Michael Lee Sr never took an art class. What he did take was a long list of jobs: farm labor, rice mills, chicken processing plants, river barges and years managing grocery stores.
Through all of it, he kept drawing. Funny little cartoons on whatever paper was around, mostly to make the people next to him laugh.
At 65 years old, with no formal art training, I’ve come to see life itself as the greatest teacher.
Where the jokes come from
Spend enough time on a river barge or behind a grocery counter and you meet every kind of character there is. A lot of them end up in the cartoons, usually with a cowboy hat, a strange haircut or feathers.
That is why the humor in Deranged feels familiar even when the situation is completely absurd. Underneath the bird lawyers and talking telephones are real people, real jobs and the kind of jokes that get told on a lunch break.
Never too late
Deranged came out in 2025, when Michael was 65. If you have a stack of drawings, stories or ideas you have been sitting on for years, let this be your sign: it is not too late to put them out into the world.