Our very own CAI president as seen in the Feb. 2008 edition of Denver Women.Written by SHARON ALMIRALL
Photography by KIT WILLIAMS
She was a cartoonist with Playgirl magazine for six months, the first cartoonist the magazine worked with in its 20 years. “I made it through one and a half editors,” Ché Rippinger says with humor. “Every time a new editor comes in, they need to clear the decks and start over.”
The petite artist, who also writes, worked as a Sunday columnist with the Denver Post, doing both illustration and writing a column, Dating and Hand Grenades. She is now definitely on her own unique path, boldly claiming in one of her cartoons, “Been there, dated that.”
Ché is pronounced Shay, and she says for the record that she is not named after Che Guevara, though she is “her own comic revolutionary tour de force and she is not a guy.” Referring to her niche as “relationship humor,” Ché gleans her material from life and can understand a variety of perspectives. “A lot of people think I’m a single mom because I can write from that perspective, but I’m not,” she says. Working as she does, as both an observer and a participant, Ché says she is not out there simply to observe humor: “I just live, and usually things that annoy me annoy other people too.” She notes that all humor is truth with a twist. The twist part (the humor itself) makes it palatable to hear, “as no one likes to be preached to.”
She notes that people don’t usually “get that they’re the problem. They don’t recognize themselves.” One of her cartoons shows a person speaking to another and delivering a New Age pickup line, “I like you. You fit my demographic.” When asked what kind of relationships she addresses in her cartoons, Ché says, “I write about all kinds of relationships — romantic, co-worker, boss, parenting — they’re all relationships.” She’s packed a lot of living into her 41 years, having been born the year the song Wild Thing was a No. 1 hit. She studied communications radio, television and film in Illinois and migrated to Colorado more than 20 years ago.
