Cartoons Are Business Too
At twenty, I was honestly sure I wanted to be in cartooning or a film star. I knew that I wanted to spend my life in making people laugh or entertaining them. Though I was not a fantastic cartoon artist, I was prolific at writing and blueprinting offbeat cartoons long before The Far Side was born, probably from my fantastic admiration of Mad Magazine as a kid. I also learned that many cartoonist work as teams, such as Disney did. Disney could draw, but not to the level as to what he envisioned his cartoon so he hired illustrators. That would eventually be the model of my cartoons, which would be still panels, not animation, but same model. That was in the early 1970s when I was a business student in Dallas because my parents told me I should be. I stored my shoebox of at least a thousand cartoon concepts in a shoebox for another quarter century or so and worked “grown-up” jobs such as real estate, marketing, tv and radio production, owning my own bus tour company in Washington, D.C. and several other entrepreneurial ventures that would have made anyone motivated by money only content and living like a king. I was miserable. All I could reckon about was my, now dusty, pile of cartoon concepts in the back of a drawer.