This week’s subject is the late, great Paul Newman. When Newman passed away last year it occured to The Lovely Anna and I that we had never seen many of the movies that made him famous and were heralded as high points of his career. I had seen “Cool Hand Luke” a few times,  “Slap Shot” (one of the greatest sports movies of all time) and a few other Newman films from the 80′s on, but not many of his older movies.  So, we made it a point to rent some of his classics. “The Sting” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” were the kind of films I was expecting, where Newman plays a rascally but ultimately likeable character with wit and depth in equal measure… the type of character I associated him with. “Hud” and “The Hustler”, on the other hand, were surprisingly depressing. Newman’s characters in those films are not very pleasant men. Considering the extreme likeability of his persona it took a lot of talent and guts to accept roles like those… it would have been a lot easier for him to just play the movie star and not take those kinds of risks. No wonder he was considered one of the all time great film actors.

Right now I am deeply immersed in trying to kick out a 13 page full color promotional comic book that is to be given away as a promo item for the movie “Super Capers”. I did a bunch of illustration work for the film, which will appear during the opening credits and in a flashback scene near the beginning of the movie. The movie will debut in select theaters on March 20th, and if sells a predetermined number of tickets it will get picked up by a major distributor (there is a deal in place) and will be shown in about 2000 theaters this summer. I actually have a credit in the opening credits, complete with a caricature of me (sort of) at the drawing board.

I just got a package with some of the other promotional items for the film, and one was a figurine of the main character “Ed Gruberman” as played by actor Justin Whalin (Jimmy Olsen in “Lois and Clark”). It was sculpted and produced based on a “turnaround” I did of the character. Here’s the partial turnaround:

Here’s the figurine. It’s very small at only about four inches tall including base.

More pics of the figure after the jump: (more…)

The guys at MAD are releasing a lot of sneak peek exclusives of issue #499 on the internet… this one comes courtesy of the Walletpop Blog.

It’s a small image but there you have it.

Here is this week’s column spot illustration for “The Independent“. I am told this feature will have a total of eight of these caricatures. This is number seven. This has been a fun little project because these illustrations are done quickly and loosely, without a lot of overthinking.

Q: Obviously most freelancers start at the bottom of the barrel and in the beginning of their career may take on some less glamorous jobs. However, once they start becoming a bit more established and gain bigger clients, how do they separate themselves from previous clients in order to focus on the jobs that they had been trying to get in the first place?

A: A freelancer is not a factory, where you can add more employees and equipment to increase production when demand gets high. As a single artist you can only produce so much work. Therefore, once you reach a point where you are consistently working, the only way to increase your income is to charge more for the same work. That mean getting clients with deeper pockets.

One of the hardest things about being a freelancer is moving up the “food chain” when it comes to the level of clients you work for. As you point out, when starting out the inexperienced freelancer takes on jobs that are not exactly “top of the line” in terms of pay or exposure. At what point do you stop accepting those jobs? Simply put, when you start getting busy enough with bigger and better jobs that accepting and doing those lower paying jobs keeps you from accepting the more lucrative one. That’s a nice position to be in.

So, how do you break away from the lower paying clients once the higher paying ones come calling? You simply tell the clients, both previous ones and newer ones who have small budgets, what your current rate is for illustration work and let them sever the ties or not contract you for the job. That can be a little hard to do on a personal level, especially if you are talking about a long time client who was very good to you at a time when you really needed a steady client or three.

One thing to keep in mind… once you tell your now former clients that essentially they cannot afford you, then they will be a former client forever. Its rare when a freelancer can go back to a client with his/her hat in their hand and say they are willing to work with them again for the old rates and then resume getting work from that client. Once you move on that is usually it. A freelancer had best be sure they are getting plenty of work at their new rates before pricing themselves out of work they used to do regularly.

Sometimes it’s worth it to do jobs for lesser pay if the work is steady and the relationship with the client is strong. I’ve got a few smaller clients that I still do work for at rates that are a little less than other clients might pay, but I either enjoy the work or they give me enough of it for it to be worth while.

Thanks to Chris Houghton 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!

Click for a closer look…

Several months ago I did a little side project for a couple of enterpenuers who were designing and building a poker play website. They wanted a more fun, humorous and cartoony environment and feel to the game than your typical video game looking sites. The results are now online at www.5PMPoker.com.

