My own, personal renaissance

My first years as a newspaper graphic artist were downright magical

Last week, a few days after my birthday, Glenn Fleischmann interviewed me for his upcoming book "How Comics Were Made: A Visual History of Printing Cartoons." Having just completed another successful trip around the sun, I was already in the mood to reminisce. But as we talked, I was amazed by what I was saying as it was coming out of my mouth. Struggling to push nascent technology to its limits, I developed a process for creating images that was, by today’s standards, bizarre.

I entered newspapers just as the effect of USA Today was being felt by broadsheets across the country. Newspapers were scrambling to incorporate color, which meant an increased emphasis on visuals. At the same time, Macintosh computers were revolutionizing how those images were being made. In those days, my trusty steed was a Quadra. With a 400 MB hard drive and 4 glorious megabytes of RAM, it was heaven on Earth.

Dark Ages

In the early 90s, there was a problem with trying to get traditional illustrations into the newspaper. Sure, we could scan a watercolor or a colored-pencil drawing, but we didn't have the technology to prepare those scans for four-color reproduction properly. That resulted in muddy images like this.

Sure, muddy could be great for moody topics...

But it fell short of the mark in doing justice to a young, vivacious Dr. Ruth Westheimer...

My Renaissance

So I got this bright idea. Using a vector application called Aldus Freehand(!) I started drawing with my mouse. (The concept of drawing with a stylus on a glass screen was quite a few years in the offing.) And to get that thick-and-thin line that I loved so much, I had a process. I would draw a shape and fill it with black. Then, in front of that, I would draw the same shape — but slightly smaller. The fluctuation of the foreground shape against the black background resulted in the illusion of a thick and thin line!

All I had to do was draw each shape twice.

Slightly different each time.

With a mouse.

It was a wrist-wrecking undertaking, but the line's sharpness and the color's crispness were dazzling to me!

I sat in the graphics department, grinding out these illustrations for hours on end. Every department in the newsroom wanted a Guigar illustration, whether it was breaking news...

Special reports...

The features department loved me. I was the perfect fit for lifestyle stories...

No job was too big, and no job was too small...

It was a time of constant experimentation and discovery! Excitement abounded. My illustrations appeared in the paper so often that I bought an out-of-town subscription for my parents in Michigan! It was shipped to them daily. When I went up to visit, I would see massive piles of the newspapers stacked in the mudroom, still sealed in their little plastic shipping baggies.

OK… it was exciting to me, anyway.

I was only at The Repository for about five years. After that, I landed a job in nearby Akron, where I made nearly as much money working part-time as I made in Canton working full-time. I would have been happy to stay in Canton, but when I asked management to match the wages Akron was offering, I was told that the request was tantamount to blackmail. So I moved to Akron. I was promoted to full-time within a couple of months, and it was just after I was passed over for a promotion there that The Philadelphia Daily News made me an offer I couldn't refuse. Literally.

Along the way, technology caught up, and my mouse-based double-drawing process was retired for good. But man, oh man... it was sure fun while it lasted.

By the way, if you've never heard me tell the story about how I basically conned my way into a job at The Repository, it's worth watching.