Wiley Miller
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Wiley Miller (born 1951 in California) is an American cartoonist whose work is characterized by wry wit and trenchant social satire.
He studied art at Virginia Commonwealth University and worked for several Los Angeles educational film studios before relocating in North Carolina in 1976 to work as an editorial cartoonist and staff artist with the Greensboro News & Record. Returning to California and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, he drew Fenton (1982), his first syndicated strip. In 1985, he signed on as an editorial cartoonist at the San Francisco Examiner.
In 1992, he launched his popular Non Sequitur strip, eventually syndicated to 700 newspapers. In 1994, Miller pioneered the use of process color in comic strips, and developed a format in 1995 that allows one cartoon to be used in two different ways for both panel dimensions and strip dimensions.
Books by Wiley Miller include Dead Lawyers and Other Pleasant Thoughts (1993), The Non Sequitur Survival Guide for the Nineties (1995), Non Sequitur’s Beastly Things (1999, foreword by Jules Feiffer), The Legal Lampoon (2002), Why We’ll Never Understand Each Other (2003), Lucy and Danae: Something Silly This Way Comes (2005) and Homer, the Reluctant Soul (2005).
In 2004, Wiley Miller, his wife Victoria Coviello and their four Jack Russell terriers moved from Santa Barbara, California, to Kennebunkport, Maine. He explained the relocation to Stephanie Bouchard of the Maine Sunday Telegram: "Part of the attraction for both of us is in a creative sense. Santa Barbara is beautiful. As far as year-round climate, it's perfect, but there's no real change. These dramatic changes really spark the creative nature because it's change. It gives you a fresh look at the world. It's invigorating. Santa Barbara is too nice; hard to get work done. We spent eight years in Iowa. Iowa is always overcast; it's awful. Here, in Winter, we don't go out much so we get more work done."
When Bouchard asked him about the Maine setting in some of his strips, he responded, "I created a series of characters that came from our visits to Maine. Offshore Flo is patterned after the [Maine Diner] in Wells. I wanted to capture the essence of Maine people's genuineness -- down-to-earth, good-natured people -- and work in the accent. I heard from displaced New Englanders. I got emails from people who said how dead-on the accent was and how dead wrong. It's tricky working phonetically because you still have to be legible, finding the balance of how far to take it. It's set in Whatchacallit, Maine. I realized there had never been this setting in comics. I hate following. More fun blazing a new trail. Nobody's ever been to Maine in the comics."
He was named Best Editorial Cartoonist by the California Newspaper Publishers Association in 1988 and won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for editorial cartooning in 1991. The National Cartoonists Society honored Non Sequitur with four awards in the first six years of publication, including their Newspaper Panel Cartoon Award for 1995, 1996, and 1998, and was nominated for the same for 1999 and 2002, and won their Newspaper Comic Strip Award for 1992.
Non Sequitur is the only comic strip to win its division during the first year of publication, and it is the only comic feature to win in two divisions; it was awarded Best Comic Strip for 1992 and Best Newspaper Panel Cartoon for 1995, 1996 and 1998.
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