EDIT- Well, that’s it! All my copies are now sold and I won’t be ordering any more to sign, draw in or otherwise sell here on The MAD Blog. Many thanks to all those who ordered the book.

You can always order a copy through Amazon here.

Christmas fast approaches and I have got exactly five… that’s right FIVE… copies of Bo Confidential: The Secret Files of America’s First Dog left. If you want one, now is the time to order. I will not be reordering any more nor offering them for sale with or without a signature, sketch or caricature of you after I run out of this stock.

You can order one of my few remaining copies here with any one of the following four options:

• Signed copy of the book (either personalized to you or just signed)- $9.95 (cover price)
• Signed with a sketch of “Bo”- $19.95
• Signed with a sketch of Alfred E. Neuman- $19.95
• Signed with a caricature sketch of YOU- $29.95

Great holiday gift for the person who hates everything. They’ll hate this too but at least they’ll have a good reason.

Q: Did you go to art school? If you did, which one? When I’m older, I want to go to an art university but I don’t know which ones are really good yet, or which ones teach cartooning. Do you even have to go to college to be a cartoonist?

A: Yes, I went to art school (The College of Visual Arts, St. Paul, MN) but never had a cartooning class. I was taught traditional drawing, painting and illustration… there was virtually no such thing as a university that taught cartooning back in the 1980′s (except perhaps the School of Visual Arts in New York City). In fact cartooning was mostly frowned upon at my school, where I was told that for every successful cartoonist there were 2,000 who worked at some retail store or waited tables to make a living.

However it’s good for a cartoonist to develop their more realistic art skills as it only strengthens their cartooning. Cartooning and realistic drawing are not mutually exclusive… although some forms of cartooning are more about writing than they are about drawing, it never hurts to have a stronger drawing skills. I never had a single moment of structured education on the art of cartooning, but simply applied the things I did learn to my more natural drawing inclinations… which were humorous by nature.

Some people beleive that college is not necessary to be an artist. Technically they are right. Art school is not like going to college to be a doctor or a lawyer. Your diploma or where you went to school means nothing. Nobody cares if you went to Harvard or Po Dunk Community College… they only care about your work. Therefore you don’t need to go to a prestigious or expensive school, or have a degree in anything. You just need to find a school that will teach you various techniques and help you develop your abilities as an artist. It’s always up to the artist to put in the work and effort to get the most out of their education. Graduating is a terrific accomplishment but it means nothing in the end to your professional career. Only in certain aspects of the cartooning profession does where you went to school make a difference… like animation. If you graduated from Cal Arts as opposed to Po Dunk Community College, you will probably get a few more interviews from animation houses, but ultimately it’s still the work that makes or breaks you. That is really true of almost any profession, but it’s rare that any doors get opened for an artist based on the name of the school on their diploma. In my 25 years as a freelancer I’ve never once been asked where I graduated from.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating not seeking an education past high school if you want to be an artist. Far from it, further education is the best road to take. It’s just that it is the learning that is important, not the piece of paper at the end or more correctly the name of the school on that piece of paper. And the learning never stops. You should continue to work hard at your skills your whole career… the great ones did and do.

Today there are a number of schools that offer cartooning course and majors. The ones that immediately come to mind are:

• Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA
• Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minneapolis, MN
• School of Visual Arts, NYC
• Academy of Art University, San Fransisco, CA

I’m sure there are a few others, like the Joe Kubert School in New Jersey, as well as schools who have major animation and illustration programs like Cal Arts and Ringling. However lots of colleges offer art programs that allow you to work at your own area of art. i.e cartooning. They are out there, and even if that diploma ends up gathering dust on your shelf it’s the journey you took to get it that counts… not the piece of paper itself.

Thanks to Robert Garcia of San Fransisco, CA 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!

Here is a quick MAD job I did earlier this month that just got posted on the MAD website. It’s obviously a parody of the movie poster for Disney’s “UP” featuring the Heene “Balloon Boy” hoax. I needed to approximate the look of the Pixar characters but with caricatures of Richard Heene and the kid.

It will probably be printed in the magazine eventually but the image is already available for download on MAD’s website, along with a lot of other parody posters and such.

The colors on this thing really got weird on me in CMYK. I’m not sure if that is something related to my upgrading to PhotoShop CS4 or not, but upon switching to CMYK everything became darker and much more purple, and it looks like it stuck when they switched back to RGB. Here’s a closeup of the dad:

The sky, for example, was much more bright blue than this darker, more magenta color. I started out using a high res image of the actual poster in RGB and then painted out the original characters, revised the clouds and prepared to paint in the new characters. Then when I switched to CMYK the weirdness happened. I tried to manipulate the color balance after but to little effect. I hate not having proper control over the look of something.

