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Cartoons
When I was a child of maybe five or six I found my parents’ copy of William Steig’s wonderful little book The Lonely Ones, a collection of mystifying and melancholy drawings. The moment is vivid in my mind. I was mesmerized, and I think of that as the moment I became a cartoonist. I drew cartoons for the high school newspaper and then the college paper. I did cartoons through the army and graduate school and even through my professorship, especially during faculty meetings. I got in trouble along the way for cartoons I did, but I liked that kind of trouble. I still do.
I was in my forties before I became a professional cartoonist which involved drawing regularly and earning very little money. I was fired from my first regular cartooning job—the Oconee Enterprise in Watkinsville, Georgia had paid me $25 a cartoon—for taking on what seemed like a shady deal that was being done by one of the town luminaries. He also happened to own the paper. The cartoon I did ruffled the right feathers though. I was already sending a weekly batch of cartoons to the New Yorker. After a couple of years they started buying my work, and I was on my way.
Click on the thumbnails above and see some of my work. You can see my most recent work on my blog Hopeless but not Serious.