Hi all,

A dozen or more of us were standing in line in the football field, and it wasn’t even the field at our High School. Tomorrow would be graduation day, and today is rehearsal.

Before we could get into the rehearsal line, some of us had to get into this smaller line that slowly moved and approached a corkboard standing off to the side of the field with several pages pinned to it. Each of us came up to it and searched for our names.

The girl in front of me, and myself, were desperate to find where our names appeared on this board. Because, only then, would we find out if we were graduating high school or not.

As I’ve told you, I struggled through school. All my classes effected by my struggle to read. Each year was better, but it was still hard. When an assignment called me to read chapter 6, 7, and 8, of a science book, or literature tome, the more pages I had to get through the harder it got.

There were classes I wanted to enjoy, but even those were hard.

And yet…

The girl was happy to see that her name was on the graduation listed on the board before us, and then turned and headed over to the rehearsal.

I stepped up to the board and began searching for my name. There were a lot of people graduating tomorrow, where was my name in the list. You’d think it would be alphabetical…
Where is it, where is my name. Either on the graduation list, or the list of people that would be redoing our Senior Year.

And there it was…

I was on the graduation list. Just barely, but I was there. Praise God.

Tomorrow I would be graduating and next year I would be starting at our local community college.

Other than my comic books, I didn’t want to have anything to do with books all through summer.

It would be at this community college that would change everything and save me multiple times.

My focus in those first two years of college were to be on what I had been dreaming about since childhood, to become a comic book artist.

Of course, there was all those General Ed classes that had to be taken as well, that’s where a lot of my struggle would be. The most undesirable reading possible.

It would be taking art classes during this time that got me through it all. Taking an Illustration class was good, but a secondary class taught by the same teacher was even better: Cartooning.

Not only did we learn how to draw caricatures, and cartoon strips, but we also studied the newspaper comics from long ago. From the time periods from before my comic book super heroes came into existence. The study of that art meant a lot to me.

On top of that, as we worked on our assignments in class, the teacher brought back an old friend of mine. Old Time Radio – of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, that I already knew so well. The comedy shows, the mysteries, and the adventures. All told in the theater of sound and imagination played as we drew our art and cartoons.

Classes like this would certainly keep me on the path that I had set for myself so many years earlier and it made me so happy.

While taking more art classes, I also took writing courses to improve my story telling abilities. At the start of one semester, I was taking a class on how to sell my writing. The first thing we all had to do was introduce our selves and describe what our goals were for the class. I told them about my desire as an artist to work in comics. Suddenly the teacher got excited and dragged me down the hall to where she was the Faculty Advisor for the school newspaper. They were in desperate need of a cartoonist.

Becoming part of the school newspaper lifted me up so high; not only was I regularly doing cartoons and illustrations, but I also began to write for it. I wrote for every page, Editorial, News, Entertainment, and Feature. The only page I didn’t write for was Sports. I was never good at Sporting the Sport anyway.

I stayed on that community college newspaper even after I graduated and moved on to the local university. It would save my grade point average while I struggled with all the new classes.

I struggled even further in many of the classes at the University while I couldn’t find the right classes I needed for my goals. I finally arranged to have an appointment with a councilor in the art department. The simple question I had for him is “What classes do I need to take to work in comic books?”

The answer I received was “Well, take my illustration class.”

That was it. I would have done that on my own without his suggestion if I thought it would be helpful. His ‘counseling’ wasn’t helpful at all.

In my heart I knew what was going to happen next. I was going to drop out of school. I knew I couldn’t keep going, and the school wasn’t being helpful to anything I wanted. It hurt a lot.

I left the councilor’s office with these terrible thoughts in my mind and walked down a dark hall between class rooms that hadn’t done anything for me. I’d like to think I was praying to God for guidance as I did, but my heart wasn’t in it. Even so, God had already made a path for me…

Half way down that dark hall way there was class going on and outside the open door was a display window with examples of what the students in the classes are working on…

In that window were artwork pinned up black and white ink drawings of figures, and next to them were three or four comic book pages.

COMIC BOOK PAGES!!

Comics, the very things that I wanted to be doing, the one thing I wanted to learn draw while at this University. The one thing that the Councilor couldn’t tell me how to do. How did he not know that there was a class in the very building his office was in that was teaching comic book artwork?

I was suddenly lifted up out of the darkness, things were not lost yet.

I met with the teacher, and he knew at once what I was after and what I needed. Because he was taking a sabbatical, I would have to wait another semester before I could start his classes, so he recommended ones to take while I waited. As I took those classes I went back to the newspaper to keep my grades up and do more illustrations, cartooning, and writing.

This art teacher was everything that I needed. Not only did have figure drawing course, but also a class that focused on heads and hands. These classes included painting, focusing on the figure and how to paint portraits. I would get so much out of these classes.

The Special Studies Course which had those comic book pages up in the display window, was so much more. Not only were there comics, but training in story boards for animation and movies, background matte paintings, and so much more. I renamed the class “Narrative Illustration”, but even that didn’t hold all that was in it.

There were still classes I was struggling with, but with the newspaper and this Special Studies Course I was able to pull myself out of the worst of it and found more opportunities to enjoy reading, even in school.

I found that there was an actual Science Fiction as Literature class.
Though at my reading rate I wouldn’t be able to complete all the required books in one semester, but it was still great.

Graduating from the University was so much greater for me than what High School was like.

Now I could turn toward the world and see what God has prepared me for.