Yes, it’s that day again… the national holiday that isn’t officially recognized (yet) but one we all look forward to the other 364 days of the year. Yes, its National Gorilla Suit Day.
What is National Gorilla Suit Day??? Are you joking?!? It began, as almost all nonsensical and idiotic things do, with Don Martin. A series of cartoons in the 1964 book Don Martin Bounces Back! concerns the misadventures of Fester Bestertester and his railings against various gorilla suit companies and the holiday National Gorilla Suit Day. Proving that Don Martin was about 40 years ahead of his time, his National Gorilla Suit Day paved the way for lesser imitations like National Talk Like A Pirate Day.
The best thing about National Gorilla Suit Day is that there isn’t much that needs to be done to celebrate this very important holiday. There are no gifts to buy or exchange that will drive up your credit card balances. No painted, unfertilized poultry zygotes to hide or place in baskets with chocolate effigies of Oryctolagus cuniculus and other confections for consumption by children. No need to cut a living conifer from the forest, drag it into your domicile, festoon it with bits of glass and plastic and wrap it with lighted wires conducting dangerous electricity while the tree itself dies, dries out and becomes more and more flammable. No need to carve out and remove the seeds and pulp from large, orange gourds and then place live flames within them while small children walk around in close proximity wearing lightweight cloth costumes. There are no pesky lights or decorations to put up around the outside of your home, unless of course you have a giant inflatable gorilla you stole from the roof of a used car dealership when you were in college and you still have it in a box in the rafters of your garage…. not that I know anyone who ever did anything like that. If I DID I would say they are encouraged to inflate that gorilla in their front yard and, if approached by the local constabulary, claim you bought it at a garage sale years ago.
No, all you need to do is put on your gorilla suit and go about the neighborhood knocking on doors and spread the good word about National Gorilla Suit Day. Scaring the bejeezus out of some of the old folks wouldn’t ruin your day, either. So, on January 31st wear your mangy, moth eaten simian garb with pride, and just say “I’m wearing a Gorilla Suit… and I’m okay!”
I happened to be on vacation in Maui a few years ago during National Gorilla Suit Day, and blogged about my celebrations at the time:
Apparently not many local Maui residents own gorilla suits. Hard to believe, I know. Still I did what I could. Here I am at the resort:
I can tell you that gorilla suits and high humidity are a recipe for disaster. I nearly passed out several times. Several old ladies screamed as I ran around the pool, although one tried to buy me a drink. A number of Japanese tourists insisted on getting their pictures taken with me… one at a time. That took about 40 minutes and I almost passed out again. Everything was going fine until I tried surfing in it. Did you know that when a gorilla suit gets wet, it gets significantly heavier? No kidding, it weighs a ton when soaked. I was trying to hang 10 but I only hung about 2 and a half then went down and stayed down. I managed to walk out onto the beach, soliciting a number of other screams and another offer of a drink from a different lady. The good news is I found several mahi-mahi in my pants when I took off the suit, so we are set for dinner tonight.
All in all, a good National Gorilla Suit Day. I hope you all had a happy one.- Jan. 31, 2007
So, have a great 2009 National Gorilla Suit Day. Please be aware of the elderly and infim when you go knocking on doors scaring the crap out of people, and lay off the banana liqueur… National Gorilla Suit Day is behind only New Year’s, July 4th, Memorial Day weekend, Labor Day weekend, Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day, Super Bowl Sunday (?), Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, President’s Day, Easter, Hanukkah, Columbus Day, Veteran’s Day, Kwanzaa, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, National Bring your Child to Work Day and Yom Kippur as the deadliest of U.S. holidays. Keep it safe, people.
Yesterdays’ deadline for submissions for the NCS divisional Reuben awards has left my studio overflowing with nearly three dozen submissions for the “Editorial Cartoon” category which my North Central Chapter is judging. We’ll be meeting in Lincoln, NE next month to judge the entries.
That reminds me of somehting I have been meaning to tell folks about. It has been some years since the website of the National Cartoonist Society’s website was updated, but recently it’s gotten a facelift. In flew in sort of “under the radar”.
The new site, designed and created by fromer NCS president Steve McGarry‘s sons Joe and Luke McGarry, sports a much more streamlined design that is easily navigable, looks much less cluttered and stays away from the very overused Flash content. The default “News” page is set up in a blog format, and there is discussion that it will eventually have multiple contributors which should allow for much more frequent news and updating. The news/blog page also sports a blogroll with many member blogs listed and other cartoon related links. A lot of the information and features previously on the NCS site have migrated to the new site, including:
A detailing of the start of the NCS and it’s subsequent History.
An explanation and a history of the various Awards the NCS has bestowed over the years, including of course “The Reuben” for “Cartoonist of the Year”.
