The final “Sketch o’the Week” for 2008 is of former child star Macaulay Culkin. I saw a small picture of him in a magazine and it stuck me how creepy he looks. He retains just enough of his 10-year-old features from his “Home Alone” days to be recognizable, but he’s now nearly 30 with this thick giraffe neck and long, bony nose. The reference picture was taken in pretty bright sunlight, which left some heavy shadows that were interesting. I’m not sure if he’s even still in the entertainment business, as his appearance in the magazine was a result of the tragic death of his sister in a car accident.

Oh, and Happy New Year. Drive safely.

I’ve seen my artwork stolen off the internet and used as samples for dozens of live caricaturists all around the world. I’ve seen it put on postage stamps from South American and former U.S.S.R. countries and sold in sets on eBay. I’ve seen it being used on many websites and being sold as prints online. I’ve even seen a caricature I did of Jesse Ventura tattooed on somebody’s shoulder. This one might top them all:

Yep… looks familiar.

The above shoe throwing extravaganzas took place near the University of Tehran and the U.S. Embassy in Iran on the 26th of December and featured as targets prints of caricatures of President Bush by myself and fellow NCN member Court Jones. You can see a whole gaggle of pictures of the scene and read about it here. There is also a news story on CNN about it here (which features a picture of Court’s poster). I guess it made some network newscasts.

According to the story, at the end the caricatures were grabbed and torn to pieces by angry people… sounds like your average day drawing caricatures at Six Flags to me.

Tip o’the hat to the National Caricaturist Network‘s forum and Brian Vasilik for the heads up.

I’m busy working on a few jobs right now, but here are some tidbits from the last week of interest around the interwebby:

Who Blotches the Watchmen Dept.

Fox, that’s who.

On Christmas Eve Judge Gary Allen Feess issued a ruling in favor of Fox in the rights dispute case over the new Watchmen movie that is supposed to premiere on March 3rd. Fox alleged that they owned the rights to produce and distribute a Watchmen movie, and that producer Larry Gordon was breaking a contract between himself and Fox guaranteeing those rights by producing the Zack Synder film and distributing it through Warner Bros. Fanboys the world over are scribbling in their secret journals and preparing to don trench coats, lift-shoes and ink blot masks seeking retribution (that’s a Watchmen reference, for you non-geeks).

According to this article on EW.com, Feess doesn’t seem to think much of Gordon’s honesty. Fox was apparently able to prove they did contact Warner Bros. prior to the film’s production in an effort to settle the matter, but were ignored. Gordon claimed he was “unable to remember” his agreement with Fox.

As bad as this might seem for fans of the graphic novel like myself who have been waiting for decades for a movie to be made, the article linked above is right when it points out this is actually a good thing overall. It means that the courts still protect the copyrights of studios and honor agreements properly. It benefits no one when these things are trampled underfoot. Do not fear, Watchmen rubes… the movie will come out. There is too much money to be made for WB not to settle with Fox and get Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach and co. on the silver screen this winter.

A Gang of Idiots Grows in Brooklyn

Actually they were from the Bronx, but who’s counting? Check out this awesome picture from the New York Times Magazine article “The Lives They Lived”:

Picture from the VandenBergh/Elder Family

That’s Al Jaffee and Will Elder having lunch in the cafeteria of their high school in 1939. The picture was part of an article remembering the lives of some notable folks who passed on in 2008 (Will’s gone but Al is still kickin’!). Did the other kids in that cafeteria have any idea that sitting among them were two of the most brilliant and innovative creative geniuses the world of cartooning and visual humor would ever see? No, they thought they were weirdos… that’s why they are all by themselves. If I had a time machine one of my stops would definitely be that cafeteria to have lunch with those guys. If you want to blow your mind even further, it is very likely the guy taking that picture was Harvey Kurtzman, another high school pal. That’s THREE of the most brilliant and innovative creative geniuses the world of cartooning and visual humor would ever see, in case you are counting.

The Apple Falls Far from the Tree Dept.

