Wow.

The power of the internet is an amazing thing.

Yesterday I posted a little rant here on The MAD Blog about Apple’s head-scratching rejection of Bobble Rep, an application conceived and developed by film director Ray Griggs for which I was commissioned to draw a caricature of each of all 540 members of the 111th United States congress. As usual I just wrote off the top of my head, grammar errors and somewhat acerbic tone included.

24 hours later my blog was twice crashed by overwhelming traffic coming from links on virtually every major independent Apple blog/website including TUAW, 9to5 Mac and Macworld, from Twitter links via the New York Times David Pogue, CNN/Fotune and many others.

Thanks for the suggestions and support. Ray and his programmer guru Stevo Brock are looking into other options including porting the app to other platforms. For those asking about seeing all 540 caricatures, I will make sure that they are published here on my website if the app never sees the light of day or other venues such as a flash-based website are not developed.

Thanks again for all the interest in this little tale. No word yet from Apple, but I can almost guarantee you that few people going to work in Cupertino today have not heard about this story thanks to all of you.

Yep, I’m off again on the final leg of what has been an insane year of traveling and speaking at cartoonists events and other functions… five continents in the last 5 months. This time I’m taking The Lovely Anna along to Sydney, Australia where I will be speaking and doing a caricature workshop at the Australian Cartoonists Associations Stanley Awards Weekend. However this time we will be staying for a week to see the sights including some time in the Hunter Valley vineyard area.

Look for a report from the Stanleys and a few others from “down under” over the next week, as well as the usual stupidity here on The MAD Blog.

EDIT- Apple reconsidered its decision and approved the Bobble Rep app after a media storm of protest was set off by this innocent little rant on my insignificant little blog. Below is the original blog post:

Just yesterday I was complaining about how Apple sometimes treats its customers as if they were stupid.

I had no idea how right I was.

Back in the late summer movie director/entrepreneur Ray Griggs, for whom I did all that art for his movie “Super Capers“, approached me with an idea for an iPhone app. The concept was a database of all the members of the United States Congress which allowed the user to find the names and contact information of their senators and congressional representative either via zipcode or by using the iPhone’s GPS location services. He wanted the visuals to be more than just a bunch of pictures, and asked me to do caricatures for each senator and representative.

That’s 540 caricature if you are keeping count (including those non-voting members of the house from Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.). FIVE HUNDRED FORTY. Five-four-Oh. Whew.

The caricature “heads” would be placed on one of 12 different bodies I has also drawn to make a cartoon, virtual “bobblehead” for each member of congress’s page. You can make the heads bobble by shaking your phone or flicking the head with your finger. Of course that’s just a novelty, and the real purpose of the app is the database that allows you to find out who your representatives in Washington are and how to contact them.

I did all 540 caricatures. In fact I finished the last few dozen in my hotel room in Washington DC prior to my USO trip. Ray and his programmers wrapped up the programming and the app was sent to Apple for approval.

Here are some of the visuals that were sent to Apple:

Ray had showed a lot of people this app, and there was a fair amount of interest in it. In fact, he tells me that he is booked to appear on both the Glenn Beck John Stossel show and the Mike Huckabee show next week to talk about the app and his upcoming documentary. Both Beck Stossel and Huckabee loved the app and that’s what precipitated his appearance on their shows.

Looks like all Ray will have to talk about is how ridiculous Apple’s app approval folks are, since the app was REJECTED yesterday . Here is Apple’s official rejection letter and the “reason”:

Subject: Bobble Rep – 111th Congress Edition 1.0: Application Submission Feedback

Please include the line below in follow-up emails for this request.

Follow-up:  87280909

Dear Mr. Griggs,

Thank you for submitting Bobble Rep – 111th Congress Edition to the App Store. We’ve reviewed Bobble Rep – 111th Congress Edition and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section  3.3.14 from the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement which states:

“Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

A screenshot of this issue has been attached for your reference.

If you believe that you can make the necessary changes so that Bobble Rep – 111th Congress Edition does not violate the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.

Regards,
iPhone Developer Program
****************************

Wow. I’ve had rejections in theme parks before but never because my drawings were considered “obscene, pornographic, or defamatory”. I can see where they are coming from, though. Check out these “hard hitting” caricatures (said with tongue firmly in cheek):

CA- Harman

ND- Pomeroy

OH- Kucinich

Brutal, I know. I mean, if Dennis Kucinich ever saw that he’d doubtless curl up in the fetal position and cry for a week. What was I thinking, doing these over-the-top, cut-throat abominations of caricatures for a public iPhone app????

Wait… someone is at the door. MAYBE IT’S THE SECRET SERVICE!!!!!!

