There are only a few museums around the country that focus on comics and cartooning as part of their ongoing programs. The Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, the  MoCCA (Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art) in New York and the Museum of Cartoon Art in San Fransisco are three that come to mind right away.

A fourth is The Toonseum, a part of the excellent Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, in Pittsburgh, PA. The Toonseum’s mission statement is: “to celebrate the art of cartooning. (Their) goal is to promote a deeper appreciation of the cartoonists and their work through hands-on workshops, community outreach, cartoon-oriented educational programming, and exhibitions of original cartoon art.”

The Toonseum is about to have their first art show/sell at the Zombo Gallery in Pittsburgh. “Ink and Paint” takes place Nov. 14- Dec. 6th.

From the Zombo press release:

INK AND PAINT..THE CARTOON SHOW AT ZOMBO GALLERY!

NOVEMBER 14- DECEMBER 6

[Pittsburgh, PA] Come see the first ever partnership between the ToonSeum and Zombo Gallery: Ink and Paint. The exhibition will feature traditional ink cartoons and less traditional paintings by national and local cartoonists. The opening reception is on Friday, November 14, 2008 from 6 to 11 pm. The show will run through Saturday, December 6, 2008.

Ink and Paint is inspired by the desire to showcase the variety of work created by cartoonists. “Cartoonists work in many mediums, and diverse styles. We wanted to create a gallery show that would give the public and collectors the opportunity to explore cartoons as a highly entertaining and collectible art form.” says Ink and Paint curator, Joe Wos

The show will feature some of the nations top talent including Dan Piraro, Rob Rogers, Jim Borgman, Mike Peters, Lee Moder, Ed Piskor, Wayno, Steph Scuillo, and Joe Wos, among others.

The exhibition will feature original art for sale as well as a silent auction of select items. All proceeds will benefit the ToonSeum, Pittsburgh’s museum dedicated to the cartoon arts. The ToonSeum celebrated its first birthday in October 2008. In its first year they created groundbreaking exhibitions including Drawn to the Hive: Cartooning Pittsburgh’s Mayors, Wee Pal’s: The Works of Morrie Turner, and Just Kidding Around: Children in Cartoons and Comics.

“Zombo Gallery is the home for Cartoon low-brow pop art,” says Zombo Gallery owner, Michael Devine. “Since our inception, we found that this kind of art has been neglected and needs to be brought to the local art community. Lawrenceville is the perfect spot for us. Most of the people here grew up on comics and cartoons and still have a large place in their hearts for it.”

Join the ToonSeum and Zombo Gallery at the opening reception on Friday, November 14, 2008 from 6 to 11 pm. The opening reception and gallery is free and always open to the public.

Add my name to the list of artists donating work for sale at the exhibit. I’ll be sending in an original page from MAD. Not sure which one yet.

Which brings me to the subject of this post! The Toonseum would be happy to accept donations of original cartoon art from professional cartoonists.

From Joe Woos at The Toonseum:

We are asking our cartoonists friends to support the ToonSeum by donating a piece to this event. All proceeds will benefit the ToonSeum, Pittsburgh’s Museum of Cartoon Art. Your donation of art helps us create exhibitions, as well as present workshops, panels, and educational programming related to the cartoon arts.

We are looking for traditional cartoon art, paintings, sculpture, anything at all created by cartoonists. We hope we can count you to participate in this show.

All items must be recieved by November 7th. They may be shipped to

The ToonSeum,
10 Children’s Way
Pittsburgh, PA 15212

If you are in Pittsburgh and need us to pick up an item just let me know.

Please feel free to forward this to fellow cartoonists and artists friends. On behalf of the ToonSeum thank you for your continued help and support.

Joe Wos
Executive Director,
The ToonSeum
412-325-1060
joe@toonseum.com

Museums like this need all the support they can get! If you don’t have any art that you think will help them, you can always donate directly.

Here’s a stab at the famously hard-to-caricature William Shatner. Actually these days he’s a lot easier to capture than he was in the 60′s as a younger man. Boston Legal is one of The Lovely Anna‘s favorite TV shows.

