Ive spent my whole life working in a medium that was regarded with contempt largely because of historical reasons.
We have this history of impossible solutions to insoluble problems.
As for me, I am in pursuit of excellence. I have no time to get old.
I want to point out to adults that there is a world of good material available to you now in comic form – in this medium – and learn to give it your support because the more you support it, the better the material will be as it comes out.
A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.
Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I’d been reading.
I write about what I know and what I have experienced. This keeps me an “honest” writer.
Humor has historically been tied to the mores of the day. The Yellow Kid was predicated on what people thought was funny about the immigrant Irish. When you’re different in a society, you’re funny.
Thus, sped by currents of curiosity afloat the swift river of rumor do secrets sail to strange ports.
Comics deal with two fundamental communicating devices: words and images. Admittedly this is an arbitrary separation. But, since in the modern world of communication they are treated as independent disciplines, it seems valid. Actually, the are derivatives of a single origin and in the skillful employment of words and images lies the expressive potential of the medium.
The comic strip is no longer the comic strip, but in reality an illustrated novel. It is new and raw in form just now, but material for limitless intelligent development. And eventually and inevitably it will a legitimate medium for the best writers and artists. It is already the embryo of a new art form.