Lunch Break

Recently, I found Joe Barbera’s book My Life in Toons at the local library. I haven’t been able to put it down since. It’s a very insightful read and peek into this man’s life.

Before Joe Barbera got into the crazy world of Cartoons, he worked at a bank as an assistant tax man for six, long, dark years. His only escape and solace were his lunch breaks, where he would spend an hour, perched on a convenient headstone at the local cemetery across from the bank. He would sit down, a sandwich in one hand, a book in the other. For that hour, his mind would wander in and out of books like Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage or Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed.
At about this time, Joe was also reading the magazines of the day as well. Redbook, Saturday Evening Post, and Collier’s. He would spend his nights after work drawing and creating gag cartoons into the wee hours to submit to these publications.
He began spending his lunch break routine racing around, drawings in hand, from the offices of Collier’s to Redbook’s. Pick up the rejects from one, and deliver it to another, and vice versa always making it back to work just in the nick of time.
I found this part to be rather inspiring:
“ There were always rejects. This went on for about 2 years. Reject, reject, and again reject. Why did I persist? Was it that I was convinced my destiny was to be a great cartoonist despite the blindness of any number of editors? Not really. It was survival. It was staying alive. It was having something to look forward to- even if that was nothing more than drawing breath for a few moments in an office where people did something more than add, subtract, multiply and divide. Redbook and Collier’s- those offices were perfectly ordinary, and yet for me they exuded an atmosphere of creativity and the slimmest sliver of a possibility that I might be permitted to create something, too.”

The more I venture further into this book, the more I think I really need to get started on the script for the Oscar Winning Biopic on these Hanna Barbera starring 2 certain Oscar Winning Thespians…

Frederator can produce it for me.
Meanwhile, Check this out:

Well, back to work.
-JX!