Good bye, Cartoons

By Mortz Ortigoza 

 I just saw an ugly public official with big lips, protruding upper teeth, flat nose, big eye glasses, fat belly, and crumpled dress. Those downsides could be exaggerated on a cartoon to attract readers and amused them. But, hikbi, er, sigh, beginning tonight, a Sunday,  I’ll no longer draw an illustration for our weekly newspaper's Northern Watch .

My 26 cartoons in a row.

The editor-in-chief asked me and writers to add another news article to spike the number of our news for our weekly publication. Since I drew the political caricature for our editorial because the real cartoonist left, I told her I’ll no longer make illustration since it would add more man hours for my work as columnist  and  a daily radio commentator.

For a stint of six months and two weeks, I’ve been passionately drawing cartoons. Drawing, son of a gun, was my childhood past time!

I got the ire of my elementary and high school teachers then because when they became a bore with their teaching, I sketched at my notebooks and my parents reprimanded me when most of these teachers reported my actuation to them.

"Beside, notebooks are expensive you just don't draw on them," my mother angrily told me and that was in the late 1970s and early 1980s where  cheap notebooks from China ay hinde pa ata uso.

Since elementary grades the illustrations of Ranan Lurie of Newsweek’s and Norman Rockwell of the Saturday Evening Post influenced my hunger to draw. Thanks to the stacks of those magazines preserved until now by my father in our house when he was in the military service.

 Ranan Lurie's cartoon. Lurie was the illustrator of U.S magazine's Newsweek. He influenced' my zeal to draw since my elementary grades.

But  making caricature was not a breeze, even one is adroit  in sketching on a piece of white paper, illustration making entails in-depth understanding of the political situation through elaborate everyday reading of newspaper and news magazine.

Bye-bye cartooning works, I’ll be missing you! 
But modesty aside, I showed to all and sundry that I could draw and be at the leagues of professionals in the country ha ha ha, that's according to friends teh-heh and sanamagan I was not even a professional cartoonist, puwedi nagbubuhat ng cartoons na empty sa bodega namin noong may store pa kami.

Cartoons, sigh, you ain’t blame me if I stop workin’ unless somebody there wants my skill for a fee and not for free, teh-heh!.

Norman Rockwell's painting for the Saturday Evening Post. I had a painting
canvass of this art done by my friend Danny Oligario when we were working
at the Philippine Military Academy in the late 1980s.
Danny, a professional painter, taught me how to draw using charcoal.

(You can read my selected columns at http://mortzortigoza.blogspot.com and articles at Pangasinan News Aro. You can send comments too at totomortz@yahoo.com)