EDIT- Don’t misunderstand, I am far from a noob when it comes to digital imaging and printing. I have been dealing with CMYK and screen to print color shifts for over a decade now. Usually PhotoShop does a pretty good job when converting from a typical RGB color profile to a standard U.S. web coated SWOP v2 CMYK color space. In this instance the difference was more profound. I suspect it had something to do with the original downloaded “UP” RGB file I used as the basis of the illustration. Since it was a compressed JPG file, some of the color information was probably squeezed out of it and that made the conversion tougher, or perhaps the blue sky color was just so far out of the CMYK gamut that it was doomed from the start.

Here’s the original RGB poster image:

You can see how different the blue is. Now that I look at it again, I definitely think the issue was the original blue color being completely unattainable in CMYK/print.

Black Friday… when completely insane people go out into completely insane crowds in search of deals on whatever. I try to avoid shopping on this day if at all possible.

Except from the comfort of my own home, of course!

The image above is of another new MAD book that was just released entitled 1001 MAD Pages You Must Read Before You Die (Crammed into 864 Actual Pages). This is another “Barnes and Noble” exclusive book like MAD About the Movies: The Director’s Cut and I am guessing features a lot of classic MAD features in black and white. I have no idea if I have anything in it or not (my guess is not), but as a collection of hundreds of MAD gems from the last 57 years it should be good. Plus, it’s less that $10!!!

It beats a tie or aftershave with a picture of a ship on the bottle… but just barely. You can’t use a tie or a bottle of aftershave to prop open a heavy door.

This week’s sketch subject is “Zombieland” actor Jesse Eisenberg. It’s rare that I go to see a movie with high expectations and have that movie live up to it. Zombieland was every bit as fun as the trailers looked.

Whenever we have people over to the house inevitably they end up in my studio for a tour… all one room of it. Maybe it’s not the Taj Mahal but still for most people it’s a bit like a visit to a candy store… I have surrounded myself with a lot of cool stuff for inspiration and a generally creative atmosphere and tried to lay out the space for both maximum efficiency and functionality. Laymen marvel, women weep and fellow artists turn green with envy.

I’ve been threatening to redo it for years now.

Well, I finally pulled the trigger this fall and remodeled the studio, and it went from way cool past awesome and rocketed totally off the charts.

Here are some pictures of the old studio… you can take a tour of it here:

The old drawing board

My former computer workstation area

Old bookshelves, cabinet and of course the batsuit

The old batshelves

White walls, cheap plywood shelves, corkboard. All gone. Witness the splendor that is Studio 2.0:

New drawing area with signed MAD prints, new paint, new carpet, new cabinets
and quartz countertops/desk

Computer workstation

Built in natural wood bookshelves

Custom built natural maple shelves match the new cabinets

Batman recesses into the built in shelves

The new Bat Shelves!

Better shot of drawing board

Challenge coins I was given from Germany/Kuwait/Iraq

DVD’s, Blu-Rays and other goodies

Gollum watches over the studio

It took over 2 months to redo the entire thing. I finally had the computer desk countertop installed yesterday so the whole project is now complete. Cost a lot more than I thought as well, but seeing how much time I spend in this room and that I hadn’t even painted it in 15 years it was long overdue.

Now I have to stop staring around and get some work done!!!

…that after being gone for the last 12 days the Dreaded Deadline Demon would be making an appearance today?

Q: What happens when you are headed back from a trip to Australia and have absolutely no time, between packing and checking out and getting to the airport and going through security and customs and eventually getting all the way back to Minnesota, but you need to do a Sunday Mailbag blog post? Do you shamelessly cop out by posting a meaningless answer to a completely made up question, and even more shamelessly recycle a previously used gag?

Yes.

Thanks to A.E. Neuman 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!

So far 2009 hasn’t been the best of years for MAD magazine. The announcement back in February that as of issue #500 MAD was going to start publishing quarterly instead of monthly was cited by some as the death knell of the publication. I get asked about the reduction in publication all the time, and what I think the future holds for MAD.

I think the rumors of MAD‘s death have been greatly exaggerated.

There are a number of things in the works right now that bode well for MAD and not only it’s continued publication but a resurgence in it’s visibility and maybe a return to a greater publication schedule.

One of those things was the publication of the “Bo Confidential” book this summer, which is already in it’s second printing despite basically zero promotion and will probably see a promotional push for the holidays. No doubt other original books projects are being explored.

There is a lot of buzz about a complete makeover of the MAD website… no details as of yet but the plans I’ve heard about are ambitious and would make MAD‘s corner of the web a place to visit daily (or multiple times a day).

There is also a lot of talk about the expansion of MAD into other media, and there are real plans in development for some really cool and interesting stuff that will bring MAD to a whole new generation of fans and readers. Most of these projects are still in the “can’t talk about it” stage but they are not just rumors. Maybe some or all will end up in development hell and never see the light of day, but they are in real development.

This is actually an exciting time for MAD. I will certainly share details when it is appropriate to share them here. In the meantime, things are looking up in the MAD world.