and Sarah", featuring the routine foibles facing a single mom and her daughter. The strip found an audience in a few weekly and monthly newspapers and it ran for five years. It didn't earn much money, but it did earn Jan an offer of syndication in 1982.
Jan turned it down.
The offer was "a bleak contract with a lot of very stiff copyright clauses where I would be giving up everything forever," Jan said on the Illustrator Showcase of nrm.org. *(3) It meant that if the syndicate wanted to, Jan could lose control of her own comic strip, that someone else could be chosen as the cartoonist and she would have no say at all. She gave up her cartooning dream for several years.
Building on the theme of the first comic strip, the determined Jan began another strip in 1988, entitled "Sister City." (She also married her second husband, Ted, in 1988.) The second strip had an enlarged cast and more plot lines. Running in the Eugene, Oregon newspaper for five years, "Sister City" was a boost for Jan, giving her a larger audience and strict deadlines. She sent "Sister City" off to Universal Press Syndicate for their examination; the editor declined the strip but sent a long letter explaining the rejection. (Very unusual.) At first, she was told that they didn't need any more women cartoonists - that they had enough female perspective with Cathy Guisewite, Lynn Johnston and Nicole Hollander. Thankfully, the bias evaporated over time.
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