The Member Directory of active members and the In Memorium list of members that have passed away in the 60 plus years of the organizations existence.
Listing of the various Regional Chapters and contact info/links for each.
It will be good to see announcements, news and other things of interest to both NCS members and anyone interested in cartooning posted there on a more regular basis. I’ll have to ask the McGarry boys about adding an RSS feed link to the news page so members can subscribe and get updates as they occur.
I’d like to take a second to shamelessly plug a new book that will be released to the wide, wide world in March but is currently available for pre-order at an internet near you!
Joe Bluhm is one of those artists that makes other artists jealous. His talent is prodigious, his enthusiasm for his art immense, and his dedication to it all inspirational. I kind of hate him… but not really. Actually he’s a good friend, and he’s got a new book coming out that is going to be a must have for the bookshelf.
The book is called “Sketch Infectus”, and it’s chock full of almost 400 of Joe’s fantastic sketches, doodles and studies. A real artistic master’s brilliance is not really apparent when looking at their finished work, which they have had a chance to coax, polish and cajole into an end result. The real talent shows in the sketches and studies drawn from life or out of the artist’s imagination. This book is full of them, as well as a number of quotes from various artists about the value of sketching and keeping a sketchbook. I am honored to say I am one of those quoted.
The artwork is incredible and inspirational. After looking at it you cannot resist grabbing a pencil and starting to sketch yourself.
Joe is also no dummy when it comes to marketing. He is currently offering to include an original sketch with any copy pre-ordered before February 5th. It might be one from the book, or another from some other sketchbook, but Joe will be sacrilegiously chopping up a few sketchbooks and giving away these sketchy gems with every copy… for a limited time!
Last week DC Comics and Time Warner announced that MAD will be going from a monthly to a quarterly publication, presumably due to dropping circulation amid the increasing costs and difficulties of a badly ailing magazine marketplace. Almost simultaneously, MAD began getting the most attention I’ve seen it receive in a long time from the media and on the internet from its latest issue, cover pictured above.
The inside of the issue featured “The First 100 Minutes of the Obama Presidency” as well as the feature I did the art for and previously mentioned, “MAD Exposes Who’s Thinking What at the Obama Inauguration”. The cover image is rendered even more funny considering that the White House refused to allow photographers into the Oval Office to photograph Obama on his first day of work, instead issuing approved pictures which were rejected by the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse in protest.
I’ve got something called a “Google Alert” set up that sends me daily e-mailed digests of links to any web page, blog or other web article published on the internet that includes the term “MAD Magazine” in it. Usually this results in a few links a day to people mentioning the magazine in passing for whatever reason. In the last few days I’ve received literally hundreds of links from news sites, blogs, forums and web ‘zines raving about MAD daring to take on President Obama both on the cover and inside issue #498, which went on sale the same day of Obama’s inauguration.
Here’s a smattering of some of the various viral chatter:
A Google search for “”MAD Magazine” Obama” will give you hundreds of similar mentions. This is by far the most internet buzz I’ve seen from a MAD issue since I started working for them in 2000. Most of the chatter seems to be that MAD is one of the first publications willing to criticize and make fun of “Obamessiah”… something only the right wing catering publications and media outlets have dared to do.
CNN aired a piece on the issue yesterday, featuring editor John Ficarra:
I would hope this will also would shut up all the folks out there who have been accusing MAD of being a left wing rag for the last 8 years. HELLO! MAD has always made fun of those in power, and goodness knows the Bush administration gave them plenty of fodder (although they took plenty of shots at Hillary Clinton and other prominent democrats as well over the last few years). This issue of MAD hit news stands the very same day Obama became president… he hadn’t even had a chance to do something stupid yet and MAD showed they don’t have a problem giving him the MAD treatment. Rest assured that MAD will not hesitate to ridicule Obama every chance they get… which is 75% less chances as of issue #500.
It’s unfortunate that this kind of publicity, which you simply cannot buy, is coming at a time when whatever positive effects it might have had on the circulation are rendered meaningless. Not that I think a little internet buzz would create that big a spike in magazine sales (although if this issue isn’t the biggest seller in recent years I will be surprised) but it certainly can’t hurt.
This week’s subject is actor Jack Black, drawn from a smallish picture out of an entertainment magazine. Black is heavy set but interestingly his face does not have a lot of fat on it. On the contrary it’s quite bony except for a suggestion of a puffy sort of underbite. He was brilliant in “Tropic Thunder”.
Last night I finished a last minute job for MAD that was probably the toughest deadline they’ve ever given me. Surprisingly I finished two days ahead of schedule. As a result I am frazzled and need a break, so today’s post is just going to be a disturbing Youtube video I ran across on the excellent DRAWN! illustration and cartooning blog. This was an actual commercial for Green Giant canned peas and corn using stop motion animation:
That is incredibly frightening. The giant is a leering, psychotic horror… especially terrifying is this final pose where he leans down and thrusts the cans at the viewer with an insane look worthy of Brian Bolland‘s Joker illustrations. If I had been a kid in the 1950′s and saw that commercial I would have had nightmares for a week and never eaten a bite of Green Giant vegetables!