The project was pretty involved. First I needed to design a playing environment that would be fun and unique, but would also work within the dimensions they needed. They wanted some silly animations that would either randomly move or move when some goal or event happened in the game. We did a lot of brainstorming and they settled on an old attic room: (more…)

This is out “in the wild” on the interwebby and will be in MAD #499:

You have to feel a little sorry for the guy, but how stupid can you be? Doesn’t he have any handlers or advisers around to tell him taking hits off bongs at parties where everyone has a camera in their cell phone is not going to be kept a secret?

I am officially getting excited about the Watchmen movie, especially after I saw this “public service announcement” recently:

There are a lot of fans of the graphic novel that are still worried about the film adaptation of their beloved Watchmen falling short of expectations. I’m not one of them, even though I am an enormous fan of the original Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons masterpiece. Why not? Simply put, there is no possible way for a film, unless it was 10 hours long, to capture all the intricacies and subtleties of the graphic novel, so I don’t expect it to. The Watchmen is incredibly involved… I know some self-professed fans of the graphic novel who claim to have read it many times but were STILL shocked when I pointed out that Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis were homosexual lovers in the backstory. It’s easy to miss some of the more subtle things when reading the books… how can these be expected to make the transition to film?

That doesn’t mean I don’t think it can’t be a great film that does justice to the source material. Look at “The Lord of the Rings“… Peter Jackson changed A LOT of the story from the original Tolkien novels. However his films were great adaptations because he GOT what The Lord of the Rings was all about, and he kept to that vision. He was also smart enough to lift dialogue right from the books and use it in the films, even if he attributed the words to different characters or at different times (example: I believe that Galadriel’s opening words “The world is changed. I feel it in the water… etc.” was spoken by Treebeard in the books). The changes he made created a better MOVIE than a straight retelling of Tolkien’s trilogy could have done. It is called an “adaptation” for a reason. Different medium, different demands.

This little video shows me that Watchmen director Zack Snyder might just “get it” also. Hopefully like Jackson the changes he made to the story that were necessary to make it into a good MOVIE were such that kept to the original vision and preserved the core of what makes the Watchmen graphic novel great.

This has been all the rage on Facebook for the last week or two. The concept is that you write a note with 25 random facts about yourself and then “tag” 25 of your Facebook friends with the results. They in turn need to do the same, tagging 25 of their friends and so on.

Ordinarily I hate these kinds of things. I get seemingly endless invites to join all sorts of goofy groups and add applications on Facebook that I always ignore, but this one is kind of fun. So, since not everyone is on Facebook (and sorry to those who saw this there for the repeat) here is my list of 25 random things about me:

1. I was wearing polyester pants when I met my future wife… we both worked in a fast food restaurant and it was part of the uniform, but still…
2. I won a state math award in high school.
3. I started drawing caricatures in theme parks at 18 years old.
4. After reading part of a chapter of the early “Harry Potter” books to my kids at bedtime, I would sneak downstairs with the book and keep reading it.
5. I have a movie quality, custom made latex Batman costume (Val Kilmer version) which I used to wear to take the kids out trick or treating. They got candy, I got beers. Now I only wear it to fight crime. (more…)

If there was ever any doubt that Time Warner’s financial struggles were a key factor in MAD‘s switching to quarterly publication and laying off several (more) staffers, this article from My Way News should squash it:

Time Warner swings to 4Q loss on hefty writedown

TW lost $16.03 billion in the last quarter of 2008. Knowing all that was going down, is it any wonder TW sold all the remaining and most valuable original MAD cover artwork, and then cut publication and personnel? It was a company wide bloodletting, and althogh recent drops in circulation didn’t help even if MAD was still selling over 200,000 copies an issue I doubt things would have been any different. According to the article:

“The publishing division reported a 13 percent decline in revenue to $1.3 billion, primarily pulled down by a 20 percent drop in ad sales.”

“Time Warner has also announced layoffs at its various divisions because of the recession.”

“Last month, its Warner Bros. Entertainment movie studio announced cuts of nearly 800 jobs, or 10 percent of its global work force, through layoffs, attrition and outsourcing, citing sinking consumer demand and the overall weak economy.”

(more…)