On Mon­day, Richard Codor wrote about his car­toon edu­ca­tion. Check back on Fri­day for his final post.

The idea for Too Many Latkes! came from one of my fond­est child­hood mem­o­ries. My moth­er was the office man­ag­er of our syn­a­gogue and in charge of orga­niz­ing the annu­al ​“Latke Fundrais­er.” She would always say, ​“This year we’re going to make a moun­tain of latkes!” Every year, all the latke cooks would gath­er at the tem­ple on Hanukkah and fried huge amounts of latkes. They nev­er quite made enough latkes for a moun­tain but the image stuck in my head. 

When I had my own kids and we began a tra­di­tion of mak­ing elab­o­rate hol­i­day par­ties with cer­e­monies, music and song. I looked around for some­thing enter­tain­ing that I could do. The first thing that came to mind was that latke moun­tain. Tak­ing bits and pieces from the many sto­ries I illus­trat­ed and ani­mat­ed for children?s pro­gram­ming in Israel and the US, I came up with the out­line of Too Many Latkes! At the time I was a sto­ry­board artist for Doug, the ani­mat­ed TV show and dai­ly I would make lit­tle Post-It flip books to work out script­ed action. It seemed nat­ur­al to make Latkes into a big newsprint flip book that I could act out in front my guests, the way I would a sto­ry­board pitch. 

It became a big hit at Hanukkah and every year inevitably some body would ask when is it going to be a book. By the time I got around to seri­ous­ly mak­ing it into book form, the nature of pub­lish­ing and even draw­ing had changed. I no longer worked on paper. My draw­ings were done with a sty­lus in pro­grams on com­put­er screen. To keep the feel­ing of the large orig­i­nal black and white mark­er draw­ings on newsprint, I had to reduce, scan, col­or and touch up the draw­ings in Pho­to­Shop. A lengthy process but well worth it since, the dig­i­tal images loose lit­tle when pub­lished in paper or Ibook form. 

Now I can do book read­ings using a com­put­er slideshow, draw­ing tablet, speak­ers, pro­jec­tor and HD screen. How­ev­er, there are places that are just too inti­mate for all those gad­gets. So from the dig­i­tal files, I’ve print­ed out again black and white images and made a new flipbook. 

Some things nev­er change.

Richard Codor­’s work is fea­tured in the books The Big Book of Jew­ish Humor (Collins), All You Want To Know About Sab­bath Ser­vice (Behrman House), and in Israel, the social satire clas­sic, Zoo Eretz Zoo (E.L.S. Edi­tions.). His sto­ry­boards are used in numer­ous mul­ti­eth­nic, polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect and incor­rect movies, TV and Inter­net media such as ​“Doug”, ​“Lizzie McGuire”, ​“Robots” and ​“Queer Duck”. He is a recip­i­ent of mul­ti­ple Jew­ish Press Association/​Rockower Awards for Car­toon­ing and the first Charles Schulz Prize.