Very few of the posts at Drawn! are this terrifying. If you don’t visit that blog regularly you are missing out.
There’s been a lot of discussion over “teh interweb” the last few days about DC Comic’s announcement that MAD will be switching to a quarterly as of issue #500 in April. I’ve read a lot of lamenting about “the good old days” and some expected responses about how it’s what MAD deserves because its “content has gone downhill” in the last 5, 10, 15, 20 years…. blah, blah, blah. Some people are determined to blame the content of MAD for the current state of the magazine.
Anybody who honestly thinks the problems MAD has had with its circulation and readership is a result of its content does not:
Actually read the magazine
Know anything about the current state of the magazine/periodical business
Those who write on message boards and in response forums that MAD has “lost its edge” and “isn’t what it used to be” remind me of MAD scribe Desmond Devlin‘s “The Untold History of MAD” article from MAD #400, which recounted the following part of MAD‘s historical timeline:
Also in 1952: The second issue of MAD goes on sale December 9th, 1952. On December 11, the first-ever letter complaining that MAD “just isn’t as funny and original as it used to be” arrives.
That’s funny because back in the 70′s MAD got letters from people saying it had gone downhill since the 60′s, and those in the 80′s said the magazine wasn’t as sharp as it was in the 70′s… etc. MAD art director Sam Viviano nails it when he says that MAD was “at its best when you first started reading it.” I really get a kick out of people who register for the MAD message boards and post once to complain how terrible the magazine is, but in the process of doing so admit they haven’t really read it in decades and just picked it up on the news stand that day and were appalled to find it wasn’t exactly as they remembered it. I find most of the people I engage in a discussion of the quality of the art and writing content in MAD today are basing their opinions not on having actually read any number of recent issues, but simply by dismissing it from quick glances or hearsay from others who also probably haven’t read any recent issues.
Dismissing the current content of the magazine as poor and blaming it for MAD‘s struggles is just plain wrong.
Admittedly I might be a little biased, but I think the content in MAD has been on an upswing for the last several years. Particularly on the political side, MAD has been producing some of it’s sharpest content in a long time lately. They have some exceptional artists and writers still working for them, in particular Hermann Mejia, who if you don’t think deserves to be included in the same class as greats like Jack Davis and Mort Drucker then you don’t know what you are talking about. The fore mentioned Desmond Devlin is consistently funny and poignant in his skewering of pop culture and current events. John Caldwell‘s contributions are always funny and enjoyable. Features like “The Fundalini Pages” and “The Strip Club” are positive and entertaining new content that are a departure from the traditional model. Writers like Jeff Kruse, Barry Liebmann and several others have been doing some funny political work lately. The movie and TV parodies have unfortunately become smaller parts of the content recently, but still accurately point out the absurdities and shortcomings of their subjects as penned by Devlin, Dick DeBartolo, Arnie Kogen and others. Sergio Aragonés is as good as they get. There is plenty of good writing and art in MAD today. Is it all great? No, hardly. There are features that fall flat and MAD struggles to find a balance between the Farely brothers excuse for humor that kids seem to find appealing and something more intelligent. However nostalgia aside there were plenty of duds in the classic MAD days that appeared between the brilliance… it isn’t that much different today.
MAD‘s real problem is one they cannot avoid… they are a magazine. Name me a single magazine, outside tabloid trash peddlers, that isn’t struggling badly right now. I suppose that’s all about content also, right? TV Guide used to sell over 20 million copies a WEEK, and now they sell about 3 million copies… I suppose the quality of their TV schedules has badly declined. Playboy used to sell over 7 million copies an issue and today they are at 3 million copies…. of course we all know the quality of naked women has decreased dramatically since the 70′s. Newspapers are in serious trouble right now, and I guess we can blame that on the poor quality of news reporting and writing in the papers, yes? Look at reading materials that target the younger generation… comic books titles are considered wildly successful best sellers today at levels that would have seen them canceled as dismal failures in the 70′s. The magazine industry, its ad revenue business model and its inefficient distribution system has eroded substantially under the weight of other sources of media consumption and in the last 10 years dramatically from largely free internet content and the exponentially growing number of households with computers and internet access. This is especially true with the younger generation, who have been weaned on getting their media and entertainment through a web browser. MAD‘s circulation started declining around the time cable TV exploded in households and video arcades started popping up on every street corner. Since then things like constantly advancing gaming consoles, increasing TV content choices and ultimately “teh interweb” had directly competed for the attention and entertainment dollars of the younger generation.
