Old, new again.



I came across this the other day - it’s at least 3 decades old if you can believe it. Dog-eared and water marred it sat aside off in a corner of the basement among many unsorted and long forgotten papers. This was penciled and inked by a friend of mine and later I colored it with (I think) China markers. I am figuring this was drawn around ’75 or ’76 and that would make the guy who drew it 15 or 16 and me 16 or 17.

Don always kicked ass when it came to drawing. Even though he is a year younger than me (which was a chasm of time as a teenager) he was way ahead of me in ability. At 15, he managed through our art teacher, to wind up working as an in-betweener for Zander’s when they were located over on Madison Avenue around 40th St. It was a spectacular summer for him. Don could draw rings around me but, somehow all that early success never materialized into anything more.

Don tagged along when I went up to show samples at Warren and he tagged along when I went up to Marvel to show samples but, he never managed to get his foot in the door. Other things wound up taking his focus. He moved to California, went into the service for a couple of years and by the time he got out, drawing had fallen by the wayside. I’ve got a few of his drawings around here if I look for them. He always talked about getting back to his drawing and maybe even doing storyboarding but it makes me think about bike-riding.

I think about bike riding in the sense of when I was a teenager I would take these long, long bike rides taking me from the Bronx on a meandering path up to White Plains and back. I just loved getting out of the house and being away from the neighborhood. Last time I road a bike was awhile back and it wasn’t easy at all. The memory of the bike riding was still there as vivid as ever but the truth is I hadn’t exercised those muscles in a long, long time. Kind of how I think Don would be if he ever got back to drawing again.

Too bad really, because he was so very good.