This week’s sketch is a quick one of the new “Tonight Show” host Conan O’Brien. Not much too it, just a straightforward basic study. Conan has a face that is ripe for really going after with exaggeration… I want to do a better one at a later date. The straight on pose is boring.
I have yet to see Conan on “The Tonight Show”, but that is hardly surprising as I have watched only handful of minutes of that show since Johnny Carson left, and those were because I was brushing my teeth after the news and couldn’t reach the remote to either turn the TV off. I also haven’t seen much of Conan in his former incarnation, mainly because if I was up that late I was working. I am going to try and catch his show and give it a chance soon… I was neither encouraged nor discouraged from doing so by Mark Evanier‘s recent remarks about Conan’s first week. Mark knows about comedy, TV and late night comedy TV, so I pay attention when he offers his opinions.
Here’s the second of numerous video “sample”caricatures from a promo video I used at some of my retail caricature locations in the mid 90′s. This one is of Katey Sagal and Ed O’Neill AKA Peg and Al Bundy from the TV show “Married… with Children“. I likely originally drew this sample from memory one day at the theme park, considering I had been drawing the Bundys for NOW comics for several years at that time.
I happen to have a scan of this sample as well, shown below, which I still use at the theme parks believe it or not. With it’s endless syndication, the Bundys are still instantly recognizable to almost all ages.
9:00 am @ Salon Madera, Centro Cultural de Cali- FORO INTERNACIONAL DE HISTORIETA & HUMOR (International Forum of Comics and Humor)- Presentations by several artists and a panel discussion of comics, illustration and humor with:
Claudia Contrera- Director of the Comic Festival in Valparaiso (Chile)
Tom Richmond- MAD Magazine Illustrator (United States)
Arturo Kemchs- President of the Mexican Association of Cartoons
Gil Mauritius- Director of the Comic Club de Guayaquil (Ecuador)
Joni Benjumea- Comics (Colombia)
Nelson Zuluaga- Sample Comic- Pereira Risaralda
Perucho Mejia pdh.- Moderator (Colombia) Calicomix Foundation
3:00 pm- Cartoonists Live Drawing Jam @ Centro Cultural Comfenalco (I’ll be doing live caricatures)
7:00 pm- Opening Reception @ Centro Cultural Comfenalco
Wednesday, June 10th-
9:00 am @ Salon Madera, Centro Cultural de Cali- FORO INTERNACIONAL DE HISTORIETA & HUMOR (International Forum of Comics and Humor)- Further panel discussion and presentations by the remaining artists.
3:00 pm- Cartoonists Live Drawing Jam @ Developmental Library (I’ll be doing live caricatures again)
4:00 pm @ Centro Colombo Americano- Demonstration: Tom Richmond (USA)- I’ll be doing a demo of an illustration job from start to finish (approx. 2 hours)
7:00 pm @ Centro Cultural Colombo Americano- The MAD Art of Tom Richmond exhibit- Opening Reception for the exhibition
That last will be an exhibit of my artwork at the Centro Cultural Colombo Americano gallery, which will hang for several weeks (I think). Most of it will be prints of my full color MAD and other illustration jobs (by their request as opposed to originals, and some as large as 2 x 3 meters) but I will bring a couple of originals with me for the show, leaving one for their permanent collection from visiting artists.
I’ve got Friday the 12th free to enjoy the city with some of the other speakers and some guides from the Centro Cultural Colombo Americano. It should be a fun adventure. I will try and do some posting when I am there, but who knows what things like internet connections will be like? Certainly I will post a full account when I get back if I cannot do so when there.
In the meantime there will be the usual hub-bub and clap-trap on The MAD Blog, including a new “old” caricature demo video tomorrow and a “Sketch o’the Week” on Wednesday.
Q: You’ve noted that a bad caricaturist can get trapped using a set of pre-defined exaggeration points – enlarging a chin, making a nose bigger, giving the eyebrows an odd slant, etc. – and that when you are working you try to find something more personal or a little more interesting and less “by the book”. When you are on the clock, where do you draw the line between making the subject look like the typical caricature one might see vs. something YOU find satisfying?
A: I think what you are referring to is what I call “generic caricature”, where a caricaturist basically draws the same features and/or the same relationships of features over and over, only changing the obvious details. To a certain extent almost all live caricaturists have tendencies concerning types of features that roughly can be defined as part of their “style”. However when those tendencies become overpowering, rigid certainties in almost every drawing then that caricaturist is drawing generic caricatures.
