May 21, 2026

I loved Mad Magazine as a kid in the 70s. Mort Drucker was my favorite cartoonist. Then there were Jack Davis, Don Martin… I was also a huge fan of Al Hirschfeld and Pat Oliphant. And let’s not forget Charles Schulz!

Their drawings inspired me to draw!

In case you haven’t noticed, this is an all-male list. Unconsciously it sent me a strong message: only men do cartoons.

But I loved to draw goofy characters! Still, inside I believed I’d never really be a cartoonist like the men.

I was also enchanted by the old Disney films, and loved everything Bugs Bunny and his colleagues got up to. Again, with the exception of Mary Blair--whose existence I didn’t know about till decades later—these wonderful animations were created by men, in an overwhelmingly male field.

How strange, to love the very things that were closed off to me because of my sex! Looking back, I can see the ridiculously random nature of gender expectations back then. So many occupations were actively and unapologetically closed off to women.

Discouragement is a strange beast to have living inside you! You can look happy and goofy on the outside, but on the inside you’ve taken cultural norms to heart and constructed all sorts of self-limiting walls.

I assumed I’d never break into cartooning or animation as a career, however much I loved both. I continued to make drawings and sculptures to entertain family and friends, skewering and satirizing, exaggerating and distorting.

And more than once I was asked “Why are your characters so ugly?”
They were never ugly to me. And I doubt I would’ve been asked that question as a male.

I tried getting into children’s book illustration, because that’s what women did, it seemed. But my characters continued to be “ugly” and the field was very competitive and stringent.

Thankfully it was the men I met at different part-time jobs who encouraged me to try getting into animation. I didn’t believe I could, but they kept insisting. So I tried, and the timing couldn’t have been better: a punk studio named Klasky-Csupo happened to be hiring. There were women there! And they were hiring women as well as men!

I was still harboring the beast of Discouragement inside me, but little by little, my coworkers turned it into Encouragement. With their guidance and humor they helped me to gather external evidence that maybe, just maybe, I could be in animation.

And the same thing happened later, when I finally became a cartoonist. Gary Groth—another man!—said he loved what I was doing. I was floored.

So, given time, life reverses itself. Expectations and beliefs get flipped. You just have to wait long enough and keep trying.

If someone encourages you to be yourself, take them up on it! Your self is the only thing you can be, and it’s exactly what the world needs.