Cartoonist Gets Kick Out Of Sharing His Art

Jim Weisen remembers walking home one afternoon long ago, admiring his drawing. He was in fifth grade. And he’d been trying for months to draw an airplane in proper perspective.

He’d finally gotten it.

“I was amazed. I walked so slow that night, inching along, staring at that drawing. And I said, ‘I’m going to be an artist. I’m going to be an artist.”’

And that’s what he became. A graphic artist, primarily.

But as hundreds of Valley kids know, Weisen, 74, has another love: cartooning.

He has for years gone into Valley schools to give kids a taste of what cartoonists do.

“We exaggerate. If a person has a big nose, we make it a really big nose,” he said.

“A cartoonist observes people and really enjoys them … We laugh with them, not at them.”

Each student draws along, as Weisen walks them through every part of the face. Eyes, especially eyes wide with surprise. Eyebrows, rampant with surprise. Then noses. Maybe ski-schnoots or banana noses.

Weisen wiggles one ear. They aren’t the most beautiful part of the body, he advises. “You know what I do? I use my initials to draw the middle of an ear,” he said. “J.W. The kids just love that.”

Fingers next. And here comes the explanation of why so many Disney characters have just three fingers. “Cartoonists just draw sausage fingers. And they just draw three. They took one off starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. And that saved Disney hours and hours of drawing.”

Weisen and his wife June raised their four children in the Spokane Valley.

He did enough work as a gag cartoonist - one panel pieces, primarily for trade magazines - to feel as though he had proved his way. “Humor is a serious business, you know. I had to pay my dues.”

But work as a graphic artist kept him busy and feeling creative, too.

“One day I can design a package, the next day a small ad, and the next a logo.”

He retired officially nine years ago. But this is a man whose list of projects will never end, whose preference is to stay close to young people, and who recoils from the thought of life in a retirement community.

“I like hearing children hollering and screaming while they play. I like hearing a dog bark down the street.

“That’s where life is.”

Weisen still does some work for Group W Studio, the business he started that’s now owned by one of his sons.

But his current passion threads through his religious faith, his artwork and a spot halfway around the world.

He is immersed in a vast project of illustrations for his church, the Church of Nazarene, to use in New Guinea.

There are so many tribal languages that missionaries there count on pidgin and simple stick illustrations. They teach everything from Old Testament stories to modern-day sanitation.

Weisen’s stick figures carry themselves with a slightly exotic grace.

It’s an odd juxtaposition of everyday life and something bigger than life, to find this neatly sweatshirted man in his comfortable Valley home swept up in the spreading of the Gospel.

But Weisen keeps it all simple.

He tells of one card among many he’s received from students. This one came from a little boy in Boise who saw his cartooning demonstration.

The card began with the usual thank you and ended like this:

“But don’t worry, when you die I’ll take your place.”

“I got the biggest kick out of that,” he says with a grin.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MEMO: Saturday’s People is a regular Valley Voice feature profiling remarkable individuals in the Valley. If you know someone who would be a good profile subject, please call editor Mike Schmeltzer at 927-2170.