Cartoons should provoke thought

By Carl Heintze

When I was about 14 I decided I wanted to be a cartoonist. This happened because one of my friends had a book on cartooning. It looked easy. So I bought the same book and we both drew cartoons.

In fact we each drew a book of cartoons. Cartoon books were big in those days and I suppose we thought we could become as rich and famous as Milt Caniff, who drew Terry and the Pirates, or the creator of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. So we began drawing cartoons and showing them to each other to admire.

We never got a larger audience, but we had a lot of fun with our hobby. My strip was called, not very imaginatively, Jack Speed: Life in the Future.

Jack was a cool guy with a moustache, and most of the strip (which only had one edition) had to do with the invasion of aliens from outer space intent on finishing off earth. (Shades of Star Wars and Star Trek.)

Of course, Jack and his loyal crew of space buddies finished off the invaders. I can't remember now what the aliens were called, but they weren't Klingons.

Remember, though, this was in the days just before World War II when enemies were abroad. War seemed just around the corner--as, indeed, it was.

There was nothing very original in the characters or the plot, but my friend and I had a lot of fun drawing our version of spacecraft, not unlike the spaceships we had seen in Saturday serials at the Uptown Theater (which was really downtown). Both Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon also were still in the Sunday papers so we had that to fall back on, too. (And we did.)

Well, needless to say, Jack Speed never challenged either Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers, but it also never curbed my enthusiasm for trying to draw an occasional cartoon.

I made cartoons on greeting cards to send to friends. They must have made some kind of impression on them because they saved these handmade messages and years later sent them back to me to remind me of the good old days and our friendship. Or, at least I think that's why they sent them back.

Now and then I still pick up a pen in the hopes that something like the aura that inspired Bill Mauldin, my favorite cartoonist (just before the late Charles Schulz) would inspire me. Mauldin, however, went to art school, and it shows in his work, much of which made World War II funny.

Sparky Schulz managed to draw about at my speed, but with greater simplicity. His wonderful contribution was his ability to endow his inanimate characters with real personality and philosophic power. I don't know how he did it. I'm not sure he knew how he did, but it certainly worked.

I know I'll never be the artist that Mauldin was, nor do I have the intellectual equipment which blessed Mr. Schulz. I'll never be a threat to Steven DeCinzo, who I think is a real draftsman, but who seems to have the ability to enrage some of his viewers. They seem not to realize that a cartoon is meant to satirize, to exaggerate, to make a point very powerfully. Cartoons are neither kind nor fair. But they aren't supposed to be. They're supposed to make you react.

At their best, they make you see the argument about some social or political problem with a new perspective. At their least, they ought to be amusing.

It's hard to stay between these two extremes day after day and I know I couldn't sustain it. I also know I just don't have the artistic skill to compete with those who do. Charlie Schulzes come along only once a century or so.

Bill Mauldins need a war to sharpen their skills. I don't want to be in another war and I think it is too late to go to art school. So I guess I'll have to settle for words rather than pictures.

But, I do offer you one cartoon. In case you don't recognize it, in case my draftsmanship leaves something to be desired, that's me. That's me drawn by me.

Not bad, eh?