Drawing Interest

How I got into Cartooning
by Jonathan Plotkin
@spontoonist

NCS National Member since 2003

If you ask most cartoonists how they got into their craft I suspect most would answer that it was the craft that got into them. For me, drawing in general was purely an escape from a large and terrifying family of rambunctious boys growing up in the late 1950’s. As the runt of the family, I found solace in a corner with a pad of paper and crayons which I would spend most of my waking hours using to block out the noise and bedlam that surrounded me. I recall some encouragement along the way, but not much.  Art was seen as a distraction back then…something you did “to waste time” or “procrastinate”.  Yet I knew intuitively that making art, even meaningless doodles, was a tool that I could lean on to actually become a better student. It would be years before I came to fully understand how this was actually a key part of how I learned. More on that later.

I came of age in the 1960’s.  By the time I got to middle school, I was pretty good at drawing hot rod characters and the cars popularized by Ed “big Daddy” Roth who launched Rat Fink as an anti-hero to Mickey Mouse. I was not particularly athletic so attracting girls meant I had to improvise.  Making art gave me an edge with the ladies, and a powerful tool to use satire and humor to communicate. Still, I was being hauled down to the principal’s office regularly as my hair grew longer and I spent more time concentrating on my art during class instead of “listening”.  Both behaviors were seen as taboo and I paid dearly in extended time washing desktops and black boards during detentions.

In 1968 while a freshman in High School I discovered Zap Comix, LSD and my High Scool newspaper where I became the staff cartoonist. Robert Crumb, Rick Griffin, and Gilbert Shelton were my hero’s as much as any rock stars or major league athletes.  I would spend hours copying their styles and eventually crafted my own. Lucky for me the LSD didn’t do any lasting harm (he says) but the comix were to become a life-long calling. As time went on I became the staff cartoonist for my college newspaper (The George Washington University Hatchet) and created  poster art for a variety of bands and alternative causes including the People’s Bicentennial Commission which was run out of a two room office in Dupont Circle by a couple of former SDS operatives including Jeremy Rifkin and Rennie Davis.  I was also the staff cartoonist  at the time for DC Purge run by Ralph Nader. I would give Ralph a ride home some evenings in my VW Bug but never all the way to his flat….he didn’t seem to trust many people back then.

After graduation I freelanced for the Valley Advocate, a string of alternative newspapers that published weekly in towns up and down the Connecticut River valley from Bridgeport to Brattleboro, Vermont.  After graduation I procured a press pass from the Advocate and a letter of introduction from the publisher and made my way to Europe where I “covered” the 1976 Presidential election.  A series of political cartoons and essays eventually made their way back to the States for publication. By this time, I was focused more on editorial illustration rather than cartooning per se.  I was thrilled by the work of masters such as Brad Holland, Marshall Arisman and Gary Panter.

Shortly after returning from 6 months in Europe, I was drafted into my dad’s real estate development business by default (he actually fell and busted his knee….which required a son not doing anything to be his driver). After a year he recovered and I applied for a fellowship, was accepted and headed to graduate school in Boston for an MBA to get out of the job….graduate school being the only legitimate reason for abandoning one’s family…at least that was the case with my family.

I took off for three weeks before school started and headed to North Africa with an old friend who I met in Spain a few years earlier and together we ended up in the hills above Tangier during Ramadan. I will leave the story behind this chapter for later.  What is important is the last evening there our hands and arms were painted by our Moroccan hosts with Henna.  No one told us the ornate orange designs would take months to fade.  When I returned to Boston a few days later I spent the night before the first day in class on the floor of a friends’ apartment in Boston with the same clothes I had on in Tangier two days prior as my bags were temporarily  lost in transit. The smell of the goat we ate during the final night of Ramadan still permeated my being….I must have been a delight to be around. The first day of class found me surrounded by two sets of students.  Those in blue blazers, ties and rosy faces and the foreign students from around the world.  None of the American’s would speak with me that first couple of days.  The foreign students were noticeably curious about this long haired, orange armed  American. They approached me and wanted to know if I would share my lecture notes.  I took copious notes however most of the ink was spent doodling.  Yet I could recall verbatim every word that was said in a lecture even if  I didn’t quite grasp the meaning as I didn’t have a business background. The solution was my sitting in the middle of the foreign students study circle and reciting my notes over and over again.  In time this reinforced my understanding of the topics being covered and allowed the students who were significantly smarter than myself, to solve the problems and crack the cases. Our little group won all the competitions that first year. It was then that I realized the power of visual thinking and how learning can be amplified by tying auditory information to a visual language even if that language was nothing more than doodles. If I had to do it all over again academically I would have headed straight into a career as an Art Therapist.

When I moved to Chicago in 1981 to get married I was able to land a regular weekly cartoon spot in the third section of the Chicago Reader.  My one panel drawing appeared as Ab Ovum (the name of the head shop in Springfield, Massachusetts where I picked up my first ZAP Comix). Week after week for about 6 years it appeared after Jay Lynch and Gary Whitney’s Phoebe and the Pigeon People and right before Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek. Matt Groening’s Life in Hell were also tucked into those pages, long before Matt found his calling with The Simpson’s.  I recall asking Matt one evening at the annual Park West Chicago Reader appreciation dinner for freelancers how he was able to stick with cartooning by supplying alternative newspapers around the country at $55 a shot? I had already started a family and needed to find a steady source of income.  Matt said “This is what I do, I can’t think of doing anything else”. I was humbled by his commitment and dedication to his craft.

Over the years I supported our growing family  as a real estate developer, investor and patron of the arts. I channeled my appreciation for editorial illustration into a long term free-lance gig with the Chicago Tribune as one of their Op Ed page illustrators.  The same was true with the Dailey Herald and various other newspapers and magazines over the years. In recent years I was commissioned to design and install large scale murals in commercial properties, most notably, the Hotel EMC2 on Ontario just east of Michigan Avenue in Chicago. That assignment included preparing a series of animations for the hotels multiple TV monitors throughout the property.

I became a full member of the National Cartoonist Society and the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists in 2003. My drawings always elevated everything else I was doing in business including roles I played on the Boards of various non-profit arts organizations including Remains Theatre and as Chairman of the Cultural Arts Commission in my City.

Today I have more time for cartooning and illustration with my work appearing regularly in the American Bystander, perhaps the last humor magazine being published in America. I use various forms of media from pen and ink to markers and digital collage. A classic barrel Bic pen is and has always been my favorite drawing tool.

Together with Pat Byrnes we founded The Drawing Board which uses visual metaphor (i.e. Cartoons) to inspire culture change in large organizations by using humor to change one’s perspective leading to clarity and connection. https://www.cartoonists.com/

All in all, it’s been a great ride….with 6 grandchildren under the age of 6 living just minutes from our home I have no plans to settle down anytime soon. There is a new generation just waiting to hear my stories!