I’m not saying that none of the problems with circulation are internal. MAD has been trying different tactics and directions in an effort to appeal to a new generation of readers, and some of it has met with bad results. You can bet the farm that a lot of the decisions to replace cartoon and illustration based content with in-house pages like photo outtakes, text driven and photoshopped articles and features like “spot the difference”, etc are a result of trying to accommodate cost cutting demands from upstairs. Corporate cost cutting efforts also cut a great portion of their staff quietly over the last few years, leaving them with a smaller staff that has been seriously overworked. In their efforts to cut costs and to compete with the internet, these cost cutting ventures have been eroding the very content that separates MAD from all that free internet stuff… the cartooning and writing that you don’t find online very often. However I will again point out that what’s mostly causing the struggles of MAD and any magazine on the stands these days has nothing to do with the content. MAD saw its biggest drop in circulation from 1974 to 1984, when the content was still being created by the legendary talents that made MAD great. Even if the 2009 MAD was given carte blanche to create as its editorial department saw fit, would it make that big of a difference in today’s marketplace? I’d argue that a MAD today with all its past geniuses at the height of their powers creating every page in the magazine would be in the same boat today’s MAD is.
So what’s next? In my opinion MAD will need to find a combination web/print model if it wants to adapt to the 21st century, which is exactly what all magazines that want to survive will need to do. There is ongoing discussion about how to accomplish this at MAD. I think it likely some of the more timely content will start appearing on the web in some form, and the quarterly will hopefully be more richly illustrated and written, to take advantage of the longer production time and the few advantages print has over electronic media. MAD is a valuable property and brand, and it won’t go away entirely for that very reason. It faces the same challenges as all magazines today do, which has less to do with what’s between their covers than it does with the health of the marketplace it is trying to survive in.
MAD is one of the few places that cartooning and illustration of its kind appears, and if it ceases publication entirely the world will be a poorer place.
Q: In a past article you said, regarding showing potential clients your reliability and professionalism: “the easiest way to demonstrate this is by having a body of work already established… in comics, magazine illustration, advertising, etc.” As someone who has only done commissions for friends and very small published works, my big question is how do you go about getting professional freelance work in the first place? You have an impressive client list and I realized I don’t know the first thing about trying to contact those types of clients (ex: Scholastic, magazines, advertising). Any hints, tips or tricks for a beginning freelancer on how to break into the business in general?
A: “Commissions for friends and very small published works” is professional work. Few people go straight from zero to the cover of TIME. The most productive way to “break in” is to start small and built up a body of work. There is a lot of work to be had at a local level, even in the smallest of towns.
Every town has small businesses that need advertising and images to go with them. Set up meetings with local resturants, pizzarrias and coffee shops (not the big chains, but independently owned stores) and pitch them on cartoons for kids menus. For caricaturists, there are lots of “personality” driven small businesses like used car lots, personal training centers, realtors (ugh) or travel agents that might be interested in caricatured “characters” as part of a branding or ad campaign. Local printers will often get jobs designing fliers for businesses and might need some illustration work done. If you live near a bigger city, there are usually free creative-type newspapers that like to use illustration for features and sometimes covers… they don’t pay much but your goal at first is to build up a body of work. Obviously any publishers in the city, including ones that just publish ad circulars or catalogs, will find they need illustration now and then. Even your church and local schools need some stuff done now and then. Most towns have local newspapers or suburban papers that will occasionally need illustration. Whether they give you work on the spot of not, they should know who you are and that you are in the area.
The important thing is to treat even the most humble client like they are TIME, and their job is important to you. Nail your deadlines, and do your best work all the time. Word gets around, both good and bad.
In the meantime, do not be afraid to send work to larger potential clients… just make sure what you send them is professional and well presented. There’s no secret way to contact them. Magazines have a mailing address and the name of their art director on the masthead, somewhere in the first dozen or so pages of each issue.
Thanks to Char Reed 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!
Here’s my latest spot caricature for The Independent. Not sure what “AMHC” stands for or what milking has to do with it, but I can guess considering the subject matter. These are seriously down and dirty quick illustrations.
The rumors of MAD‘s demise after issue #500 were greatly exaggerated… but not that greatly.
Newsarama reports today that DC has announced MAD will become a quarterly publication following issue #500, which will be on the stands in April. Issue 501 will be released in August, with issue 502 in November and so on. The magazine will go from 48 pages to 56. More on Publisher’s Beat.
DC also announced that both MAD Kids and MAD Classics will be discontinued. Three full time MAD staffers are also being laid off, along with a number of other DC staff members.
Obviously this is very sad news. I’m a little too busy right now to write much about it, but needess to say I’ll be having a lot more free time in the future for blogging. I’ll address it more in depth next week.
I’ll address it more in depth next week.
