Today we have a previously unpublished interview with the late Dick Ayers.
AYERS: I came out of the war, and I was going to art career school on 23rd Street, I think it was. It was the first skyscraper! There was 23 floors, on which the last floor … You took the elevator, it only went 22 stories. [Clancy laughs.] Then you walked up the last, and you got to the school. Now, it wasn’t till many years later when somebody — when I was at a show — he spoke to me, and said” “Oh, that’s nice. You get paid for doing that. Doing those drawings on airplanes.” [Casey laughs.]
I got a kick out of that, because it’s really a nice, modern building now. So that went along and it was mostly doing commercial drawings, which I wanted to do: but I kept hoping I would find somebody that would get me more into the comic strip line — for which, it turned out, I realized, there WAS none! Nobody was teaching how to write and draw comic-book stories. I read a poster on a subway wall, and Burne Hogarth was starting a school. It was the beginning of the School of Visual Arts.
I was about a month late. The school had already started in September, and I was about October. I got to be interviewed by Burne, which made me just thrilled! He was my big idol at that time! We got going, and he said something to the effect that, “Your samples have only comic book art. There’s much more to it than that.”
I said, “Yeah, but I don’t like the idea of drawing the same character week in and week out. I’d like to have it so I do a cowboy this week, and a soldier the next week, and like that.” He admired that.
He started a course in writing that started me learning to write, which I’d never touched before, the schematics of doing the story and writing it. It came along fine. We did great, and I think I was the first student in his school to get work at it.
As I’m going into my class for about the first evening, there’s a fellow and on his notebook is “Bache.” Bache is MY middle name. So that made me stop and talk to him. I got more interested, and then I found out he worked for Joe Shuster right nearby, and then would go to the school there, too … which is what I did for quite some time. I penciled Funnyman.
Elsewhere:
Ooooh, new Julia Gforer. I'm a believer.
Sorta comics, but not really, but still... the original Disneyland prospectus.
More new Benjamin Marra is always good news.
I like this comic about a house.
Love this newspaper clipping about legendary comics publisher "Busy" Arnold.
Definitely not comics, but incredibly awesome: Takeshi Murata's (comics readers can see his work in Kramers Ergot 8) stunning sculpture, which debuted a week ago at Frieze.
