For many equestrians who have spent time on social media, they are familiar with the all-to-true equine cartoons by Morgane Schmidt. Her fantastic depictions of equestrians and their horses are frequently seen on Facebook and Instagram, through her popular Idea of Order pages. We recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Morgane to learn more about her inspiration for her comics and the release of her exciting new book, Life with Horses Is Never Orderly. Morgane is a life-long equestrian, who dabbled in eventing and reining, before falling head over heels in love with the sport of dressage. She has earned her United States Dressage Federation (USDF) Bronze and Silver medals and is currently working to earn her prestigious Gold medal. She currently resides in Florida with her three horses and her Great Dane.
The Cheshire Horse (TCH): What is your background in horses?
Morgane Schmidt (MS): I started riding horses in Florida when I was about 14. I started off as an eventer, that’s what I wanted to do — I wanted to jump big fences. And, my dad bought a 15.1 hand bulldog-bodied Quarter Horse mare who did not know how to jump. She was like a western pleasure horse… but only walk/jog – the canter was an entirely different story. So, my trainer at the time told him, ‘This is an absolutely lovely horse, but it just isn’t going to work for what your daughter wants to do.’
Fortunately for me, he then bought me a Thoroughbred that was currently eventing. I think he was 16 years old or so at the time. He was a 17 hand ex-racehorse, had been around the show jumping circuit in Maryland, and then was toting around someone in the low eventing divisions, so my trainer and my father rightfully thought that he would be an appropriate mount for me. And, you know, he was remarkably super, super good at what he did. I fell off him a lot, I learned a lot, and we had lots of great adventures together.
I did that until my late high school/early college days when I just became really tired of falling off, and I sort of realized that, as much as I loved the sport of eventing, my nervous system just really wasn’t cut out for the sport. I mean, if you are in the start box, and you are turning various shades of green, and are revisiting your earlier sips of Gatorade, you probably need to pick something else to do for fun.
So, at this point, I transitioned to the sport of dressage, and that has been my focus for the last 20 years or so. At the same time, my father had convinced my younger sister to try out reining; we had always dabbled in Western Pleasure a bit because we still had that trusty Quarter Horse mare. But at that time she was moving on to reining. And my dad, at the same time that I was practicing dressage, convinced me to give reining a shot.
I, of course, convinced him that my dressage horse was not going to be a reiner. I mean, he was a big Holsteiner cross. So, off we went to look for the “perfect horse.” He told me that he knew a great palomino that my sister had been competing against all last year. At the time, I had never had a horse of color, but I thought that they were just beautiful — well, he buys the horse, I have never seen the horse in my life. We drive out there to pick up the horse and get out and tied to the hitching post is this very beige, dirty-looking, incredibly hairy goat-looking horse that might be 14 hands on a good day.
I just look at my dad, “Seriously?!?” Turns out that it was a divorce sale and, unfortunately, the poor guy had been on the back burner for the last six months. It was an immediate disappointment at the moment, but, to be honest, he’s just one of the best horses that I have ever owned. This gelding became Woody, who is a frequent star in my comic.
I still have Woody. He is just a great soul. I eventually turned him into a lower-level dressage horse and love everything about him. In addition to Woody, I also have Willie, a KWPN gelding, and Milona DG, a four-year-old-KWPN chestnut mare (who is as stereotypical of a chestnut mare as you can get!).
TCH: What is your background in art? How did you begin drawing equine cartoons?
MS: I have been drawing ever since I can remember. In kindergarten, I drew unicorns, because that’s what crazy, horse-obsessed children do. I was invited to have one of my pieces in an art show, but I was a very detail-oriented, hyper-focused child who wanted to make sure everything was perfect and looked just like the picture. You can definitely say that I had a wide-streak of perfectionism in my early years.
So, in about second grade, my parents decided to enroll me in legitimate art lessons. There was a studio downtown that held sessions for kids in different mediums, like charcoal and things like that. I started trying to draw realism — and I got pretty good with horses. I learned some basics from that, and then I just kept drawing. I was always the kid doodling in class, experimenting with different methods, seeing what worked and didn’t work for me.
When I was still in grade school, I dreamed about being an illustrator for Disney when I grew up. For various reasons I did not end up moving in that direction, but it was really a focus for a while. That moved some of my drawings to more of the cartoony-comic style.
Regardless, drawing was always kind of a thing that I did. I was always creating and doodling. And, horses have just been an obsession since I was young. All of that kind of came together and took shape when I moved to New Mexico in 2010. I had always wanted to make a webcomic, but I just never found the time for it. However, when I was dumped in the middle of Clovis, NM, which might as well have been a back station on Mars, there just wasn’t much to do. I had time it seems!
I started trying to draw the comic then. It was largely inspired by Thelwell, the British cartoonist. I just love Thelwell and his depictions. Everything he drew was just so witty and fun. I was also drawn to The Far Side, with its ironic and often snarky humor. I was also influenced by Calvin and Hobbes.
Originally, when I started doing comics, I wanted to do a serial comic… you know, something like Garfield or Calvin and Hobbes. This allows the audience to connect with the characters and follow them on their journey week to week in a series. However, I quickly learned that serials only work when you produce the comics in mass, with what I was doing, that was not an option. It was hard to get people to tune in and follow the character development.
