Genie & Zack Make Cartoons

By Nathan Diebenow

There’s a common perception that humanity’s sense of humor is located in our blood or DNA, if you will. So it goes, we inherit our ability to crack jokes from our forebears’ funny bones, their forebears’ forebears’ funny bones, and all the way back to Adam’s rib.

Another theory on the origins of our shenanigans is that our skills in crafting comedy derive from our interactions with our family and community. As they say, it takes a whistlestop to wean a wisenheimer. Or is it “it takes a metropolis to mold a mime?”

Alliteration aside, perhaps both tales check out. Either way, who doesn’t like a laugh?

Not only do Genie and Walt “Zack” Zacharias laugh but they give a laugh too!

This comedic husband-and-wife team have been writing editorial cartoons nigh over a decade together. If you’re a regular reader of The Clifton Record or Meridian Tribune newspapers, chances are you’ve seen their two-panel “Ranch Tails” comic strip each week.

But who are these folks? What makes them tick? Where do they get their material?

It turns out Genie and Zack’s kin each bought properties on opposite sides of Clifton on Highway 219 back in the day. As youngsters, they both even went to the same high school (Richfield) in Waco. Zack was a senior when Genie was a sophomore. Yet neither one of them knew the other until Genie’s kids were in college.

Prior to their first meet up, the two led different lives. Genie left Texas to study at and graduate from Tulane University. She later married, obtained a master’s and doctoral degrees at NYU, and worked in New York City for almost 10 years.

Zack attended Texas Tech and Baylor universities. He served as a highway patrolman in his “mis-spent youth” days before returning to college and obtaining his doctorate from and then working at University of Mississippi (aka Ole Miss). Zack spent the remainder of his professional career at various universities in Texas and at Villanova in Philadelphia as an administrator, instructor, and overseer of special projects.

After decades working abroad, both Genie and Zack returned to Bosque County to take care of their aging parents.

“I spent a year or so trying to fix him up with various friends and family. That didn’t work out very well. We ended up getting married about five years later,” Genie said.

A few years before they married, Genie had already been submitting her “Rustic Ramblings” column to The Clifton Record for publication. The column originally focused on her experiences living on and fixing up her Uncle Rudolph Genecov’s ranch.

“My uncle, who had no children, kept Shetland ponies here for me, the Zander kids, and lots of other Clifton kids to enjoy. I always loved it here and brought my own children here when they were small. I always came back to the ranch, no matter how far away I lived,” she said.

Genie hasn’t been afraid to share personal anecdotes from her life in her columns –a fearlessness she carried over with Zack as they hammed out their editorial cartoons week after week.

“My emails and texts are too long. I can’t stop once I begin. My daughter once quipped, ‘My mom can talk or write about anything.’ I don’t think she meant it as a compliment,” Genie said.

When the Record changed hands in 2012, Genie and Zack started creating the “Ranch Tails” cartoons together.

“All my life, I’ve done drawings and cartoons as gifts,” Genie said. “‘The Rat’ character that always has the last word in the comic strip was born when a field mouse took up residence on our back porch and breezeway.”

The first “Rat” comic strip hangs in Genie’s studio, along with several other pictures that feature memorable cows the couple had over the years.

As for inspiration for columns and comic strips, that comes from their lives on the ranch, world news, and things they read and hear here and there.

“I write and draw about whatever’s going on in our lives and the lives of those around us in Bosque County –often this includes animals, my grown kids, and now grandkids,” she said.

Over the years, Genie and Zack have developed and maintained a strong creative partnership, despite their slightly difference perspectives on what’s funny. Both come up with content ideas and refine the other’s elements for maximum effect in their comics.

“If I have a great idea for a comic strip, he makes it more succinct and funnier. He often creates the little ‘story’ and sets it up. Sometimes I don’t get his humor, and occasionally, I have to rein him in,” she said. “I hope my writing has improved and become a bit more succinct. Yay for word processing and computers! I look at older comic strips and see that my characters have evolved. They seem better drawn now—unless I’m in a hurry.”

As attitudes toward comedy have changed in the past eight years, the duo keep on trucking, poking fun at “everything” but in good taste, of course. Another thing that’s changed is Genie’s move toward drawing on the iPad.

This year Genie will celebrate a milestone in her writing career –her 1,000th published column! She might have missed a few deadlines in the last 20 years because of family members being sick, she admitted, but not by much.

“I think we’ll hit 1000 next September 2023. We should have a party,” she said.

Of the 1000 columns and almost equal number of cartoons, a few do stand out as having affected their audience, like a column Genie wrote about when her father passed away, but often times, it’s those universal experiences that folks comment on with her in public.

“I used to get a lot of older folks, usually men, coming up to me at the post office or feed store or wherever saying things like, ‘I used to have a cow just like that! She got into everything!’ Or I’ll be in the grocery store and some woman will say, ‘I have a husband that does that too,’” Genie said.

So what else does the future have in store for “Ranch Tails?” “One of my sculpture projects –a bucket list item– is a small bronze of our main comic strip characters,” she said.