Good Swiping Is An Art

I've Had Enormous Luck And Enormous Pleasure In Working In Such Forms As Movies And Plays That I Loved When I Was A Kid And I Just - Because I Could Always Write Dialogue, Because I Always Had A Sense Of How People Spoke. And Because I Had A Strong Narrative Sense; Growing Up And Loving Stories, Loving Novels, I Just Seem To Know How To Tell A Story And I Read A Lot, I Went To A Lot Of Movies, I Went To A Lot Of Plays, And It Rubbed Off On Me. And That's All. It Just Rubbed Off On Me.

Cartoons Were Very Conservative. The Country Was Very Conservative. Although The Liberals Were Allegedly In Charge For A Long Time, There Was A Very Acceptable Balance What People Would Talk About In Public. And I Wanted To Stretch Those And Move Further Out. And As The Civil Rights Movement Began, I Started Doing Cartoons On That And On Sit-ins And I Was, Along With Bill Mauldin, A Great Cartoonist Out Of World War Ii, Arguably One Of Two White Cartoonists Doing This Kind Of Work, Bill And Me.

My Success Was The Shock Of Recognition, Probably, Rather Than The Quality Of The Work. I Mean, The Quality May Have Been Fine, But There's A Lot Of Fine Work Out There. It Was The Fact That I Was Doing Something That At That Time, Nobody Else Was Doing, Except For Say, Mort Saul Out In San Francisco On The Hungry Eye, And "second City" Was Emerging Out In Chicago. Nothing In Print. It Was Basically Happening In Cabaret And Nothing In Fiction. And Certainly Nothing In New York In Cartoons.

I Have No Sense Of Direction; I Never Know Where I Am. When I Back Up A Car, I'm More Likely To Hit What's Behind Me Than Not, Because I Have No Vision For It. I've Never Been Able To Play Games Or Play Cards Because I Can't In My Head Get The Next Move. I've Never Been Able To Balance A Checkbook. So There's Some Brain Damage, But It May Be That Very Brain Damage That Allows Me To Do The Work I Do. I've Never Met A Cartoonist Who Isn't Quirky Or Weird In Some Ways.

At The Time, Liberals Didn't Understand That They Had First Amendment Rights. So, I Was Doing Cartoons In This Narrative Cartoon Form About Subject Surrounding That And As I Was Turned Down By Editor After Editor At Each Publishing House, I Began To Notice On Their Desks This New Newspaper Called The Village Voice, Which I Then Went And Picked Up And Thought, Well My God, These Editors That Were Turning Me Down All, Whom Tell Me How Much They Like My Stuff, But They Don't Know How To Market It Because Nobody Knows Who I Am. If I Got Into This Paper, They Would Know Who I Am.