BTW, sorry for the ugly “© 2008 Tom Richmond” in the image, but I am going to start adding that to anything I put on the internet to try and safeguard as best I can against the possible passage someday of the Orphan Works Act.

Just a few jobs going right now. I’m just getting into the final work on my part of the “MAD 20″, AKA “MAD’s 20 Dumbest People, Events and Things of 2008″. It should come as no surprise that one of the subjects of this year’s “MAD 20″ is the credit crisis, and that is indeed the subject of my piece. Sorry I can’t share more.

Here’s a step by step image gallery of the workplace poster I finished up yesterday. It’s nice that the client I do these for does not mind that I share the final artwork as soon as it’s done. I often forget to post finished jobs because by the time they are published I have done several other jobs and it’s off my radar.

Job: Create 17 x 17 inch poster image depicting “four employees in a cafeteria, just finishing lunch. There are two women, one race-neutral and one black, and two men, both white. One of the two guys is chomping down on his last triple-triple burger and has destroyed several others, along with a huge plate of fries (just a few remain on the plate). The other guy has had a meatball grinder and a box of donuts, and he’s holding his stomach with a pained expression. The guys should be a bit on the chunky side, but not obese. Both are looking very logy, like after Thanksgiving dinner. The two women are cheery, upbeat and wide awake, looking at the guys and, in a funny way, offering constructive, ah, criticism in a humorous way (they shouldn’t look like nags). One of the women is just finishing a modest-sized bowl of salad, the other a veggie wrap.”

Here’s my initital pencil:

After a client review it was decided they wanted the ladies standing and looking like they wanted to be seated at the table but it would be covered with wrappers and discarded containers, half eaten food, etc. Here is the revised sketch:

This one was approved with direction to change the ladie’s expressions to be “less angry and more shocked/ disgusted”. On to the inks:

Pretty standard inks for this kind of job. As always I concentrate on line wieght and do not add much in the way of values via crosshatching or other techniques knowing the color will do all that work.

Here is the color in various stages of completion. See my coloring tutorials for details on this technique:

Here’s the final image. Click on it for a closer look:

Monday deadline blues…. Look for an “On the Drawing Board” post tomorrow with a “step by step” of a recent job.

Q: How did you execute your Holmes graphic (see above) ? Did you scan the material for the clothing and hat then skew it in Photoshop.  It looks very cool ! Maybe you don’t want to share your secret. I hope you do.

A: It’s not really any kind of secret. It’s just some simple Photoshop trickery. I didn’t save a “step by step” nor did I save the original pattern files, so I will just have to explain it. I do have the original unflattened file so you can see the various elements.

First, I inked the image and scanned it as I always do, then moved the line work to it’s own layer.

Then I painted the background using the paintbrush tool and some airbrush type brushes:

Then I painted the face using my techniques explained HERE:

Finally, the part you asked about… the clothing. Holmes is famous for wearing a type of pattern called “houndstooth”. A simple google of “Houndstooth Pattern” yielded several nice samples. Sorry I didn’t;t save the exact file and I couldn’t find what looked like the same one again, but any decent one would do. I created a single rectangle of the pattern, and then using the “Image>Adjustment>Hue/Saturation” feature I changed the color to a nice green/red for the hat. Then I simply copied the rectangle and moved it “under” each section of panel of the hat, between the seams. Then I used the “Edit>Transform>Distort” feature on the rectangle to create the illusion of perspective and direction of the pattern for each panel. I also would rotate or skew the rectangle to get it to fit in the bill or back of the hat. Then I would erase away the parts of the rectangle not needed to fill the particular panel I was working on. Then I did the same thing for the next panel of the hat.

I again used “Image>Adjustment>Hue/Saturation” to change the colors to a more brown/red for the jacket. I used the same method to alter the rectangle to fill in the various sections of the jacket. Here’s what that layer looks like with the rest hidden:

The shading was done using the “Burn” tool primarily, with some additional painting using a brush on “multiply” mode so it would not have any opacity effect on the pattern.

