Coming into the business, you’d pass through these little agencies until you got to understand what was happening in the business, unless you were really able to have a style strong enough to go directly to the publishers.
I just saw the emotion in everything, so I got to feel everything that was going on and that I was viewing, but I couldn’t think in terms of structure, which is the whole point of deep focus.
In other words, DC was never harmed by the paper shortages.
If I had one quality that really ruined me and at the same time helped me, it was the fact that I never stopped looking, and by that time I was really working at it.
I was not too smart and constantly mouthed off and didn’t know anything.
I was hired to do as many Boy Commando, Newsboy Legion, and Sandman stories as I could.
I was hired as a penciler.
DC used to print up all of their pages, they were the only company that did it.
But I was also a big mouth, I started to develop a troubled relationship with Harry Shorten.
But generally speaking, people weren’t fired, art jobs were very hard to get, so something really calamitous had to happen to a person who was working there in order for you to find a space.
Everything was sensory and I never saw the structure in anything.
All of the penciling was consistently done by one person and the inking was whoever could finish on time.
Comics were going down for the second time and here, all of a sudden, came this thing and for the next fifteen years, romance comics were about the top sellers in the field; they outsold everything.
It was exactly an assembly line. You could look into infinity down these rows of drawing tables.
By the end of the 50s, everything began to collapse and, little by little, I lost all of my work. I lost Rex, the Wonder Dog and all the westerns.
I think the lack of precision and deep focus is why it took me years to build up my work.
Precision is not one of the qualities that comes out in my work.