ABSTRACT
I was the first person in my family to finish school and I did well, so I got into law school. This was a very big deal for us, so I was prevailed upon to follow through. But it was awful. Awful! So, I snuck off and became a political cartoonist. I published hundreds of works, my first when I was 18, but I stopped well before I was 30. My cartoons were not really funny; they had word play and inversion and bitterness hidden under cuteness. One of my best works of that period was an image of a claustrophobic room that I used to draw a lot. In the room was a big square man holding up a little tiny woman with the text, ‘How can I protect you if you don’t feel threatened?’ I was very influenced by George Grosz, Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz and Hannah Hoch and that crew of anti-fascist artists. I thought I could take those kinds of influences into the popular art of cartooning.