It’s a pretty simple way to approximate a complex pattern on clothing, but you have to use it warily as it makes for a shocking and out-of-place realism in an otherwise cartoon illustration. I generally dislike the use of realistic textures or patterns in cartoon illustration, and do not use it much. I did use the same method when I did some Spider-Man and Superman illustrations for MAD KIDS, but I created the patterns myself that time:

In this case I was able to use the magic wand tool to isolate the inside ovals or diamonds from the background material and create some shiny light effects that gave the costumes a little more volume and texture.

Thanks to Michael Garisek for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!

Our Elizabeth and one of her favorites, Rachel Ray

As the parent of an autistic child, no ones knows better than I both the difficulties and expenses involved with raising a kid with autism. As a self employed person, it’s doubly tough as health insurance is a wallet buster under the best of circumstances, let alone when one of your kids has a disability. Autism isn’t nearly as expensive to deal with as other disabilities might be… we didn’t have to remodel our home to accommodate a wheelchair for example. Still there are plenty of extra expenses involved including doctors visits, medication and the like. Not to mention spending a fortune in Roseanne DVD sets (a particular love of Elizabeth’s).

I read an interesting article on CNN.com the other day about a parent group in Virginia that is pressing for a law that would require insurance companies to cover medical costs to treat autism. According to the article, similar requirements have been instated in Pennsylvania and South Carolina, where caps of $50,000 per child per year are in place. Naturally insurance companies say this will raise premiums. The article examines the case of a family who “in order to provide the best care” had the father quit his job to provide full time care for their child. The article states: “Although (the mother) has a good job in sales, the bills still amount to more than the family’s monthly income. Costs for (the child’s) applied behavior analysis, a relatively new therapy that has passionate advocates as well as critics, can run up to thousands of dollars a week, not including the cost for speech therapy, his medications and special schooling.”

I’m not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, total refusal to pay for any kind of autism related costs by an insurance company is ridiculous. I believe kids with depression are covered for treatment, including drugs. Other psychological problems are also covered by many insurance policies. Autism is not just some phantom malady that someone may or may not have… it should be covered like other psychological disorders. In actuality most PROVEN treatments, like psychiatric care and meds, ARE covered by insurance in cases of autism… it’s the unproven, experimental treatments that are not.

The problem I see with it is in the article quote above: “Costs for (the child’s) applied behavior analysis, a relatively new therapy that has passionate advocates as well as critics, can run up to thousands of dollars a week“. The Lovely Anna and I have always looked with suspicion upon such treatments and questioned the effectiveness and science behind them. The “treatments” for autism are varied and numerous, but basically none have ever stood up to serious scientific testing for real effectiveness or consistent results. Some do help in certain cases, most others do not. Many “fad treatments” have appeared and disappeared over the years. Sometimes costing many, many thousands of dollars, these treatments usually have little basis in science and yet parents will flock to them no matter the cost and difficulties involved. There are auditory treatments, visual treatments, hardcore behavioral treatments, drug treatments, detoxification treatments, dietary treatments… the list is endless.

Why would a parent pay thousands of dollars a week for a treatment that is not even proven to work? You know that sick, helpless feeling you have in your stomach when your kid has the flu and is pale, sick and lying in bed with a high fever… and you can do nothing but sit by them and try to comfort them while you wait for it to run it’s course? Take that feeling and multiply it by about ten thousand, and then understand there is no course for the autism to ‘run’… it is usually for life, every day, day after day. It’s no wonder a parent will clutch at any straws that give even a shred of hope that it can make their child’s life better.

