I fell in love with the cartoon medium at an early age, and began drawing cartoons in earnest during my elementary school years, and improved steadily to a near-professional level by my senior high school year. I realized, though, that for cartoons to be popular with the larger teenage and adult audiences, the cartoons must contain ideas that are relevant to their interests (and my own interests, as I reached their age). I have since worked in the Hollywood animation industry for over three decades, mostly as an animator and director.
My personal preference in art is the area where fine illustration and cartoons overlap, creating a hybrid of beautifully drawn cartoons that caricature our own human existence. My taste in humor, though, leans toward the zany. Consequently, my favorite cartoons from animation’s Golden Age — from the 1930s to the early 1950s — are the 1940s Warner cartoons directed by Bob Clampett, with their consistently beautiful drawing, elegant animation (movement) and zany humor. Particularly noteworthy, relative to my own goals with Viagri, are Clampett’s “Russian Rhapsody” (1944), “Book Revue” (1946), and “Coal Black” (1943), plus his wartime Snafu and Hook cartoons. But I also love the surrealism in Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop as “Snow White” (1933), the visual poetry of Disney’s “Fantasia” (1940), and the absurdist gags in Tex Avery’s Red Hot Riding Hood sequel, “Little Rural Riding Hood” (1949).
My personal goal in creating sexy cartoons is to present sex as erotic and life-affirmative (not mean spirited). To me sex is a very natural part of life, yet many people have been indoctrinated from an early, vulnerable age to regard sex as dirty, sinful and vile, due mainly to the heavy influence of anti-sex religions in our Western Cultures. Indeed, recent medical and psychological studies have confirmed that sex is very necessary to people’s mental and physical health, which means that a positive attitude toward sex is not simply a luxury, but a necessity. My own childhood indoctrination was very puritanical, and so I had a particularly difficult time in my early adult life to regard sex in a positive light. And so today I am eager to share what I’ve learned and observed more recently, about sex and life, through humor and erotica, and I think what I’ve learned will add a depth and significance to my erotic cartoons.