I got my start as a professional artist drawing caricatures at a theme park near Chicago during the summers between college semesters. That is a hard and challenging thing to do, believe me. I eventually started my own caricature concession operations, and now have a few around the country, including here in Minnesota as well as Georgia, Missouri and Massachusetts.

Live caricature is a unique art form. It involves both art and performance. The most successful excel at both, but one or the other will get you by. I learned to draw caricatures at the theme park, thanks to having the opportunity to draw and work with some really talented artists. There is nothing like drawing 3,000 faces a summer to get your caricature drawing skills going. A lot of people will look down their noses at theme park or party caricaturists, saying that it’s all garbage. Not true. While there is a fair share of lousy artists who manage to make a living doing live caricatures (often it’s their ‘performance’ that gets them the jobs), there are also many with tremendous talent who are just starting out or have found a love of this kind of work and do some amazing quick draw art. If you visit a theme park, have a look at all the caricaturists before you choose one to get drawn by. See if one has a style that catches your eye.

I don’t draw live caricatures personally much anymore. I spend most of my time working on my own freelance jobs, and in the summer I work with new artists to teach them techniques and also handle the business end of things. However I do travel around to my various locations during the season, and this weekend I’ll be at our concessions in St. Flags New England, drawing on Saturday and likely Friday as well. I still enjoy it when I get the chance to do it. If anyone stops by mention you saw this post and I’ll make your ears look like satellite dishes at no extra charge.

One more cool thing about this trip. Each year Bunny Hoest, one of the creators of “The Lockhorns” strip, hosts a picnic at her home for members of the National Cartoonists Society. This happens to co-incide with my visit to the area, so I plan to attend. Lot’s of big time cartooning legends show up that this get together, and I will be having a lot of fun meeting and talking with some of my heroes. MAD artist Ray Alma and his wife will be giving me a lift there, and rumor has it I might finally get to meet Hermann Mejia, the outstanding MAD artist whose work I greatly admire. Hopefully I can post a pic of Hermann and I later.

The July issue of MAD will have a parody of the new Superman movie, written by Dick DeBartolo with art by me. Here are some images from the job to give you a little advance peek:

Doing parodies in advance of the film’s release is not my favorite thing to do. I much prefer seeing the film first, as there is so much more to have fun with that way. Just working from a script and a few advance scenes, photos and trailers doesn’t give either myself or the writer the chance to lampoon the acting, pacing or so many of the elements that make or break a movie. Even choices in color make themselves apparent after seeing a film. Regardless, when the job requires doing the art before seeing the film, I jump in and do the best I can.

Thanks to the Internet, that isn’t an impossible task. I end up spending a lot more time scouring the ‘net for images or clips than a normal job, but it pays off. Since I am a self-admitted stickler for detail, I have been known to make last minute changes to the artwork just to get something right. A few years ago, when working on “X-2″ for MAD (in advance of the film’s release), I stumbled upon some technical drawings of the movie’s X-Jet, which was radically different from the first film’s jet. The art was due to MAD the next day, but I redid three panels to get the jet right. Unfortunately that went to waste somewhat when we found out that Singer re-shot the original ending and we got it WRONG in the parody. D’OH! Oh, well, at least the jet was right!

Back to Superman Returns… this was a tough project because the trailer was very late in being released, and not many images were available. Oh, there were plenty of Brandon Routh and his speedo, but not much in the way of scenes from the film. Plus there were several scenes that seemed to be the same as those from the first film that involved Jor-el and Lara (Superman’s parents, played by Marlon Brando and Susannah York). Brando’s image was definately being used from old footage as the hologram at the Fortress of Solitude, but nobody knew how the Krypton scenes would be handled… old footage? Repeated from the 1978 original? Repeated but CGI’d up ala the Star Wars updates? We finally settled on doing the scenes from the old movie, one panel of which you see here. What? Mort Drucker did the original parody in MAD, circa 1978? His Brando caricature is a classic?? No pressure….

I’m planning to see the movie this week if I can, and will post a review. I am not sold on Brandon Routh, but I hope he surprises me.

As any previous visitor can see, this new website is a complete reinvention from my previous site’s design. That site, may it rest in peace, was designed by me also and written in HTML by some web guys for very cheap back in 1995. Over the years I rewrote most of it, adding the JavaScript left menu and other things piecemeal until it was really hard to keep updated and was bloated with old, bad work from a long time ago. I got so sick of looking at it one day I realized nearly a year had gone by since last I updated it. I decided I needed a new site.

After getting some quotes I started working with A2Z Site Solutions. I had very specific ideas of what I wanted the site to look like, as I had designed a new logo and wanted the theme for the site based on it… kind of a 50′s retro cartoon feel. Ken and the design team at A2Z really worked hard to make me happy, and I think they did a terrific job. I designed the look and did all the graphics including the text and headers, backgrounds and icons. I even storyboarded the intro and did the vector art for the dip pen and inkwell (that was different). They realized the look I wanted for the site and added their own ideas like the animated curve of icons on the home page and other flash features. It was a group effort and they made all the little changes and tweaks that must have seemed endless from me but made all the difference without a single complaint or argument. I hope they are as proud of the results as I am.

I hope you enjoy the site, whether you are a first time visitor or have been to the old site many times over the last 11 years. I will be updating it a lot more frequently, thanks to how quick and easy A2Z’s site management system is to use. Feel free to leave your comments!

For the last year or so I have been resisting the pressure to join the 21st century and start a blog of my own. Now that it seems like everyone and their dog has a blog and it’s gone from novel to hip to commonplace, I finally buckled and this is the result.

What do I have to talk about? Well, my intentions here are to use this space for a number of things. For starters, I’ll be posting announcements about news and things going on with me. I’m also planning on posting sneak peaks at upcoming projects and things I am working on or just finished for clients, including MAD. I also plan on having a weekly feature or two, like a “Mailbag” entry where I answer some questions sent to me via e-mail every week. I may even occasionally rant about something that’s driving me crazy or heap praise on something I have discovered and love. Of course I’ll have my links section on the bloglist you see on the right. I am planning on making entries here often… we’ll see if I can make that work.

Since I don’t have the time to moderate a lot of responses here, I will only ocassionally “turn on” the comments feature. If comments are allowed and you wish to leave one, you’ll need to register by clicking on the “Register” link near the bottom of the blogroll column on the right.