Part 1: Background Noise

Please forgive this self-indulgence, but I feel it's time I explained a bit about who I am and why I do the things I do. Yes, this will contain hundreds of those selfish words such as "I", "me", "my", and so forth, but for the most part I'll be focusing on things that have influenced my art and provide some context to the work I produce and which you are familiar with. Maybe if you choose to read this you'll be able to see my products in a new light. Maybe you'll even see part of yourself in this. There will be tangents, but please keep in mind this is not intended to be venting or baring my soul; it's just an explanation, plain and simple.

If you aren't already bored to tears, I'll begin.

I was raised on television. I lived in a small town with nearly no other children my age to play with in walking distance. This probably didn't matter much anyways, as I was forbidden from leaving the yard without adult supervision under any circumstances. The other children I knew were all walking and riding their bikes to friends' houses and the park, while all my transportation was limited to riding in cars at predetermined times.

Since this was back in the late eighties and early nineties, rather than today, I was the odd one out. Rarely did it seem anyone in my family was available to play with, and I was never a big fan of reading fiction, so I mostly drew and let the TV live my life for me. Sometimes, this was a positive. I'm ready to give Sesame Street and other PBS programs due credit for enabling my early understanding of the English language, and without their assistance I doubt I would have been reading books aloud to astonished family members at the age of two. So TV was a good thing, but I don't have to tell you what they say about too much of a good thing.

As a child, I assumed it was only natural that cartoons were a centerpiece of my viewing rituals. I am now aware that every person has different tastes, and during these formative years I really didn't know that many of my classmates' favorite programs were sports, live-action comedies, or even not watching television at all. Many of today's children are probably being brought up on American Idol and Survivor, so why does the idea that cartoons are exclusively for children remain such a popular myth? Who do these people think makes cartoons anyhow?

I read (or heard, I forget which) something once about Sigmund Freud that struck a chord with me. I won't get too graphic, but it boiled down to the idea that the first thing that arouses a male in his life becomes that person's fetish. As I have not studied Freud's theories in any great capacity and have no way of proving them or disproving them, I take this notion at my own risk, but it feels about right so I'm not too worried over it. I was too young to know much of anything of a sexual nature at that age, though I was always a skeptic at heart. The stories about storks and other nonsense flowed in one ear and out the other. I may have known where babies didn't come from, but certainly not the facts. All I really knew about sex was it had something to do with a male, a female, and a lack of clothing.

However, none of this was happening in the real world. It was all taking place inside my head, a place where characters in books had to be replaced with familiar cartoon personalities in order to stave off boredom-induced comas. There were never any grand illusions about the line between reality and fantasy (once I did try to mail myself to Pluto, though I attribute this to lack of knowledge in basic science and astronomy), but I didn't let this prevent me from allowing the cartoon world in my imagination to flourish. This fictitious world of clean lines and vivid colors was so much easier to understand and much more entertaining. How could I help but prefer to ground my mind there instead of here?

I was still ignorant at that age, but I did feel sexual urges, it's plain as day in retrospect. There were certain characters in cartoons that I had crushes on. I knew that I could never meet or develop realtionships with them, so I set out at a very early age to do the next best thing, and instead chased after real girls. There was really nothing more to this than "puppy love", and I didn't ever think through what my intentions were, but I was about seven or eight when I became the first kid in my grade to have a "girlfriend", and probably the first to share a kiss on the lips (though my girlfriend's participation would have made it a tie, rather than a runaway first-place victory). Shockingly, this relationship did not last, and simply faded into the backgrounds of our respective lives rather than end messily. Give us a break, it was only second grade.

Today it's obvious that this just wasn't for me, at any age. It would be wrong to try to develop a relationship with another person I didn't feel a connection with simply to fulfill a desire to fit in or to substitute for a cartoon. People deserve to be treated like people in their own right, not as a vessel for living out my own selfishness. Still, I was lost in my cartoon world, trying to understand what sex was, and why I felt such strong attractions to cartoon characters but not flesh-and-blood humans.

When the tipping point was, I can't possibly remember, but I felt very excited and emotionally uplifted whenever something in a cartoon show involved underwear or a character being partially unclothed: his pants falling down, for example. Since much humor is rooted in discomfort of others, the joke here was that the subject would be embarrassed and turn red due to his underpants being exposed. Why did these particular gags make me feel so strangely happy? Perhaps because this was as close as I came to the idea of sex as it existed in my little world. There was certainly no nudity on television then (on anything I watched, at least), so this was it. Underwear equals sex. What I didn't understand was why it only seemed to be male characters whose underpants were seen. Why almost no females?

Females' underwear was, in actuality, a very common phenomenon in the early days of animation! Mickey Mouse's longtime companion Minnie seemed to be involved in at least one underwear-related gag in each of the black and white cartoons of the late 1920's and early 1930's, or rather the ones she appeared in. It was almost as if Walt Disney had a very strong underwear fetish as well which he chose to manifest in his art. Minnie's panties would be used to grab ahold of her, employed as a makeshift parachute, and sometimes even drop to her ankles. We all know Disney was a great success even way back when, so it's not surprising that many of his contemporaries began not only copying his style (look up Warner Bros.' "Foxy" cartoons, "Aesop's Fables", "Toby the Pup", and "Flip the Frog" for starters) but also his tendency to use women's underwear gratuitously. Betty Boop became famous for unnecessary panty-flashes before the Hayes Code stepped in to clean up entertainment. Suddenly, women's undergarments were considered too sexy for animation. Again, we face the stigma that all animation "is for kids".

So, I didn't even know what women's underpants really looked like. The few times I was able to see them in cartoons, like when a dress was torn off or lifted, they were oversized, baggy shorts gathered at the knees. These were bloomers, and though I had my suspicions that women didn't still wear them, they eventually took their place at the center of my underwear fascination. I assume now that bloomers, and large boxer shorts, were not considered "sexy" by censors as they were not form-fitting. Thus they could be shown in cartoons without fear of reprisal from the FCC. That which most others thought of as "unsexy" became sexy, because it was all I had.

Since I was ten or so, I felt the need to become involved in cartoons as participant rather than just spectator. It took a long time to hone my craft, and appearances of undergarments were few. It wouldn't really be until I became influenced by Japanese cartoons (covered in Part 2) that things I found sexy would begin to take a more of a role in my work. I am guessing this is in part due to how Japanese artists may not feel as confined as Western artists to purge their work of suggestive material. Luckily, by this time I had the internet and was now more comfortable with the knowledge that I wasn't the only person in the world who was attracted to cartoon characters.

That is the basis of what my cartoon repertoire is built on: a mixture of cartoon traditions and censorship akin to a Freudian jigsaw puzzle with half of the pieces absent. Visual stimuli have always been what motivated me most, even before I developed my current signature style. I'm very much content with cartoons and just looking at two-dimensional images, with the rest of the world sitting by the wayside like an ignored television set, only left turned on to provide background noise.