My Job World, Part I

For the last 15 years, I have made my living as an Art Director. I started out wanting to be a cartoonist. I went to a well known art High School in New York called, appropriately enough The High School of Art and Design, hoping, as did many of my classmates, I'd make it as a cartoonist at Marvel Comics. Of course it wasn't long before I realized that this was more of a fantasy. For one thing, there were many better artists than me around, and also I realized I would never get to be as creative as I wanted, because as I had seen, Marvel had a factory-like atmosphere where the best attribute one could have to be a penciller was not only talent but to have an industrious nature, meaning to put out a large number of pages by deadline, not to have say on what characters you drew, and to do exactly what you were told.

I stumbled around until I ended up in Louisville Kentucky. I was brought there to be with my eventual ex-wife. She taught at a large well-known college there, and I had to make a decision on what I would do with my life.

I started working for a small magazine doing little illustrations, when I noticed the guy laying out was really lame and I hated the way he dealt with my artwork. I started laying out the pages by hand and giving him my sketches which he followed, but never to my satisfaction.

Eventually, he taught me to use Pagemaker and my designing life on computer began.