Artwork by Michael Ramirez, Pulitzer prize winning editorial cartoonist

One last reminder about the February 6th deadline for the Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship. The National Cartoonists Society Foundation has a new website with news and information about both the scholarships and other NCSF programs.

This from the NCF:

The annual Jay Kennedy Scholarship, in memory of the late King Features editor, was funded by an initial $100,000 grant from the Hearst Foundation/King Features Syndicate and additional generous donations from Jerry Scott, Jim Borgman, Patrick McDonnell and many other prominent cartoonists. Submissions are adjudicated by a panel of top cartoonists and an award is given to the best college cartoonist. The recipient is feted at the annual NCS Reuben Awards Convention attended by many of the world’s leading cartoonists.

Applicants must be college students in the United States, Canada or Mexico that will be in their Junior or Senior year of college during the 2009-2010 academic year. Applicants DO NOT have to be art majors to be eligible for this scholarship.

Along with a completed entry form, applicants  are required to send 5 samples of their own cartooning artwork; noting if and where the work has been published (either print or web). Please send copies. DO NOT send original artwork.

DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 6, 2009

The applications will be judged by the National Cartoonists Society Foundation (NCSF) and the number of scholarships given out and their amounts will be at the discretion of the NCSF.

That deadline is fast approaching, so if you are eligible for consideration get your work together and send it in. If I remember right last year we had only about 40 entries, and we’d certainly like to see more this year.

Very busy right now, but I ran across this video on the National Caricaturist Network message boards this morning, posted by Canadian editorial cartoonist, caricaturist and illustrator Patrick LaMontagne that I thought was not only hilarious but eerily accurate. If you are ever wondering why art directors sometimes make what seems like a simple, straightforward illustration job very complicated and convoluted instead, here’s your answer:

It would be less funny if it wasn’t so true. Replace the stop sign with an illustration of someone driving a car or similar, and you get the idea.

This week’s sketch is a warm up study of “Slumdog Millionaire” star Dev Patel.

Number One Son Thomas is ready to rock!

I took a break from my current crazy deadline job to finally take my twelve year old son Tom to his first concert last night… AC/DC. I say “finally” because I had purchased the tickets through my trainer months ago as an early Christmas present for Tom, and we went to the concert center when AC/DC was in town only to find out they were making TWO stops in St. Paul, MN on this tour… and we had tickets for the show two months later. Ooops. We went home disappointed that night, but made up for it tonight.

Funny how life works. When I was a kid the music my parent listened to when they grew up was about as interesting to me as watching paint dry. I figured it would be the same story with my kids, but imagine my surprise when my kids happened upon my CD collection in the storage room (they are all on my iPod now) and couldn’t believe how cool the music I listened to was. “WOW! You have ‘Black Sabbath’ albums, dad! ‘Cheap Trick’! ‘AC/DC!’” I couldn’t believe they’d ever even heard of these bands. I asked how they knew these bands and their music.

Two word answer: “Guitar Hero”.

The recent rash of old rockers having a resurrence of their careers, putting out albums and touring ala AC/DC can credit most of it to that video game. Kids are crazy for “Guitar Hero”, “Rock Band” and their sequels, and through them they are exposed to a lot of classic rock music and bands that they otherwise would never have heard of. It’s a riot to walk in on them jamming out to some old song by the Kinks and be better at the vocals on “Rock Band 2″ than they are because I know the song backwards. Surprisingly they don’t hate it… they think it’s cool that their dad knows “The Trooper” by Iron Maiden by heart.

How was AC/DC? Wow, those guys are old. They can still bring it, though. Angus Young was all over the place… he just looks like Gollum now. The drummer looks like my dad. The band sounds the same. Brian Johnson on lead vocals definitely took a lot of shortcuts on some of their songs to save his voice, but the way that guy abuses his vocal chords it’s amazing he can even speak today after 25 years of rocking out. The last time I saw AC/DC in concert I was living in a small apartment on 4th Street near the University of Minnesota campus going to college, working at Burger King, and had just started drawing caricatures during the summers… that would be 1985-86. Yikes. AC/DC isn’t the only one who’s getting old.

