Art image credit: Scholastic Publishing

Hometown: Denville and Mount Olive

“It’s always nice in Budd Lake,” says artist and illustrator, Tim Jacobus, he who made a Goosebumps fictional work so vivid with his rich, colorful cover artwork, when asked how things are on the “lake” side of Mount Olive. 

Jacobus, 62, is a 1977 graduate of Morris Knolls High School in Denville. He spent 20 years in Denville, 11 years along the north shore of Lake Hopatcong, and the past 30 years he’s lived in Mount Olive. “My sister still lives in the house I grew up in,” he says happily. “You know, it’s one of those things when you’re growing up, you go, ‘Oh yeah, this is fine,’ and it’s not until you’re older and you see other things where you realize what you had. What an ideal place we had, what an ideal time, and all that stuff.”

Per Jacobus, his dad knew how to draw. It all started there. “I assumed growing up that everybody knew how to draw, because it was something that we just did. If my father was trying to describe, ‘Hey, I’m going to build a deck on the back of the house,’ he would just whip out a piece of paper, ‘and it will look something like this.’ And I had that ability, as well. It wasn’t until later on where you realize, “Oh, this is a little bit unique.’ My best friend who grew up next door to me also knew how to draw, and we spent time drawing together, and that carried on to high school, and we both went to the same art school together. He took a different avenue in the art business – he produces television commercials and is a huge figure in the advertising business – but it was just one of those environments where drawing was just part of it. We played sports outside and we ran around and we went swimming and fishing and all that stuff, but there was still some art mixed into that whole mix.”

The school attended was Spectrum Art School. “It was in Hillsborough, New Jersey; a commercial art school, right there upon Route 206,” Jacobus says. “It was tiny. If there was 60 Kids in the whole school, there was only 20 of us in the graduating class, but that’s what made the school so unique and appealing. This wasn’t a college, imagine a trade school.” It was a three-year, 35 hours per week course where all Jacobus and his classmates did was draw and paint. “But then what made it unique is the way they kept their teachers on hand. The teachers had to be working artists, and they were there a couple of days a week, but the other part of the week they were working on actual projects, dealing with actual clients. It was an array of people, it wasn’t just people who were all illustrators or art directors, it was just a wide range of what they did, the style of what they did, and so everybody brought something unique to the table.”

For Jacobus and his fellow students, it was a great experience, most of them going on to art careers while taking different paths. “They (the students) would lean towards one teacher and that style or that technique that appealed to them, or the genre that was for them. And, again, an amazing amount of people came out, but the diversity of what was chosen, that they were able to get out of this small school, was unique.”

His first job was drawing illustrations of food on sale for A&P Supermarkets weekly circulars. “That was a big deal, that Sunday paper in particular,” he recalls. “That was the only day they did color, and that was the only day they featured those illustrations. There was an older gentleman who had been doing illustrations for them for I don’t know how long, but he was trying to wean himself off, and he was going into semi-retirement, so they were trying to look for somebody just to kind of back him up a little bit. You think at first it’s going to be very simple, and it’s not. There’s a skill to that as well.” Jacobus was given a list of foods to draw, and he had to complete that list. “There’s no fooling around; the Sunday paper is coming out on Sunday. There’s no, ‘Give me another day. I’m having a hard time with the prime rib.’ He had to ensure it all got done, make it good enough but at the same time not get hung up on a drawing. “It was more important to finish the list than to spend an extra two hours on detail.” The consistency was important at the time. “There’s nothing better,” Jacobus says. “Most of our jobs were one and done, and when you’re early on, you want to string them together. Paying your bills is a challenge. To have a reoccurring art related job was great. It didn’t happen often, so it was a great one to have in your back pocket.”

And so was scoring some free food. When photos of items weren’t suitable to paint from, management sent him downstairs for the real thing, which he could take home. “They gave me a note or something, because I didn’t have to pay for it, I could just hand it to the cashier. On the way out, I’d say, ‘Mike upstairs says I can have this,’ so you get yourself a couple of free steaks and some vegetables, and you’ve got a couple of meals for the week. That’s a double score.”

It’s been 30 years since the first Goosebumps cover. “People still look back on it (the book series itself) fondly,” Jacobus says, “and you know, it still makes people smile. I like that.” He didn’t at the time work with one publisher specifically, but had done work for Scholastic, who embraced his reliability and suggested he’d be good for their R.L Stine-authored series. 

His covers were colorful, fun, didn’t send the ultimate chill up a child’s spine, but instead invited young readers in. “They (Scholastic) had never done a horror series for that age group before,” Jacobus remembers, “and because of it never having been done before, there’s no metrics, there’s no battle plan. There was a fear that the books would be too scary, nobody would like them.” When the first two books came out, they didn’t just pick Jacobus straight out of the gate. Another artist that had a background in horror did the cover of Goosebumps book number two, Stay Out of the Basement, after Jacobus had done the initial offering, Welcome to Dead House. “He did an incredible piece of art,” Jacobus says, “and it had all those classic horror imageries, and my stuff was a little more colorful and a little more cartoonish, for lack of a better term.” To see vivid colors, yellows and oranges and more, on a horror cover was rare, but it won over the publisher. “I think it made them say, ‘Yeah. let’s go in this direction.’ And they did – for over 100 covers.

Jacobus and Stine still work together. “We just worked together. No series, we did a one-off. Just recently, and it was fun to work with a graphic novel, and I got a chance to do a special edition cover for that piece. We’re in contact all the time, and more on a friendly basis, and we, you know, we’ve been going to events together, speaking at comic conventions, during the pandemic all that with virtual so we’ve been doing a lot of zoom things together. It’s really fun because I love the guy to death. We don’t get a chance to see each other that much. We’re two different people and I think it just comes across when we get together.”

And those Chuck Taylor sneakers that appeared on many a Goosebumps cover? He still wears a pair. “This is no hokey thing, this is the real deal,” he says. “I won’t wear them maybe when I have to go to a wedding, but I have been to a few weddings where I knew I could get away with it, and wear my suit with my Gods.” Back to the covers and the art. “I just started putting them in there. It wasn’t anything that was planned. I was like, ‘Well, I might as well throw these in there because I like them,’ and they just kind of caught on.”

Tim Jacobus loves being an artist. “Just the simplicity of it,” he says. “Being able to create something. I see things in my head, and then I’m able to get those thoughts to move down and get them on paper, and watch the image slowly evolve and become a finished product. It’s the same thing that I’ve been doing for forever. This started back when I was a kid. You produce something, and that’s just the basic simple elements of doing just that thing. The spark never went away.”

To learn more about Tim Jacobus and his work, visit www.jacobusstudios.com.