Match to Flame 223

I related the story of how I acquired that comic book in the first volume of this collection so I won’t repeat it here, but there was more to that story: The following day after the acquisition of my first comic book and the initial forty or fifty readings, I found myself camped out on our screened-in porch with the book and a small chalkboard easel. I’d spent the morning trying to draw in chalk the two spacemen on the Tom Corbett Space Cadet cover. Suddenly at one point I exceeded my wildest expectations and positively nine-year-oldnine-year-me or a nine-year-old?} nailed a drawing of the boots on one of them. Now all I needed was an appreciative audience. I wanted my dad to see that drawing. I also wanted to do more drawing, but I couldn’t because I didn’t want to erase my masterpiece. So I waited impatiently the rest of the day until my dad got home from work so he could see what an artist I was turning into and that I was well on my way to a career in cartooning. Like a good father, he duly praised my efforts, little realizing that he was helping set in motion a process that would now see his expectations for me and my expectations for myself diverging onto separate tracks.

In an interesting and serendipitous coda to the tale of that comic book, one of my other takeaways from that book was that the artist had signed his name on the cover, and his name was Mort Meskin. When the cover appeared in Funky as one of my Sunday strips, I acknowledged Meskin with a tip of the felt tip.

Some time later I received a call from his son Peter Meskin about that Sunday strip, saying that he had seen the strip, liked it, and had appreciated the nod to his late father. In the course of our long conversation, he mentioned that he was planning to sell off what remained of his father’s original art as he began to downsize his possessions. Since he was the one to bring it up (opening the door to a new line of questioning, as they say in TV courtroom dramas), I asked if he happened to still have the original art for the Tom Corbett Space Cadet book I had used in Funky. He said that he did, we struck a deal, and the cover for my very first comic book now hangs in my studio. If the Rexall Drugstore in Akron where I purchased my copy of The Flash #115 was my personal Trinity site,*{*See the introduction to The Complete Funky Winkerbean, Volume 13.} the Tom Corbett Space Cadet cover rates a close second in terms of inspiration.

From The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume 14