atkinson KEVIN by Lon Levin
What kind of kid were you? Where did you grow up? What were your influences?
As a kid I did not have too many typical interests, especially sports, which I thought was very boring. I grew up in Texas, initially in a very suburban kind of place. My friends were mostly of the outsider stripe, like myself. When I was 13, my family moved to a very small, rural type of town. Really deep in the middle of nowhere. So I spent even more time than before, immersing myself in comics and art and drawing. I also got very into music, specifically stuff like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. My early childhood influences were 60's television like Batman and Dark Shadows. Also comics, Marvel, DC, Gold Key Horror and TV adaptions. Disney animated films, Harryhausen. Lots of stuff. By age 12 I had discovered Golden Age comics, EC comics, R. Crumb and the Undergrounds. Also the golden age of newspaper comics with Alex Raymond, Windsor McCay, Caniff and all those legendary cartoonists. Painters like Van Gogh and Rembrandt. By my mid teens I discovered Heavy Metal and the Europeans. When did you first think about art as something you wanted to do? Were you encouraged or discouraged by family, friends, teachers, mentors? I wanted to be a cartoonist since I was four, in 1965. I used to copy the funny papers. Charlie Brown, Dennis the Menace and Popeye, etc. My dad noticed me doing this and encouraged it. He told me it was a job people had and comics became the one I wanted, never was interested in another career path. I was a little bit of a child art prodigy, took art lessons from age six and began winning prizes in local art shows. My teacher in first grade hung up a big piece of butcher paper and had me draw cartoons all over it while everybody else had to read or something, so that was a nice piece of early recognition.
