From Cartoonist to Writer

When I wore a younger man’s clothes I was enthralled by the color comic strips section in the Sunday paper. The smell of a fresh newspaper on a cold, crisp Sunday morning still takes me back to those long ago days when I was a boy. I couldn’t wait to dig into that wondrous wonderful world of the funnies. I’d lay out on the living room floor with my favorite comic strip characters spread out in front of me. I’d laugh at Dagwood while Blondie held open the front door as he rushed out to work in the morning, just to plow right into the mailman! My fingers would trace along the dotted line footsteps in the Family Circus as Jeffy or Billy took the longest route possible from their front door to the bus stop, only to be amazed when they missed the school bus. Watching Dennis the Menace antagonize Margaret or drive poor old Mr. Wilson crazy—that was always fun! And don’t get me started on all those adventure strips that used to dot the comic page landscape—Tarzan, Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon, and Johnny Hazard, just to name a few.  

But reading the funnies was only half the fun. The other half was the time I would spend drawing those comics in my trusty sketchbook. I would spend hours copying each line of each character in each strip until I had it perfect. Performing this ritual week after week taught me a lot about the mechanics of drawing cartoons, which led to me developing my own characters starring in my own comic strips. I tried for years to sell my cartoons to the big syndicates in New York, with no takers.

While I waited for a comic features editor at King Features, or Universal Press, or one of the other big houses to discover that they just couldn’t live without my talent, I drew cartoons for newspaper ads for a video electronics store. I also got one of my comic strips published in a local weekly paper in my hometown. These little snippets of success fueled my ambition to keep on trying to become a Professional Cartoonist. I spent years drawing and then submitting the fruits of my labor to the newspaper syndicates, looking for acceptance and affirmation that I was good enough to make it to the cartooning big leagues. Nothing happened… so eventually I broke down and started to concentrate on getting a real job.

Then one day, a buddy of mine approached me about drawing spot cartoon illustrations for a book he was writing. I met Dave Murray when I started work at one of those “real” jobs. We were selling TV, video, and audio equipment for a well-established local electronics store, and we were doing quite well. Dave was considered somewhat of an expert in the world of video and VCR’s and spent as much time helping his customers decipher the product manuals as he did selling the product. He had the idea that perhaps cataloging all that knowledge in book form would be a sellable idea—and he was right! Housetraining Your VCR: A Help Manual for Humans (1992, Grapevine Publications, Corvallis, OR) was the product of that knowledge. Dave, being a funny guy, peppered the book with light-hearted stories and anecdotes mixed in with the actual expert information, making for an enjoyable, fun read designed to help the ill-informed VCR owner easily setup and work their new-fangled recording/playback machines.

Finally! I was gonna be paid as a working professional cartoonist. It wasn’t a syndicated comic strip in the newspapers, but it was a start. Nothing could stop me now! I was on my way… as soon as the book was published, it would just be a matter of time before the syndicate boys would come knocking.

Ha! Although I had a lot of fun working on that project, it gave me a glimpse of what it takes to work with a publisher and their expectation of us helping to promote the book. We did radio interviews in different markets as well as book signings at local bookstores. It certainly gave us our fifteen minutes of fame, but the riches and the high dollar cartooning contracts I’d hoped for just never happened. But the book did go into a second printing, which included some updated information, as even back then, the technology was changing so fast that your VCR was obsolete almost before you even got it home from the store. It ended up being a big critical success (for Dave’s engaging, well written text), if not a big financial one.

Even though the financial rewards were not there for me as the illustrator, the reward I did reap was realizing what I really wanted to do, and that was to write a book of my own. I was an avid reader of PI Detective mysteries, so I decided that was the genre I would tackle. I wrote the first draft of Dead is Forever back in 1994, and then life got in the way. I did try to shop it around to agents, but the only takers were the type who wanted to charge me reading fees and copying costs to send out my manuscript to potential publishers. I ended up shelving the project for over twenty years before I dusted it off and got back to work. It was interesting reading through that draft and seeing how much had changed in twenty years. Since it wasn’t meant to be a period piece, I had to update things like substituting cell phones for pagers and landlines (although I did leave some of the landline phone conversations in the book), and changing out car models since a few I had used were no longer in production.

One of the best changes that came along during those twenty years was the advancement of the home computer and the invention of the internet, which of course allowed a company like Amazon to come into existence, eventually providing a platform for Indie Authors. Over the last couple of years, I’ve written many short stories and I have several book length stories I’m playing around with. However, my main focus for now is expanding the world of Tony Razzolito, the PI Detective in my books Dead is Forever, The Razzman Chronicles, and Deadly Passion – all available for Kindle download on Amazon.

I’m still a cartooning fanatic, and I will always manage to keep my toes dipped in the inkwell of the comic strip world in one form or another. But what I’ve discovered is that I really like to write. I enjoy crafting a good story and sharing it with anyone who is interested in reading it. I like to write more than I like to draw cartoons… and that’s saying a lot, because my younger self was convinced that I would be grinding out a daily syndicated comic strip for a living. Life still gets in the way, but I make sure I carve out the time needed to write every day. It’s important to me to keep working on my craft so that I will continue to improve, because I’ve decided that I’m in this writing thing for the long haul. 

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