This is incredibly cool! The New York Times also has an interactive, flash-based archive of 23 of Al Jaffee‘s Fold-Ins from MAD from the 60′s to the present. The flash features provides a great digital “fold in” action, so you don’t have to try and fold your monitor… which is hard.
If you are lucky enough to meet the man, you’ll see that at 87 he is as sharp as a razor, still has a mischievous twinkle in his eyes and is ever the consummate gentleman.
I met Al only once, at MAD holiday party a few years ago when he was still a little wet behind the ears at only 84. I had the fairly newly published book MAD ART under my arm and intended to accost any and all MAD artists at the party and beg them to sign my book on their particular entries. I approached Al a little timidly as he was deep in conversation with Paul Peter Porges, and anyone who has every been in “deep conversation” with Porges knows it is no small matter. I introduced myself during a lull in the exchange (I think Porges might have fallen off his chair or was similarly distracted), expecting an accommodating smile, a scribbled signature and perhaps a little small talk to be polite to a fellow MAD freelancer about 1,000 rungs farther down the later than he was.
To my surprise he instantly recognized my name, rattled off the names of a few of the jobs I’d done in the last year or two for MAD and told me he loved my work and thought I was a great addition to the magazine! I was thunderstruck, to be honest. He signed my book “To Tom, with Admiration, Al Jaffee”. Wow, that sort of made my decade.
The NY Times ran a big article on Al yesterday, which I heartily recommend reading. Although he’s know for his “Fold In” feature, he has been of far more importance than that for MAD for over forty years. People sometimes forget that he also wrote and illustrated some many hundreds of other articles including “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions”, product parody stuff, Rube Goldberg-esque imaginary inventions and other contributions too numerous to mention and of surprising diversity. Sergio refers to Al as “The guy who can do anything”.
Al Jaffee is nominated for the National Cartoonists Society‘s Reuben award for “Cartoonist of the Year”, and as worthy as the competition is I hope he takes home the gold. He’s been a marvel for a long time, and hope fully for a long time to come.
Q: I was wondering what is a wash (in inking), and how do you do it? I know that it makes the ink turn grey, or maybe something like that.
A: Washes are areas of gray created by watered down ink that you “wash” into an inked drawing to add values of gray and turn it into a more “inked painting”. Washes can be used either as flat areas of specific values or as a more painted grayscale set of values like a monochrome watercolor painting.
Washes are more easily accomplished via the computer these days, and I often will use the computer to add the washes and values after scanning in the line artwork in the same manner I add my color when I am doing a black and white piece. Occasionally, however, I will do it the old fashioned way to take advantage of the more flawed and hand-done look it imparts… especially with respect to the texture of the board the washes naturally pick up.
The best way to create consistent natural washes is to set up a “palette” of gray values. Take small several plastic bottles and add water to them, then add drops of ink until you reach a range of values… say one at 10%, one at 30%, one at 50%, etc. How do you know what percent they are. You eyeball it, of course. It doesn’t really matter what actual percentage of black it is anyway… it’s all about how it looks. Once you have the these set up, you can dip a clean, rinsed brush into them to get a pure, consistent wash value. You wash over your linework to add the values where you want them. Be sure you used a waterproof ink for the linework… otherwise you will mess your lines up badly.
Washes work like watercolors, where if you place one on top of the other the overlap produces a darker value. You can paint an area flat or do some modeling and rendering to make a much more dimensional looking final result. Here are some examples of some ink and wash art, although I had a hard time finding anything at all using physical washes… it’s so much easier on the computer:
I added an actual ink wash to the seat and console of this
spot illustration for MAD Kids just to be different…
The washes on this ink sketch were added with
grayscale markers of 10%, 20% and 40%
These darker “washes” were done digitally on this
spot illustration for Fade In Magazine
Here’s a small spot I also did for Fade In before adding
some more subtle washes using PhotoShop
With the digital washes. More subtle than in the Pee wee spot…
“Back in the Day” at MAD the artists used a lot of washes to accent the inked artwork, but most avoided a fully painted look. They would use actual washes or often gray markers to add just a little value in the art, since the whole thing (pasted up lettering and all) was photostated as a line screen it all became a dot pattern and could be reproduced in print. Some artists, Like Mort Drucker, were old school and used “rubylith” to indicate percentages of gray for flat areas to add values. Rubylith is a sheet of a clear acetate plastic with a film of transparent red affixed to it like a peel off sticker. Mort would place this sheet over a portion of his art and tape into place. Then he would cut out and remove the areas of red that were not to be the gray value, leaving a red “mask” over the area that was to be gray. Then he would write what percentage of gray he wanted the red area to be:
Mort original panel with rubylith in place. Note the 20% indicated
for the printer. The other washes were done in markers. The foreground
character’s shirt has marker values under the rubylith.
