My first job came the next year at 16.
As a matter of fact, I didn't even have a drawing table or a light or anything because I never had a professional job in my life.
Most of us came out of Popeye, so turning Popeye into something believable was tricky enough.
First of all there was a guy named Charles Nicholas, who used to do all of the inking that Jack and Simon didn't do. Simon used to do splashes and covers, but Charles Nicholas, after a while, did the inside of all of the stuff.
By the end of the '50s, everything began to collapse and, little by little, I lost all of my work. I lost Rex, the Wonder Dog and all the westerns.
The publishers were like syndicates. For instance, the guys that DC hired in 1936, those guys were still working there years later.
I started working in production and I worked there for three weeks but apparently they thought I was making too much noise and they fired me.
Within a couple of days I got a job with Jack Binder's agency. Jack Binder had a loft on Fifth Avenue and it just looked like an internment camp.