I’ve drawn ever since I was a little child, and I lived a lot of my life through making cartoons and telling my own stories. I started out with a love of “Peanuts.” I drew Charlie Browns and Snoopys. Then as I got older, I started drawing my own characters. I even wrote a letter to Charles Schulz when I was a young man, saying that I wanted his job when he died.
“Peanuts” was really a transformative comic strip for me, because it was the only comic strip where the main character is unhappy. There’s something very realistic about that, and I don’t think childhood is necessarily a very happy time, because there’s a lot of learning, a lot of stresses and what not; and so it was realistic, but it was very funny, and the drawings were just beautiful and simple. So, I read “Peanuts” left and right and dog-eared my copies.
