What I love about cartoons is the idea of first of all the speed of it and then the
ability to say something.
Everybody has stories in them.
Everybody.
We all do.
I'm Rick Mucho.
I'm from Warren, Ohio.
I'm a graphic designer, illustrator, slash cartoonist.
That's not bad.
I can tell, I can tell that's bad.
I think when kids draw, that's what it is.
It's a cartoon.
The earliest memories I have were, I don't know, maybe four or five years old with my
brother.
I had a brother who was a year older.
He made us pretty close, but we were constantly drawing.
I met Mort Drucker at a cartoonist convention in Columbus.
I stood in a line to talk to him, and I was the last one.
We ended up talking for almost a half an hour, but he looked at my work and he was very polite
about it, but he basically told me that my problem was I was all over the place and that
I needed to focus on humorous illustration.
He said, you could become very successful doing that.
All those things he told me not to do, those are all the things I want to do.
My definition of success is if you can make a living doing what you want to do, even if
you never reach a financial status of what society considers to be successful, I'm okay
with that.
When you're a freelancer and you work alone, you think to yourself, oh no, I don't want
to see that guy by himself, let him have a pal with him.
Let him have a, you know, like a brother.
That's what I did.
I just put two guys and I put them in these hats and it took me years to realize that
the hat that I drew on these guys was actually a version of a cowboy hat my dad used to draw.
That's just an opportunity to make an observation and make an extra little comment.
Cartoons are opinion.
You know, you can't really do a cartoon that doesn't have your, a little bit of your perspective
in it.
I'll try to point out things that are obvious on both sides that will then reinforce my argument.
There's two logos that I did in the same month and they couldn't really be more different.
One was the logo for Magnum, the roller coaster, and I ended up doing the design of it in just
pencil sketch form, the roughs, and they sent the finish off to Cleveland.
The other logo was for the Warren Sports Hall of Fame and those were done within the same
like three week period.
I got about 30 times less for the, for the, why I spent the same amount of time, maybe
even more for the Warren Sports Hall of Fame logo, but you do it because you love doing
it.
My son was a sophomore, I think it can't and he and a friend of his were watching the
video far and away with Tom Cruise.
They had just made the announcement that the Erie Seawolves were moving the organization
down to the Mahoney Valley and they, they were going to rename it.
As my son and his friend are watching this video, there's Tom Cruise is fighting.
He's like a boxer in Boston, you know, in a bar and somebody calls him a scrapper, scrapper,
Steel Valley Scrappers, that would be a good name.
So I did, I tried, I called the organization, they didn't, they weren't dealing with freelancers,
they had an ad agency.
Well, I get a call six months later from that ad agency, they want me to clean up their
versions of different ideas and I say, what if I, can I suggest an idea of my own?
So I draw the scrappers type looking like it's, you know, made of steel type of thing and I,
and I drew a steel worker in there with a hard hat holding a beam and I beam like it
was a baseball bat.
I thought it was an appropriate name because of the double meaning, scrappers are people
who fight and struggle like the immigrants who came to this valley to make the steel,
you know, and how you melt scrap to make new steel.
They used that sales pitch and the organization bought it and that's how it happened.
The Mahoning Valley lies right in between Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
So it's the Mahoning Valley, also known as the football mason-dixon line and it goes
right down the middle of a couch separating Cleveland and Pittsburgh fans.
So that's the rough layout and then the finishes is right here.
Michael Jackson, they didn't print this one either.
Everybody wants to do something that lasts.
I think that's why we have children and that's why we always try to build things.
I'd like to be remembered for providing a community with cartoons that sometimes were
a little bit enlightening, maybe sometimes a little bit amusing or humorous.
You always hope that they see it in the way you intended it to be.
So when you do anything, you envision it, you see it one way, that doesn't mean other
people will see it the same way, but you never know, you never know.
