Last weekend my local chapter of the National Cartoonist Society (if you can call a chapter that encompasses Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas, Missouri, Nebraska and Colorado “local”) met in Lincoln, NE to judge our assigned division of the NCS Reuben awards, have a chapter meeting and listen to several terrific speakers in the bargain. Some fermented beverages were also consumed.

NCC Members deep in contemplation of the entries.

First up was the judging of the divisional award for “Editorial Cartooning”. This was a tough subject as it was necessary to try and be objective about the work and set aside your own personal political tastes. There was also no fewer than 50 entries! Nine chapter members met privately in a Lincoln hotel conference room and poured over the entries for several hours. Our results have been forwarded to the NCS brass for ratification and the nominees will be revealed in March. The winner will be announced at the annual NCS Reuben Awards in late May.

That afternoon chapter members and other area cartoonists met at a local Lincoln restaurant were we enjoyed a lineup of great speakers:

Tom Floyd- The veteran comic book artist shared his work with us, including some of his latest stuff. His nostalgic radio show/pulp flavored art was great.

Tom Floyd

Jeff Koterba- The Omaha World-Herald and syndicated political cartoonist showed off some of his latest work, told some horror stories of people’s more enthusiastic reactions to some of his cartoons and shared his process.

Jeff Koterba

Cedric Hohnstadt- The Twin Cities illustrator and jack-of-all-trades presented work he’d done in character design, animation, product illustration, advertising, magazine illustration and other areas. He talked about his marketing and how he gets and approaches jobs.

Cedric Hohnstadt

It was a facsinating speaker lineup and lots of fun. It’s always a good time coming out of the cartoon cave and hanging out with other cartoonists and illustrators. We spend most of our time isolated, bent over a drawing table under a glaring hot light bulb working in solitude, so any time we get together is always a laugh.

On my way to San Francisco today, but at least I’ll have something to read on the way! Issue # 3 of the excellent “Stay Tooned!” magazine appeared in my mailbox on Wednesday.

This issue features profiles of two of the members of my local NCS Chapter, the “North Central”: editorial cartoonist Paul Fell and illustrator Cedric Hohnstadt. Also featured are profiles on Chad Carpenter, Benita Epstein, R.J. Matson, Jim Scancarelli, Richard Thompson and Mike Witmer. There are addtional articles by Mark Tatulli, John Kovaleski and Mike Edholm, as well as regular columns and contributions by R.C. Harvey, Norm Feuti and myself. Cover by Richard Thompson.

Stay Tooned! just keeps getting better. Editor and publisher John Read really puts his heart and soul into this magazine, and it shows. Sharp printing, nice paper, great layouts and fantastic content from cover to over. This is truly a worthy successor to “Cartoonist Profiles”. If you have any interest in cartooning, you are seriously missing out on something special if you aren’t getting Stay Tooned!. Go subscribe at this website right now, and while you are at it buy up the first three back issues. No kidding, there is no other publication of this type in the world, and the world needs one… especially one this well done.

As I mentioned before, I have suddenly found myself attending WonderCon in San Francisco beginning tomorrow and running through Sunday evening. This happened very much at the last minute… in more ways than one. Before I begin to go into the gory details, here is my official schedule of appearances at WonderCon:

Fri. Feb 27th:

• 4:00 pm- 5:00 pm: DC Comics Booth

Sat. Feb 28th:

• 12:00 pm- 1:00 pm: DC Comics Booth
• 5:00 pm- 7:00 pm: Super Capers Movie Promo Booth (1412)
  

Sun. Mar 1st:

• 11:00 am- 12:00 noon: Super Capers Movie Promo Booth (1412)

UPDATE- I will also be spending some time at the National Cartoonists Society booth, but have no definite times for that. Likely I’ll be there on Friday evening and possibly between my signings on Saturday and on Sunday afternoon.

I will have some copies of MAD #499 to sign at the DC booth, and will be signing the promotional comic book I did the art for at the Super Capers booth. I will also likely have some original MAD art available.

Which brings me to the last minute thing again…

Earlier this month I got a call from Super Capers director Ray Griggs about doing a promotional comic book for the film for WonderCon, where they had a booth set up and would have actors from the show as well as a panel on Sunday screening the trailer and discussing the movie. The catch was he needed to get the finished book to the printer by February 20th in order to get copies printed by WonderCon.

