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.
