Background About Mike Twohy Mike Twohy has been drawing cartoons as far back as he can remember, prodigiously and compulsively, on any available surface, from binders to place mats. The launching of his panel That's Life is the fulfillment of an ambition that began with his first submission to syndicates at age 11: "I just remember being delighted that the rejection letters addressed me as Mr. Twohy." Twohy grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where early work experience in cartooning included drawing high-school sports cartoons for the local paper and illustrating reading and math workbooks. In college he studied fine art and received his M.F.A. in painting in 1973 from the University of California, Berkeley. His paintings were strongly influenced by the Pop Art movement and often contained cartoon elements, so it didn't feel like a big

jump he says, when he began free-lance cartooning a few years later. In a short period of time he was being published by Saturday Review, TV Guide, Audubon and Esquire. "It was exciting and addictive to reach so many people so quickly," he said. In 1980 his first drawing was published in The New Yorker, which has published his cartoons regularly ever since. Twohy says that free-lancing to a great variety of markets (from Criminal Defense to Vegetarian Times) broadened his humor and called on him to look at a range of topics and current events and develop a variety of characters, both human and animal. Underlying all his work has been his adherence to finding humor in situations that everyone recognizes. In That's Life, we see ourselves, or sometimes our neighbors, in visits to the doctor's office, the vet, or (God forbid!) the lawyer, at family picnics, surfing the Net, watching late-breaking news, preparing for the holidays, and chatting over lattes or Popsicles. After his 1996 show of original drawings at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum, exhibit director Paola Stuff wrote of Twohy's work: "The world is in dire need of cartoons that can look at normal everyday situations and turn them into moments of bewildered hilarity".