FUNNY BUSINESS.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

On a quiet street in the south hills of Eugene in a pleasant-looking, split-level house, the residents are dreaming up fantastical stuff.

A museum painting that sucks visitors inside an alternate reality. Critters that morph into talking furniture. Unspeakable monsters overcome by egotistical superheroes - all larger-than-life stories.

Welcome to the comic world of Janet and Michael Gilbert, two otherwise ordinary folks who get paid to dream up the extraordinary and bring it to life in the colorful pages of comic books.

Michael Gilbert, 53, has been drawing comics since he was a kid. He self-published his first collection as a college student, and in the intervening years has been hired to draw some of the classics: Batman, Superman, the Disney gang.

He also revived and breathed new life into an obscure character from the 1940s, Mr. Monster.

His wife, Janet, 51, is newer to the game. For the past 14 years, she has specialized in writing Disney story lines for Donald Duck.

How did they get where they are today? Perseverance and the ability to conjure clever tales.

"We both have a goofy sense of humor," Janet said.

The two work for Egmont Comic Creations, a Denmark publisher that commissions comic art and stories, and offers them to publishers around the world. The Gilberts' work is well known around the world, where Disney comics are hugely popular. Their stories are published in several languages and can be found in 91 countries.

More recently, a U.S. firm, Gemstone, has been distributing their work here.

We caught up with the couple at their home studios recently to get a sneak peek at their current projects and to learn how to break into the biz.

In Michael's studio, Donald Duck is coming to life in a series of panels where the cranky little critter has decided he's got the chops to write his own screenplay. First step in the process: work avoidance. When he learns how much work writing is, he gets a scientist pal to build a computer that transcribes his thoughts.

Michael's room is large with an artist's desk beneath a north-facing window that provides good light. On the walls are original panels from the work of one of his comic book heroes, Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spiderman and Dr. Strange.

Janet's space is small and spare with no art on the walls to distract her, and the window shades are drawn. She writes the stories that artists will draw and prefers no distractions.

In that room, she's come up with some exotic story lines for the Duckville gang.

Last year, for example, she sent Donald's nephews Huey, Louie and Dewey into a museum where they learn that the world's great art was disappearing off the walls.

Then the trio get sucked into the frame of a blank canvas transporting them to an alternate world inhabited by Rodin's "Thinker," Rembrandt's "Mona Lisa" and famous backdrops such as Van Gogh's "Starry Night." The artworks are hiding out from museum visitors because they feel unappreciated.

The tale caught the attention of the German news magazine Stern, the equivalent of a combination Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly, which noted the comic book and author in a brief review.

"That's what makes it fun for me, to try to stretch the Disney inversive a little bit," Janet said.

Once, she sent all the furniture in the town of Duckville out on strike, then put Donald Duck into a transformation capsule that turned him into a chair, allowing him to talk the furniture into coming back to work.

Of all the Disney characters, Donald is her favorite.

"Donald is lazy, bad-tempered, egotistical, silly, stupid, clumsy, yet still completely lovable. Sometimes he's even brave. And despite all of his troubles, travails and major injuries, he keeps on going - which is a good lesson for the rest of us," she said.

Unlike Mickey Mouse, a goody-two-shoes who always does the right thing, Donald is forever getting himself into scrapes and out of them. Kids instinctively gravitate to his less-than-perfect personality, she said.

We all have a little bit of Donald Duck inside us, Janet said. And maybe that's why the character has such a following.

"He's fantastically popular all over the world," she said. Dozens of fan Web sites attest to that. There's even a word for his devotees: Donaldists.

At the moment, though, Janet is branching beyond Disney. She was recently hired by Viz, a San Francisco publisher, to rewrite a Japanese comic book for English-speaking readers.

Japanese comic books have been steadily migrating stateside for the past decade. The book she's working on is titled "Happy Hustle High School."

The story comes to her in a literal translation from Japanese to English. It's up to her to retool it into lively contemporary, slang-infused language.

Blame Michael for bringing her into the comic book world.

She met him when she was teaching art in a middle school in Ohio. An up-and-coming comic book artist, he had been featured in the local newspaper and she called to ask if he'd speak to her students about his work.

Michael had been enchanted by comic books since his grandmother used them to try to get him to read. They so transfixed him, he soon began creating his own.

In the comic art world, everything is larger than life. "The heroes are more heroic. The women are sexier, the schlubs, schlubbier," Michael said.

He self-published his first collection while he was a student at the State University of New York at New Paltz, printing 4,000 copies for $400 that he sold door-to-door for 50 cents.

It was a good lesson in figuring out distribution before you publish, he said.

Eventually, he moved to California and got involved with a nascent underground comics movement in Berkeley. It took him about 10 years of hustle to get to where he was supporting himself.

Along the way, he has drawn Superman, Batman and various Disney characters, and when asked to come up with a new character, he resurrected an obscure one that had been gathering dust on the shelf since the mid '50s: Mr. Monster.

His superhero is actually just an ordinary guy with an amazingly good physique and who goes after the scariest critters that Michael can dream up.

The creation allows him to play with all his favorite themes.

"When I put the stories together, I try to fit it to all my strengths - horror, humor and super heroics."

Besides Mr. Monster, Michael also has been working on a comic book within "The Simpsons" universe. For Bongo Comics, he's been drawing Radioactive Man, Bart Simpson's comic hero of choice. And he recently got an assignment to develop tattoos by a New Jersey tattoo designer.

Comic book art has seen highs and lows since its inception in the 1890s. Many consider the 1950s to be the golden era of the art.

But in the 1980s, Art Siegelman breathed new life into the form with his visionary volumes on the Holocaust titled "Maus."

In 2001, with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," a story about comic book artists set in World War II, comic books just aren't low-brow anymore.

"People aren't thinking of them so much as junk culture anymore," Janet said.

As the popularity of the art has grown, so have the number of artists trying to break into the business.

For upstarts who want a career in comics, the Gilberts have some advice.

Read a lot, they say - both good and bad examples of the form. You read the good stuff to figure out why they're good, the bad so you can identify what to avoid.

Draw a lot, Michael says. Get as good as you can. Draw from life as well as your imagination to expand your skills.

Then take your work to comic conventions where you can show it and get feedback from editors and other artists.

And don't give up.

Michael says he knew several talented artists just starting out when he did, some of them perhaps better than he was. The difference between them was that he kept after it.

"You have to be persistent," he said.

CAPTION(S):

Michael and Janet Gilbert draw and write comic books for Egmont Comic Creations, a Denmark publisher that commissions comic art and stories, and offers them to publishers around the world.