My first newspaper cartoon panel The Neighborhood, began syndication in October of 1980.  It was my first professional cartooning effort and my first syndicate submission.  I was 40 years old at the time, and I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time.  Herman a funny ruckus panel had been in papers for some time, but it was Gary Larson’s The Far Side, which preceded The Neighborhood by a matter of months, that ushered in what newspapers called the new “off the wall” humor panels.  I was glad to be a part of that first wave.

I was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  My folks subscribed to a number of the mass-market magazines of the day like Look, Colliers and Saturday Evening Post.  They were full of gag cartoons, which I followed closely.  But I learned to draw by studying and copying the comic art that appeared in EC Comics. I collected and drew from nearly all of their horror titles like Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror, and later their other titles like Piracy, Aces High and Mad.  EC Comics had, in my opinion, the greatest gathering of comic book artists ever assembled.  Artists like Wally Wood, Reed Crandall, Graham Engels, George Evans, Frank Frazetta and Al Williamson among others.  But the artist I most identified with was Jack Davis.  As a 12 or 13 year-old kid, I spent countless hours trying to replicate Jack’s drawings.  I learned about composition, anatomy, light and shadow and more.

45 years later, at the 2000 National Cartoonists Society Rueben Awards in New York, I met Jack for the first time.  I got to tell him how much his art meant to me, and I was able to describe to him specific panels I remembered trying to draw.   We’ve gotten together a number of times since, we’ve exchanged artwork and we’ve become friends.  For me that first meeting remains one of the biggest moments of my cartooning career.

You would think with all this interest in cartooning, I would have had a burning passion to be a cartoonist, but evidently I had more interest in sports, girls and just plain surviving high school.  Having no real direction, I rattled around in collage for close to 5 years before graduating with an Applied Arts degree in Commercial Art/Graphic Design.  I worked in a couple of art departments, a design studio and an ad agency after college, but it all started to ring hollow after a few years.  So I left commercial art behind to take a sales job with a national corporation, which led to a 13-year career in sales management, product management and marketing management.

By 1978 I was beginning to feel the need to get back to creating something with my hands.  I spent the next 2 years experimenting with cartooning in a couple of the local newspapers, and in 1980 the Des Moines Register and Tribune Syndicate took on The Neighborhood.

It’s been a great run.  The Neighborhood was a successful syndicated feature, and an even bigger licensing commodity.  A huge greeting card line and many other products were on the market for years.  After 10 years I grew restless, creatively, and wanted to try working in a strip form.  I was interested in working with reoccurring characters, and filtering gags through established personalities.  The new strip was called Ballard Street, and in retrospect, the multi-panel form wasn’t the right one for my kind of humor.  So, after a year or so, I began to move Ballard Street the strip back to Ballard Street the panel.  Where it has remained ever since.

I’m usually up around 6:30 or 7 am; just about the time my dog Rosie presses her nose into my face. It’s time for our morning walk, which lasts a good 45 minutes. Breakfast fallows for both Rosie and myself. I have coffee and toast with my newspaper, and Rosie has hard little nuggets of some sort.

I try to do all of my idea work for the week on a single day, Monday. I spend much of the day away from the studio, touring the city lakes, rummaging through used bookstores and finally settling into a coffee shop where I focus on the development of the week’s cartoons. Over the years I’ve found that a single condensed idea session works best for me. One idea often leads to another making it easier to get on a creative roll. Often times only a couple of hours is needed to develop enough ideas for the week. Sometimes I’m picking at it for the better part of the day, and other times I’m still at it Monday evenings.

A cartoon solution for me can begin with a word, or phrase or some language that pops into my head, but just as often ideas come from scribbles or sketches I’m doing without specific direction. My scribbling might start to look like a cat, lets say, and then I might add ill-fitting cowboy chaps. How about some one chasing the cat in their underwear! At this point, I’d have to ask myself “what’s going on here?” And, hopefully the answer (or caption) will be just surprising enough to be considered entertaining to readers.

I do my initial drawings with a ballpoint pen in miniature or thumbnail size. The thumbnails are proportionate to the final size I send to the syndicate. Starting with the thumbnail size allows me to cover a lot of visual ground quickly, and I can make correction and adjustments without compromise. I enlarge the thumbnails on my copier to the final drawing size. I then slip this enlarged sketch under a sheet of visualizing layout paper, and do the initial full size pencil sketch. A plain old No. 2 pencil works well for this sort of thing. Because I use a light table, I tape the pencil drawing to the back of an 8 ½ x 11 piece of 1 ply plate finish Bristol, and lay it on the light table. The 1 ply Bristol is stiff enough to hold up to an application of India ink, but thin enough to allow me to see the pencil drawing underneath. I use an old fashion dip pen with a Hunt Imperial 101 nib.

I stopped doing the Sunday panel in 2011, so I have no coloring issues to consider. When I was doing them, I made Xeroxes of the Sunday line art and colored them with magic markers. Each color was numbered to correspond to a numbered color chart supplied by the company that produces the color negatives used to print the color comics. I’ve never used a computer to draw or color with.

I usually draw and ink at least 2 and often 3 cartoons in a day. It depend upon how much time I need during the week to other things, such as licensing projects, paying the bills or if I have a painting going. I can usually open up two days in a week, or maybe three if I need them. My goal is to free up a good part of the weekend, which for me can act as a battery recharger. And then of course one needs to check on the family from time to time.

Being a cartoonist and working at home, can be a very isolating experience, so another of my “save the brain” techniques is to get out of the house for lunch, which I do 2 or 3 times a week. I used to work all the time; days, nights and weekends. It worked for a lot of years but now I’m content with the schedule I worked out through trial and error.

The only hobbies I seem to have are reading and fly-fishing. I can get a fair amount of the fishing in around here with one or two annual trips to the big rivers out West. All in all it’s a pretty good life.