AMA — "Did you have a fallback career in mind?"

Q.: If you hadn't become a cartoonist/artist, did you have a fallback career in mind?

This is a wonderful question. In terms of cartooning in general: No, I never had a fallback career. Being a cartoonist was my One Thing. It’s the only thing I wanted to do — for as long as I can remember. The dream took many forms as I grew up — comic strips, comic books, political cartoons, etc. But being a cartoonist was my only goal in life.

In fact, my 20-year career in newspapers was based on a strategy to become a professional cartoonist. Bill Day, a political cartoonist for The Detroit Free Press at the time, visited my senior thesis show at Alma College, (photos below) and I took him to dinner to pick his brain.

That evening, he gave me advice that changed my life. He told me to get a job as a newspaper graphic artist — in the newsroom — and submit my comics separately. I got a good job at a mid-sized daily newspaper — The (Canton, Ohio) Repository, and I submitted political cartoons that I worked on at home. My newspaper career paid the bills for the next two decades while I honed my craft as a cartoonist.

There was only one point in my life that cartooning took a back seat. It was the late 90s, and my newspaper career was doing so well that I nearly forgot about cartooning entirely. I had been head-hunted away from Ohio to work at the Philadelphia Daily News, and now I was going to be given a big promotion — a leadership position. I was going to change how newspapers communicated information visually. (And I had a plan to do it.) If that would have happened, I would have probably thrown everything into newspaper graphics and forgotten about comics entirely.

I was given the promotion informally on Friday, as I was leaving work. On Monday, my boss met me in the parking lot to tell me that a higher-up had nixed my promotion because they had someone else in mind — someone they were bringing in from outside the company.

The very next week, I dusted off an old syndicate submission that I had been puttering around with and started posting it on the Internet. It was called Greystone Inn, and when I had posted the nine-week submission on my own website, I started working on Week Ten. And then Week Eleven. I would go on to post a daily comic strip — with no pauses — for the next four-and-a-half years.

I did quiet quitting long before it was a hashtag.

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