 But I was also a big mouth, I started to develop a troubled relationship with Harry Shorten. |
| If I had one quality that really ruined me and at the same time helped me, it was the fact that I never stopped looking, and by that time I was really working at it. |
| I was hired as a penciler. |
| I was not too smart and constantly mouthed off and didn't know anything. |
| Most of us came out of Popeye, so turning Popeye into something believable was tricky enough. |
| All of the penciling was consistently done by one person and the inking was whoever could finish on time. |
| Then the war became a real problem and along with other shortages, they started to have paper problems. |
| Everything was sensory and I never saw the structure in anything. |
| It was exactly an assembly line. You could look into infinity down these rows of drawing tables. |
| Comics were going down for the second time and here, all of a sudden, came this thing and for the next fifteen years, romance comics were about the top sellers in the field; they outsold everything. |
| I just saw the emotion in everything, so I got to feel everything that was going on and that I was viewing, but I couldn't think in terms of structure, which is the whole point of deep focus. |
| But generally speaking, people weren't fired, art jobs were very hard to get, so something really calamitous had to happen to a person who was working there in order for you to find a space. |
| DC used to print up all of their pages, they were the only company that did it. |
| Precision is not one of the qualities that comes out in my work. |
| I was hired to do as many Boy Commando, Newsboy Legion, and Sandman stories as I could. |
| In other words, DC was never harmed by the paper shortages. |
| First of all there was a guy named Charles Nicholas, who used to do all of the inking that Jack and Simon didn't do. Simon used to do splashes and covers, but Charles Nicholas, after a while, did the inside of all of the stuff. |
| I think the lack of precision and deep focus is why it took me years to build up my work. |
| Coming into the business, you'd pass through these little agencies until you got to understand what was happening in the business, unless you were really able to have a style strong enough to go directly to the publishers. |