This is truly ridiculous. These caricatures aren’t mean or very exaggerated. They are simple, fun cartoon likenesses of the politicians and the purpose of the app is a informational database. There is no editorial commentary involved at all.

This is the very reason that Apple as a company should be taken to task over its ludicrous and inconsistent app approval policies. Clearly this app does not “ridicule public figures” and is violating nothing, but Apple has decided the world must be protected from the insidious subversiveness this would force upon the public and the brutal, heinous ridicule that my cruel, cruel caricatures would subject these politicians to.

Hard to believe that anybody could be this blind. Maybe they just have a monkey doing the approval of their apps, and he throws a dart at a dartboard with “approved” and “rejected” targets on it and whatever it hits is the fate of that app. That would explain how they could approve an app with a cartoon baby picture and when you shake the phone hard enough the baby dies. Yes, that one got through only to be yanked after some outraged people complained, but no way are a bunch of flame-throwing caricatures going to get through!!!

Unbelievable.

The really sad part is that here is an app that might get people interested in who represents them in Washington, especially kids and young adults, and connects people to their senators and representatives via fun and PARTISAN FREE way. Yet Apple has decided it’s not appropriate. There needs to be more of that in this world of right versus left, especially as that applies to young kids who are being raised to consider politics the public equivalent of professional wrestling. Ray’s documentary “I Want Your Money” is distinctly right wing (and my own political views are mostly left of center) but the app is totally partisan neutral.

Please spread the word how stupid this rejection is. Apple of course does not care what its customers think… apparently they consider us idiots at best anyway (appropriate on my part, as I am a member of MAD‘s “Usual Gang of Idiots”), but it’s worth a laugh and a shake of your head.

EDIT- Thanks for all the comments, support and suggestions from everyone. Ray and his programmer Stevo Brock are working on other options, including other platforms… but that’s all in their hands. I just draw funny pictures. I’m going to close down comments on this thread, but feel free to e-mail me with further comments or suggestions.

Also, for those who have written and asked about seeing all 540 of the congressional caricatures, one way or another I will make sure we publish those… either via the app on another platform or here on my website if nothing else.

Q: I’ve been following your blog for quite some time and on the last few months I can see that you’re trying to use more and more your new “no black lines” style, it looks pretty cool by the way. My question is related to “style”, how do you feel about the need for an commercial artist to establish a style and stick to it for years and years? Isn’t it something that ends up slowing the artist progress as he ends up stuck in a “comfort zone”?

A: This is a concept that does see a fair amount of debate: whether or not a freelance illustrator should stick to a single style and/or specialty or develop several styles and areas of subject matter to become a kind of “Jack of All Trades”. I’ve gotten advice from both sides of that argument at times from illustrators I admire. Each side has some compelling arguments, and I think it all depends on where one wants to go with their freelance careers as to which one makes the most sense for a given illustrator.

The first professional cartoonist I ever met emphatically supported the “multiple styles” approach. I was a college student in 1987 at what is now the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, MN. Our illustration class took a field trip to visit a local “illustration studio”. Illustration studios are scarce if not completely a thing of the past these days, but they used to be a kind of collective of illustrators in a single space of offices that operated like an advertising agency. The studio had a rep or several reps that would run down work for it’s stable of artists, and they would have a selection of different styles and techniques among their group of artists to make them a kind of “one stop shop” for the art needs of clients. Sometimes the artists were paid by the job and sometimes they were salaried, but it was more of a social community and office environment. Today individual reps have stables of artists but it works on commission and the artists are spread out all over the place, working on their own. Most studios had a resident cartoonist, and this studio had a cartoonist named George Karn.

Karn was a big bear of a man sitting behind and enormous drafting table with jars, glasses, mugs, coffee cans and all manner of containers surrounding him stuffed with every conceivable pen or marker known to man with no discernible method of organization. You might not be familiar with his name, but I can almost guarantee you’ve seen his work. Karn was a commercial illustrator/cartoonist for decades and did thousands of pieces for ads, products and publications everyone has seen. He was the the artist who created the characters for Trix and Count Chocula cereals for General Mills. He passed away a few years ago.

With the entire class squeezed into his work area, Karn answered a number of questions, one of which was the old “If you had one piece of advice to give…”. His answer was not to get pigeonholed into a single style, look or subject matter lest you greatly restrict the work you would be considered for. He showed us a promo piece he had done that had a dozen samples of different cartooning styles from comic bookish figures to animation-like characters to caricatures. He explained that, since he could do it all, he was up for consideration for a lot more work than if he just did one thing. He also said it kept him from being tied to a style that might become dated or fall out of favor with art directors. Meeting Karn was very interesting… here was a guy who made a living doing humorous illustration… exactly what I wanted to do. I’ve heard that same philosophy from a few other artists, especially the part about a style becoming dated. That’s a little bit of a different animal from the active peddling of multiple styles simultaneously, however. Artists who have long enough careers will almost always have to allow their styles to evolve either a little or a lot to accommodate the changing times and tastes.

