Path To Syndication
Monday, November 24th, 2008
Here’s another piece I did while at the Citizen. Don’t recall at all what the details of the article it was for. I do know that I’ve got a stockpile of arcane bits of information from reading articles on business, science, culture, etc, that I had to dissect in order to produce accompanying art. Do you know how many types of bacteria are in the average public restroom? I do.
My Path To Syndication, PART 3: Step Aside, Thor
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008So it was that I entered the advertising phase of my career. By year three of college I was an advertising major with editorial minor. (For those of you who don’t know, “editorial” is illustration for articles in magazines, newspapers, etc.) I graduated Sheridan College and quickly found work as a night-watchman at a tractor factory. I was supposed to patrol the grounds while a senior watchman manned the front gate, but I’d find an empty board room and spend the night watching movies and drawing comics. I figured it made no difference, since if I saw anybody robbing I wasn’t about to confront them weaponless and at minimum wage.Then I got my first job at an ad agency. It was a pay cut. I worked on the “stat machine”, a now outdated piece of equipment which was really a glorified photocopier on which you would make photo-prints of lettering and such for paste-up (before computers made paste-up obsolete). I worked in a darkroom 8 hours a day and began to resemble Gollum. Just before my skin became completely luminescent and I lost all social skills they made me a junior in the art department and I got access to fun assignments and daylight.About a year later my editorial teacher from college recommended me for an on-staff illustration job at the Ottawa Citizen Newspaper. Because they didn’t want all the art to look like it was done by the same person they encouraged me to experiment with as many different styles as possible, the combination of unionized job security and complete artistic freedom has probably never been heard of anywhere in the art world. Over the next 8 years I estimate I did probably 5,000 pieces of art for that paper. A few samples:
And the peace tower logo I drew for the masthead, my legacy of sorts:
My Path To Syndication, PART 2: No Art School For Old Superheroes
Thursday, August 7th, 2008I’d heard that all you needed grade-wise to get into art school was a grade 12 with a 60% average, which I accomplished by taking the easiest courses I could get away with and dropping out of any classes I couldn’t pass without studying. It is not necessary to not study to become a cartoonist, it’s just the path I took. I spent the extra time drawing superheroes and submitting samples to comic book companies.
So it was that I arrived at the age of 17 for the interview at the Ontario College of Art with a portfolio full of drawings of Thor, Hulk, and Captain America. Much to my surprise this was not considered to be “art”. My “fall back” was Animation at Sheridan College. This pre-dated The Little Mermaid’s rekindling of the animation biz, a time when one could still walk into Sheridan’s animation program with a drawing of a cup and saucer with passable elliptical perspective.
This wasn’t really the program for me, though. Granted I had a few great teachers who introduced me to things like life drawing (it’s quite an eye-opener the first time a model gets naked in front of you and your fellow teenagers… it’s funny to see all these drawings of a male nude that slowly blur away into nothingness around the genital area) and line control, etc.. But the monotony of repeating the same drawing over and over with only the slightest variation in order to produce after weeks of work a 2 second film clip of a bouncing ball was much too painstaking for an impatient person like myself. I knew halfway through the first year that I’d meant to take Illustration instead of Animation.
So for my second year of college (still too young to attend any college socials involving alcohol) I switched over to Illustration at the other campus, still bent on superheroing my way to stardom. But many of the classes seemed designed to steer me away from my Fantastic Four destiny. I was forced to learn things like letter forms, color theory, photography, wood-cutting, litho prints, and a course called “Research Drawing” taught by a bizarre hillbilly-esque man who gave us assignments along the lines of “place the lima bean on the blank page. Now put your index finger on the bean, close your eyes, and move it around the page until it feels “right”.”
Now all of these classes (with the possible exception of lima bean pushing) were of definite value to my growth as an artist, but I couldn’t see that at the time. I met another kid who was just as enthusiastically uninterested in these things, and together we clowned around, skipped classes, handed in shoddy assignments, and wrote and drew our own comic books (one was called Phlebitis Man, about a guy who dosed himself with chemicals and attached a lightening rod to his head during a thunderstorm thinking he would be endowed with the power to run fast a la The Flash, but instead just got a severe case of vein inflammation… man, I wish I had a copy of that comic now). My parents, who had been supportive because of my hitherto one-tracked mind, were speechless when I got a report card full of Ds. My pal and I discussed dropping out and going to take film-making at another school. I actually went so far as to fill out an application before I came to my senses: wait a minute, doing art is all you’ve wanted to do since you were 8 years old, and people who try to become film directors in Toronto end up becoming doormen. I had to get back to art school and start drawing my pants off (figuratively).
Next: Step Aside, Thor
My Path To Syndication, PART 1
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008I was one of those fortunate few who knew what they wanted to do from a ridiculously tender age. My mom kept one of those kid scrapbooks where you put your report card and embarrassing class photo and filled in questions about your achievements (“learned that peeing outside was socially unacceptable”) and dreams of future employment. Once I’d gotten past my ambition to become an astronaut (lack of 20-20 eyesight, terror of being any higher off the ground than halfway up the monkey bars) I started answering “artist”.
In grade two I was in one of those split-classes, and a kid a year older than me and I bonded at recess over Mad Magazine. We’d sit and draw from Don Martin cartoons and impress the girls (I didn’t know much about girls at this point, only that impressing them felt important and doing so through sports or other more traditional male methods was proving impractical).
The “Path To Syndication” takes an approximate 25 year break here, diverted by a three-pack of Marvel comics I picked up containing a Hulk, a Thor, and sandwiched in the middle some hapless hero called The 3D Man (they always stuck some piece of junk in the middle that they knew nobody would ever buy on purpose. Why would they even make a comic about 3D Man? He looked like a joke and his only power was that he was 3 times as strong as a regular guy. 3 times?? The Hulk was, like, 500 times). Here’s the cover of the Hulk comic that was in the three-pack that changed my life.
And so I plunged into the world of superhero comics for the duration of grade school. All I wanted to do was draw for Marvel. Perhaps some of this influence is visible still in Pooch Café.
One of the advantages of knowing at such a young age that I wanted to pursue a career that required very little academic achievement was that all I needed was a 60% average and a grade 12 diploma to get to art college, so skimming by on basket-weavers became my elective in high-school. I also learned that any assignment you handed in, no matter how mediocre, would jump one grade if it were accompanied with artwork (teachers are bored as hell reading reports on fault lines or Merchant Of Venice and welcome any break in the flow of regurgitation on student pages no matter how inappropriate). I confided this juicy information to Sandra Bell-Lundy’s 12 year-old son on the sly when she told me he wanted to be a cartoonist and bade him keep this nugget secret, but he wasted no time telling his mom that Paul told him he didn’t have to try hard at school anymore and got me in trouble with Sandra, the little rat.
My parents, bless them, were accommodating of my lack-luster grades as I seemed to be genuinely obsessed with my chosen path of drawing hyper-radiated megalomaniacs in butt-hugging spandex. I had convinced them through years of dedicated dynamic drawing that a knowledge of algebra and the digestive system of frogs was not relevant where I was going. It was no small surprise to them, and to myself as well, when I arrived at art college and began to flunk.
Next: No Art School For Old Superheroes