Talking Movies: From Zap to Zapiro – Episode 2
Welcome to Talking Movies, I’m Spling. This week we begin Episode 2 of From Zap to Zapiro…
It is amazing how prolific you have been and the name Zapiro. I wanted to find out from you, how did you arrive at that name? And were there any other names in the running?
There were no other names in the running. I mean, I always say that everybody’s a cartoonist. All of us are cartoonists when we are 3 years old, 4 years old, 5 years old. Those of us who kind of carry on drawing like that are the ones who eventually become cartoonists.
By the time I was sort of 8 or 9, I was entering the Christmas card competition in the junior August and drawing in a very cartoony way, but I still signed my drawings as Jonathan Shapiro.
But when I was in standard 6, so grade 8, I arrived at the Rondebosch High School. I was at the primary school as well. A prefect at the school who was a very good sportsman and he was very good academically and he was very well-liked.
And his name was Shapiro as well. Martin Shapiro, spelt the Polish way, S-Z, like the Hungarian Szabo and that sort of thing. So Martin Szapiro, S-Z-A-P-I-R-O.
And the guys in my grade thought I was his brother and they called me Zap. And I thought, well, that’s a nice name to put on my cartoons. I didn’t know at that time that that had kind of already been taken by Zap Comics and Robert Crumb and all that.
I only found out later. But I used to sign my drawings Zap all through my high school time. And even through the time that I was at university and doing the occasional drawing for the left, I was studying architecture, but I was occasionally doing political stuff and I’d sign my drawings Zap.
And in 1984, I was doing a drawing of a policeman shooting someone dead. That felt a bit flippant to just put the little Zap there. So I thought it was for the UDF at that point.
And I thought, no, I must try and get something more substantial. I thought of pulling the rest of my name in. I spent the afternoon trying to link the Zap that I already had as a nice little graphic with some other letters that felt like they lived in the same universe.
And that’s what happened.
I mean, it’s become such a brand for you. And I think it’s, I don’t know how much you would say it’s contributed to your success. And it’s got quite a catchy sound to it. So yeah, I mean, it’s become this entity in its own right. And obviously, it wasn’t Zorro that got the Z there. But you have become like a bit of a superhero in a way, in the South African political landscape.
Thanks. I didn’t anticipate everything that would happen, but I didn’t use the word branding. At that stage, I felt that was very much a kind of an advertising kind of thing. It was very commercial. But I absolutely understood the power of the signature from Giles’s signature and from some others like Modillo.
Or when I looked at Charles Schulz’s signature, he just signed Schulz, you know, for peanuts. I completely understood or Hergé or Udozo. So I definitely knew that I had to have something that people would recognize.
And I mean, the funniest thing is that somebody sent me something from deep in Limpopo, a Zapiro trading store, things like that. The name itself has somehow, it’s got a kind of a life of its own in this way, I suppose, in the same way that shower has a life of its own.
In this day and age of things like X or Twitter and social media, where the news breaks almost instantaneously, how do you stay ahead of the curve when it comes to breaking news and making sure that your work, which is published the next day is going to still be hot off the press, so to speak?
You know, there’s like two things there. One thing that people often ask me about is about breaking stories. I don’t do breaking stories. I want there to be a little bit of time so that people know what the thing is about.
I want there to be enough around so that many of the readers will have a strong sense of what it’s about before having to read it and sort of dampen the effect of the cartoon because they’re not quite sure what’s going on.
That said, the speed at which things happen now with social media and with immediate media compared to the sort of old style where you had your newspapers, which took a while, you’d hear certain things on the radio but then you’d process them along with the next day’s news.
Things have moved much faster now and, you know, when you talk about things like X, Twitter, whatever, one does know that one has to be a bit quicker than before but still you’re not going to break the story.
Tell you what I found in this era of speed and social media and X and all of that is that what I used to be able to do was hear something said on the radio or even in the early days of social media.
I could take something, maybe acknowledge it, if I saw a usage, a word usage or something that I thought was funny, I could work with it. If somebody said something unintentionally funny or if somebody actually created a nice wordplay and then I would acknowledge it but these days I can’t compete with that.
It’s too fast. I can’t compete with the memes, with the big tweets because they’re out there and then so many people have seen that that people will say oh that’s not original so I’ve got to do something different as a cartoonist. That’s been the biggest difference for me.
I’ve got to be fast, I’ve got to be more layered than the way that the memes are.