Fun time with the boy. He loved it. He could do worse for having AC/DC be his first rock concert.

BIG, crazy MAD job on the board right now. This one has an odd backstory and is, as far as I know, unique in the storied history of the magazine. Naturally I will not be able to share any of that story until the job is in print, but as that will be NEXT MONTH in MAD #499 it won’t be too long before I’m able to tell the tale.

In the meantime I am working furiously on the project in question… no time for any other jobs. Before I got started on it late last week I finished this poster job for Marlin:

Job: Illustration of a boy who’s maybe 10 years old. He’s at the front door of a house, looking contrite, eyes cast downward. He’s wearing a baseball cap. He’s got a bat resting on a step, and is there to admit that he’s broken a window (which we can see on an upper floor). Standing in the doorway is an old man who is looking at the young guy admiringly and affectionately.

Initial pencil:

I decided to have the kid looking up at the window sheepishly and apologetically, because I thought I needed to tie the three elements together. The client disagreed, wanting the kid to instead be looking down and being very sorry and embarrassed. The also wanted me to make the old guy less smiley and more like he was appreciating the kid’s honesty in confessing but still not pleased his window was broken.

Revised pencil:

I was kind of under the gun with this, so I did the revision quickly right on the computer. The client liked this one.

Here’s the final:

Click for a closer look…

Q: MAD’s big 500th issue is coming up up in March… can you spill the beans on any plans MAD might have for the milestone? Will you have anything in it?

A: The guys at MAD are being pretty tight lipped about the plans for No. 500. I actually don’t know much at all about what to expect, and that includes what little I know that I cannot tell you. Rumor has it that the issue will be bigger than a normal issue (more pages anyway), but that is not confirmed officially.

MAD‘s Maddest Writer Dick Debartolo has posted the following in several MAD Message boards and on Alfred’s MySpace page:

For MAD 500 we’re compiling a list of all the movies, songs, books, famous pictures, etc., that included a reference to, or showed MAD Magazine. We know some of the most popular ones like the TV show Murphy Brown, where her office was decorated with many MAD covers..But we figured MAD fans might be a good source to find other MAD “placements”.

We didn’t know exactly where to find MAD fans to ask, and then someone said; “I know! How about the MAD website!” It’s a crazy thought, but it just might work! You can post your sightings right in this thread or email us at letters@madmagazine.com.

Thanks!
Dick De

Dick DeBartolo
MAD‘s Maddest Writer

That is confirmation of one feature in issue #500. Incidentally if you have any suggestions for Dick e-mail him at the address in the quote.

Will I have anything in 500? I sure hope so. The first issue I ever had work in for MAD was #399 (Oct. 2000), so MAD will have published 101 issues since I started working for them when 500 hits the stands… 75 of which I had work in. That is actually a drop in the bucket compared to most major MAD contributors. I am sure the guys at MAD would love to have something for everyone who has ever done a significant amount of work for the magazine to do for issue #500… but that is nearly impossible. I’m hoping we will see work by some of the MAD legends that have not contributed in some time, like Jack Davis, Harry North, Angelo Torres and Bob Clarke as well as those mainstays who still occasionally appear in the magazine like Mort Drucker, Paul Coker Jr., etc. You know there will be work by Sergio Aragonés and Al Jaffee as always. Maybe they will come up with some big feature that needs tons of spot illustrations like their “50 Worst Things about…” articles and then have spots by a lot of the artists that defined MAD. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Hopefully they’ll find something for me to do for #500, but I know they won’t if I blow the deadline on my piece for #499!!! Gotta go!

Thanks to Grant Jonen 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!

I’ve got a killer MAD job on the board right now with a brutal deadline, so posts this next week may be a bit abbreviated. Here’s my latest newspaper political caricature for the column “Good Old Boys Gone Bad” in North Carolina’s The Independent print and on-line newspaper.

Back to shameless begging…

The great Google ad experiment is over.

Starting today the ads (as you can see) that for the last year or so have been littering my sidebar are gone. I placed them there in an effort to “monetize” my blog… in other words try to make a little dough to help justify the time and effort I put into The MAD Blog. The idea was to get advertisers to pay me through the Google Adsense program, which would generate some revenue but not cost the readers of the blog a dime. It didn’t work out too well.

