The Sketchbooks

I was still working on developing my style or styles, and to do that one must practice and sketch whenever possible.

I filled half a dozen large, bound, empty page books and numerous smaller ones with characters, gags, and the occasional fine art sketch. It took a long time for me to arrive at what I could call my own style, which was more or less an amalgam of all my favorite artists, along with a dash of myself for taste.

If you weren’t one of those fortunate souls who arrived on this planet with a ready-made formula for success, you had to do things the hard way by beating that forged cartoon steel on the anvil of practice into a weapon that fits comfortably in your drawing hand. Cartoonists combine our outside influences with our own base metal into an alloy with our own name on it.

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Comic book superheroes were what I was fixated on in junior high, specifically the Marvel titles. I had little use for Superman or the rest of the DC Universe; back then you were either a DC man or a member of the Mighty Marvel Marching Society (I even had a membership card), and seldom did you cross party lines with the possible exception of Batman (the Bob Kane version).

Prior to that, in elementary school I did humorous things more along the lines of Mad magazine or gag cartoons. Here is the oldest example I have of a multi-panel gag.

War cartoons were also something I did, from watching all the war shows on TV, like Combat, along with the old movies that stations ran.

I would sit there sketching, making the sound effects as I went for the explosions and machine guns as they materialized. It added an audio track of realism for me while imagining this world that lived in my mind and on paper.

The super heroes were where I put in most of my time and energy in 1965-68. I copied frames from the comics as well as imagined my own situations. These were more or less finished works in pencil—rarely did I do preparatory roughs to be further rendered in subsequent versions. You won’t see a lot of eraser marks either, I knew what it was that I wanted to draw.

Copying figures and poses was how I learned how to draw characters. I would copy comic strips from the newspapers too. Sundays, after lunch, were the time for reading the Sunday Funnies on the floor of the living room. I marveled at how the pros made it seem so easy, and I knew if I wanted to draw like them, it would take a lot of practice.

And practice I did! Fortunately, I didn’t have too much homework to do in our small-town school, and I used those hours to wear down a bunch of pencils and use up paper. I even sent off samples to New York and Marvel Comics. In return, I received two postcards I assumed at the time were from Stan the Man himself, only to find out decades later that those cards sent out to fans were all signed by Flo Steinberg, Stan’s gal Friday.

I don’t have the super portrait I did of Stan that he/she was flattered by, but if I recall correctly, it was Stan as Galactus, the space being who used the Silver Surfer to do his planetary grocery shopping.

If you want to see more cartoons with this article…