The the printer would remove the rubylith and photostat the inked art using a halftone screen to create the dot patterns. Then he would “strip” the rubylith area into the “black plate” of the print film using the percentage indicated. The end result:
20% value in place where Mort wanted…
Thanks to Mike Kuznar for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail meand I’ll try and answer it here. I’m out!!!
I’ve written a number of times about this scourge of evil that lobbyists are trying to push through the legislature. Basically it’s a law that allows publishers or whomever to use creative works without paying the creator if the creator cannot be located by the vaguely defined “reasonably diligent search”. That’s bad enough, when any copyright violator can claim the made a “reasonably diligent search” if busted by the original creator, but previous incarnations also limited the amount a creator could receive in a court case so that it would cost the user of the creative works little or no more to try and use it without a real try at a search for the creator than it would if they contacted them and paid for it up front.
No word if that kind of language still exists in the “New and Improved” Orphan Works bill being introduced next week, but there is disturbing news that several groups that opposed the bill last time around will not be doing so this time. According to the Illustrator’s Partnership, several “artist’s groups” have withdrawn their opposing in exchange for concessions that benefit their groups. No names and no details beyond that. The full release from IP:
FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP
The New “Improved” Orphan Works bill is due out next week. We expect it to be much the same as the last one. Unfortunately, the Orphan Works landscape has changed.
Several groups which opposed the bill last time will not oppose it this time. They’re ready to concede defeat in return for concessions for their groups. They’ve also insisted that no other visual artists speak out against it. They say we must all capitulate in order not to endanger the concessions they want. They say we have to show Congress that artists speak with one voice: theirs. That creates a problem.
Not all visual artists have the same stake in copyright protection. Who owns the copyrights to your high school yearbook photos? Your wedding photos? Bar mitzvah pictures? How often has that ever been an issue?
If you don’t make your living primarily by licensing copyrights, you may not have the same stake in this bill as those of us who do. Moreover, visual arts groups don’t exist by licensing copyrights; artists do. So whatever concessions might be acceptable to an artists group might still harm the careers of artists.
We believe the way to speak with one voice is not to submit to a bill that would:
- Create uncertainty in commercial markets;
- Nullify the exclusive right of copyright and therefore
- Reduce the value of your work;
- Threaten the privacy protection afforded by current copyright law; and
- Invite retaliation from abroad.
Instead, Congress should be lobbied to draft specific, limited exemptions that permit the use of true orphaned work. When we’ve seen the new bill, we’ll provide you with suggested language for writing lawmakers. In the meantime, you can help by continuing to spread these emails to any interested party, both in the US and overseas.
Remember: the US Orphan Works amendment is not an exception to copyright law to permit the archiving and preservation of old, abandoned works. It is a license to infringe contemporary works by living artists worldwide. Its goal is to force these works into private commercial US registries as a condition of protecting copyrights.
Coerced registration violates international copyright law and copyright-related treaties. To concede defeat on it is to knock a hole in copyright law and admit a Trojan horse.
— Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner, for the Board of the Illustrators’ Partnership
That does not sound good, but I will be interested to find out which artists groups are doing this and what the “concessions” are. There is a vast copyright search database that companies must search prior to using or copyrighting things like names or slogans, so there should be one for general creative works if such a bill is to function as a law.
