I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, and by the age of 6 I knew I wanted to be a cartoonist and nothing else. I wish I could tell you why I felt that way, but to this day, I'm still not sure. What I do know is that I was fascinated by comics and cartoons, particularly the comic strips that ran in newspapers, which everyone read back then. My favorite was Peanuts, by Charles Schultz. It wasn't so much the writing--most of the jokes went over my head. It was Schultz's lines. They were so juicy and luscious! My dream was to draw a newspaper comic strip myself, and to live in a world like the one I saw in Peanuts for the rest of my life.
I was certainly no Charles Schultz, but during my school years I was good enough to be thought of as the "kid who could draw". Though my teachers were often impatient with my incessant doodling, the other kids respected me for it. When you're small and terrible at sports, it's definitely good to have something.
I went to art school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and then took a long trip around the world. When I came back, I moved back to Ann Arbor, determined to try to make a living with my work. While showing around my portfolio, I wandered into the office of the Ann Arbor News, where the Opinion page editor told me she was looking for political cartoons about local issues. I went home and drew up some ideas, and she bought them.
Soon, I was contributing four cartoons a week, and that, along with freelance illustration work, earned me enough to live on. I still can't believe how lucky I was! Being a local political cartoonist was really fun. I got kind of famous around town, and people would often recognize me. Sometimes I would even get angry calls from politicians and business people who didn't like something I'd drawn about them.
Dominos Pizza is headquartered in Ann Arbor, and I would frequently draw critical cartoons about their founder and CEO, Tom Monaghan, who was quite an eccentric character. Once, in an effort to get on my good side, they invited me to their campus, gave me a tour of headquarters, and let me bake a pizza. It didn't stop me from criticizing them, but it did make me feel a little more important.
While I was still working at the Ann Arbor News I became interested in a new kind of comic book that had started showing up in the comic shops, independent or "alternative" comics. Alternative comics were different from the mainstream, superhero comics most people are familiar with. They were personal comics about all sorts of non-superhero things, and in all sorts of different styles.
In 1989 I self-published some comics of my own, and they impressed the folks at Fantagraphics Books, at that time the premiere alt-comics publisher, enough to give me my own series. It was called Unsupervised Existence, and was about a couple of young people not unlike myself and my soon-to-be wife.
After that series, I wrote and drew two more, another for Fantagraphics called Cud, and one for another publisher, Dark Horse, called Cud Comics. By the mid-90s, alternative comics had grown into real movement, which was really fun and exciting to be part of. Finally, people were realizing that comics didn't have to be about superheroes, which cleared the way for the graphic novels we see today.
In the mid-1990s I got interested in writing comics for other people to draw. A lot of people in the comics industry liked my alternative comics, so I started asking editors I knew from comics conventions if they had projects I could work on. By the late 90s I was doing quite a bit of writing work, particularly for DC Vertigo, the division of DC Comics that best known for producing the Sandman series.
In fact, my highest profile DC project was the story arc that kicked off The Dreaming, a Sandman spinoff series that featured story arcs about Neil Gaiman's characters by different writers and artists. I also wrote several limited series I came up with myself, including Muktuk Wolfsbreath, Hard-Boiled Shaman (above).
My longest-running writer job was with Egmont, a Danish publisher of Donald Duck Comics. Donald Duck is huge in Europe, and writing them is a very coveted gig, so I felt quite lucky. I ended up writing Donald Duck comics for 14 years!
As I said at the start, newspaper comics were my first love, and I'd always wanted to do one. I tried a few times over the years, but finally, in 2000, King Features agreed to syndicate Edge City, which was co-created with my wife, Patty. The strip was about a married couple with two young kids, much like us at the time. While it wasn't exactly autobiographical, we did base a lot of stories on our actual lives. The family was Jewish, like us, and Jewish holidays and themes made regular appearances. Edge City was actually the first syndicated comic strip to portray a Passover seder!
It's really an amazing thing to get to live your childhood dream, and I loved working on Edge City during the 15 years it appeared in papers all over the USA, and a few international ones as well. The strip ended at the end of 2015, but it's being rerun online here and here:.
Today, besides being the author of a graphic novel, Mendel the Mess Up. I'm a graphic recorder, which means I go to meetings and conferences and take visual notes to record what people are saying. In addition to graphic recording, my business, Breakthrough Visuals provides animated explainer videos, infographics, illustrations and cartoons to businesses and organizations.
I'm really grateful to have been able to spend my life drawing, and I think 6-year-old me would be very happy with how things worked out!
