Beginning in 1984, when I dropped out of high-school in my senior year, and up to when I dropped out of college (you can see a pattern developing here) after earning a 24-Hour Equivalency GED @ SUNY O.C.C., my cartoons had begun to appear in an eclectic variety of publications. The first would have been "Meadowbook" - Nottingham high-school's annual art/lit anthology, and then reaching a high point in 1985 with runs in several alternative campus newspapers and niche publications equaling a combined circulation of around 55k.
The two-year Associates Degree I was enrolled in at SUNY was for "Graphic Art/Advertising Technology," featuring courses in Illustration, Design, Mechanical Color Separation, Preparation of Art for Repro, typography and the like. All with retro equipment that would become hopelessly obsolete within a couple years with the advent of computers, such as wax rollers for paste-up, rub-on lettering, Rubylith, Letraset tint sheets, stat cameras and the like. I also did the humor section layout for the campus paper "The Overview,” plus was a contributing editor 2x’s a semester for the art/lit supplement, and formed a Student Art Club ("Jump Into The SAC!"). Every once in a while I'd also do schoolwork.
Other rags included two underground papers for Syracuse University: “The Report” and “Point Blank,” plus a feature strip in the SUNY School of Environmental Forestry's paper “The Knothole.”
The following series of posts that will go up under the "Old School" topic all stem from around this time period.
My graphics arts classes were in that time too, I actually liked cutting rubylith. I was also learning that early Adobe layout program in the other art building at WWU. I miss the reality of old style offset printing.
ReplyDeleteYeah, being highly skilled with an X-acto blade is a marketable talent indeed...
ReplyDeleteAnd sometimes I still draw circles using my coffee mug instead of a computer.