The Lovely Anna and I have not been immune to this thinking. We do read about treatments and we weigh the possibility of it’s effectiveness against it’s invasiveness and it’s application specifically to Elizabeth before we decide to try something. For a while there was a treatment we tried that was having success in some cases, which involved the injection of a hormone called Secretin. Secretin naturally occurs in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, and both a synthetic version and a version derived from pig intestines were used to treat people with digestion problems. By accident it was discovered, when a doctor was using secretin to treat a patient with digestive problems who also had autism, that it caused the patient’s autistic symptoms to improve dramatically. Thus this unrelated substance became a very much demanded treatment for autism with no scientific study to support it whatsoever. The treatments were not covered by insurance (not for autism, but they were for treating GI problems), costs hundreds of dollars each and the right kind of secretin was very, very hard to find. Only the pig derived version seemed to work. There were no side effects except for a brief flushing and warm flash right after the treatment. We found a doctor willing to administer the secretin for autism, and gave Elizabeth two treatments. We found no quantifiable improvement and stopped the treatments. Later one scientific study found that only 25% of autistic patients showed improvement, and of those 100% also had GI problems… something that many autistic people seem to suffer from. Autistic subjects without accompanying GI issues showed no improvement over the placebo subjects. Several other studies demonstrated absolutely no evidence that secetin had any effect on autism whatsoever.

The gluten-free diet treatment is another one that is gaining popularity right now, especially thanks to Jenny “I cured my son of autism” McCarthy. The popular belief that this helps reduce or eliminate autistic symptoms stems from the belief that damage from immunizations like MMR or from preservatives in them like thimerosal cause kids to be unable to digest gluten and casein and these act like opiates in their systems, basically making them stoned all the time and/or short circuiting their brains. Many reports abound that such diets have “cured” or greatly improved people with autism. Once again, there is zero scientific evidence that this is the case. Putting Elizabeth on such a diet would be impossible short of locking her in a cell and feeding her through a slot in the door, because the only foods she will eat are very selective and mostly starches and fats. We would need to starve her before she would resort to eating gluten-free foods, and then we’d need to isolate her from any access to any foods that were not gluten-free. Short of rolling her around in a giant plastic ball I cannot see how we can do that. Also, any evidence these treatments do work tend to again only work on kids who also have GI problems, and Elizabeth has no such issues.

I’m not saying that those claiming these treatments worked for their kids are lying. A diagnosis of autism is one of “Autism Spectrum Disorder” (ASD)… the operative word being “spectrum”. Autism isn’t like the measles, where you have it or you do not. Cased falling into ASD range from those with little more than Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and/or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to the sit-in-the-corner, hand-flapping nonverbal type. I believe there are multiple causes for multiple disorders all considered to be ASD and something found to work on one case many not work on the next 100 or even 1000 cases. Even though no scientific study has found a link between autism and GI disorders does not mean in certain cases there is NOT a link. Why else would secretin and dietary treatments work so well in a select few cases? I am convinced that in the future there will be well over a dozen different specific autistic disorders identified, like Asperger’s Syndrome and Fragile X is identified now, with specific causes pinpointed and hopefully specific and effectively proven treatments found. Right now it’s too big a spectrum for definitive answers.

Getting back to the insurance issue, I personally do not believe insurance companies should foot the bill for experimental treatments with no scientific prove of effectiveness. That said any treatment proven to help or improve the lives of autistic kids should be covered by insurance, in most cases IS covered currently. Elizabeth sees a psychologist and is on meds to even her moods and deal with her more destructive OCD problems. These are covered by our insurance, and improve Elizabeth’s quality of life quite a bit.

As much as I sympathize with the parents in that CNN article, The health care and insurance industries in this country are about as broken as they can be right now and lawmakers have bigger issues that need fixing than forcing insurance companies to pay for overpriced treatments that have a very small chance of working just to give people the feeling they are doing something to help their autistic children. I can tell you that if a treatment for autism surfaced that I truly believed would help Elizabeth I would sell everything I own to get it for her. We research, examine and wiegh what is available and occasionally try what makes sense for her. In the meantime, we love her and give her the best life we can provide… which is the job of any parent.

Not the sequel… the “Directors’ Cut“.

Back in 1998 MAD published MAD About the Movies, a collection of movie spoofs from over the years. It was in part to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of Warner Bros. (WB owns DC Comics which in turn owns MAD) and all the movies in the book were Warner Bros. films.

