How Bowden Drew His Cartoons in His Own Words

I have used a variety of drawing tools and papers in my career as newspaper cartoonist-illustrator. I began drawing sports cartoons as sports editor of The Florida Flambeau at Florida State University. And on June 2, 1950 I began summer employment as reporter-columnist and contributing sports cartoons to the Panama City News Herald. My first cartoon for the Pensacola News Journal portrayed All-State Pensacola High School fullback Ed Sears, published October 30, 1953. I drew Sears on the weekend after of my first week as a sports writer, working at the dining room table at my wife Louise’s parents home in Panama City. (This drawing and explanation of drawing materials are in the opening chapter of my cartoon book, Drawing From an Editor’s Life).

I drew the early sports page cartoons with Speedball pens and watercolor brush using India ink and shaded with wax crayon on pebble, Coquille or illustration board. In Pensacola throughout the 1950s I purchased the paper at Peaden’s Office Supply, dowtown’s only art supply store and now home for Jackson’s restaurant. This ridged paper highlights crayon markings as consistent dot ptterns like old Ben Day gray shadings in earlier works.Sports cartoonist Willard Mullin, editorial cartoonists Bill Mauldin and the fabled Herblock used that technique in their era in the 1930, ’40s and ’50s.

During the letterpress “hard metal” era, drawings were engraved from photographic negatives on zinc, exposing only the lines and shading exposed for what was known as a “Line cut.” If I had used graphite (called the lead pencil), the drawing would have been engraved as a “half-tone,” the tight-dot light and shadow for photographs.

Hence, in the early years when Pensacola Engraving did all of the News Journal’s line and half-tone photographic cuts, I drew cartoons very large, almost newspage size and in the engraving process lines could be vague or lost. When I I complained to owner Eugene Foote, he said, “Make your lines stronger, thicker,” And that’s a reason many of the early cartoons are a bit heavy-handed.

For a time when I was News Editor of The Pensacola News, designing Page One, I would work up a spot caricature or drawing to illustrate news stories. I draw on newsprint on deadline with a heavy graphite pencil we used to edit copy (news stories); some were engraved as line cuts, some were screened like photographs. But when I became editorial page editor in 1965, I continued on pebble board and finally began penning art on smooth-surface Swathmore Bristol artpaper.

When visiting the Raleigh News and Observer to inspect their new computer system in the 1970s, I talked with editorial cartoonist Dwane Powell, who introduced me to Craftint duo tone paper with embedded shading brsuhed to surface by liquid developer. Many cartoonists and some comic strip artists (Buz Sawyer, for example) were using the unique paper because of the quick developer exposing heavy or light dots or lines enhancing the inked drawing. I ordered the expensive paper from Cleveland, and noted the developed shading turned yellow after a time. I soon returned to inking and cross-hatching which I believe in the best technique, demonstrated by the great work early line drawings of Charles Dana Gibson and the great draftmanship of 20th ccentury cartoonist Pat Oliphant and Jeff McNelly. Besides the old crayon shading, used effectively by Herblock and many sports cartoonists, had gone out of style. So had the sports cartoon.

From the beginning I used the Speedball dip-pen with India ink, inexpensive fountain pens (tube filled the with India Ink) and even the Sharpie black marker for dark areas. Several companies make ballpoints for sketching and drawing. In the exactness of scanning artwork in the Computer Age, the drawings have more clarity in reproduction and you can make a line with any ballpoint pen and fill in the shading or color with computer strokes. And technology had provided variety of ink-filled ballpoint pens, some waterproof, that work as effectively as India ink. I never worked in color, since process color was limited in the letterpress era, although some of my drawings have been colorized by others for reproduction.

The old Speedball pen (like you used to find in the Post Office) and the watercolor brush are still reliable, but in the Digital Age the artpaper and tools are less important that the final output, thanks to the on-screen quickness and multi-dimensions of high technology. From the beginning I aimed for lasting quality, with an eye on the future when my work could be an active educational archive to tell the story of a rarity in journalism, a newspaper editor who drew his own editorial cartoons.