Generic caricatures can be very commercially successful. If the features that are rubber stamped on everybody are of a flattering or attractive nature (i.e. very fun and cartoony) then the customers are often happier with that than a “true” caricature. However doing drawings of this nature is easy and lazy. Some artists might decide easy and lazy but financially effective is just fine with them. Personally that would drive me crazy, and I would very quickly hate my job drawing live caricatures as there would be zero artistic satisfaction in anything I do. I would be no more than an art machine, cookie-cutting my way through day after boring day. The drawings might sell very well, but they are devoid of any creativity or artistic effort. Some caricaturists choose this route, which is sad.
However, there is an opposite end of that spectrum that is, in my opinion, just as bad. That is the live caricaturist that thinks it’s all about them, their “art” and the “pureness” of “real caricature”… and screw the customer. These artists will often go out of their way to do as derogatory and nasty a caricature as they can, and are actually proud of the negative reactions of their customers. Most of the caricaturists that cop this attitude have deep seeded resentment toward the customers, despite the fact that they are paying their bills with the money those same customers are willing to pay for a caricature. They do not just exaggerate but viciously distort the faces they draw using the excuse that it’s a “real caricature” and if the customer doesn’t love it they are morons who don’t “get” real caricature. Very few artists can exaggerate the face to such extremes and still retain a recognizable likeness, so I’d estimate 90% of these types of caricaturists do lousy work with poor likenesses and blame the customer’s lack of sophistication on their returns and rejections. In a way this is even worse than selling out doing the cute and generic caricatures… and least those artists understand the venue and dynamic in which they work. Art snobbery doesn’t play very well in a public retail environment…. I don’t think we’ll see anyone winning a Pulitzer or Nobel prize for their theme park caricature work.
The trick to doing live caricature is to find that happy medium where you do good work at a fast pace, pleasing both your customers and yourself as an artist. It is possible to do all that at the same time. You want to do a good caricature, one where you make very specific observations and decisions based on the face in front of you, not on a predetermined set of features, and exaggerate those features to an extent that it is obviously a caricature but that it still looks like the subject. That said, you have to be aware that you are working for a client and that client is sitting right in front of you, and your ultimate job is to make them happy with your work. It’s a balancing act.
Long ago I developed a kind of sixth sense that will tell me how much a given subject can “take” with respect to exaggeration. Some subjects are going to need to be handled more gentley than others. I do the cutsie drawings when they are required, and pull out the hammer when I get a “live one” that I can tell will appreciate some serious exaggeration. Regardless if I do cute or cruel caricatures, I always stop short of exaggerating so much that the likeness becomes unrecognizable. I can always find artistic satisfaction in even the least exaggerated of caricatures by going for other goals in the drawing like expression, likeness, personality, body action or just plain old good craftsmanship with the lines and color. I do not “sell out” and start cranking out generic drawings, but I also do not need to make my customers cry to justify my artistic existence.
Thanks to Robert and Margaret Carspecken 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 just placed my order for this eagerly anticipated collection of the entire run of Humbug Magazine. I have never seen a single page of this publication, but being that is was edited by Harvey Kurtzman and features work by Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth, Will Elder and Wally Wood, it is undoubtedly pure genius.
Humbug was Kurtzman’s second attempt to recapture the magic of his early MAD work, the second being the VERY short lived (2 issues) Trump! Magazine published by Playboy‘s Hugh Hefner. Humbug was actually published by Kurtzman and the creators themselves, which makes it as pure a creative effort as it could possibly be. It was so poorly distributed that it’s tremendously hard to find original copies of the issues, and as (I believe) it has never been reprinted before, this will be the first opportunity many will have to see it.
News broke yesterday on the LA Times Blog and was further confirmed on The Comic’s Reporter and Heidi MacDonald‘s The Beat that Viacom is canceling Nickelodeon Magazine effective immediately. From LA Times Blog:
Viacom is shutting down Nickelodeon Magazine this week and will lay off about 30 staffers. Launched in 1993, the magazine, with a circulation of more than 1 million and a total audience of more than 6 million, was for many years an important promotional platform for the children’s cable network and provided a steady stream of cash. The magazine even once was a National Magazine Award finalist and also led to a few spin-off products.
Viacom is citing the fact that the magazine is no longer a viable marketing tool for the television network, which apparently was the main purpose of the publication… although it was known to make a fair profit as well. The loss of readership to the internet and the loss of print ad revenues were also cited as being reasons for the decision, which cost 30 people their jobs not to mention the freelancers who got regular work with the magazine. I am sure rising production and distribution costs were also a big factor, as those plus the circulation drops and loss of ad revenue have been the typical reasons for the struggles of virtually every print magazine on the news stands.
