I started drawing cartoons in the fifth grade by basically copying, line for line, strips from the funny pages. I didn’t know then what plagiarism was, but I know now, and that was plagiarism. Actually, I highly recommend it as a learning method. After getting the strip characters down pretty good, I started coming up with my own. But I quickly realized I had nothing for them to do. They just laid there on the page. So I was forced to learn how to give them a little world to live in and things to say.