The Curious Artistic Life of T. M. Strait

I like art.

At one time, I even liked to draw.

My parents had a great art book that I would look through, even as a toddler.  I was struck particularly by a painting of St. George slaying a dragon.  My earliest dreams that I remember, when I was only three or four was of being a knight rescuing a princess from a dragon.

Before I started Kindergarten, I would go to the grocery store with my mother.  She would leave me by the magazines (yes, this was in an age where you didn't worry so much about such things) and there I discovered the amazing world of comic books.  The combination of words and pictures to tell amazing stories.  I convinced my mother to let us buy a copy of Snow White from the Classics Illustrated Jr. line, and eagerly read it over and over again (yes, my mother taught me to read even before Kindergarten began). There was an order form on the back, with dozens you could buy and have mailed to you, for the whopping price of fifteen cents apiece.  I carefully picked out three, including The Dancing Princess and The Frog and the Princess - anything about princesses and being rescued were the ones I wanted.  Waiting the six weeks or so for those to arrive in our mail was the longest wait of my young life.

As I got a few years older, I continued to love comics, branching more into super heroes.  But it wasn't enough just to read.  I wanted to create my own stories.  So I created my own comic books, a whole line centered around Superboy and Krypto, the Legion of Super Heroes, and Plant Lad (the star of my line).  It was starting to dawn on me that my drawing skills were somewhat suspect.  I liked scenes in front of a bank.  I would draw a straight line down the panel, stick a rectangle out front and write the word BANK.  Wahh laah!  I tried to sell a few to friends, but remember this was before copy machines, and I didn't prepare them on mimeograph paper.  So each issue sold was individually hand drawn!  I may have sold less that a half dozen in my entire career, making a sum total of about thirteen cents.

By 7th grade, I was beginning to realize I was more of a writer than an artist.  This was confirmed by my first real "Art" class that year.  One of our projects was to create a pig out of plaster of Paris.  Mine was a true misshapen monstrosity   I got an F for my efforts, a truly humiliating grade for somebody who had at least TRIED to do the assignment.

 But I did not give up.  The next assignment was to draw a picture using other characters from popular culture.  I created a cartoon that combined two popular newspaper comic strips of the time, Eek and Meek (two fierce little mice) and Frank and Earnest (kind of everyman sad sacks).  Eek was throwing something at Frank.  I worked very, very hard on this picture.  I very carefully crafted the images of the four, and set my humorous scene.  It looked good to me.  I was so ready to present to the teacher and get my grade!

She looked at it carefully, and then marked her grade.  C+.  I was mortified!  I told her, "B-but I worked so hard on it!!!"  She looked at me sympathetically, like you might look at one who had flatulence but just medically couldn't help it, and said, "I know you did.  That's why I gave you a C+."

My heart was broken.  And thus died my dreams of combining art and story.  All my efforts since have been concentrated on the word aspect.

But sometimes in my mind, in the deep recesses of my imagination, I still see my stories as explosively illustrated, with me being able to draw more than banks and stick figures with capes.

Who knows?  Maybe someday, with enough time and discipline.  One never knows.  One can always dream!