The Penguin

Photo by  bruce mars  on  Unsplash (No, this probably isn't the 637th of these things...but who cares? It looks impressive. Roll Tape!) If you're a creator, at some point you're going to face critique. If you're a creator for money, you're going to definitely face critique...from people with far less imagination than you, who don't get your vision/sense of humor, and - let's face it - you don't particularly like. These could be bosses, coworkers, clients, friends, family, neighbors, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, partridges in or out of pear trees. Anybody. All of these people have vastly different priorities than you, they're looking at the project from a certain budget and time frame, and it often seems like they just don't care that much about artistic merit at all. I'm going to tell you, as a creator for money in both my day job and my side job, that your assumptions about the lack of imagination and creative merit...

I was just going back through my blog archive and happened to stumble across this post I wrote way back in June 2015, in which I profiled Boy's Life artist Tom Eaton. Mr. Eaton wrote and illustrated "Pedro" and "Dink & Duff" for the magazine, as well as illustrating numerous puzzles and gags, beginning sometime in 1984. I received wonderful responses from several Tom Eaton fans, who pointed me to collections of old Boy's Life ; at the time, I was kicking around the idea of collecting Mr. Eaton's work into a single document, if only for my own amusement. As far as I know, there is no definitive "Collected Tom Eaton", which is a shame. Having revisited the post, I decided to Google Tom Eaton and his work, wondering if new material had been uploaded since I wrote the original post. This is when I found out he'd recently passed away, on December 11, 2016. You can read the Scouting magazine obituary here. Tom Eaton was a big influe...