The passing of a legend

As a space buff, there will always be only one reporter who could report on the space program and most importantly manned spaceflight- and that was Walter Cronkite. He became, for me and many others, the icon that represented reporting on a mission. When you saw him, with a GOXing Saturn V over his shoulder it was the most exciting thing in the world. For those of us who could no more get to the Cape to see an actual launch than we could fly to the moon ourselves, the very closest you could get was watching CBS and Cronkite.

So influenced was I by this man that when I began drawing my early cartoons, I gleefully created the Walter Antcrite character to do the coverage. On October 19, 1976- Antcrite first came from the tip of my pencil. Two and a half decades later, as I started into another serial about ants and spaceflight "The Program" I revived the Antcrite character. There isn't a chance in the world that the real Walter Cronkite ever read my stuff, but I like drawing the character and his side-kick Crawley Harra. They will continue to appear and will always stand as a tribute to the pure journalist who came onto my TV and inspired a space-buff kid to not only go on to bigger things, but to seek truth.