Symbolism ahoy! But what might these images symbolize? And what, in particular, might the wee man at lower left represent? Rest assured, you’ll soon find out!

Pretty decent elephant, gotta say, especially since I’d never drawn one before. Dug up some relevant photoreference online, started sketching, and wound up with a not-bad drawing of a pachyderm.

UPDATE: Wait, just realized that I was wrong! I have, in fact, drawn an elephant before, and it was a key moment in my budding career as an artist, if not my entire life! However could I forget?

See, about midway through my first year at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in New Jersey long ago, I found myself desperately grinding my way through a class assignment—which happened to be a drawing of the vintage hero the Phantom riding an elephant. Lordy loo, did I ever hate hacking out that g-d sketch! This was the point at which I realized that I absolutely despised the work I was doing, that drawing just for drawing’s sake brought me no inherent joy or pleasure whatsoever, and that I should definitely try to find something else to do with my life. During the upcoming February vacation, I vowed to decide whether or not I should quit the Kubert School early, or try to muddle my way through the rest of the school year. At the time, I just wasn’t sure if I could tolerate dragging myself through more hackwork assignments I didn’t care a whit about—such as, say, drawing the g-d Phantom riding a g-d elephant. ’Twas quite the epiphany to realize that I didn’t love or even like drawing as such, unlike most if not all of the artists I knew then—and now.

Ah, but during that remarkably fateful February vacation, I happened to bring along a few pirated VHS tapes of Japanese animation borrowed from my roommate, one of which happened to feature a few episodes of the TV series The Dirty Pair. I scarfed ’em down, became feverishly infatuated with the idea of creating stories about the characters, and returned to the Kubert School afire with a newfound enthusiasm for comics. Decades later, here we are, folks!

For the record, drawing as a purposeful means of telling a story does interest me, and always has—well, since that awful sketch of Phantom and his elephant, that is. (That elephant, needless to say, didn’t work out quite as well as this page’s elephant.)

-Adam Warren