I've always had a good handle on drawing children.
I went through a phase where people would introduce me at parties as a cartoonist, and everybody felt sorry for me. 'Oh, Matt's a cartoonist.' Then people further feeling sorry for me would ask me to draw Garfield. Because I'm a cartoonist, draw Snoopy or Garfield or something.
When I was a kid, I could draw, and my ambition was to be a cartoonist. I wanted to draw comics. But I also liked newspaper comics.
Who doesn't want to draw Batman or Superman? Everyone would like to be able to draw them. I've been really lucky when it comes to the characters that I get to illustrate.
Drawing is more fun to me than writing. I think it's interesting to talk to different cartoonists about how those activities work for them. I'm a very writerly cartoonist. I certainly spend more time on the writing than I do on the drawing, even though the drawing, of course, is very time-consuming.
Cartoonists are untrained artists, while illustrators are more trained.
He was mostly leaping tall buildings in the beginning. There were cases where he would leap off a tall building or swoop down, and at that point he would look like he was flying, I suppose. It was just natural to draw him like that.
But now that I'm cartooning full-time, I'm more of an observer. I'm talking to people who are experiencing these things. But it's not like being in the trenches.
I thought about trying to do a strip. I even tried to do it, but I felt I didn't have the voice. Even though I liked that form, I didn't think I thought in the form of the three panels.
The fine-art world knows very little about the cartoon world.
I general don't color my stuff - I'm pretty horrible with color. Usually, I'll get one of my cartoonist friends to help me out.
I attended the Columbus College Of Art & Design for a little while, until I realized they didn't take cartooning very seriously.
I'm still awaiting the idea of drawing comics for a living being a reality. I feel like I've been dodging work for 20 years, and at some point, I'll have to get a real job.
As a master of graphic creation, as teacher, historian, and roving ambassador of comics, Jerry Robinson has ensured that future generations of talented kids will continue to imagine and then put marks on paper.
I was mentored by great Disney animators at the end of their careers.
I don't think of myself as an illustrator. I think of myself as a cartoonist. I write the story with pictures - I don't illustrate the story with the pictures.
Well, it's a humor strip, so my first responsibility has always been to entertain the reader... But if, in addition, I can help move readers to thought and judgment about issues that concern me, so much the better.
But to me what seems to be missing in a lot of portfolios is Cartooning.
Certainly in cartooning I'm given huge free rein at the moment.
I was writing and cartooning and writing short stories from grade school on.
I'm not electronically geared at all; I'm really a 19th century cartoonist. I have a 15-year-old daughter, and what she's attracted to is of course iPod and this pod and that, I mean stuff I don't even begin to know - I never learned how to type for Christ's sake! I can't get in her head and find out what she would do if she had the kind of talent I had, I don't have a clue. Every generation comes up with its own quirkiness and its own culture which gets its inspiration from what's in the air at that time.
Cartooning is for people who can't quite draw and can't quite write. You combine the two half-talents and come up with a career.
Fortunately, cartooning is not a job. It's something like eating or sleeping.
Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T.
For a long time, I've loved the kind of characters who are boastful yet petty. I was originally a gag manga artist, after all.