Last week Apple announced that next month’s Macworld Conference & Expo, happening Jan. 5th -9th in San Fransisco, CA, will be the last one they participate in and that CEO Steve Jobs will not be doing a keynote address there. The annual San Fransisco event has been considered THE major Mac tradeshow and has been going on since 1985. Apple cites “reduced need to appear at trade shows” as the reason for the decision. Apple Insider reports that “sources within Apple claim the move is strictly a matter of de-emphasizing the event and not the sign of any health problems that would keep Jobs from presenting a keynote.”

Personally I think that stinks of spin and a very bad business decision.

First off, the spin: regardless of their decision to not appear in future shows, there are only two reasons Steve Jobs won’t be delivering a keynote address THIS year:

1. He can’t
2. He won’t.

I don’t buy the latter. Why won’t he? He doesn’t have a few hours one afternoon to pimp his company’s newest products at a major trade show? It’s not the travel… he LIVES in San Fransisco! It’s not the preparation… he’s got thousands of employees who could prepare the entire address for him (somehow I don’t think Steve does his own multimedia presentation work). Nope, it’s because he can’t. His health has been a question mark for some time. I think it’s obvious it’s worse than Apple wants to admit and he couldn’t do the address without revealing that. Really that is neither here nor there anyway. Someday Apple will have to do business without Steve Jobs as their figurehead… they might as well get started. Let the man scale back and retire if he’s having health issues.

Second, the bad business decision. Maybe they feel they no longer need to do trade shows, with the proliferation of their Apple Stores and online presence, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. What has set Apple apart from Microsoft and hardware companies like Dell, etc. is their clinging to the image of the small market, personal chic brand. Even as they keep getting bigger and bigger market share, and as they dominate some markets like personal music players and smartphones, they have still insisted they are the laid back and cooler little brother who has the personal touch. Their entire ad campaigns are built around this notion. Removing themselves from personal interaction like trade shows will reinforce the growing perception that they are becoming another soulless corporate monstrosity. Considering the prices they expect people to pay for their products in order to keep their glossy white Apple Stores afloat, they shouldn’t have any qualms about spending a few bucks to keep the little personal interaction they still have with the masses and taking advantage of the publicity and buzz that surround the announcements they make at these large shows. Hundreds of live bloggers and maybe hundreds of thousands of consumers watching live? You can’t buy that kind of publicity.

If Apple keeps going down this path, they will become like Willy Wonka and his chocolate factory, with wonderful toys rolling out of the factory but out of touch with the consumer, or at least the consumer feeling out of touch with them. You have to wonder just how long the toys will stay wonderful if that happens.

Q: While in school at Syracuse I heard (maybe from Nick Meglin) that the artists of MAD were not paid that well. Essentially they traded exposure in MAD to secure freelance work from other sources. Can you tell me if that was true and if it is still true? If not is payment in accordance with the Graphics Artist Guild standards. Also there is the usual gang of idiots but does Mad negotiate on a separate basis for say a “visiting artist” i.e.. CF Payne?

A: This is a bit of a delicate subject, because I am not sure if it is proper to discuss MAD‘s pay scale for freelance work publicly. I don’t have a copy of The Artist’s Market, which is a book that publishes the rates individual magazines pay for freelance illustration, writing, cartoons, etc., so I don’t know if MAD reveals those numbers or not. However I think I can answer your question without going into specific figures.

The answer is: It depends on what you consider “being paid well” means, and what category you try and place MAD work in. MAD is unique. It’s both a magazine and a comic book, but it’s also completely neither. Therefore it’s hard to pin down what kind of pay you can call “standard” for work in MAD.

Compared to regular comic book work, where you get paid anywhere from $75 to $200 per page for pencils, $60 to $100 per page for inks and $60 to $100 per page for coloring (or higher for any of those tasks if you are a big time artist working on a big time book), MAD pays quite a bit higher. MAD artists of course routinely do pencils, inks and color all themselves, so you need to compare the combined rates of all three comic book artists involved to the single MAD page rate. Even then I can safely say MAD‘s rates are much better. Some comic book artists get royalties on their books but that is both rare and rarely adds up to any actual extra income (it’s my understanding that the number of issues needed to be sold for royalties to kick in is generally so high that it is seldom if ever reached). So, compared to regular comics MAD actually pays very well.

