Some of us find our lives abridged even before the paperback comes out.
Despite what they tell you, there are simply no moral absolutes in a complex world.
I can say that even in the midst of my most cynical comic stripping: Opus shone through with a bit of heart, anchoring the ugly proceedings with a comforting pull of emotion.
Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke.
Such is the nature of comic strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste. Typically, the end result is lazy, rich cartoonists.
I ignore Hallmark Holidays. And this comes from a guy who has sold a million Opus greeting cards.
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.
Bloom County was set in a tidy, rural environment probably because of Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
And that's why any of my picture books exist: They all seem to be built backwards from a simple, emotionally optimistic story beat.
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.
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.
I started as a news photographer at the University Of Texas' Daily Texan.
