The cartooning was always just an abstraction. It was an income. It was making me famous. It was allowing me to go and do other things that I’d wanted to do.
That’s the conundrum of cartoon stripping, as opposed to political cartoons. When your anger is the driving force of your drawing hand, failure follows. The anger is OK, but it has to serve the interests of the heart, frankly.
The fan letters were mostly answered by professional people that’d done them for a living. And I didn’t have any daily connection with their response to my work. I didn’t have a relationship with my audience. And every artist should have it.
I drew the last image ever of Opus at midnight while Puccini was playing and I got rather stupid. Thirty years. A bit like saying goodbye to a child – which is ironic because I was never, never sentimental about him as many of his fans were.
I paint digitally now. A pity, in some ways, as the biggest price one pays is that you no longer have a finished piece of physical art to hang on a wall. I miss that terribly.
