kartooner

We all come from hum­ble begin­nings and the same applies to first gen­er­a­tion design work. Whether it be trac­ing from your Peanuts books, like I did when I was young, or fin­ger paint­ing, there is a begin­ning to every designer’s reper­toire. After­all, every­one had to start somewhere.

I knew I wanted to be an artist after my Dad taught me how to draw a pump­kin around age 3. Despite by age, it was some­thing I strived for, espe­cially after see­ing my Grandmother’s paint­ings. Need­less to say I was inspired to per­sue a career in art and the path from where I was then to where I am now had its ups and downs.

After see­ing Randy (a friend from the past) draw­ing his own comics in grade school, I too wanted to draw my own comics. I can remem­ber that day pretty vividly, com­ing home after being inspired and check­ing my house for pieces of paper, lined or not, it didn’t mat­ter. I sat down at the kitchen table and began doo­dling char­ac­ters for my “unnamed” comic. I even­tu­ally came up with an idea for the story, it would be about a kid in junior high who could warp to other dimen­sions using his locker. Still, I didn’t have a name and looked at these char­ac­ters that I cre­ated from my imag­i­na­tion star­ing back at me. The kid, who I named Randy, resem­bled my grade school friend except for the addi­tion of spec­ta­cles and tight green spandex.

It took me awhile, but I finally came up with a rather absurd title; “The Din­gle­berry Dimen­sion”. Now that the comic was finally titled I brain­stormed the lay­out which ended up being your stan­dard comic lay­out; 3 rows with 4 boxes across. At first I drew the boxes by hand but tossed that task aside when we got our first com­puter (a Pen­tium II 300 Mhz). By serendip­i­tous means, I found out that I could just as eas­ily draw the boxes in Microsoft Paint and print out comic sheets by the barrel.

Over time I would cre­ate comics based on my char­ac­ter, Jan­i­tor Bob appro­pri­ately titled “The Adven­tures of Jan­i­tor Bob” and a comic based entirely on the eraser, Pink Pet. That comic in par­tic­u­lar delved into the his­tory of the space­ship, The Pink Pet (I know, stu­pid name for a space­ship) and its arch neme­sis Black Pen.

After I fin­ished a comic book I’d bind it by hand with a lit­tle help from the sta­pler and some tape for touchup. I’d then show them to fam­ily, who as you can imag­ine enjoyed them, and friends, who typ­i­cally had mixed feel­ings about the con­tent. I’d hear com­ments from my high school croonies like, “Why is the story so sappy?” or con­struc­tive crit­i­cism like “This is con­fus­ing, but well drawn.”, and to tell you the truth it didn’t mat­ter. To me, what mat­tered was that I felt fufilled by draw­ing these comics and any neg­a­tive com­ments I’d hear would go out one ear, and well you know the rest.

My point in all this, albeit an obvi­ous one, is that we all start some­where and that par­tic­u­lar point in time is impor­tant for our growth from ado­les­cence towards our lives and careers as adults and pro­fes­sion­als. Never for­get about where you came from because there is no point B with­out a point A.