Although I had been drawing from the moment I discovered my opposable thumb, I never took an art course until college. My parents had bought me a John Gnagy drawing set when I was ten, but I was more interested in telling stories with words and sequential art.

I had creative outlets in high school, but I was on a "college prep" track. The conventional wisdom of the time decreed that the mimeograph comics I was writing and drawing for my friend's fanzine were not to be taken seriously, careerwise. I wasn't too sure about the art classes my high school offered; my younger brother Pete had made ceramic toilet hash pipe (with a lid that opened) in art class. When I got to college, I looked forward to my first formal drawing class, where I began unlearning all the bad habits I had been practicing for the previous sixteen years.

After two years of college and two years of military service, it was three years at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, paid for by the G.I. bill. I had wanted to be an illustrator - mainly for comic books - but the V.A. decreed that I must take the Advertising Art course; it offered a better chance of employment. They were right, it turned out. It did lead a long and rewarding career.

A few weeks before I graduated art school, I sold my first batch of illustrations to a clip art company, and so became a professional artist. The first person I called to share this with was the artist Steve Ditko. My relatives were happy for me, of course, but I figured that - of everyone I knew - he would be the one person who could best appreciate my accomplishment. We knew each other very, very slightly. I used to call him once a year, just to say hello. He was always friendly and encouraging in a slightly stand-offish way, but it was very clear from the joy in his voice that the man loved what he was doing.

At any rate, I spent a year doing freelance and consulting before winding up in the art group of the Technical Publications department of a computer company. I spent seven years there, learning my trade and honing my skills. Aside from the mundane tasks of pasting-up manuals and drawing flow charts, there were posters, brochures and pamphlets to be designed, photos to be retouched with the airbrush, slides and view graphs to be generated, not to mention the occasional caricature, and once - and only once - a comic book.

I realized early on that the most effective graphic designs were the simplest. If a line or element didn't serve a purpose, it didn't belong. I saved very little from those days; one thing that has survived was a pamphlet for a "third party" project - named "SUMMIT" - that we were doing with another company.

It was during that time that I really got to know that beguiling creature know as "the client". There's a quote from the Bible that sums up how most corporate people seemed to feel about their art department; "A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country."

The best example of this was an incident where Louella - an artist who had escaped from Communist Hungary, and worked in the art department - had just finished a beautiful pencil rendering of a B-52 taking off from an airfield. The client came to pick it up and said, I guess as a compliment, "That's beautiful! Almost professional."

Louella demonstrated great restraint, for a Type-A person. She could have clobbered this guy, and no jury of her peers would have convicted her.

Then, there was the executive secretary that came into the art room one day with a list of names for a conference.

"I need these for the program, typed up in chronological order."

Obviously, she had misspoken. "Are you sure you want them in chronological order?" I asked.

She seemed a bit annoyed with fact that I didn't understand her, or appreciate the importance of her office. She answered, "Of course! That's exactly the way I want them listed!"

I typed them up in alphabetical order, as she most likely really wanted them. But I was tempted to call every person on the list, find out their birthdays, and actually list them in chronological order.

Occasionally, the editors in our department could be bothersome, especially in the era before desktop publishing. In the final stages of the publishing process, any changes or corrections to the text of the manuals had to be made on the masters themselves by the artists. Sometimes, this was transposing two words in a sentence or two letters in a word. It could also mean re-paging a whole chapter. In an idle moment, I composed this poem:

The Editor

There's no more vicious predator,
Than the overzealous editor,
Who circumscribes your lines of verse,
And substitutes with something worse.

Who conjures up a grammar rule,
You haven't seen since grammar school,
Who strains your prose through countless sieves,
And badgers you with adjectives.

They have no use for art or sports,
Ignoring current news reports.
They get their joy correcting text,
And have no time for food or sex.

And at the end, this paragraph,
Will be their final epitaph;
"Here I am my life's completed
But I'm not dead - I'm just deleted."

The editors liked it - but it didn't stop them from decorating it with a gaggle of graffiti-like proofreader's marks as they corrected it. Some people just can't be helped.

It was a time of change. In a few years, computers would quickly turn the whole commercial art world topsy-turvy. Some people would be put out of work; others would quit and turn to teaching. But there were those of us who embraced the new technology, realizing that the computer was simply a new tool. The camera and the airbrush had been looked upon the same way, once upon a time. The computer - and , in turn, the internet - would turn out to be the artist's friend. Artists were needed for web pages. Painters would soon sell their canvasses on E-Bay.