This job for Greg Klee at the Boston Globe started out as a bit of a fishing expedition.
Because we anachronistic illustrators pride ourself on our ability to innovate, it was a little ironic that the article was describing the virtues of imitation. Imitators are often better at business than Innovators even though there is a pervasive "cult" of Innovation in American business. And that often, products, or whole businesses that we think of as marvelously innovative are, on closer inspection, just better realized versions of something that may already exist but is poorly focused or marketed.
Greg and I even joked about me imitating another illustrator as a kind of meta-commentary on the whole thing. But I reminded him that we illustrators are a pragmatic bunch and that amount of art-school cleverness was not my strong suit anyway! And old fashioned guy that I am, it was really nice to see
my images on newsprint again!
