From WickedCoolStuff.com comes some awesome Monty Python and the Holy Grail goodies:

The Black Knight backpack!

The cow (and other farm animals) catapult!

A complete horse action figure!!

If none of these items make you instantly laugh out loud go immediately to your local movie rental store or your Netflix cue and rent “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, sit down and watch this hilarious film, then come back.

The Jaques Art Center in Aitkin, MN will be having an exhibit of original cartoon art by “nationally known cartoonists, comic artists, illustrators and animators” starting one week from today, August 28th and running through October 3rd. Show organizer and cartoonist Duane Barnhart dropped by the studio last night to pick up several pieces of mine for the show, including a few original pages from MAD and other stuff. It sounds like a great exhibit with a lot of different work in it… I know that he has gotten originals from resident Minnesota cartoonists like Dan Jurgens (Superman, etc.), Jerry Van Amerongen (Ballard Street) and many more.

There is a reception for the show on Saturday, August 29th from 1-4pm at the Jaques Art Center, which will be a “meet the cartoonists” event and a chance for the public to speak with area artists.

I will be a special guest speaker on Thursday, September 10th at the nearby 40 Club Convention Center in Aitkin. I’ll be doing a multimedia presentation, talking about caricature in illustration, MAD, etc. The price of admission is a food shelf donation or a donation to the Jaques Art Center.

This should be a great show. Duane is working very hard on it and it sound like he has collected an amazing amount of top notch professional work.

The International Society of Caricature Artists (ISCA, formerly known as the NCN) 2009 Annual Caricature Convention and Competition is fast approaching on November 2nd-7th in Sandusky, Ohio. If you are a caricaturist either doing the live thing or for publication and have never attended one of these events, you are missing something special.

There are some unique things about this year’s convention that makes it a perfect time for non-ISCA members to attend to see what it’s all about.

First off, there is not one, not two, not three but FOUR guest speakers, all from MAD Magazine:

• 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- My humble self

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.

You’ll also get a chance to meet and hang out with such caricature legends as Jan Op de Beeck, Joe Bluhm, Steve Silver, Court Jones and many others who attend every year and also sometimes conduct workshops. The final schedule is not complete and as there are so many main speakers the workshops might be limited this year, but at least you’ll see ones by Jan and Silver.

Ordinarily these conventions are only open to members of the organization. For the first time this year there will be a special fee of $99 for anyone who is not a member but wants to attend just the MAD speaker presentations. I warn you, though, if you are a caricaturist or cartoonist and attend just for the speakers you will be so blown away by the creative power of the event you will likely apply for membership on the spot and end up drawing away like the other 150 plus attending artists.

The deadline for the discounted early registration is fast approaching on Sept. 15th. There are $99 a night room rates available at the resort as well. I hope to see some readers of The MAD Blog there!

A little something different this week… an inked sketch of a cartoon bodybuilder doing a deadlift I am working up for my trainer, Ryan Branson and his personal training business for t-shirts, etc. Needs to be line art only.

Yet another time lapse video from my old 1993 “demo reel” of live caricatures. This time the subject is Albert Einstein… a sample I actually still use at the parks but usually in black and white.

By the way I stole that T-shirt slogan gag from Steve Fasen in 1985.

I spent a sweltering Saturday drawing live caricatures at my theme park operation at Six Flags New England. Here is a smattering of some of the ones I did. The pictures are never the best, and these are true live ones done at the park that I spend the appropriate short amount of time on :

These last two are two of my caricaturists, Bill Breneisen and Guerlins Ellsyee. I took a little more time doing these but they are probably still about 15-18 minutes tops:

Bill’s getting married in a week…

Q: Now that MAD has gone to quarterly, how much has that affected your freelance workload?

A: While I have many other clients sadly there is no question that without the MAD work I am far less busy than I used to be when they were 12 issues a year.

For example, I was notified about the move to quarterly in February while I was working on the art for the “Watchmen” parody. At that same time the previous year (2008) I was doing the art for MAD‘s parody of “Heroes”. At this point of the year (mid August) in 2008 after finishing “Heroes” I had done parodies of “Samantha Who?”, “30 Rock” and “Iron Man” and was working on “The Dark Knight” plus two 2 page articles. This year since “Watchmen” I’ve done one small spot illustration for MAD #500 and am working on a 2 page job for them now. That’s a big difference.

I did do the “Bo Confidential” book for them in May, which was a big job… But yes the magazine work is something I miss a lot both paycheck wise and more for the enjoyment of doing MAD art.

Other clients are keeping me busy and MAD has projects up their sleeve I am sure to work on, so there is little self pity going on with me. I do wish it was different of course and MAD was still published monthly, but life is life. New opportunities and challenges await around the next corner, and MAD is still in the picture.

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’m currently in Agawam, Massachusetts visiting my theme park operation at Six Flags New England, where I am actually scheduled to spend today drawing caricatures. If I have a chance I’ll take some pictures of some of the drawings.

I’m finally getting around to doing this report on our trip to Pittsburgh and the opening of my show at the Toonseum, located in the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.