However compared to other magazine illustration and especially advertising, MAD generally does not pay the same level of rates. This is especially true if you consider the time involved. As I have said before, freelance illustrators are not charging for the time it takes to do an illustration, but rather for the rights to reproduce the images. Still, it is hard to divorce yourself entirely of the consideration of the time involved in creating an illustration versus the amount you are paid for the reproduction rights. MAD work is extremely involved and time consuming, especially when you consider the research and homework you need to do in order to do something like a movie or TV parody well. All work for MAD is also work for hire, so you have no rights to the artwork after it’s done. Essentially you are therefore supposed to be compensated for full rights, which in general is 200% of your usual asking price for magazine work and much more for advertising. When you think about it in those terms, an argument can be made that MAD‘s pay rate is not so good.

There are other considerations, however. First, MAD pays upon submission, NOT publication, so you don’t have to wait for a check. In fact, MAD is by far the fastest paying client I have ever worked for. They aren’t quite as fast as the old days, when an artist would deliver their work directly to Bill Gaines at the MAD offices, and receive a check on the spot while Bill guffawed at the pages in hand. Its pretty close to that, however. I usually have a check in my mailbox within a few days of my delivering the art… never more that a week. They take care of their freelancers.

Second, what you heard from Nick (or whomever) about “exposure” in MAD is also quite true. I have gotten many jobs because of my work in MAD. That is most definitely a tangible benefit to working for the magazine. However there is also a kind of stigma about working for MAD… many more “upscale” magazines specifically avoid what they call “MAD Magazine caricature” in their publications. Since TV Guide stopped using Jack Davis and Bruce Stark style caricature illustrations you do not see many MAD flavored caricatures in major entertainment publications. Still many more like the look and as I said jobs do materialize because my involvement with MAD.

As to your alluding to being paid “in accordance with the Graphics Artist Guild standards”, I can tell you that almost nobody is paid according to those standards. The Graphic Artist Guild’s Pricing and Ethical Guidelines Handbook is so optimistic in it’s estimates of pay for various jobs that only the very top people in their respective fields can expect to get those rates. I use the Handbook for guidelines on copyrights and typical rights agreements and to get an idea of what would be considered the highest rates for a given job. In that respect it’s useful.

Finally, I do not believe that there is a different pay scale for the regular “Usual Gang of Idiots” and a “guest artist”, but I do not know for certain as I am not privy to the rates of other MAD artists… only my own rate. I would be shocked if I found out that long time artists like Mort Drucker still got the same page rate the rest of us get, but again I have no idea.

Given all the different considerations I feel MAD‘s page rates to be quite fair and their payment practices to be outstanding. I can say with certainty that I have never worked harder on any jobs than the one’s I have done for MAD, and they have never given me cause to lament that hard work nor made me feel inadequately compensated.

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!

Just a quick post today. Here is this week’s political caricature for The Independent. It will appear in tomorrow’s column both online and in print.

I’d love to do more newspaper illustration. Unlike magazine work, it’s much more of a “quick and dirty” sort of exercise. Often you get only a day or so to do the job. It’s less intense because the images need to be relatively simple due to the restrictions of printing on newsprint, and the short deadlines mean you donlt have time to rethink everything over and over. It doesn’t pay all that well (especially these days) compared to magazines or especially advertising, but the reduced time involved sort of evens that out.

The only other newspaper work I’ve done, outside of work for the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Daily college newspaper back when I was a student, was this piece for the Star Tribune last spring. They either didn’t like the final results, or they didn’t find the budget to do more sports illustrations because I got no return calls from them. Oh well…

A screen capture from “The Watchmen” motion comic

I’ve written in the past about the exciting work that my friends Michael Jantze and Kelly McNutt are doing in exploring the transformation of static comic strips into a format for the 21st century. The challenge is to figure out a way to translate the traditional strip comic into a multimedia format that keeps the original feel and function of the strip and is both visually arresting and relatively quick and inexpensive to produce. The idea is to bring strips into the age of the internet by making them deliverable by e-mail, web or cell phone in a Web 2.0 format. They call them “Audio Comics”. Here are some examples using Micheal’s “The Norm” strip:

I think they are brilliant, combining the images and sounds of actual newspaper elements with simple but interesting animations and voiceover. They are on to something here.

