Johnny Hart on how to develop a truly unique art style

HART: ...All you have to do, if you want Brant in a great mood, is remind him of this early time when we went to New York. We took cartoons down and I was doing these really grotesque characters with big noses and big bug eyes. See, I figured I was going to be different than anybody else, not knowing that the way to sell is to conform, to look like everybody else. So I wanted to be really unique like Partch was, and I devised these characters that -ー when I think about it, it kills me -ー had like these big noses with big nostrils on them, and protruding lips and no chin and just to put a trademark on it I put the eyebrows on sticks！ [laughs] Really grotesque...

And we put all these things in a big portfolio and we took them and went to see Gurney Williams [cartoon editor of Collier’s]. ...it came our time to go in and they called Brant's name and the secretary said to me, "Are you with him?" And I said, "Yeah." I told her my name, and she says, "I'll look at you both." …So I pull out this stuff and she lays it out in front of her and she's looking at it. She doesn't say anything about the frames and all. I can remember it had burgundy-colored posterboard cut out and framed around the cartoons. …she's looking at his work and she's looking at my work, and she turns around and she looks at me and says, "Did you do these? "Yes," I said, very proudly. I'm figuring, boy, am I making strides here -- I didn't realize until years later that she was really saying, "Did you actually do this? Is this a joke?"

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MARSCHALL: If your style was inspired by VIP -- taking it to the nth degree -- was he an early inspiration?
HART: Oh, yeah, Partch was. This is the reason that I tell kids, young kids that are coming up, to copy the works of the people they like. What I was trying to do there was figure out a way to be different from all these other guys. I had to do something totally differentー "I didn't want to draw noses like any of these guys draw. That's why the eyebrows are on sticks. Nobody's done this before" —- you know?…

I did a comic book, you know how a kid will sit down and draw his own comic book? ...I was doing a comic book about Dopey Duck. At that time when I was really young, one of my favorite characters was Donald Duck, so I created a duck with a pointed beak, if you can figure that one out. (It had to be different from Donald.) See, I was already trying to figure out how to be different, it had to be me, it had to be mine. I finally wised up later in life and said, like I say to all kids coming up, "You cannot, really, actually copy anybody. But set up and copy the best parts of all the guys you like. If you like a Gallagher nose, and you like Tom Henderson feet, and the way that VIP draws cars, or something like that, look at all the guys you admire and copy the parts you like. Copy them the best you can copy them if you want, but ultimately it will evolve into your own style."