Sunday Mailbag: Your Signature?

Q: I love your signature… it’s perfect for a cartoonist. Is it just your natural signature or did you engineer it?

A: Thanks! No cartoonist I know did not design their signature in some way. It’s an extension of their art, really.

I can’t remember exactly when I ‘engineered’ my signature, but it was very early on in my career. Certainly before I started doing professional illustration work, when I was signing about 3,000 live caricatures every summer at the theme parks. It’s evolved a little bit over the years, but the elements I intentionally incorporated into it remain:

• The big swooping “R” and the large open circle for the dot of the “i” was supposed to be reminiscent of the famous signature of Walt Disney
• Using three unconnected, parallel vertical lines for the “m’s” is my tribute to Mort Drucker, one of my cartooning heroes. He does this in his signature, although I later found out he cribbed it from the signature of Andrew Loomis, who probably stole it from someone else. But that works even better for me, because I am also a huge Loomis fan, so the “|||” does double duty there.
• The incorporation of an upper case “H” and using the cross-line of it as a baseline for the rest of the signature was something I just came up with myself. At least, I don’t think I got that from anyplace in particular, but I may have just forgotten where it came from.

That’s it. Nothing too deep, but a few nods to cartooning/illustration giants are in there.

Thanks to George Carter for the question. If you have a question you want answered about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!