My father had a subscription to a magazine called Pharmacy International. The title naturally gives the impression that this magazine would have been of no interest to a seven-year-old boy. Yet I am certain that I was the happiest member of the family when the postman arrived to deliver the familiar brown envelope with its inviting red lettering.
Then came the wait for my father to return in the evening, the family dinner, and finally he would rip open the envelope, browse through the magazine and put it on his desk for a proper read at the weekend. At that moment, I remember almost attacking the magazine, quickly flipping through the pages to find the Vidaylin Multivitamin ad and the new illustration it had used to bring alive its ongoing headline: “He’s heard the call for Vidaylin.”
I appreciated the witty Vidaylin messages well before I discovered the reason for them being in Pharmacy International, and a great deal of time before I learned what advertising was. In fact, a few years later my eagerness to await my father’s magazine accompanied me when I began to greatly look forward to my mother’s visits to the house of our neighbor – her uncle and Aley’s cherished family doctor. Choucri Baroody had two teenage sons and a daughter who had an impressive collection of American comic magazines. There I was introduced to Archie, Little Lulu, and Captain Marvel.
That summer, having witnessed my budding interest in comic books, my mother enrolled me in a bookstore program that allowed kids of my age to flip through the various Tin Tin books while seated on the floor next to the children’s books section. Then Sindbad started to publish out of Cairo, and I was once again hooked to a new character, enthralled with a new story and all its heroes, from TohToh to Safwan and Aunt Moushira.
Growing up amongst all these iconic and unforgettable characters had a great influence on my passion for drawing. My parents encouraged that passion and enrolled me in private drawing lessons with the police sergeant Ali Koubaisy, who worked at the gendarme station in Aley and was known to be an amateur painter. The walls of our garden would become the talk of the town, and cousins who emigrated with their parents during the Lebanese Civil War would come looking for my wall cartoons when they visited in later years. Even the glass partitions on the pediatrics’ floor of the American University Hospital carried my cartoons between 1982 – the year my second son broke his leg and was hospitalized there – and 2009, when the floor was renovated.