New Lou Interview for DEADBEAT Magazine
Mon, February 18, 2013 at 7:44 PM 
Babes, fast cars and tattoos! What more could a boy ask for? Thanks to Deadbeat Magazine and my new friends in Oz down under for a great lead-off interview and feature. Some of the juicy bits excerpted here...
"I’ve always hated going to school of any sort. To me, it was a job, only you didn’t get paid. I was pretty ambitious, but I didn’t see the sense in having to show up anywhere and do a lot of things that I didn’t want to do... Going to a real art school that taught you how to be something besides an art teacher wasn’t really affordable, so, my parents convinced me to take the first job that came along – all-night dishwasher and busboy at a local Howard Johnson’s.
"Meanwhile, I had sent some art samples to a local city newspaper, and miraculously, they hired me. They put me on night shift there as a masker in the ad department – painting red lacquer on sheets of acetate. I grew to enjoy staying up all night, and have been a night people ever since. Eventually, they taught me to set phototype and work the stat machine. Best part of it, though, was touching up stripper photos for the newspaper burlesque ads. I thought I was Van Gogh."
The newspaper was the now-long-gone Philadelphia Bulletin, and the burlesk ads were for the Trocadero Theater in Philly's tenderloin on Arch Street. When thiings were slow in the art department, a few of us would sneak down to the catch the late show. We told everybody we we'd been to the Teddy Roosevelt Opera Company (T.R.O.C.). First show I saw there featured Virginia "Ding Dong" Bell, and I've been an opera fan ever since.
"My father was a bean counter at a rail car company. So, I had to look elsewhere on my own for any culture beyond what a blue-collar suburban life had to offer. There was television… Walt Disney, Warner Bros. cartoons, Rocky & Bullwinkle, and all that stuff. I realize now that my career's been a little bit of a Zen thing...
"I could read very well by age four – thanks to a steady diet of newspaper comics and comic books. I knew every comic author and writer by name, and most of the artists wrote their own strip. I was sure that if Rembrandt couldn’t write, then he wasn’t very good, was he?
"My last job was in the mid ‘70s at a Philadelphia art studio, and by then I was selling freelance illustration pretty steadily, as well as cartoons to Playboy. New York City was just ninety miles north, and I realized that everything I was doing was coming from up there, so my wife and I packed up and moved to New York. To live in New York, even back then, you had to know who you were and why you were there. Beginning each day in Manhattan is like getting hit in the face with a shovel. You have to like it, then get back up and continue down the street. We moved there when the city was at its grimiest and most dangerous. Son of Sam was running around loose. We got hit with a huge blackout. The worst blizzards in fifty years. It’s just hard to live there, unless you’re on a trust fund... for people starting out now, my advice is: have rich parents."
