#266 You guessed it...

Cartoons—what are they? They’re not exactly art, although some are. They rank from somewhere between the Mona Lisa and drawing in the dirt with a stick and there was a time when cartoons were not considered art at all. Oh yeah. There were a lot of assholes back then. Just like now.

They’re too powerful a medium to ignore; they can affect change on a massive scale. They shape opinion with the fissile material of humor and truth. No small things they are, and the mighty have been brought down by them much to their chagrin.

We cartoonists didn’t always get the kind of recognition we do these days. Now we’re like demigods or something because (I suppose) we figured out how to make a living doing what we did in junior high in the margins of our notebooks. A nifty trick if you can pull it off.

It amazes me sometimes that I did pull it off. It was all mostly by accident—I would connect with a person, and it would often result in my getting paying work. Or they would find me online, thankfully. The internet provided at the same time it killed my job doing girlie cartoons. Lots of paradigms were shifting, and demographics flipping—it was a crazy time.

Being a cartoonist was a forgone conclusion for me. I was in its thrall from the very beginning. It must have been the visuals that stimulated my nervous system like a narcotic, hooking me at a very early age. I could never shake it after that; I needed to draw. There was power in drawing: being perceived as having a talent sets you apart from the herd as special, you can gain advantage over your fears by drawing them, you’re mocking them and the thing you feared most loses its hold on you just long enough to shake it off. And you can be your own boss.

If I could have seen what I do now back in junior high, it would have blown my mind. My talent level wasn’t that great in high school; I wasn’t very a hard-working student, I was more concerned with girls and making out with them in the back seat of my ‘66 Corvair Manza.

Side note: at our town’s annual summer “Corn Show” there was one on display.

But with lots of practice, I got fairly good. An interviewer once asked Chet Atkins how he became the best guitar player in the world and his answer was, “Practice, that’s all I can tell you.”

If you want to see more cartoons with this article…