Ariel Freaner, was born in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico. Coming from a family of professionals, Ariel’s father may have preferred that he pursue a more practical career as an attorney, engineer, or civil servant, but all Ariel ever wanted to do was follow his love of drawing. He started working various jobs at an very early age, but one Christmas his parents got him a drafting table and ever since, no matter what other work he did, he has made time for his art. By the time he was 17 he was drawing a Sunday full page comic and a daily comic strip for one of the leading northern Mexican newspapers “El Imparcial.”
The cartoon strip was called “Los Blincabolines”–The Jumplybeans–and was quite popular. During his days as a cartoonist in Hermosillo, Ariel created a new character to represent the Red Cross in Sonora which was a huge success and won him awards all over Mexico.
Ariel moved to the beautiful city of San Diego, California, where he started his own business as a graphic designer. His hard work and commitment to his profession paid off and he opened his own design and creative firm, Freaner Creative.
After a car accident that almost killed him, Ariel decided he wanted to be a winner in life—not in money, fame or those intangible things for which we can’t account when we leave this world—but success in the things he loves most, especially his art. He realized it was time to move on to more creative and personal things and turned back to his love of comic strips to create his new series, “Catching Up”, which picks up were the Jumplybeans left off.
The strip addresses the pressures of catching up with our everyday life: feelings, love, news, technological changes and everything that surround us: our problems, our blessings, work, and all those things that we can get and those that seem to continually slip through our grasps. He sees his comic strip as his last chance at redemption. While lying in the hospital he realized he was tired of catching up with the everyday rat race to survive.
“Catching Up” is not just about computers, technology or the internet. It’s about trying hard to catch up with all the new things in life that we face everyday. It’s trying to understand our progress and this ever-changing world in which we live. It’s trying to keep up with the things that happen to us; the things that change around us and the ones that simply don’t.
Part of Ariel’s inspiration to be a cartoonist was his Uncle Bill Melendez who was responsible for all of the Peanuts specials, starting with “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in 1965. Uncle Bill was also responsible for the classic characters of The Trix Rabbit; Snap, Crackle & Pop; and the Lucky Charms Leprechaun. He was also responsible for the television specials starting “Garfield” and “Cathy”.
Ariel’s comic strip, Catching Up, is not just about becoming obsolete in the electronic age and our on-going struggle to exist with technology, the strip is about catching up with our selves, our true feelings, our souls, it’s about…
…Catching Up with life.