Still unbelievably swamped with work and deadlines…. I’ve got several jobs “in the can” as they say (meaning done) and several more with deadlines either creeping up, looming or trying to kick my ass right now. I just finished this one the other day for the workplace poster company and can share it right away as the client doesn’t mind me doing so:
Click for a closer look…
It may look like I cheated and used a photo background, but I actually cheated and used the fully painted background I did for a piece I did for MAD a few years ago called “Rejected Characters from Pixar’s CARS“. I really dislike the use of photo images within a cartoon illustration like this… it creates a disjointed and disconnected feel. Even more painterly stuff looks a little out of place when there are no lines to bind it in. In this case though it isn’t working too badly and the subdued color and minimal contrast in values reads as “atmospheric perspective”… I hope. I painted the rest in about 3 hours to make the deadline.
Monday I will be able to post the illustration I did for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, as it will be in the paper on Sunday as the cover of a special pull out section on the baseball opener. The other jobs I’ve been sweating will have to wait for varying lengths of time before I can post them.
This summer I posted about the new book coming out illustrated by my friend and fellow member of MAD’s “Usual Gang of Idiots” Rick Tulka entitled “Paris Café: The Sélect Crowd“, and how CBS did a new piece on Rick and the book. Well, the book has been out for some time and The Lovely Anna and I have been enjoying our copy.
Rick has told me many times about this café, Le Sélect, where he has spent the last decade sipping coffee and drawing the patrons, wait staff and passersby in his inimitable style. Author Noël Riley Fitch and Rick decided to write a book featuring a collection of Rick’s café sketches and detailing the history of the establishment. The Montparnasse café has been a favorite of the creative and intellectual crowd since 1923, with noted famous frequent patrons including Hemingway, Beauvoir, Picasso, James Baldwin, and George Plimpton. The book describes Le Sélect’s rich past but is also a fascinating short study of the role café’s play in the social, cultural and intellectual life of Paris. My only complaint about the book is that is it too small… I wish it was a coffee table sized volume so Rick’s richly textured and shaded dark graphite drawings were given their proper due.
That CBS feature is now available on YouTube (isn’t everything?), and Rick is very prominently featured and interviewed in the piece. He tells me he’s had to sign a few autographs there since it ran. You can order the book through Amazon.
A quick and not entirely successful study of Kim Basinger from an older photo. Not really much of a caricature. She’s got a very square face shape from the front, but it becomes much more triangular in a 3/4 view.
Last week I mentioned that John Read‘s new quarterly magazine, Stay Tooned! had been released and was arriving in subscriber’s mailboxes. Two days later I got my copy, and was finally able to give it a good read through yesterday.
First off, it weighs in at a whopping 88 pages, and most of that is content, not advertising. That’s an impressive collection of articles and interviews on cartooning. It’s printed on a white, sturdy stock paper with a color cover. Photos and artwork reproduce well on that paper, and they all look great in the magazine.
The issue includes profiles of no less than nine working cartoonists (in order of print): Greg Cravens, Marcus Hamilton, Steve Kelley, Steven Butler, John Rose, Mashall Ramsey, John Deaton, Rob Corley and Scott Stantis. The interview-style profiles of the artists are of good length and much better conceived and thought out than your typical generic question interviews. Each one asks questions tailored to the specific artist and his style or area of expertise. It’s fascinating to learn how and from where these artists came to be professional cartoonists, as well as what they do and how they do it.
There is also no lack of artwork. Each interview, column or article contains no small number of cartoons and illustrations, in some cases including early stages of drawings and rough concepts. Marcus Hamilton’s profile shows the process of the conception and revisions on a Dennis the Menace panel that is particularly interesting.
Article contributions and columns by the likes of Daryl Cagle, Norm Feuti, Brad Fitpatrick, David Fitzsimmons, Bob Harvey, Rob Smith Jr. and Richard Thompson are informative and/or entertaining. I especially liked Brad’s story of a clueless guy who wanted to use some of his artwork for nothing and the resulting correspondence (complete with bad internet spelling and grammar). Any cartoonist with a website can relate.
I was duly impressed with the magazine and hope it meets with great success. It’s a worthy successor to Jud Hurd‘s Cartoonist PROfiles. My only complaint about the magazine was the hack that contributed the “Mail Q & A” column… John must owe that guy money or something.
