The Origin Story

I was teaching kindergarten all day and going to graduate school all night, so it was only a matter of time until this happened.

I hadn’t sold a cartoon to The New Yorker yet, Facebook was my only social media outlet, and I was bored in class. Simpler times. (Class was probably interesting, by the way, but interesting doesn’t keep me from being bored. Stop reading if you agree.) So I was doodling.

And my stick figure was born. I’m not the first person to draw a stick figure, and I won’t be the last, but this stick figure is one-of-a-kind. (It’s the inside that counts.) There are usually one or two stick figures, and they are best friends. They also don’t understand each other. They are also both me.

For some reason, this guy got traction. Not a lot of traction, but enough to make me keep going. Scott McCloud, in Understanding Comics¹, explores the idea that the more abstract a character, (e.g. a stick figure) the more readers can relate to and identify with them. I believe this is true. I also believe that a stick figure is easier to draw without getting caught by the professor in a graduate school class where one is supposed to be an adult and take things seriously. Going into debt, for example, is quite serious.

But these two. Come on.

I snapped quick photos of them during class breaks. They were blurry, grainy, and drawn on lined paper. They were fourth-gradeish², back-of-the-classroom, doodled up drawings that mined the shallow shoals of my inner depths. But this was before therapy for me, so really, I was ahead of the game.

As I drew, I expanded my boundaries. Have I ever done acid? No. Do Frog and Toad make me feel like I should? Yes.

The most challenging part of drawing during class with pen and paper was that there was no going back. No editing, no erasing, and no second-guessing. I had to tell the story as I went. And I took my time. I made a meal out of it. I spent a whole class, between taking notes and raising my hand to rock that participation grade, thinking of each next panel. It was a formidable moment in my cartooning career.

But of course, I always kept each cartoon grounded in reality.

If there is a takeaway here, it’s this.

You never know where life will take you. You never know what future storm you might cause with a flap of your proverbial wings. You never know if being lazy and drawing the simplest thing you can think of might be the best thing you ever did. You also never know what tiny doodle might bring joy to someone else.

So here's to playing the long game!

Thanks for reading,

-Steinberg

1. McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics : the Invisible Art. New York :HarperPerennial, 1994.

2. Ask me about Man in the Can