Comic strips are not the only cartoon print media trying to break away from the page and rediscover themselves in limited animated form on the internet. Editorial cartoonists have been dabbling in animation based cartoons in online newspaper websites for some time. Here’s one of those by cartoonist Chappatte:

Lately comic books are trying to get into the action. Warner Bros. Digital Distribution and Warner Premiere have produced several “Motion Comics”, which are in a similar vein as the examples above… namely taking the static images of existing art and combining them with animatic-like limited animation, music and voiceovers to create a “multimedia” comic. “The Watchmen” is now a motion comic series available on iTunes.

There is also a series called “Batman: Black and White” on iTunes featuring art by Alex Ross from the comic of the same title. Individual episodes are about 25 minutes long and cost $1.99 each.

This concept is interesting but still in it’s infancy. Both the motion comics mentioned above have good and bad points, and they differ in their approach. “The Watchmen” includes the word balloons and text, which appear as the narrator reads them. The animations are limited anamatic style motion, pans and zooms that do not try and be an animated film but more a reading of the comic itself. “Batman: Black and White” tries harder to be animated, with more layers of moving images, some individual articulation of characters like moving arms, etc, and no word balloons or text boxes.

Of the two approaches, I think I favor The Watchmen‘s less involved approach. I don’t mind the text boxes and animatics… it isn’t tying to be something it isn’t. I don’t understand why they just have a single narrator reading all the individual parts, however. It would be much less distracting to at least have a female reading all the female parts, if not a full cast doing all the parts. Having a male narrator doing a bad ‘female’ voice takes away from the experience.

“Batman: Black and White” uses more of a vocal cast and then eliminates the text entirely. That makes for more of an engaging experience. Some of the images are very busy and kind of hard to figue out what’s going on… there are lot’s of extreme close ups of very tiny parts of panels which demonstrate the limitations of this approach.

Sorry I could not embed any teasers of these “Motion Comics”, but the copyright owners don’t permit that kind of thing. You can see short teasers of each episdoe on iTunes. The motion comics themsleves are interesting forays into a possible future of comics, so you can decide for yourself if you want to plunk down the coin to watch them.

Merry Christmas to all, and Happy Holidays to those celebrating other occasions this time of year. I hope the season finds you happy and healthy in the company of family and friends.

For those looking for a little Christmas inspiration, this post from last year about a special Christmas gift that TV personality Rachel Ray gave our autistic daughter Elizabeth (without even knowing she did) says a lot about the simple power we all have to make the world a better place for those who need a little help.

This week’s sketch is a theme-park style study of Mary-Louise Parker of Showtime’s “Weeds”… another show I hear is good but that I don’t watch. My “theme park” style of drawing is spontaneous, loose and cartoony using a 3mm 4B lead in a lead holder, a blending stomp and a lot of arm movement. I’d make this into a park sample with a little work on the likeness but I’d have a tough time coming up with the “pot” gag that would get past the theme park police.

Two big jobs wrapped up yesterday, which leaves a new project for Penthouse (no naughty stuff, just funny) and more of the column header caricatures for The Independent on the board right now.

I can’t share the Fade In job until publication, but as always the client for the workplace poster jobs doesn’t mind my posting the images I do for them upon completion. So here is the latest of those posters:

Initial Pencil

The job was to do an image of a harried looking nurse thinking about a relaxing getaway on a beach, being served hand and foot. The first pencil rough above needed some changed after art direction. They wanted the nurse to look less harried and more dreamy thinking of her getaway, and some changes to the beach scene…

Pencil round two

Final art. Click for a closer look…

Final art above done in my line and color style. In this particular case I did the background, “dream cloud” and nurse/foreground on separate layers for online animation purposes by the client.

The Penthouse job will be fun… it involves St. Patrick’s Day. I am quite sure I won’t be able to share that here until publication but it will serve as a good post for March.

I did this warm up sketch yesterday and, since I am extremely busy with a few jobs that need wrapping up today it’s all I have time to post. The subject is actor Samuel L. Jackson. This was from a small picture out of an entertainment magazine that jumped out at me as a good representation of him. Often reference pictures just do not capture a subject in a way that really speaks to the viewer of the subject’s complete persona. This is especially true of certain “rubber faced” actors or ones who change their looks drasticlly from role to role. Jackson can look very different with just a simple change of facial hair, glasses and more importantly expression. For some reason the crooked grin really caught my eye.