While the multiple styles approach is occasionally supported, I’ve found it’s more common for the opposite concept to be recommended by pro illustrators. Artists like Jack Davis, C.F. Payne, and others have told me to establish an identity, both visual and professional, and stick to it. I got that same advice from one artist I greatly admire, and who has been a great mentor for me over the years… longtime MAD artist and current art director Sam Viviano. Sam has told me repeatedly that it is far better to be have that solid, recognizable identity than to try and be too many things at once. He told me that art directors need to know what to expect from an illustrator, and that is best accomplished by presenting an identifiable style as opposed to the confusion of multiple personalities/styles. Art directors don’t like surprises, and if they hire an illustrator they need to have a pretty good idea of what they are getting before the make the call. I can tell a quick story to illustrate that. I had an artist working for me at Valleyfair many years ago, and he took his portfolio to a local publisher to try and get publication work. He had all manner of styles in is book, from park-like caricatures to some David Levine-ish crosshatch caricatures. These latter they liked, and he got a call to work up a caricature of then Minnesota Viking’s coach Dennis Green. He worked hard on the piece, and then brought it to me to show before turning it in. What he showed me was a park style airbrush caricature, not the crosshatch style. I told him they would not like it, and that he should have done it in the style they responded best to. He disagreed. As I expected, the piece was rejected and he got a kill fee, plus he never got another call from that publisher.

Another issue with presenting multiple styles is the “jack of all trades, master of none” theory. Maybe the diverse illustrator does a good job with all the different types of art they present, but that doesn’t mean an art director will give them a call. If an AD wants a caricature of president Bush for an article, is he/she likely to call and artist who has a few caricatures among several radically different styles on their promo sheets, or an illustrator that does nothing but caricatures? The same could be said with sports illustrations, funny animal cartoons, etc. Maybe the multiple personality thing would get an illustrator considered for more work, but actually getting the work is another thing. Some ADs like to work with just a few illustrators, but many are not afraid to search for the style they are looking for outside their regular contacts. Specializing results in work within that specialty… the trick is not to specialize in something so obscure or seldom needed as to limit your potential jobs. Caricatures, for example, are used widely for entertainment, editorial, political and sports related features… a very good thing to be known for. Drawing really good sloths? Not so much.

Finally, I’ve been told trying to be a do-it-all go-to illustrator will limit how far you go in the world of illustration. Maybe most of us will never become regulars in Time, Sports Illustrated or Entertainment Weekly, but those who do reach that level are never “jack of all trade” types. The C.F. Paynes, Steve Brodners, John Kaschts, Mark Fredricksons and other heavy hitters have that instantly recognizable style that is unmistakable. We’d all like to think that level is attainable, and it’s hard to argue with success. George Karn may have done a lot of work we’ve all seen, but he was not in the same league as guys like Payne and Brodner. In all honesty, I was a little put off by Karn’s promo sheet, as I felt it did not jut present multiple styles, but other artist’s styles. He could see blatant ripoffs of artist like Davis, Jeff MacNelly an several more. That’s a little different than having several of your own styles to present.

Personally I believe that it’s better to have that recognizable identity than being a multi-personalty do it all. Maybe it means I won’t get any jobs drawing lawn mowers one day and cute little bunnies the next, but as long as I keep fairly busy doing what I do best it’s all good. I know some may disagree, and if that works for them then more power to ‘em.

Now, EVOLUTION of one’s style is another matter. Most artist’s styles will naturally evolve over time. Remaking one’s style consciously is something some illustrators have tried to do, and some have been successful while others have not. The ones for which that has worked seemed to have a style that was dated… meaning it was a “hot” style for a certain period of time and them became passé and they stopped getting work. The only reason I could see to radically change one’s style would be because the work dried up.

You mentioned my “no black line” style of illustration, as shown here:

Well, I also have a more fully painted method as well:

I think it’s wrong to label these different approaches as “style”. Both these and my line and color illustrations are all still my “style” and recognizable as my art… they are just using different methods of rendering. I’d call them different techniques of the same style. As long as the art director I am working with is clear as to which look he or she wants, there is absolutely no confusion.

Thanks to Shiva Souza 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!

Whenever I get a new techie toy that I use in conjunction with my work I try and post a review of it from a visual artist’s perspective… in other words how does it affect my work on the computer or in business? You can read my reviews of the Cintiq 12wx, OS X Leopard and the iPhone from previous posts.

