“Honey, I wanna be a cartoonist.”
I started drawing cartoons professionally in 1990, the year I started doing work with the Keebler Elves. It was also the year I had been assigned to create a cartoon dinosaur nutrition program for the Chicago Public School System. Prior to this, I had never really done any professional cartoon work. I just sort of fell into it, mainly because I was the only one at my design agency who felt capable enough to draw cartoons. A year later, I would surprise my wife Anne, who was 3 months pregnant with our first child, with the announcement that I wanted to enter into the “lucrative” comic strip business.
Over the next several weeks, I would like to share samples of my early work, starting with a strip we called “Second Nature,” and working my way up through the early development period with King Features. I have such a huge volume of work spanning many years that it was hard to choose which samples to highlight.
This very early Second Nature cartoon was sort of my “Big Bang” into the comic strip world. Second Nature featured a beaver, an otter and a rabbit, with the writing centering primarily around social and political themes. This particular strip is probably one of the first 2 or 3 ever drawn, and I’ve never shown it to anyone but Anne. It would take me many months of character refinement before I would feel confident enough to submit any work to the syndicates.
Next post: Samples from those early Second Nature strip submissions, my first of several calls from Jay Kennedy, a memorable phone call with Lee Salem, and the feedback I received from other editors on the strip.