Saturday mornings in Bill Jones’ Science Hill home in Pulaski County usually are reserved for his artistic projects. He grabs a box of pens and pencils and blank paper to accomplish his work in solitude. Though there sometimes is the pressure of a deadline, he generally is relaxed once he begins producing compositions for publication.
Jones has been accumulating ideas all week. He often jots them down so he can use them when he’s drawing, even if they don’t enter his mind until some weird hour, such as 2 a.m., although his ideas primarily come from brainstorming sessions on various topics.
Often, the drawing’s subjects relate to technology or trends in society. They may contain talking robots, animals and even humans. He draws them in batches. He wants them to make the reader laugh and think.
One shows a robot typing on a laptop computer, while another robot views the computer screen. The standing robot says, “Just reply: I’m not a bot, you’re a bot.”
Another is titled “Otter Correct.” It shows a guy intently staring into his cell phone. A furry otter on his left shoulder points at the phone and says, “There’s no ‘n’ in dam.” It’s a clever wordplay on the modern computer “autocorrect” function
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Jones, 62, has been drawing cartoons since high school, when he composed a storyline of science fiction cartoons inspired by the iconic Star Wars movie series.
His strong interest in drawing began in the second grade, when he was assigned a seat next to John Withers, who also could draw. “That interest continued for both of us, and we stayed close through school, always checking to see what the other was drawing,” Jones said.
About 10 years after high school, Jones and Withers were reconnected through work. Withers was a sign painter, and Jones designed two or three signs a year as part of his job as a graphic designer.
“I had developed an interest in editorial cartoons, as a fan,” Jones said. “I had a web page for a short time that would collect links to some of the best editorial cartoons of the day—conservative and liberal.
“One day, John gave me a small book by a New Yorker cartoonist named William Hamilton. He had bought it at a secondhand bookstore. I hadn’t heard of Hamilton before, but I loved his cartoon style and his humor. I began to realize that magazine cartooning was something I could do, and that it was something I wanted to do.”
Jones said it took much work “to get to a place where I was creating something I was happy with and something other people were finding funny. I began sending cartoons to publications, and, eventually, I sold one, and things started happening.”
Cheryl Burnett, Jones’ art teacher at Pulaski County High School, said she could tell from the beginning in working with Jones that he was a natural. “I recalled telling his mom that he needs to stay with art,” she said. “He’s that good.”
The retired art teacher said she is not the least bit surprised with the trade Jones chose and his current cartooning work.
Cartooning never developed into a full-time job for Jones, but he adapted it into his creative talents in his regular job. He grew intense about it around 12 years ago. He works in traditional ink on paper.
Jones has been a graphic designer and illustrator for more than 30 years for Kinetic Strategic Design, which has headquarters in downtown Somerset across from the Virginia Theater, where he first saw Star Wars in 1977. Sometimes, his cartoons brighten up documents for business clients.
Jones has made a bit of a splash in cartooning on the national scene. He has sold 48 cartoons to The Wall Street Journal and about 100 overall to publications.
His cartoons have been published in a variety of prestigious publications in recent years, including Reader’s Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, American Legion Magazine, American Bystander, Alta Magazine, Air Mail, The Oldie Magazine and The Kappan, a publication by Alpha Delta Kappa, an international organization of women educators.
“It really is a lot of fun,” said Jones, who signs his cartoons with his last name.
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Jones was born in 1962 in Biloxi, Mississippi, into a military family from Pulaski County. His father, William Jones Sr., and mother, Pearlie Jones, live in Mount Victory in Pulaski County. His mother’s creative talent is making quilts, and she is taking up painting. Bill is an only child.
Young Bill would visit Somerset’s drugstores to buy and read comic books. Superheroes were his favorite. “I’ve kept them,” he said with pride only a comic book lover would understand.
Though he stopped buying comic books, Jones drew his own cartoons. At Somerset Community College, he had a comic strip in The Mirror, the school paper. Its main character was named Xero, who resembled the Jarvik-7 model for the world’s first artificial heart transplant. Xero looked like a bucket with eyes. It was a short, fat character with an artificial head.
Later, at the University of Kentucky, Jones took graphic-design classes, including illustration and painting. He drew cartoons for the student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel. He had a popular feature called “Zeke and Rodney,” based on himself and his college roommate.
Jones graduated with a degree in graphic design from UK and began his career with the Somerset design business in 1988. “I brought my cartoons into some of the job’s projects,” he said. “Some of them involved adventures related to employees.”
He sometimes bounces his cartoons off his wife, Judy. “Usually, her comment is that she doesn’t understand them. At least she is honest,” he said with a laugh. “Such is the life of a cartoonist.” They were married near the turn of the 21st century. Judy is a manager for New Life Industries, a Christian apparel company in Somerset.
Jones’ cartoons are single panel. His favorites from the newspaper comics pages are “Calvin and Hobbes” by Bill Watterson, “Cul de Sac” by Richard Thompson and “The Far Side” by Gary Larson.
Jones said his cartoons are known as gag or magazine cartoons. “They have to be drawn and written in such a way that the reader understands the setting and who the characters are at a glance,” he explained. “The joke usually depends on the reader understanding the context.
“Occasionally, the joke will be something that could be said by any character in any context, but usually, it is something that depends on the context to make it funny. That is why you see so many tropes in single-panel cartoons—like a guy stranded on a deserted island, or a grim reaper, or the wise man on the mountaintop. The reader immediately knows the context.”
It takes Jones about an hour to an hour and a half to create a cartoon.
“When I have a set of five or 10 cartoons, I send them off to a publication,” he said. “Most are on a once-a-month schedule. Usually, they send me back a note to say ‘no, thanks’ or to buy one or two. The ones I don’t sell I can send to other publications.”
Two of his partners at work—William Cox and Kirby Stephens—use the same word to describe their cartoonist colleague: “funny.”
“He always has had a wonderful sense of humor,” Cox said.
Jones said he has fun at work and cartooning. But he acknowledges that it is “getting tougher” to make money as a cartoonist.
“Magazines have dropped off, and ones still around don’t pay as much,” he said. “In the last 10 years, a cartoon for Reader’s Digest, which wants all color, has dropped to about half of what it was four years ago.”
But come Saturday mornings, Jones still wants to get out his pens and pencils and blank sheets of paper to make people laugh and to inform them of their world. It is not a slight thing to do.