Recently I've been thinking that I need a theme, a general topic that will spur me to come back each day or at least each week, to finish the thought, to wrap things up.
My problem with that? If I make my topic Theological or even devotional, its more study time that I really need to be devoting to the church. So I need a topic that will not take away valuable study time.
Over the last few years, one of my most enjoyable reading topics has been comic book history, especially the stories behind the creators and comics I enjoyed in the 70's and early 80's.
That gave me the idea for what I hope is a continuing series on this blog. Though it will not be "spiritual" or even devotional, it will give you insight into my history, thought processes, my love for art.
I will occasionally interrupt this series for a devotional or theological discussion, and the comic posts themselves may at times lend towards some observations on Christianity.
So today I want to start with my first exposure to comic books and comic book art, at least my earliest memories of it.
I was born on October 22, 1966. In January of that year The Batman television series debuted. A few weeks before my birth, Star Trek premiered on NBC. Though I certainly did not watch these two shows in their original runs, I remember clearly watching both in re-runs on weekends and afternoons even before I started Kindergarten. Batman especially struck a cord, stirring both artistic and heroic feelings in a young boy. A cousin of mine says he remembers me saying around the age of four that when I became a teenager I planned to be the new Robin.
Somewhere around the age of five, my grandmother gave me one or more Mad Magazines she had gotten, no doubt, at a yard sale or auction. I was immediately hooked. The art was what got me first. The caricatures of famous people are what I remember the most. I was a child of television, and to see these men could draw Mike Connors (Manix) or Buddy Ebsen (Barnaby Jones) in a funny,exaggerated style just drew me in. I became an instant fan of Jack Davis, Mort Drucker, Don Martin, and the marginal drawings of Sergio Aragones.
Jack Davis especially inspired me to try my hand at drawing. My earliest drawings were most likely copies of Davis characters. To this day, my preliminary and thumbnail sketches feature Davis style zig-zags at the elbows and knees.
Mort Drucker's TV and Movie Parodies also were large sources of inspiration. He did everything so consistently, it would be easy to write him off as uninspired or just re-hashing the same stuff. But his level of technical brilliance could not be ignored. Of Drucker, Charles Schultz once said, "Frankly, I don't know how he does it, and I stand in a long list of admirers... I think he draws everything the way we would all like to draw."
And of course Mad was where I first found Sergio Aragones. His "marginal" drawings and occasional full page wordless strips were always funny, always well drawn, and a world of their own. I remember seeing him on a Dick Clark show in the late 70's, he drew the intro and commercial break cartoon bumpers and occasionally would do instant cartoons on an easel during the program. Once I watched him explain his process, showing how he (then) used a fountain pen to do his drawings because they were fluid and fast and required less pressure than ballpoint pens. I bugged Mom and Dad at every drugstore and department store until we finally found a Shaeffer Fountian Pen that used cartridges. I used that pen for over 10 years, practicing my cartooning, both funny and political, and sketching incessantly.
From Mad, it was a short leap to the Superhero and Mystery Comics that I would read the rest of my life.
