By ANN HINCH
Assistant Editor

NIPOMO, Calif. — Now 50, Leigh Rubin has been drawing since kindergarten; even then, he knew he wanted to be an artist. But he can’t remember ever taking part in agriculture, though people figure he must know something about it.

“No, I’m a complete fraud,” he revealed on a windy afternoon, while walking his dog outside his California home. “I don’t know anything at all” about farming.

In fact, that dog “and a bunch of gophers” are the sum total of Rubin’s current livestock. When he was a boy, though, he did have ducks and chickens, and has milked a cow. Once.

Yet, Rubin is quite popular on the ag-show and expo circuit, thanks to his Rubes cartoons, which are widely published and frequently feature more cows, chickens, fish, rabbits, sheep, horses and other livestock, than humans. When pressed, he confesses he does read a lot of ag publications and has been known to learn something from a farming show on occasion.

The older he gets and the more he draws, the more ag-related speaking engagements he books. Rubin said he draws animals more often than people because a cartoonist can get away with doing things to them they can’t do to a human character in a family publication – for example, he cites a comic he once drew featuring cows, in which one had a pierced udder.

Among his earliest influences were those typical to most kids in the 1960s – Warner Brothers cartoons and Mad magazine. His father owned a print shop, where he worked through high school and for several years more after graduation.

“It gave me a really good feel for layout and design,” he said of his first career.

In the mid-1980s, he was promoting a book derived from his own line of greeting cards, Notable Quotes, and a local newspaper reporter covered a signing. The entertainment editor liked his work so much that the paper began running his cartoons.

For four years after that, Rubin marketed his own work and tried to find representation so he could reach a wider audience. In 1989, Creators Syndicate signed him, “and we’ve been happily married ever since,” he quipped.

Rubin said he is in 400 publications in the United States and other countries. His ideas come from what he calls “a twisted mind, to begin with” and have, so far, meshed well with both general and agricultural themes. One happy mix was a cartoon he once drew of two youngsters holding cows in front of them, squirting each other with milk from the udders.

This was something he thought he’d made up, but at the World Dairy Expo one year, he met an elderly fellow who told him how funny it was and how it reminded him of when he was a boy on the farm and the kids would get into squirting-udder fights.

“It was like he was revisiting his childhood,” Rubin fondly remembered of the effect his cartoon had. “He was really happy.”
So far, Rubin’s only had two forays into animated cartoons. In the mid-1990s he created a character to play between ABC Saturday morning cartoons in 15-second promos; that lasted only a year. Recently, he was tapped by film director Don Most to contribute art for an animated opening-credits sequence for his farm-related movie, “Moola” (see review on page 13).

Most used some of Rubin’s existing cow art, and commissioned more as well. One of the pieces – featuring a cow in sunglasses driving a convertible with excess cash flying out the back – inspired the movie title with its license plate reading MOOLA.

“It’s kind of a team effort, there,” Rubin said of working with Most’s ideas. “I wouldn’t have thought of it. Apparently, I can take direction.”

To learn more about Rubin or see additional cartoons, visit http://rubescartoons.com