Joe's AI-Generated Funnies!

This header image was AI-generated. Am I supposed to feel bad about that?
"You scribble."

This book changed my life.My older sister said those words to me when I was about four years old, and they had such an impact on my still-developing brain that I didn't draw or color anything for quite a while after that. Eventually, my concerned parents bought me a copy of I Can Draw It Myself (1970) by Dr. Seuss, which got me to pick up a crayon again. Very little has changed in the ensuing decades since the incident with my sister; I'm still hyper-sensitive to criticism and am liable to quit a project after receiving any negative feedback.
Dr. Seuss got me back into making art, and I was further inspired by Lee J. Ames' Draw 50 Famous Cartoons (1979), which I discovered at the Flint Public Library. Because of those books -- plus the influence of Mad, Cracked, and various DC and Marvel comics -- I became a compulsive doodler for decades, drawing on any piece of paper I got my hands on. Did I get any good at it? No, but I was having fun. As I've mentioned on this blog in the past, I started making homemade comics and sharing them with classmates in elementary school, and I continued doing so through junior and senior high. I trailed off a little in college, until I saw Crumb (1994), which made me want to draw again.
I used to spend hours and hours drawing. To this day, I have two thick binders of the sketches I've created over the years. They're still on a shelf in my closet now, taking up valuable real estate. But whenever I've shared my hand-drawn art with others, it tends to get one of two reactions: either total indifference or mild dislike. I think the low point of my experience as an artist was submitting a cartoon to a website and being told, straight up, that the art was not of professional quality. I call this a "low point" because the same website had recently published a cartoon that was simply a drawing of a triangle with a funny caption. That's what had emboldened me to submit one of my own drawings in the first place.
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