Nickelodeon Magazine was one of the few publications out there with a strong comics/cartoon presence in it’s content, so it’s loss is a definite blow to professional all ages comics and cartoons. There are few venues out there these days for that kind of humorous comic work. We have had a subscription almost since it’s inception in 1993, although with my youngest at 13 we’d outgrown the content to a certain extent. The comics were of terrific quality and it was always a joy to see the work of so many talented cartoonists collected in a single publication like that. It’s a tremendous tragedy that the world is slowly losing print comics like this.
I suppose people will be flooding the internet blaming the cancellation of Nickelodeon Magazine on a drop in the quality of the content, just like they say supposedly happened with MAD. I guess Spongebob and Dora just aren’t as entertaining as they used to be to kids… and of course the quality of the articles and interviews with the stars of iCarly, the Naked Bros. and other Nick TV staples are just not as good as they used to be. That must be the reason, just like it was with MAD… right?
One of our caricature locations at Six Flags New England
I’m traveling back from visiting my operation at Six Flags New England today. We’ve got a great group of artists there this summer doing airbrush t-shirts, airbrush tattoos and of course caricatures. The park is located between Springfield, MA and Hartford, CT in a small Massachusetts town called Agawam. If you happen to visit the park this summer stop in and say hello to the artists.
EDIT- I should mention I also have caricature operations at Valleyfair in Shakopee MN, Six Flags St. Louis in Eureka, MO, Sy. Louis Union Station in St. Louis, MO and caricature and airnrush tattoos at Nickelodeon Universe in the Mall of America, Bloomington, MN. Stop by any of these and check out the artists this summer. I visit each location several times a summer (usually).
This week’s victim is tabloid queen and “why is this person a celebrity?” poster child Tori Spelling. Tori is having a little trouble with her breast impants these days… some rapid weight loss has caused them to migrate into new positions, kind of like the earth’s tectonic plates.
The scan is a little rough as I used a borrowed scanner I was not familiar with since I am currently on the road in Massachusetts visiting my theme park operations at Six Flags New England. In fact this sketch was drawn sitting in one of my caricature booths this morning.
I promised on Sunday I would dig up an old video montage I had made back in 1993 of me doing several caricature samples in time-lapse format for my caricature locations. The father of one of my caricature artists did video editing work, and put together this demo video for me. We used it as a looping display at my booths in the Mall of America and at Underground Atlanta, and in between each “sample” there was text telling people how long they took, etc. This video is ancient… to give you an idea it was originally on a VHS tape using a repeat-play VCR as DVD was still too new and expensive back in ’93!
I found the DVD yesterday and proceeded to edit it to single sample videos. The time lapse brings each drawing down to about 2 to 3 minutes, actual drawing time is about 10 to 12 minutes. By the way, he did the music so don’t ask. I know… it’s weird.
Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that these drawings are over 18 years old (they were samples long before I redrew them for this video). I had only been drawing caricatures for about 5-6 years. Not exactly my idea of work I am proud of today, but it is what it is. There are several others so I will upload them now and then.
It’s no secret that I am a big fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‘s Sherlock Holmes, the great fictional detective. I’ve done numerous Holmes illustrations for audiobook collections, designed a Sherlock Holmes pen and am somewhat of a scholar on the “Canon” i.e. Conan Doyle’s original 56 short stories and 4 novels. However I am not very well versed on the thousands of works by other creative people with Holmes as their subject including the numerous films, TV series, stories books and comics. Shame on me, perhaps, but I’ve always felt that while you can certainly enjoy the interpretations of any source material you can seldom beat the original creator’s vision. The James Bond films come to mind as taking the creation of Ian Fleming and in some cases making him more interesting and exciting, but I think that’s a rare exception that proves the rule. In any case finding the time to even sample the other works of the most widely filmed, written and acted character in the history of fiction is not easy.
Which brings me to the upcoming new film “Sherlock Holmes” by director Guy Ritchie and starring Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. John Watson. I’ve gotten not a few e-mails from people asking what I think about this new movie. A full trailer has recently been released (see above). I’ll admit despite trying to keep an open mind I am having a hard time believing I will like this film. That’s saying something considering I am one of the few hardcore Batman comic book fans that loves the Adam West TV series… proving I do not have a problem with very different and oddball takes on favorite fictional characters.
I’ve read articles stating, and it’s quite obvious from the trailer, that Ritchie’s intent is to update the Holmes character to 21st century interest even though keeping it set in the proper century. Still, it’s one thing to reinvent a classic character and another to completely ignore some of the most recognized character elements they possess while playing up some of the least important. I guess Ritchie’s idea of updating Holmes is to turn him into an action hero, leaping out of buildings and fighting villains with all manner of weapons.
