I’ll confess right here that I secretly wish I’d have drawn a strip about a little boy with a fake tiger, going for adventures throughout the universe in spaceships of his imagination.
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 knew ‘Mars Needs Moms! ‘ would be a movie seconds after the title came to mind. Similarly, I also knew that my daughter would be calling me a dork as a default term of endearment eventually.
I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I’d bet I wouldn’t lose 10% of my papers over the next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.
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.
Steve Dallas…a frat-boy lawyer who I knew in school. He’s never written me. I suspect he was shot by an annoyed girlfriend, which has saved me many legal fees.
