Making a career out of cartooning

Thomas Paul, circa 1970. They just don't make them like this guy anymore.

 Every kid can draw. Few are world renowned, but every child, at some point, has put pencil to paper and created something.

7-year-old me thought he was better than everybody else and wanted to make a career out of it. I have probably let him down and claimed it was for practical reasons.

For most of my youth, whenever someone asked what I wanted to be, my answer was typically “an artist.” Already you can see that I was probably not the most normal of children. Luckily that is a trait I have kept alive as an adult.

As I've grown older I'm come to realize that being an artist is about as far from a lucrative career as they come. You can just ask my many friends who studied it in college and they’ll attest that there are not a lot of firms looking to hire classically trained painters, sculptors, or in the case of 7-year-old me, cartoonists. It’s not an in demand field. And definitely not one that you can just walk into. But 7-year-old me surely thought that he was going to make it.

Aside from my long-standing love of comics and hopes to one day break into the field, my drawing background started at a young age with my grandfather. He was a farmer who dedicated his life to the fields and his family (my mother is one of 13), but when he wasn’t tending to the market, he would doodle, usually landscapes of Americana, with waves of grain and far reaching sunsets. They were not museum worthy but have always been a source of inspiration.

I on the other hand have always been more interested in caricatures. I don’t know if it was because of comic books or cartoons, but my style has always involved people primarily, and never depicted as a perfect representation of man. In many ways it is the opposite of my grandfather’s work, but that never stopped him from letting me in on a jam session, where he would provide the background and I would create the people. I believe my mom has a few of these pieces hidden away in scrape books as keepsakes.

Drawing has never really escaped me. Throughout elementary and high school I attempted to create a few lines of comics, first on lined paper while teachers were trying to get us to pay attention, and later a few friends and me became responsible for two online series, which have since fallen by the wayside. Even today I will grab a sketchbook and try to put ideas down on paper with the hope of one day doing a full-on graphic tale.

I think it was also high school when I realized that making a career out of art (cartooning, really) was not for me. But that also opened up the possibility of writing, something I have found that I enjoy on many levels. And luckily, I have been able to find a job doing.

Art, and drawing especially, will hopefully always provide me with inspiration, but I am definitely not creating it in a way that 7-year-old me would have preferred. This is one of the places I have strayed from the course. But I am trying to make it up. At the same time that I was asked a question about what 7-year-old me had planned for the future (go here for more on this), I also took some time to think about what I wanted for the years ahead. And in doing so, I wrote a single line I hope to keep in the back of my head: “Make brilliance the standard in everything I do.”

No, 7-year-old me, I am not an artist. Instead my career path is to draw pictures with words. It may not allow me to bring the characters and scenarios you had dreamt of to life or even compare to the beauty that grandpa created on napkins while waiting for grandma to finish at the grocery store, but it’s my contribution. And today I’m damn proud of it.