Design Is Important Because Chaos Is So

At Sixteen I Was Stupid, Confused And Indecisive. At Twenty-five I Was Wise, Self-confident, Prepossessing And Assertive. At Forty-five I Am Stupid, Confused, Insecure And Indecisive. Who Would Have Supposed That Maturity Is Only A Short Break In Adolescence?

At The Time, Liberals Didn't Understand That They Had First Amendment Rights. So, I Was Doing Cartoons In This Narrative Cartoon Form About Subject Surrounding That And As I Was Turned Down By Editor After Editor At Each Publishing House, I Began To Notice On Their Desks This New Newspaper Called The Village Voice, Which I Then Went And Picked Up And Thought, Well My God, These Editors That Were Turning Me Down All, Whom Tell Me How Much They Like My Stuff, But They Don't Know How To Market It Because Nobody Knows Who I Am. If I Got Into This Paper, They Would Know Who I Am.

Cartoons Were Very Conservative. The Country Was Very Conservative. Although The Liberals Were Allegedly In Charge For A Long Time, There Was A Very Acceptable Balance What People Would Talk About In Public. And I Wanted To Stretch Those And Move Further Out. And As The Civil Rights Movement Began, I Started Doing Cartoons On That And On Sit-ins And I Was, Along With Bill Mauldin, A Great Cartoonist Out Of World War Ii, Arguably One Of Two White Cartoonists Doing This Kind Of Work, Bill And Me.

There Are Many People Who Get Beat Up, Who Suffer, Who Are Victimized, And Then They Sit Down To Write And They Write Crap. How Many Of These Graphic Novels Over The Years Are From Really Talented People? Most Of Them Actually, If You Look At Them, Are Self-pitying Confessionals About "poor Me".

I Was Doing Cartoons And Mocking White Liberals, Mocking The Attitude Of Government Who Said To Go Slow, While Intending To Do Absolutely Nothing For Black People, Then Called Negroes. And I Had A Lot Of Fun And I Expressed A Lot Of Anger. That Was A Thing That Was Important To Know At That Time. As I Was Emerging Into More And More Into Politics That I Was Angry.