Aack! That daily 'Cathy' deadline's too much

LOS ANGELES - Cathy Guisewite doesn't know what the last four panels of her

Cathy

comic strip will look like when they appear in 700 daily and Sunday U.S newspapers in early October. In fact, even after a nearly nonstop 34-year run of putting words in the mouth and anxieties in the mind of her alter ego, she's hard-pressed during an interview to say what the next four panels will look like - even though a deadline looms in less than 24 hours.

"Quick, give me ideas!" Guisewite says as she sits behind the desk of her Studio City, Calif., home office. At first glance, the desk, with its gleaming white iMac in one corner and a disappointingly small stack of folded newspapers, Vogue magazines, and scribbled-on scraps of paper ("I just did a huge cleaning") in another, seems incongruous with the widely beloved (and more than occasionally skewered) paper-piling, dressing-room-loathing Everywoman comic-strip character that has evolved in this room for the last 17 years.

Then one notices the word "AACK," Cathy's familiar utterance of exasperation, rendered in large wooden letters on one of the four white walls; the pieces of graph paper that flutter across the counter like autumn leaves; and the four rectangular windows above the Porta-Trace light box on which she draws.

Guisewite literally frames her view of the world in four panels - just like a daily cartoon strip.

And now she wants out.

Earlier last week, when she announced that the last of the daily Cathy strips will run Oct. 2, with the final Sunday strip appearing the following day, Guisewite said she wanted to quit to spend more time with family. (She has parents who live in Sarasota, Fla., and her daughter is about to enter her senior year of high school.) Ensconced in the bubble of her quasi-comic-strip office, surrounded by ceramic Cathy cookie jars, stained-glass wall hangings, and figurines, Guisewite explains that the constant pressure of generating a daily strip has made it hard to do much else.

But is Cathy done?

"I'm open to any and all possibilities," Guisewite says when asked about plans. "All I can't do anymore is the daily deadline, because right now I'm so obsessive about the way I create the comic strip it doesn't leave me any time to do anything else."

By her reckoning, Guisewite has done more than 12,000 strips, with the only extended break coming when she took eight weeks of maternity leave to spend with her newly adopted daughter in 1992.

"In the last several years I've had one month off out of the year," she said. "Which I use to do things like clean out the trunk of my car."

The strip debuted in 1976. Guisewite was living in Detroit and had embarked on a career in advertising. She started sending her parents stick-figure communiques that lamented relationship travails, workplace frustrations, and diet-based angst. At her mother's urging, she sent a packet of material to Universal Press Syndicate, and the company sent back a contract.

"They said they loved the emotional honesty of my submission and that they were confident I'd learn how to draw if I had to do it 365 days a year," Guisewite says, noting that she considers herself a writer first and foremost.

Over the years Cathy has appeared in three animated TV specials (one of which won Guisewite an Emmy), countless books, a Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society, and a slew of products. The strip once appeared in 1,400 newspapers.

Guisewite, who turns 60 next month, says, "I was somewhat obligated to keep Cathy's age as vague as possible so women of a lot of different ages could relate, so I couldn't really write about being my age. That's not appropriate for her."

As for what she has next, "cleaning out the trunk of the car is the only thing I have for sure," she says. And then she adds, "I think I'm doomed to be a writer."