This is the oldest photo I have of myself with Sergio Aragonés. I'm reasonably sure it was taken at the 1972 San Diego Comic-Con, which was called San Diego's West Coast Comic Convention and held at the El Cortez Hotel. I am not at all sure who took it and I have never been able to figure out why I have the negative to this photo among the strips of negatives I took at that convention. A logical assumption would be that whoever took it took it with my camera but in the photo, I'm holding my camera. There are some mysteries in this world that we can never solve and this is one of them.
I thought I'd repost it to give you some sense of how long I've known this man…and we weren't even new buddies then. Working backwards, I remember hanging out with Sergio at the July 4th 1970 Comic Art Convention in New York. A few days before, my pal Steve Sherman and I were wandering around Manhattan, just sightseeing and killing time before an appointment with Stan Lee. On the corner of 58th and Madison, we heard someone yelling "Mi amigos!" and across a very busy street, there was Sergio recognizing us! (I told this story in greater detail in my Conversation with Steve Sherman.)
So the point is that I knew him well enough for him to spot me in a crowd in late June of '70. We met when he was a guest speaker at my old comic book club in 1969. That's more than 51 years. During all that time, we have never had a serious argument…and the three or four unserious ones we've had have lasted an average of under two minutes each. Each ended with both of deciding the other guy was right.
Sergio is my Best Friend, at least in the Male Division…and I don't use the term "Best Friend" lightly. I know people who refer to every friend — even folks they see every three years — as their Best Friend. One guy I know has Best Friends he hasn't even met yet. Sergio is not that kind. He is a joy to know, a joy to work with, a joy to just be around.
In 2012 when I wrote a post like this with the same subject line to wish him a Happy Birthday, part of it went like this…
I've encountered one instance of someone who didn't like him…and the disliker almost admitted the reason that was obvious to all: Pure jealousy. He was envious of how popular Sergio was as both a creator of mirth-inducing sketches and as a human being who was fun to be around. That's about the only reason I can imagine for anyone to dislike my friend.
Since then, I've thought of one other person who didn't like Sergio and while the jealousy reason was probably part of it, his stated reason was this: Sergio does most of his inking with a fountain pen.
The fellow — I honestly do not recall his name — came to a few meetings in the seventies of C.A.P.S., the Comic Art Professional Society founded by Don Rico, Sergio and Yours Truly. We decided there oughta be a group where professionals in the fields of comics and cartooning could gather and discuss, among other topics, their craft.
Sergio began discussing how he'd found the perfect fountain pen with which to draw and how he had found a certain brand of permanent ink with which to fill it. Permanent ink would clog most pens but his worked great, especially since his was rarely not in motion and therefore didn't have time to sit idle and clog. The members of C.A.P.S. were fascinated by what Sergio had to say but this new gent was furious.
He took me aside and told me — and he even spoke in boldface for emphasis — that real cartoonists use pens and brushes dipped in a bottle of ink. He said this as if it was an immutable law found in the Ten Commandments somewhere between honoring thy father and thy mother, and not committing adultery. For emphasis, he repeated it a few times, also in boldface: pens and brushes dipped in a bottle of ink, pens and brushes dipped in a bottle of ink…
Sergio's work, he said, could not be real cartooning because it was not produced with pens and brushes dipped in a bottle of ink. He was angry that the art form he so loved was being polluted by people who did not understand that.
Sergio was not the main target of his ire. The main target was Garry Trudeau, whose Doonesbury was somehow being hailed as a real comic strip even though it was not done with pens and brushes dipped in a bottle of ink — or if it was, it didn't look like it was. To show me what a real comic strip looked like, the militant guy hauled out the original art to a newspaper strip he was shopping around.
He had about ten weeks of it — dailies and Sundays. They didn't look very well-drawn to me and the ones I read were supposed to be funny and weren't. But by God, there was no doubt they were drawn with pens and brushes dipped in a bottle of ink. He had no doubt whatsoever that syndicates would soon be fighting with chains and knives for the right to syndicate his work.
And of course, his strip never achieved syndication, I never saw the fellow again and you don't know who he is or was, either. Meanwhile, Sergio has every single award that is given in this world for cartooning. What can we learn from this?
Happy Birthday, my friend. May you live long enough to look back on this day and refer to it as when you were middle-aged.