Luks thought that the world was a circus and he was the clown. His clothes were outrageous. (He sometimes wore trousers cut off just below the knee, which he said was the rage of the Paris Latin Quarter. Shinn described his clothes as, "shadow plaids of huge dimensions, the latest word in suburban realty maps.")

He liked to amuse friends by jumping up on a table and impersonating everyone present. For children he imitated an entire wedding, starting with the organ and followed by the minister's "Augustus Smearcase, do you take this woman..."

Luks' favorite fantasy, though, was as a prize fighter named "Chicago Whitey" who had won at least 150 fights. He would pick a fight in a bar and then walk out, leaving others to finish the fight. "Guts! Guts! Life! Life! That's my technique!"

Before the Spanish-American war, he was condemned to death in Cuba as a spy. Unlike Glackens, Luks covered most of the Spanish-American War from a Havana bar where he listened to the war tales of soldiers and other correspondents, selected a skirmish that sounded interesting, sketched it and then added captions of his own.

When Luks returned to America he worked for the New York World (along with Glackens and Shinn). When the creator of "The Yellow Kid" was lured to Hearst's New York Journal, Luks continued the comic strip for the World. For years both papers carried versions of the comic.

In 1933 (when Luks was 66) his body was found in the doorway of a building next to the Sixth Avenue elevated railway in Manhattan. The story was that he had gone to this shabby part of town to paint the light of dawn as it filtered through the tracks. He had really started one of his fights and one of the patrons had taken him outside and beaten him to death.