For graphic novel artist Sonny Strait, drawing is sort of a reflex. He almost does it without thinking.

The longtime Denton resident has completed two graphic novels in the manga style — a storytelling form that grew out of Japanese cartoon. You can see the style almost everywhere — from bookstore shelves to children’s cartoons such as Yu-Gi-Oh! The characters have large, doe-like eyes, big heads and tiny elfin bodies. His books are part of a series titled We Shadows.

Lucinda Breeding

He played the H.L. Mencken character in Inherit the Wind, mugged and stooged in A Funny thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and even spent some time creating a company of puppets for the company’s youth outreach.

He’s also a voice-over artist with popular shows, including Dragonball Z, in which he voices Krillin.  He now voices Usopp on a series called One Piece.

Last Tuesday, Strait was at home while pundits plugged away on Election Day.

He reached for his pen and sketchbook and started drawing, and not in the Japanese, anime style.

“It was election insanity,” Strait said. “It was Election Day. I was thinking about the presidency. I was thinking: ‘You know? I can hardly name any of the presidents.’ I thought maybe I’d draw them. Maybe that would be fun.”

He set about the task at 11 a.m. on Tuesday. He turned to the Internet to find portraits of the country’s best men. He started at the beginning and made his way through the American ages.

At first, he relied on a single site for the images.

“I stated out this way, then I just started Googling. I like the older ones. You could almost do a little more to them than you can the newer ones,” Strait said.

Each president was drawn as a bust. There is a bit of caricature involved. George Washington’s hair is more of a severe triangle, and Monroe, the fifth president, looks slightly haughtier in Strait’s profile portrait.  Coolige calls to mind one H. Ross Perot, but Strait figures Coolige looks more “weasely” than the Texas magnate. Truman looks pleasant and Jimmy Carter looks positively toothy. You can tell the drawings aren’t an exercise in jest.

“It was all done in respect,” he said. “It was coming from a respectful place. I did find myself fighting the urge to make some look bad. But no, it was done seriously.”

Strait stopped to eat, but got right back to it. He was drawing the portrait of George W. Bush when the election was called for Barack Obama. “I thought, ‘Good, now I know what the next one looks like,’” he said.

He drew for almost 12 hours. He finished his portrait of the country’s first black president in time to watch Obama’s acceptance speech.

Not all of the presidents were easy to draw.

“There was one I had to draw several times. Which was it? Oh, yeah, I remember. It was Roosevelt,” Strait said. “The second one. He just didn’t have the same features that are easily exaggerated. Actually it was hard to draw George [W.] Bush. I was fighting the urge to mock him. That’s a weird thing to say in a red state.”

Strait drew a frame by hand, scanned it into a file on his computer, and copied it for all 43 presidents and President-elect Obama. He’s turned it into an 11-by-17 poster that he sold at a comic book convention last Friday. He’s donating the proceeds from the signed posters to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, an organization that protects graphic novelists from censorship and helps artists maintain their artistic rights when dealing with publishers and distributors.

Strait said he’s already thinking about using some of the elder statesmen in future work, perhaps without overtly identifying them as U.S. presidents. He said he especially likes Taft.

“I’d like to draw him again,” he said.

One thing Strait isn’t likely to forget is what went through his mind as he drew an amicable-looking George W. Bush and heard that Obama would take the torch.

“Again, this is hard to say, but relief. It was actually kind of weird, too, because I had been in this overdrive of drawing. And then here is this historic moment and I’m sitting here drawing in my sketchbook,” he said.

To see more of Strait’s art, visit www.myspace.com/sonion.

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com.