DOING IT
MICKEY SIPORIN
I grew up
in Chicago. My family was passionately involved in the arts and in politics. My father Seymour was a labor union organizer, my uncle Mitchell a well-known social realist painter and muralist, my aunt Shoshannah a talented modernist painter and my grandmother Jennie a primitive painter.
When I was four
and five I drew “stories” on multiple sheets of paper with one picture per page. A few of those relics from the mid-1940’s were saved. The ones that have survived are battle scenes from WWII usually starring Nazis prominently displaying swastikas or scenes of cowboys and Indians. The drawings appear to have been influenced by movies and newsreels as well as the comics. I even recall making sound effects as I drew, bombs exploding, gunshots, airplanes and horses. It was play. It was a child’s attempt to connect with the world. It was great fun.
A few years later
my brother Tom and I began to create comic books. 8 1/2” X 11” sheets of paper folded in half and illustrated in pencil and occasionally hand colored. We ostensibly did them for each other. I suppose it might have been a subliminal sibling competition, but mostly it was about doing it. It was fun. We read each other’s work. But for me, it was seeing the results of my efforts that was the joy. In the McCarthyite Cold War atmosphere of the late 1940’s my father’s politics were no longer tolerable in the labor movement and he was forced to look for work elsewhere.
My politically
progressive parents moved to the south side of Chicago where I was inadvertently presented with an inner city school education and the experience of growing up with and among African-Americans, many just arriving from the South. At the age of ten I was a living witness to the coming urban crisis of the 1960’s.
A little later,
in the early 1950’s, a neighborhood kid joined my brother and myself in our cartooning activity and the three of us were constantly creating comic books for this self-contained audience of three. The work was always intended to be funny or satirical and directly influenced by the newly published Mad comic books. Even if it was merely pencil on typing paper we were of the moment. We were in the world. During this time my mother Mary received a subpoena to appear before the House Un-American activities Committee. At her appearance she refused to cooperate and invoked the Fifth Amendment. Her photograph appeared in one of the Chicago daily newspapers on June 10, 1953 emerging from the United States Court House on Clark Street.
I drew a weekly
cartoon for my high school paper. At Southern Illinois University where I studied design and printmaking I did three cartoons a week. Anti-war themes and racial discrimination issues were on my mind in those years. Yet I was also interested in simply humorous or surrealist and on occasion existential subject matter. In 1961 I saw the French film “Last Year at Marienbad” and my passion for cartooning suddenly had a strong competitor. I decided I needed to learn to be a filmmaker. Film I decided was the uncharted art form of the moment. What amazing, stupendous fun it would be.
I decided to go
to UCLA to learn film. But quickly I realized that the university experience, mimicking Hollywood, wasn’t what I wanted and I quit. I felt that I could learn the craft as I envisioned it, on my own and away from a school setting.
While in Los Angeles I had become aware of a new alternative weekly newspaper The Los Angeles Free Press, a West Coast version of the Village Voice. I began to contribute my editorial work in 1964. I am still contributing to a similar weekly newspaper today The Westsider in New York City.
In 1967 I
moved to NYC. I had already made several short 16mm films, including a six minute parody of educational films entitled “How to Eat” (now in the permanent collection of the MoMA in NYC). I went on to make many more. They began as the equivalent of my early pencil “stories” and comics. At first I was technically inept. I didn’t consider myself “mechanical,” but I so desired to be a filmmaker that I stubbornly learned the craft. I was a natural editor. The camera felt natural in my hands. I set out learning how to do it, by doing it. I wrote, designed, shot, performed, edited, created soundtracks and made films for no client, no particular audience, I needed to do it. It was exciting. I made little or no money. Whatever I made would go into the next film. Playing with moving images and sound was amazing, stupendous fun.
I continued
to draw. The op-ed pages of the NY Times in 1971. The Village Voice, The Soho News. The National Lampoon bought a cartoon and didn’t publish it. I sold an idea to the New Yorker, and Whitney Darrow Jr. drew it. I was a natural for the Filmmakers Newsletter where I did a monthly cartoon for 10 years. I wrote some Spidey Super Stories for the Children’s Television Workshop’s version of that Marvel comic book. It was a long way from my boyhood “audience of three”.
More currently
my work has been in The Los Angeles Times, The Newark Star-Ledger, The Toronto Star, Funny Times and Z Magazine.
The film
world I had known disappeared too soon. The technology I had taken years to master became obsolete. Digital technology and computers replaced that hand cranked 16mm Bolex that I loved. But I still needed to play. I still needed to connect to world. I still needed to make images and ideas.
In 1987 I
went back exclusively to the pencil and paper. From these decades of work my approach to the editorial drawing and cartoon has slowly evolved. Subject matter for my drawings spring from everywhere. Walking on the street, shopping, being put on hold or the awareness of some social injustice or political outrage are always potential starting points. If it impacts me or annoys me or makes me laugh, I say thanks and I use it.
Today I greatly
admire simplicity in design, drawing and concept. I try to draw simply. I try to write simply. I think of my work as a design problem. That explains why I feel free to change format or more radically, style from one cartoon to the next. I strive for interesting, compelling drawings. I often examine my “roughs” for guidance as to how the “finished” piece should look and I work intensely for that intuitive and “easy” look. The cartoon is the integration of idea, text and drawing. I have fun doing it.