Anyway, if the $9.00 cover price seems steep the magazine and content is worth it and more. You can visit the Stay Tooned! website to order a copy of the premiere issue and subscribe.
Q: I just read a story about Mark Cuban banning bloggers from the sports room, which of course set off crazy debates throughout the Internet about the worth (or lack of) of blogging. I know your great blog isn’t a “reporter’s blog” but what’s your take? You’ve been pretty consistent with daily updates, and you’ve added google ads and a MAD store and such… So has your blog become an important addition to your business/career (through branding and additional financial ops) or is it more of a hobby and personal fun outlet?
A: Ah. Blogging. One of the most bizarre and diverse facets of the internet…. both it’s bane and boon, depending on where you are virtually standing.
I have to say I am one of those that questions the legitimacy of blogs as journalism, thinking them much more of a “vanity press”. Still, one cannot argue that anything read by, in some cases, 50,000 to 100,000 or more people a day does not have some claim to being a legitimate ‘publication’. That is a small percentage, however.
Some blogs are “vanity press”. In comics, that term is meant to describe comic books that are self published by individual writers and artists and distributed by whatever means are available. You didn’t see many of them before the mid 90′s, because they were an expensive and difficult task to produce. Once desktop publishing came along and anybody with a PC could produce a comic book that could be outputted right to film and this printed, they became more plentiful. Cheap, overseas printing is even sparking new markets of self published comics and books full of people’s art they then can sell via the internet or at comic book conventions. It used to be that good art and writing in these vanity press books were rare because, well, the reason they had to resort to self publishing in the first place was usually because the work was crappy and no comic book company would agree to publish it. There are lots of exceptions to that, and many great comics have been self published, but as a rule they were not high quality stuff. Blogs are like that today.
It takes a whopping ten minutes for anybody to set up a totally free blog and start sharing their views and opinions with the world. Some approach it as little more an an on-line diary, while others treat it like a legitimate source of news and opinion. I have always found it more than a little narcissistic to think that anyone out in the vastness of cyberspace would or should care about the opinions and thoughts of a Blockbuster employee in Hoboken, or anyone else for that matter. The ability to easily place those opinions and thoughts out on the internet where they can be seen and read by literally the entire world seems to make people believe what they have to say is actually worth the world’s time to read. But, they can so they do. That is really doing a disservice to the majority of blogs, however. Very few are of the “look at me” variety. According to this article, only about 3% of blogs are “personal diaries”. Most are about things like technology (34 percent), culture (26 percent) and politics (25 percent).
I do think that is someone is to have a blog they ought to have something to say that is either unique or of interest to some specific group of people. “Billy’s Blog”(just pulled that one out of my head… if there really is a “Billy’s Blog”, my apologies), where we are treated to Billy’s rants about whatever he feels like ranting about is a giant waste of bandwidth for the entire world except a few people who know Billy. Blogs that concentrate on a certain subject matter and have something to say about that subject matter are different. They’ve got some purpose or focus a lot of blogs lack. It doesn’t make it any more “legitimate” than the next one, but I think it does present content of interest to more than just someones mom and buddies.
Of course thinking that makes me a real hypocrite, since here I have a blog and therefore I must think as highly of my own opinions and thoughts as those of the “personal rant” type I so readily dismissed, right? Of course I do not think any such thing. I have some experience in a fairly unique field and may have some things to say that are of interest to someone who also is either a cartoonist or has an interest in cartooning, MAD, caricature or related topics.
Make no mistake, though… my blog is pure vanity press. I make no illusions about being anything but that. There is no financial or business advantage to having this blog. I do it strictly for fun and for a change of pace from drawing all the time. I enjoy writing and this is an outlet for that. The ads and such are only to try and help pay for web hosting fees, as is the Cafe Press store. The sharing of tutorials and such are just a part of my wanting to do some writing about what I know. If anyone gets anything out of it, then that’s a bonus.
Thanks to fellow member of the ‘Usual Gang of Idiots”, writer Russ Cooper for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail meand I’ll try and answer it here. I’m running low!!!
