|
I began drawing "funny pictures" (as my kids call them) when I was myself a little girl. I would sketch a group of dinosaurs with ridiculous smiles on their faces and label them "The Grin Committee," or doodle various characters on a sheet of paper and then devise conversations among them using speech bubbles. It was not until much later, when I was out of college and married, that my husband observed that I ought to be a cartoonist. He decided this after spending years watching me sketch and doodle on every placemat and napkin in every restaurant we went to (even the nice ones) and plaster my dorm room (yes, we're college sweethearts) and later our apartments with taped-up drawings.
My first submissions went to King Features' "The New Breed," who picked up several panels for publication. At the same time I was rattling down the bumpy road of Corporate Overwork. Cartooning became a shadow career where I could put my observations, complaints and insults as I hurtled through the Boom and Bust in San Francisco. My cartoons seemed to take on their own life, making their way into The Funny Times, a Chicken Soup book, numerous magazines and newsletters, business presentations, academic papers and textbooks. My work seems quite popular with business people and professors.
After about 12 years of that kind of fun, I had kids and took a moment. I created a strip called "Lizzie and Violet," about a soccer-playing teenager, which spawned the main characters for a novel called "Escape from Nowhere." I continued cartooning and publishing, and decided that my cartoons, and Brainwaves in particular, should become my primary career.
In 2004 Brainwaves debuted in its first newspaper, the Daily Press in Hampton Roads, Virginia (this happened the same day I had my second child, no kidding.) Committing to a daily strip has, of course, greatly accelerated my production. Not of children, but of cartoons.
|