He delivered a movie type script that needed to be set up for comic book format, and we had about two weeks to get it done. I managed to edit the script down to 13 pages, and I enlisted the skills of comic book artist/inker Tom Nguyen of DC Comics fame to help out with the inking. I did the layout, penciling and inked all the faces plus two of the pages myself, while Tom worked on the rest of the inks. I then did the coloring and type/balloons, delivering a final CMYK page in EPS format to Ray, who placed them in a layout template I did for him and put together the cover (art from the movie poster by Drew Struzan!) and the other pages needed to fill the rest of the comic.

I have really no idea what the final results will look like, having had nothing to do with the printing or prepress… but hopefully it will turn out okay. It was definitely an adventure putting it together that fast. I was buzzing back and forth to Tom’s place to pick up finished inks and drop off fresh pencils, and he dropped off as well.

Here’s a few of the finished pages. There were some very necessary shortcuts taken to save time, but for only having 15 days to do the work, it didn’t turn out too badly:

Cover by Struzan! Click for a closer look

Click for a closer look…

Click for a closer look…

Click for a closer look…

Click for a closer look…

It was interesting to see someone else’s inks over my penciling. That has not happened in a long time… not since my “Married…with Children” days. Tom did a fantastic job, especially considering the time crunch.

Yes, that is Adam West… he is in the movie (in a cameo… sans any superhero costume). In fact he will be taking up most of the time over the weekend signing at the Super Capers booth. I was supposed to have dinner with him and some other movie folks on Friday but that fell through.

If you will be attending WonderCon stop in and say hello!

The International Society of Caricature Artists (ISCA, formerly known as the NCN) just announced their guest speaker(s) for the 2009 Annual Caricature Convention and Competition on November 2nd-7th in Sandusky, Ohio:

It’s an all MAD lineup featuring:

• Sam Viviano- Longtime MAD artist and current art director
• Mark Fredrickson- Frequent MAD cover artist, former airbrush demigod and current digital painting master
• Hermann Mejia- The brilliant “artist’s artist” for MAD, caricaturist, painter, sculptor, genius
• Tom Richmond- An unworthy schlub along for the ride

That’s quite a lineup, and as far as I know very unique. As Sam pointed out to me, it will be possibly the first time that something like this has been organized that features predominately new generation MAD artists. Sam’s actually been with the magazine for over 30 years, but compared to guys like Mort Drucker, Jack Davis, Sergio Aragones and Al Jaffee, that’s like just starting last week. The legends get plenty of well deserved accolades, but these guys (at least three of them, anyway) deserve some attention for their work… which often gets overlooked in the shadows of the MAD giants.

This should be fun. Each speaker will have a presentation, there will be a MAD panel discussion and possibly some workshops done by the guests. I’m planning one on some form of cartooning, possibly another inking workshop but more likely storytelling as it applies to MAD.

Ordinary these conventions are only open to members of the organization. As I understand it, there will be a special fee available for anyone who is not a member but wants to attend just the MAD speaker presentations.

More details here as they become available.

A very quick (I’m talking 10 minute) study of somebody I’d better get used to doing caricatures of…  U.S. President Barack Obama.

Click for a Closer Look

MAD had a difficult dilemma concerning their proposed parody of the movie “Watchmen”… the question of when to do it.

For once the problem was not in getting a reliable advanced script. MAD occasionally tries doing movie parodies prior to the release of the films, so that they will be on the stands around the same time the films were hot. This doesn’t always work out, as the source material the writers would work from were often leaked scripts that didn’t turn out to be accurate… like the time we got the ending wrong for “X-Men 2″. Supposedly the source material obtained for the parody was rock solid… so that was not the problem.

The problem was the timing of the movie and that of the magazine. They couldn’t do it in #499, because that was slated for release in mid-February and MAD‘s parent company, Time Warner, didn’t want any spoilers revealed before the Warner Bros. film debuted. They didn’t want to do it in issue #500 in April, as they felt it would get lost in the shuffle of that anniversary number and they wanted the parody to anchor the issue. Of course we now know that #501 won’t be out until late summer , so that would be way too late.

Interestingly the powers that be at DC and Time Warner agreed that, if MAD delayed the shipping of #499 until late February they could do the parody and run it in that issue. Apparently “Watchmen” was to be released earlier in Japan and/or elsewhere overseas. With the internet being what it is, they figured that spoilers that might be revealed… like, say an entirely NEW ENDING… would hardly be kept a secret once the movie was in theaters somewhere. (more…)

In comic book stores now and on news stands on Feb. 24th:

MAD # 499 (April 2009)

• Cover (Mark Frederickson)
• The Fundalini Pages (Desmond Devlin, Evan Dorkin & Sarah Dwyer, Drew Friedman, Garth Gerhart, Marc Hempel, Darren Johnson, Jeff Kruse, Barry Liebmann, Kevin Pope, Sam Sisco, Ward Sutton, Jason Yungbluth)
• What the Heck is the Difference? (Uncredited)
  
