In the early seventies, I was writing a lot of comic books for Gold Key, the company that published the Disney comics and the ones featuring the Warner Brothers characters, plus they also had Woody Woodpecker and The Pink Panther and Scooby Doo and a lot of other famous properties. I wrote for most of the comics produced out of the firm's West Coast office and occasionally did a smidgen of drawing here and there.
Mostly, I'd do a rough sketch for a cover and then one of their experienced artists would redraw it more professionally. The two covers above are examples. They're kind of my drawing but fixed a bit and inked by someone who drew a lot better than I did. (The Pink Panther finished art was by Warren Tufts. If you know who that was, you're very impressed right now.)
I was never as serious about my drawing as I was about my writing, in part because I recognized that whatever ability I had as a writer was greater than whatever ability I had as an artist. Drawing for me was like another interest I had: Magic. I knew a lot about both and I could do both well enough to impress the easily-impressed…but only them. I could be the best cartoonist or magician in any room where nobody else was a cartoonist or a magician. Obviously, as I got more and more into the comic book industry (or after I became a member of the Magic Castle), I was rarely in such rooms.
But during the time I worked for Gold Key, I always seemed to have a girl friend who'd take me to her friends' parties and introduce me around as the guy who wrote and drew the Bugs Bunny comic books. I'd ask her to just say I wrote them and then the following conversation would ensue…
SHE: But you draw Bugs Bunny. You drew Bugs Bunny on the paper tablecloth at the restaurant last week.
ME: Yeah but that's a paper tablecloth. I don't really draw him in the comics.
SHE: Yes, you do. You showed me that issue with the cover you drew.
ME: And I explained to you that all I did was the rough sketch of that cover. Someone else — a real cartoonist — did the finished art.
SHE: Okay but the point is you drew Bugs Bunny on that cover. You showed me the sketch you did. It was a drawing of Bugs Bunny. I don't know why you don't just draw the finished comic books.
ME: Maybe it has something to do with me not being good enough…
SHE: Nonsense! You did that drawing of Bugs Bunny for my niece. She loved it!
ME: She's nine years old.
SHE: And how old are the kids who read those comic books?
ME: Oh, they're much older. They're like…ten or eleven.
SHE: You see what I mean?
And she'd go on introducing me as the guy who wrote and drew the Bugs Bunny comics. Depending on my mood, I might stop arguing the point, especially around people who couldn't grasp the concept that those might be two separate jobs. I'd say, "Yes, yes…I do the pictures. I make up the words in the 'bubbles.'" (Folks who don't know comics always call them "bubbles." Those of us who know better call them "word balloons.")
Or she might say I wrote and drew the Donald Duck comic books or the Goofy comic books. For some reason, any time at a party I was passed off as a Disney artist, someone would ask me if I would do a drawing for them of Donald and Daisy or Mickey and Minnie having sex. No one ever wanted a dirty picture of Porky Pig and Petunia getting it on but there was some repressed sexuality attached to the Disney characters.
I did no such drawings of Disney Ducks for anyone, partly because I had integrity and respect for those characters…and partly because I didn't draw well enough to put them into those poses.
I'm sure I could have been better at drawing — and also at magic — had I practiced and studied a lot more than I did. But as much as I enjoyed those two areas, I enjoyed writing ten — no, make that twenty times as much and I also seemed to have more of a flair for it. I don't think I could ever have gotten good enough at drawing or magic to make even a low-grade income at either, nor did I ever wish for either profession.
The last few years, it has come to my attention that my drawing, which was never great, has gotten a whole lot less great. In fact, it's gotten so bad that I can't do much more than draw Bugs Bunny on paper tablecloths.
It's not just that I'm out of practice. It's that all these years of working on a computer and not using a pen or pencil has caused my manual skills with a writing implement to deteriorate. My lettering used to be good enough that I could design cover logos, do lettering corrections and occasionally even letter a story. Now, I can't and a touch of arthritis has furthered degraded both skills.
Does this bother me? A little but only a little — and the decline of my lettering skills bothers me more than the worsened drawing. Lettering was more useful to me and I was a better letterer than I was an artist.
As I get older, there are lots of things I can't do as well as I once did. I've learned you can't stop that. You have to accept your new limitations and focus on those things you can do as well as you used to. If you're fortunate, there are one or two you now do better than you did then.
You can even rejoice in the fact that less is expected of you in some areas as you get older. I was a terrible dancer when I was young. I'm a terrible dancer now but when you pass the age of 60, people stop expecting anything else. If and when I hit 80, I'll probably be just as terrible a dancer as I was when I was 18 but by then, it'll be kind of impressive.