How to draw Mr. Squish.

I wanted to be a cartoonist ever since I was a little kid. I began by ripping off Peanuts. Not by drawing Charlie Brown and Snoopy, although I could. I wanted to draw my own characters. But my characters and plotlines were thinly-veiled plagiarism of Peanuts. “Billy” was about a depressed little boy, a sister who dismissed him, an angry little girl down the street who emotionally abused him, a best friend with his own attachment issues, and a dog who escaped all this tension by mentally projecting himself into a complex fantasy world. (Yeesh, just writing that description gives you a glimpse of how thoroughly messed up Charles M. Schulz was.)

But it didn’t matter if I had my own “Billy” characters. Or later, my own “Lester” characters. Other kids wanted me to draw Charlie Brown and Snoopy, and later Garfield and Odie. They didn’t know who my characters were.

How’d I learn to draw the other characters? Tracing. Every good forger starts with tracing paper, or by using a window or TV set as a makeshift light table. Practice till you can draw ’em without it. Then draw ’em without it.

We didn’t have a lot of tracing paper round the house. We had tons of paper, but it all had other stuff printed on the other side of it. Dad, in order to deal with my growing need for paper to draw and write on, would swipe a bunch of it from the office: Old printouts, old flyers, old anything. It’s a little hard to trace Huckleberry Hound off the television when the graphics for a Chinese restaurant’s lunch special are in the way.

Dad would also go dumpster-diving from time to time, and one day he came home with an entire package of exposed X-ray film. It was semi-transparent, and way thicker than paper, so I started using it for various projects. Problem is, it’d get darker and darker when you exposed it to light; from a pale green to a deep grayish purple. I used to make “filmstrips” with it by cutting it into strips, marking off squares like comic strip panels, then tracing a scene onto each square. Not that I could project these films onto anything. I just called them filmstrips because, of course, they were on film.

I had already learned to draw Garfield when, in one of the early Garfield comic strip collections, they included step-by-step instructions of how to draw Garfield. First the nose, then the eyes, then the ears, the mouth, the head, etc. I followed their directions. Looked about as good as when I drew him myself.

But I could do it better than any of the other kids at school, and some of them asked me to draw Garfield for them. Demand got so high, I started to charge for it. Not much; 25 cents a drawing. But those quarters added up, and it was enough to buy Laffy Taffy from time to time. Of course, it meant I was drawing Garfield instead of paying attention in pre-algebra, so I wound up with C’s. But to me, making those sweet quarters by drawing Garfield was more important.

Jump forward a few years to college. I decided to do my own version of how to draw one of my characters. But, y’know, the less helpful version. This strip ran October 1990.

My line, “Only pussies use pencil,” was replaced with something else like “wimps” or “losers”; I don’t recall what. Most of the time I actually didn’t use pencil. I drew with pens, and if I made mistakes I used whiteout. To me, pencil needlessly over-complicated things. Why pencil it, then ink it, when you can just skip one of the steps in the process and save time? Besides, the first sketch always looked better than the tracing job which followed.

Certain artists like to talk, with pride, about their materials. Bristol boards, fountain pens, brushes, India ink. I used ballpoints and printer paper. Seriously. I told other cartoonists about this, and they’d roll their eyes; how pedestrian. Let ’em. To me, the art comes second to the funny. If it wasn’t funny, I didn’t care how well-drawn it was, and what materials were used to create it. And to me, a line made with a brush looks slightly better—but the only people who care about such things are artists and art nerds. Most readers, like me, only care about the funny.

I did break out the pencils when I was gonna draw a bit that was harder than average. If I needed to do some detail work, sometimes that meant blue-penciling it, then inking it—again, with ballpoints, and Sharpies for the fill-ins. Sometimes I didn’t have a black Sharpie on hand, so I’d use a red one. (Red shows up as black when you resize the strip with the halftone camera.) So my original copies are sometimes full of blue and red, and when I scanned ’em into the computer I had to clean it up.

My awful instructions on how to draw Leonard aside, few would say he’s hard to draw. Most of the other cartoonists on the Hornet’s staff dropped him into their strips. Fans drew him too. I got the flu one weekend, and some fans at KEDG, the student radio station, sent me a hand-drawn get-well card with Leonard on the cover. God bless ’em.