• Botchmen (Desmond Devlin, Tom Richmond)
• A MAD Look at Trade Schools (Sergio Aragonés, Colorist: Luth)
• Digital TV Facts (Jeff Kruse)
• The Decided Disadvantages of an On-Line Education (John Caldwell)
• The Darker Side of the Lighter Side (Dave Berg, Uncredited)
• A Letter from Jamie Dimon (Dick DeBartolo)
• MAD’s Unheroic Watchmen Outtakes (Uncredited)
• The Story of Deathbed Donkey and the Rage of Sorrow (Brian McConnachie, Rick Geary)
  
• Unabridged Sports Clichés (Jacob Lambert, Paul Coker)
• The Strip Club (Joey Sayers, Scott Nickel, Tony Murphy, Dan Long, John Kovaleski, Todd Clark, Christopher Baldwin)
• Spy vs Spy (Peter Kuper)
• President Obama- The Promise vs. The Reality (Desmond Devlin, Francisco Rodriguez, Kevin Pope)
• MAD Fold-In (Al Jaffee)
• Drawn Out Dramas (Sergio Aragonés)
• Next Month In Mad #500: Colossally ginormous goodness!

I will post a sneak peek at some of the art I did for the parody of “Watchmen” tomorrow, along with some rough sketches and other goodies.

Q: I’m a college student, and I have very little time as it is, but I also freelance and am about to start drawing caricatures at a theme park for the summer as well… so I have a lot on my plate. Recently I’ve put on a few pounds (more like 20ish…), because I haven’t been eating well or exercising like I used to, because I don’t have the time. My question to you is, how on earth do you find time to make it to the gym, or not eat garbage all the time?

A: The quick answer is… I often don’t find the time to eat right and get to the gym. In the heat of major projects and late nights I will turn to comfort food and eat at odd hours, plus miss gym time as I work very late and can’t make it to the gym at my usual 8 o’clock a.m. time. Right now I’ve got the double whammy of dealing with a major shoulder injury which I will be having surgery on next month. I’ve lost some muscle and gained some wieght recently as well, so I feel your pain.

That said, I’ve found the key to being consistant in any workout/health routine is to not allow slips to derail you. It’s easy to just give up when you’ve missed some time. However you need to get back on that horse, even if for a while you are barely getting anything done. I missed all last week in the gym and ate badly as I was doing this crazy job with an insane deadline and I was up until 4 am every night and slept until 9 am then back to it. I finished the job Thursday and even though it would have been easy to not go into the gym on Friday and just get back to it Monday, I dragged myself to the gym anyway at 8 am. That first time back after missing some time is the hardest one.

Thanks to Kelton Hamm 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!

Frequent reader of The Mad Blog and fellow Minnesotan Marv Sohlo emailed me a link to this video which features a short but informative piece on caricatures and why they resonate so much with people. It’s from the BCC show “The Human Face” narrated by John Cleese. Unfortunately the creators do not allow embedding, but click on the screen capture to go to the YouTube clip:

Click on the image for the full clip… it’s less than 2 minutes…. we’ll wait…

I’ve always said that a really good caricature looks more like the subject than a photo does, and some of the observations this video makes about how the brain processes the human face offers some explanation as to why that might be very true. While that is interesting, it’s the short interview with Spitting Image caricaturist Tim Watts and his great caricature sculpture of narrator Cleese that really makes this video good. Watt’s observations on what needed to be exaggerated on Cleese are spot on. Most enlightening is his observation that in order to exaggerate the chin and forehead “something had to give” and that meant reducing the size of Cleese’s nose and making it more delicate. That’s a great example of the theory of constant mass in action.

Whew. In the last 4 1/2 weeks I have done back to back projects for MAD (6 page parody of the movie “Watchmen”) and a 13 page comic book (with inks by the great Tom Nguyen) promoting the movie “Super Capers”, which will be given away at WonderCon next weekend in San Francisco, as well ans a handful of smaller jobs. That’s a lot of hours spend in the studio penciling, inking and coloring. How many hours? I don’t know, I never keep track of the time.

However I can measure it in audiobooks. It took me the entire seven books in the Harry Potter series and the first four books of Stephen King‘s “The Dark Tower” series, plus the first few chapters of King’s 5th “Tower” book. That is not an accurate measure of actual time spent, however, as I can only listen to the books when inking and coloring… penciling and conceptual drawing/layouts take too much gray matter to let the story soak in while working.

While recovering from this ordeal, I was struck by a few things concerning the Harry Potter books. (more…)