I know the arguments that have been made by the actors and others associated with the film… that Holmes was in fact a very physical being and this is closer to the Conan Doyle original character than other portrayals. Whoever makes this argument must have been reading a different set of Conan Doyle stories than I have read. Yes, Holmes did have a number of physical skills in the original stories… he was an expert amateur boxer as demonstrated and referred to in several stories including The Sign of the Four and The Solitary Cyclist. He describes himself as having a “knowledge of baritsu” a “Japanese system of wrestling” (actually Conan Doyle probably meant “Bartitsu“) also referred to a few times as in The Empty House. Watson describes him as having a surprising level of physical strength for a man of his “excessive leanness”, as he demonstrates in the story The Speckled Band when he straightens out a bent iron poker with his bare hands to show he is quite as strong as the antagonist who bent the poker in the first place. Watson also describes him as an expert singlestick player (singlestick is a martial art related to fencing and stick fighting using a wooden weapon and stick fighting is the use of a small staff, cane or walking stick as a blunt hand weapon) and swordsman, although these skills were never featured in any specific Holmes story (Holmes used a riding crop a few times). He was also a decent marksman with a pistol, as demonstrated by his writing the royal initials “VR” in bullet holes in the wall of his sitting room during the occasional indoor target practice which so displeased his landlady, Mrs. Hudson. So there is an argument that Holmes was a formidable fighter and man of action.
However Holmes the detective abhorred that kind of physicality. As a “consulting detective” he preferred to deliver his opinions from the comfort of his armchair, and would reluctantly “bustle about and see things with my own eyes” only when the case called for it. While he would not hesitate to doff his shoes and socks and scale the walls of a house (The Sign of the Four again), spend a morning trying to tranfix a hanging pig carcass with a harpoon (Black Peter), burgle a house in the dead of night (Charles Augustus Milverton) and perform other energetic feats, Holmes always preferred using pure mental power to solves his cases. Several times he both said and insinuated that Watson was the person he relied on when “some little violence” was imminent. In my mind it becomes quite a stretch to take the Holmes of Conan Doyle’s stories and make him a swashbuckling action hero, which is apparently what Ritchie has done. It seems he has latched on to some of the less import elements of Holmes’ character and caricatured them to make them more prominent.
The trailer seems to also indicate that Ritchie has taken other attributes of Holmes’ from the canon and exaggerated them. Holmes’ penchant on being slovenly and untidy, for example. He was thus described several times by Watson, yet as a Victorian gentlemen he would never dream to be out of proper attire even in his sitting room. “Slovenly” is a relative term, and what would be considered sloppy in the late 1800′s in a gentelman’s Victorian London would be fastidious today. For example, both he and Watson undoubtedly would share the British habit of being clean shaven and groomed no matter what the circumstances, yet Holmes appears to have perpetual 2 days stubble in the trailer. Watson also chastens him for his unclean habits in the trailer. I wonder if Ritchie will make Holmes a drooling cokehead as well.
There seems to be a lot of humor in the trailer, which I think is well placed. Holmes had quite the dry wit, and he cracked plenty of sarcastic jokes and comments. Robert Downey Jr. excels in that kind of dialogue, so that will no doubt be very entertaining. Ritchie’s movies are centered on humorous English banter amid violent circumstances.
Finally, the casting of Downey Jr. is a bit of a mystery to me. He is very far from the classic look and physicality of Holmes, who was “rather over 6 feet and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller”, had a “thin, hawk-like nose” and a “square and prominent” chin. Downey Jr. is 5 foot 8 inches in “Hollywood height” which means he’s probably 5’7″ max with a small rounded nose and no chin. Now, in many cases you can get around a difference in the physical nature of an actor vs. a fictional character’s common description, but the tall, lean Holmes is iconic. Under no circumstances should Watson be TALLER than Holmes, which at 6 feet he clearly is in the trailer. Downey Jr. is a great actor and maybe he’ll make me forget he is a little guy, but I think it will distract me the entire film. It’s like casting a taller Robin alongside Batman.
I could go on and on here, but I’ll let it go and try and keep an open mind. I may love the film and still shake my head and say “fun but it wasn’t Sherlock Holmes”. Who knows? I won’t until the movie comes out. I am a fan of Guy Ritchie’s films, and it will be interesting to see if his very recognizable stamp is on this movie and how he works it in to a film set in Victorian times.
