It Is Not Size Or Age That

There's The Excitement Of Adding Color, Which I Didn't Know Anything About Until 1997 Or So, When I Did My First Picture Book. So, The Kid's Book In Particular Have Been Exciting For Me Because It Forced Me To Go Back To The Work I Loved As A Young Boy Reading Sunday's Supplements And Comics In The Sunday Papers When I Was Six, Seven, Eight, Nine. And Number Of Which Have Been In Wonderful Collections, Beautifully Reproduced.

And All The Things I Thought Were Mistakes And I Did Cartoons On Them. And Then I Think I Was The First Cartoonist In The Country To Attack The War In Viet Nam And That Helped Influence A Whole Generation Of Young Cartoonists Who Later On Took Up The Battle. And That Was Exciting To Know That I Had Helped Influence Work Of Young People Who Were Moving This Forum Into A Better And More Exciting Area, Out Of The More By The State That Political Cartooning Had Been In.

Whatever New York Loses, If You Go To Other Cities Around The World, Or Around The Country, New York Still Has A Kind Of Energy Level You Find Nowhere Else. Paris Doesn't Have It, London Doesn't Have It, San Francisco, A Great City, Doesn't Have It.

I Seemed To Have Instinctually A Strong Idea Of How The Strip Had To Be Written From The Beginning. That Changed Too, But It Was More In The Direction Of Where It Was Headed. I Didn't Have A Clue As To The Drawing Style, Because The Drawing Style That I Was Groomed On From The Beginning Was Newspaper Comic Strips, Which Were Much More Conventional.

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.