As someone said to me, it isn’t everyday your husband (or dad) get’s his artwork hung in a museum, so I dragged The Lovely Anna and all four of my kids with me to Pittsburgh to see the show and get to experience a little bit of the city. Cartoonist and Toonseum curator Joe Wos, and Pittsburgh Post Gazette/syndicated editorial cartoonist  Rob Rogers were gracious hosts, giving of their time to make sure we were taken care of. Rob hauled us about in a mini-van both from and to the airport as well as about town and treated us to several wonderful meals.

We arrived on Thursday July 30th in the afternoon and settled in to the hotel… which isn’t easy with four kids. That night Rob took us to dinner at a charming restaurant located in a converted church, where the micro brew apparatus was located where the altar once stood. It sounds sacrilegious but de-consecrated churches need to be used for something, and it was a nice place to eat. Among other things we tried perogies, a staple of local Pittsburgh cuisine, which were delicious. Later Rob brought us about town, seeing many sights and riding the “incline” up to the top of Mount Washington looking over the city. Great view.

Pittsburgh has an undeserved image of being a bleak, industrial town full of smokestacks and warehouses. It’s actually a very beautiful city located in a lush valley at the convergence of three rivers, and is a town of historic bridges, churches and art. Yes, art. Pittsburgh may have been built on the back of the steel industry, but industrial giants like the Carnegie‘s and Frick‘s created huge funds for the arts in the city which still are at work today. There is a great deal of public art and sculpture all about Pittsburgh, and in the last 20 years many of the dwindling industrial sites have been converted into entertainment and fine living areas. It’s a wonderful place to spend some time.

Joe Wos and me

The show officially opened at the Toonseum on Saturday, but there was a special reception on Friday night which was reasonably well attended. There were several fellow NCS and ISCA members there, and I also met many area cartoonists. Anna and the kids had a lot of fun, as parts of the Children’s Museum were accessible and they got to see a lot of the exhibits… particularly the Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood room. Fred Rogers was from Pittsburgh, and his children’s TV show “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood” was something Anna and I grew up with.

The show’s opening area

Joe really did a great job on show itself. The original MAD spreads and pages were framed and hung in the Toonseum area (a hallway connecting two main areas of the Children’s Museum). My son Tom had painstakingly typed out all the words from every word balloon and I took the header graphics from the MAD digital files and printed them all out for Anna to paste them up on the boards… so rather than blank word balloons the art had the story as well to enjoy. Joe and I had discussed it would be a good idea to show one project from beginning to end, so as I still had all the artwork from the MAD parody of “The Dark Knight”, the show contained every original art page of the story long with the pencil roughs and prints of the final colored artwork.

Some of the show artwork…

The splash page from the parody of “Scrubs”

Some people visiting the Toonseum, obviously nauseated

There was also some prints of work by artists I admire, which Joe decided to be the caricatures of me by Mort Drucker, Al Hirschfeld and Hermann Mejia from my Me Gallery. MAD art director Sam Viviano also wrote an intro to the show which said some very nice things and made me wonder if he owed me money or something.

Toonseum board members (L to R): Jim Martin,
Missy Gralish, Joe Wos and myself.

Missy asking a question

Me answering

On Saturday I went to the Children’s Museum where I did a short demo for a the kids. I drew Alfred for them and did caricatures of a few of them as well.

Later that night I did a class on drawing caricatures, which went fairly well. I’ve taught many hundreds of caricaturists in my them park operations but doing something more formal like this was an interesting change of pace.

One other Pittsburgh thing we did was go to the famous Primanti Bros. restaurant for one of their famous sandwiches. A Primanti Bros. sandwich is a hamburger (or other type of grilled meat) with cole slaw, tomatoes and french fries on top all between pieces of thick sliced bread. This is a big deal in Pittsburgh and has been featured on travel shows and other media on regional foods. At the risk of angering my friends from Pittsburgh, I did not “get it”. I thought it was okay and I’m glad I experienced it but I’d much rather have almost any other kind of sandwich. When defending the Primanti Bros. fare several locals told me it’s “better when you are drunk”. Ah… it’s everything?

As a show of my appreciation I donated one of the pieces from the show to the Toonseum’s permanent collection, this splash page from the “Obama Inauguration” piece I did earlier this year.

Joe and me with the donated artwork

The Toonseum is a great place and I hope they gain in success and visibility. I certainly hope that the class of the featured artists they exhibit rises immensely…. and SOON.

Videoscope Magazine bills itself as “the Ultimate Genre DVD Guide”. According to it’s website, it “began life as a newsletter but soon morphed into a nationally distributed magazine, a one-stop source for the latest in genre home entertainment coverage.” Each issue contains news and reviews of the latest DVD releases from genres such as Horror, Sci-Fi, Action, Asian, Cult, Camp, Classic, Animation, Thrillers, Indies, Film Noirs, Art-House, Verite, Vintage, Tele-Video, Exploitation, etc. It also contains numerous articles and interviews written by experts of each genre and about the star creators of the movies.

The latest issue of Videoscope contains a well written article by David Vaughan entitled “MAD at the Movies”, all about MAD‘s long history of doing movie satires. I was interviewed extensively for the article, but despite that it’s still an interesting and informative read. Fortunately they also procured quotes and insights from the likes of Dick DeBartolo, Arnie Kogen and Desmond Devlin so the level of intelligence in the article is plenty high.

There is no on-line version of the article, so if you are interested you’ll have to pick up a copy of Videoscope Magazine. I’m not sure how you can get single issues, but if you contact them I am sure they will oblige.