I also discovered that because my humor is observational and situational, it was more important to have the right horse to depict what was happening than it was to have deep characters that the audience connected with. So, I sort of moved away from stories about specific horses. There are certainly still recurring characters, but I realized that it was more important to have the right horses for the situation, not a long, drawn-out storyline.
TCH: That actually leads into our next question… Are your horses the main characters in your comic?
MS: Early on, my gelding Woody was one of the main characters. To me, Woody is a Thelwell pony even though he is a full-grown horse. In the beginning, he was featured in a lot of them. For a brief time, there was also a black horse, Flurry, and another palomino, Puppy, that I owned at the time.
These days, I definitely still have recurring characters. My dressage gelding, Willie, models most of the snarky gelding comics. But I also draw from many of the other horses that I have in my life or have met, some play minor roles and some you see more often.
TCH: When was your “big break” with your comic?
MS: You know, I don’t know if there was really a big break yet, honestly, I am always surprised and amused that anyone even reads it. But, I guess the start of the success of the comic would have been in 2012 when Horse Nation reached out to me and wanted to put the comic on their blog. And so, I started posting to their webpage weekly. Then, as Facebook took off and I started sharing the comic there, I think that it was easier to kind of get a following going.
TCH: What is some of the best feedback you have received? What inspires you to keep creating?
MS: I really enjoy the process, I just love making people laugh. That’s a lot of it for me. Every time someone messages me and says they really enjoy my work or that it hits home for them, it’s outstanding. I think that’s a lot of it for me, I like knowing that I am connecting with people. I think if I had to drill down on it, it’s something that I enjoy doing for me as well. It’s just a really nice thing when other people can appreciate what you enjoy doing.
TCH: Tell us more about your book! What was the development process like?
MS: The whole process of putting my book together was just so interesting to me, having never done anything like that before. Trafalgar (Horse and Rider Books) reached out to me and said that they were interested in potentially partnering with me and that they were reviewing source material for books that would be released in 2021 (this was in December 2019). I sent them samples, they went through and reviewed everything, and said that they did want to do a book. But, what they wanted was to organize the comics that I had already produced, about 400 at the time, into chapters and then have me produce new comics that would be original to the book.
The beginning of the process was fairly simple, I was putting the comics together into themes, like horse people, chaos, and the everyday life of owning horses, and getting a rough idea of the chapters that I wanted to have. I laid out the comics that I wanted to have in each of those chapters and tried to make them roughly the same size.
That’s when it kind of got tricky. I had all of the comics online, but I did not have the completed original drawings. I do all of my drawings by hand, but then I upload them into a photo editing program to overlay the text and do any coloring. But all of the files that I had were not the right resolution [and therefore would not print well].
So, what that meant, was that I had to send all of the original artwork, along with all of the new artwork to Vermont, and they scanned it with their high-quality industrial scanner. Then, they transferred all the new images to me, we are talking quite a lot of data and large file sizes. I subsequently had to go back through and recreate all of the text and commentary, and add in all of the color accents again. It was a lot more labor-intensive than I ever thought possible. I had to make myself hunker down and work through chapters at a time. Of course, now I am careful to make sure that I save all of my new comics at the appropriate resolution in case I ever need to print them!
Once we got all of that done, at that point, Rebecca, my editor, went through and laid out the book. We went through and wrote up the introductions and acknowledgments and all that kind of stuff. Amusingly enough, this process happened to fall within the few days that I was moving across the country from Reno to Florida. So I was editing it all on my phone as we went, which was a difficult task. But, fortunately, Rebecca and the Trafalgar team helped me pull it all together.
The finalized paperback book, Life with Horses Is Never Orderly, was supposed to be out in November (in time for the holidays), but because of COVID and shipping delays, it was released in December 2021.
TCH: What are you hoping that readers take away from your book?
MS: I guess what I would hope is that they find a sense of relatability, and because it’s relatable, they can see the humor in their everyday situations and lives. If possible, I want them to get into the habit of not taking themselves too seriously. I think horses, for me anyway, and the community have always been such an outstanding support system, so much good comes out of it.
The majority of Morgane’s comics showcase the humor in an array of uniquely equestrian moments, from the joys of owning gray horses to those all-too-common pre-competition jitters.
But, at the same time, it’s tough. Owning horses, even if you just have a pet in the backyard, it can be hard. Stuff goes sideways, stuff goes wrong. They truly are the highest high and the lowest of your lows. And to have the sense of community that you can get from being able to relate to those situations, I think, is a really positive thing.
TCH: What is next? Do you have more projects on the horizon?
MS: You know, hopefully, I would love to do another book. I think it will ultimately depend on how well-received this one is and if the publisher wants to push forward with that. I’m continuing to create and streamline my process. I also have a few commissioned jobs working with images for ad campaigns for several equestrian companies, so that’s fun and exciting.
TCH: Finally, Is there anything that you think readers would be surprised to know about you?
MS: That’s such a great question… I’m a little sad that I don’t have a brilliant answer for that! Surprised, probably not, I’m pretty unabashedly weird. I don’t know if anyone would be surprised… but I have a potentially unhealthy obsession with David Bowie, so I guess there’s that. I even named my Great Dane after him!
Morgane’s new book, Life with Horses Is Never Orderly, is now available at The Cheshire Horse, in-store and online. Be sure to pick up your copy today and see the humor that comes with everyday equestrian life and horse ownership.