A Man and His Drawing Table

I can recall a time when the pleasure of sitting down at a table and drawing first entered into my being as a necessary component of my existence. When I became consciously aware of it, that is. For me, it all began with comic books. Around the year 1984, when I would have been nine or ten years old, I started buying comic books at the neighborhood drugstore in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. As was customary at that time, I accompanied my grandfather as he went out to replenish his supply of cigars-- he preferred the cheap variety, in this case Phillies Tips. While he was making his selection, I wandered over to a set of spinner racks that contained the comic books. My first memory was of the smell that was present. Although there was the usual aromatic melange that seemed to emanate collectively from the pharmacy, the candy aisle, and the tobacco aisle, this was something altogether different. As I approached the racks, removed a comic book, and opened its cover, I became aware of the object I was holding through the smell that in retrospect seemed to result from the interface of printing ink and newsprint. I was hooked.


What comic book it was that I first purchased on that day, does not matter for this digression, nor do the particulars of a childhood of reading comics. Rather, what began that day was what I can now identify as an appreciation for the drawn image. For it was not long after I leafed through those printed-on pages of newsprint, that I found myself retrieving some sheets of paper, along with pencils and pens, struck with a compulsion to engage in the same activity that must have yielded the images I so loved in those little stapled issues. At first I copied, then I embellished, and then I tried to remake and improve upon. Soon, I was inventing images altogether. There was an intense cluster of years in which I would devoutly give myself over to daily drawing sessions with various boyhood friends. The routine was always the same: a stack of freshly purchased comic books, sometimes accompanied by a Slurpee and a fistful of pretzel rods from the local 7-11, a binder or notebook with blank, lined paper, and a selection of ball-point and felt-tip pens-- we rarely drew in pencil in order to raise the stakes. And then, for several hours, we sat and we drew and we bantered. There was something about being stooped over a desk or a kitchen table and letting oneself get lost in the building up of lines on a sheet of paper, that induced the most wondrous states of mind. For me, that was play. While others were practicing for team sports, or even studying for school, I would find myself wandering into the thicket of imaginary minutiae of a different sort of world, that of purest individuality-- a realm of boundless invention with no fixed definition, in which one felt more freedom than having to obey the arbitrary dictates of social pressure. No, this was different than what school and sports had to offer. This was solitude. And there was freedom in this solitude. I knew it. My friends knew it. And it seemed that this was our way of keeping adulthood and all of its attendant responsibilities at bay.


I must confess, that for me this seems to still be the case. I don't want to intentionally summon forth the oft-abused notion of "never growing up," but there is a particle of truth to the idea that when I find myself in a chair, alone and stooped over a drawing table, at night, with a single light illuminating the brilliant surface of the drawing paper, surrounded by all manner of pens, pencils, brushes, ink bottles, erasers, rulers and notebooks, I am that boy choosing something different than what is being offered up outside of my window. Here, at this table, everything is quiet. Everything has its own beautiful reason, separate from the chaos at large. Drawing at my table, late into the night, when everyone seems to be asleep, I feel very much awake with each stroke of the pen. A kind of meditative envelope forms around such a private activity. I am sure that an artist working in any medium may experience this, writers not excluded. However for me, it is that magic combination of this medium and this space, in which thought is carried out through the infinite permutation of line. And it is a certain kind of line. A line that, although produced in solitude, could speak to many others when released from the drawing table. It is the same line I recall loving from those early comic book days. And even now, once again, there are the stacks of comic books surrounding my drawing space. It seems to be all coming back.


Since those boyhood days of drawing from comic books, I have often been overcome by poetic reverie whenever I have seen a photograph of a cartoonist or comic artist, sitting at his drawing table. Particularly in those photographs from a distant time, that allow me to conjure romanticized notions about the early cartoonists working in a cramped studio space in a newsroom or even in their own apartment in the big city, during the summer with sweltering heat and old electric fans working overtime alongside radios, and the sounds of city traffic below. Or even in the winter with clanging and hissing hot water heaters and still the radio. In many of the older photographs from the 1920's, 30's and even 40's, the cartoonists are seated at their table, drawing, and wearing a tie and jacket, often smoking a cigarette or a pipe. I think of them being in a room together, a group of cartoonists, "gag men" bouncing ideas off of one another, trying out fresh jokes. I think of the smell of tobacco, the smell of ink, the smell of paper. I think of the sound the pens make when they scratch into the surface of the paper or board. While gazing at these photos, I often strain to read the surface contents of each desk, to glean what kind of pens they were using, what, if any, reference materials, what they were working on...whatever I can find. Some artists have a deep affinity for seeing painters standing before canvases, or sculptors working with wood or stone, ceramicists with clay, or even printmakers relishing the activity surrounding a printing press. But for me, it will always be those images of cartoonists at their drawing tables, dreaming up entire worlds in those little sequences projected onto those flat sheets of paper with simple lines and washes. When I look at those photographs, I say to myself: "That's what I want to be when I grow up." And then I catch myself: "That's what I want to be when I don't want to grow up." A man at his drawing table.


Images: Will Eisner- The Spirit (Self Portrait), published May 3, 1942; Rube Goldberg; George Herriman (c. 1916); Chester Gould; Jack Kirby; Steve Ditko (c. 1955)