The way Google ads works is that you place some code on your blog and then Google dynamically places ads on your site and you are paid by some convoluted formula consisting of clicks through to the ads placed and page views. I thought that, given I have around 700 RSS subscribers and get between 2,500 and 3,500 “page views” a day from unique visitors, it wouldn’t be too hard to rack up a few dozen ad clicks a day.

I believe I averaged about four clicks per day. Total income less than one dollar per day. Fail.

Why did it fail? Because Google Adsense, the program that is supposed to provide you with ads targeted to your reader’s interests through keywords and analyzed the content of your website is unbelievably stupid. It seldom places ANY ads that might appeal to the readers of my blog. For example, as my name is “Tom” Google Adsense, in it’s infinite wisdom, often places ads for “Tom-Tom GPS Navigation” devices. When I did my tutorial on Drawing Hands, which by the way set a record on my blog for most page views in one day with 33,000, and the ads that got placed were for “Hand Lotion”. Brilliant.

Even when it’s closer to the mark Google Adsense fails miserably. There is often a few ads for personal caricature services by other artists placed by Google. Personally I don’t market myself as doing personal commissions, but if I did what would I want the ads of competitors on my blog?? Google does have some kind of “competitor filter” that is supposed to help with that, but it works on a specific URL basis so it’s almost impossible to eliminate competitor ads. Since I don’t do personal commission or party work (generally) I don’t care much about that, but do people end up on my blog looking for that kind thing? No. Those ads are generally useless.

What kind of ads would work well on my site? How about ads for art supply wholesalers and on-line retailers? Those I would think would be winners, but I have NEVER seen one of those in any Google ad placements. The targeting program needs work.

So, no more Google Ads. If readers want to contribute a few bucks to the Greater Good of The MAD Blog, they can do so by either tipping the blog through PayPal, buying some of our Cafe Press junk or by buying some of the recommended books and stuff through the “MAD Blog Recommends…” Amazon Associates links… I’m thinking about putting some Tom-Tom GPS equipment in there just for fun.

I’m still not exactly sure how it happened, but somewhere along the line I ended up establishing the reputation of being able to “do a crowd scene”. I am sure my art director at MAD Magazine, Sam Viviano, can sympathize. He is well known for his work with crowd scenes, and all that implies. Simply put, it means you end up getting a lot of jobs doing complicated crowd scenes because… well…. you CAN. In the world of freelancing there is never anything wrong with getting jobs. However when a lot of jobs end up being time consuming crowd scenes, you sometimes just wish for a nice, simple single figure illustration job to cross your path. MAD has utilized me on many crowd scene projects, in particular their “A MAD Look Behind the Scenes of…” features that they have occasionally done. I’ve done a lot of them for other clients as well.

It’s not that I hate crowd scenes. In fact, I like them. They are a LOT of work but when you are done with them they are always something you can sit back, look at and say “whew! That one was tough” but be pleased with the effort. In fact I’ve been known to do much more complicated scenes than the job might necessarily call for just because a really detailed crowd scene is always visually intense and affords the opportunity to make it dense with visual gags, cameos and other fun stuff that makes the viewer really look it over thoroughly. The dense, “chicken fat” technique of filling space with a lot of gags has always been one of my favorite parts of MAD, and is something I’ve always enjoyed incorporating into my work when I get the chance… MAD or otherwise. I’ve also always subscribed to the philosophy inherent in the famous quote by Wally Wood about doing very detailed and busy art: “If you can’t draw well, draw A LOT”.

I’ve been meaning to do a tutorial on how to do a crowd scene illustration, and in late November I was assigned a tough one for MAD that I thought afforded the opportunity to demonstrate how to approach and execute a crowd scene. In consideration of that thought, I saved conceptual sketches and stages of this particular job for MAD so I could use them to illustrate how I go about constructing a crowd scene. (more…)

Just a FYI- I have gotten a number of complaints over the last few months about it being a hassle to register just to post comments on The MAD Blog. Therefore I have set the blog to no longer require this. However comment moderation is still in play…