10 years later MAD is coming out with a new version of the book featuring parodies of films from other studios as well as some from WB. MAD About the Movies: Director’s Cut weighs in at a whopping 400 pages and contains not only SIXTY movie parodies from films of the last 60 plus years, but other goodies as well. Here’s a short list of some of the included parodies:

• Gone with the Wind
• Bonnie and Clyde
• A Clockwork Orange
• Brokeback Mountain
• Spider-Man
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
• The Lord of the Rings (all three films!)

Obviously there are both black and white and color pages in the book. I was told I have several parodies in it myself, although I don’t have a full list. I’m pretty excited about being in the book, as it will be the first book I really have a presence in. My parody of “Traffic” was in MAD About the Oscars, but I believe that is my only contribution to a MAD book.

The book is part of an exclusive agreement with Barnes and Noble, so that is the only place you’ll be able to get a copy. It’s dirt cheap at only $9.98 for an online price.

I have not as yet seen a copy, so I have no idea what kind of stock it’s printed on. It’s listed as a “hrdcover” but at less than $10.00 I htink that might be a mistake. Still this would make a great stocking stuffer. It’s supposed to be released tomrrow, according to the Barnes and Noble website.

Today’s the day I am sitting by the phone in case I am called upon to be a “Phone-a-Friend” lifeline for my pal and fellow caricaturist Jim Batts, who is taping his show this afternoon in New York City.

Actually the way this works is he is there and ready to compete if called upon. It is possible he might not be picked from the pool of possible contestants during the taping sessions he is scheduled for. I doubt that, as he is just the kind of guy they’d want on the show… he’s quirky, has an interesting career and he knows a #%^$*@ lot about movies. In fact it’s kind of a joke I am on of his “Phone-a-Friends”, as I know a small, tiny fraction of the vast knowledge of entertainment trivia that Jim knows. In fact, Jim once participated in a radio call-in entertainment trivia game when he was working in Las Vegas doing caricatures at Excaliber, and he broke the bank. No kidding, they could not stump him. His winnings escalated with each question, and he had won over $1,300 before they cut him off. After that they had a new “ceiling” for what you could win. Jim’s going to win a bundle… I’d not bet against his taking home a million dollars.

Basically my job is to cover some small, specialized knowledge he does not possess. Mainly I am his ringer for any Harry Potter movie related questions, but if he gets one on a Batman movie or any of the films I did the parody of for MAD, he might tap me for those as well. I will take endless ribbing from my workout trainer if I end up answering a Brokeback Mountain question for him.

So I am supposed to get a prep call between 10 am and 11 am EST today, just to make sure I am available. Then I must stick by the phone between 12 pm and 7:30 pm EST to answer a possible call. I’m not sure what I’ll do if I get a call from a client today. I doubt my caller I.D. will say “Meredith Vieira” on it if they call. It will probably say “Unknown Caller” or some such. I’ll have to keep my conversations short. I was told they will call me after Jim is done so I need not wait around all day.

There is a very small chance I’ll get a call. First, I cannot imagine Jim not knowing something about a movie. Second the Harry Potter films were such big blockbusters the only questions they’d likely to be the subject of will be the very easy first several, and even someone who has not sen the films will likely know the answers to those.

Still, I’ll be ready. Bring it on, Meredith!

UPDATE- I’m off the hook. “Millionaire” called and told me Jim used a different Phone-a-Friend. I feel all empty and hollow inside… sniff… sniff…

Almost forgot “Sketch o’the Week” today. In honor of the 2008 World Series, which starts tonight, here’s a quick pencil study of baseball’s meek commissioner “Bud” Selig.

Who am I rooting for in the Series? I guess if I had to choose I’d go with Philly, just because I think a team needs to be around for more than a decade before they deserve to be in the World Series. The whole Florida Marlins thing in 1997 and 2003 still makes me a little sick to my stomach. I’m not sure Philly can win it, though. I think it will all come down to whether the youth and inexperience of the Rays will sneak up and bite them.