I wanted to review the new Apple Magic Mouse from such a perspective, but to be honest it’s still just a mouse, and has no real impact positively or negatively on my illustration/graphic work on the computer.

It is a cool new toy, though. Thus the review.

First off, some complaining. Apple has a very annoying habit of announcing new hardware and then have it unavailable for an unacceptable amount of time. It’s frustrating when you walk into an Apple store with $70 in you hand and you are told they don’t want your money because the product they have been crowing about for a week is still not in their store, and it’s over a week before it ships if you order it online. Yet every new iMac on display has one. That is some serious arrogance. Vaporware is one thing, but when the product is obviously in production and included with new computers, Apple should just wait until it’s got that product boxed and in stock before announcing it… especially at the premium prices they charge. $70 for a MOUSE??? That better be an amazing pice of equipment.

Well, for the most part it is pretty amazing. I finally received mine the other day after ordering it online, and immediately realized I can’t go back to the old wheel and button style. In case you have not read about the Magic Mouse, it is an innovative new design in mice that combines the technology of the iPhone touchscreen and the new multi-touch pads on Apple notebook computers to create a button-less mouse than responds to the movement of your fingers across it’s surface.

Like the old Mighty Mouse, you click the entire mouse unit rather than indivdual buttons, but it is sensitive enough to recognize both left and right clicks as the Mighty Mouse did. Unlike the Mighty design, this mouse has no scrolling  ball sticking up from the mouse’s surface. Instead your finger slides across the touch-sensitive surface to scroll up or down a document or web page. You can also scroll about a large document or web page in a circular motion or to right and left. Momentum of movement also counts, so a slow drag of your finger down the mouse surface moves the page accordingly, while a fast flick sends the page rolling downward and slowing up naturally like spinning the Price is Right prize wheel. Movement is very responsive.

You can also do a two fingered sideways swipe, that will navigate in programs like iPhoto, iTunes and the Finder to browse folders, photos and such in “cover flow” and other modes. It also works to go backwards and forwards to browse web pages in browsers like Safari. Handy but only for a small number of programs.

Design wise it’s as elegant and attractive as most everything Apple comes up with. Not that you need your mouse to be pretty, but it’s a great combination of aesthetics and functionality. It’s got a lower height profile than the old Mighty Mouse. It moves nicely on the surface of the desk and seems to work better on natural surfaces eliminating the need for a mouse pad.

It’s also very customizable, and the mouse’s control panel in “Preferences” is very well done with nice little video demos on the right showing the feature highlighted on the left. Most of the preferences from the old design are here (like switching to a left handed mouse) and new features like “momentum” can be turned off. It looks like there is plenty of room for future features as well.

It was a welcome change from the Mighty Mouse, which was a really poor design. Being impossible to open up to clean, it was difficult to keep the scroll ball from becoming virtually unusable. The Lovely Anna hated that mouse as it would quickly become dirty and the scrolling useless, and she loves the new design for eliminating that problem. Please do not write me or comment on how to turn the stupid thing upside down and rub it vigorously on a piece of white paper or similar instructions on cleaning it. We did all that over and over and at best it helped for a little while, but eventually it could not be cleaned up to work like it should and needed replacement. I even found a tutorial on the web on how to open and clean it which involve breaking iti open and re-gluing it, and ruined one mouse in the attempt.

Which brings me to the one complaint I have with the Magic Mouse, and really on ongoing issue I have with Apple in general. The complaint with the new mouse is the lack of side buttons to activate Expose or a way to bring up the dashboard like the old mouse so conveniently had. Yes, there are simple keyboard shortcuts for these but I miss the mouse features. So why did Apple leave them out? For the same reason they designed the old mouse to be sealed and unable to clean thoroughly… they think their customers are morons. Really, they must. They don’t trust them to be able to do the simplest of tasks, like open up a mouse, remove the tracking ball, clean the wheels and reassemble the unit. The guts of a Mac and the nuts and bolts of the software are hidden and inaccessible to the average consumer as well. They keep designing their hardware to be more and more simple, seemingly because they don’t think their customers are smart enough to handle things like extra buttons on the mouse. I’m all for clean design, but give me a little credit in that I won’t fall apart and be hopelessly confused because there are a few extra buttons on my new mouse. I keep squeezing the sides of the Magic Mouse expecting the Expose feature to activate and then grumble as I reach for my keyboard. oh, well.

So, does the new Magic Mouse make working on the computer easier? No, but I don’t have to get angry because my mouse won’t scroll to one side or the other anymore. $70 is pretty steep for a mouse but it works very well, despite the dumbing down of the features.

It was a great and inspiring time as always. Here is a caricature of me by the brilliant Hermann Mejia done as we sat about a table in the main room:

More later.

You would think that an innocent, unsuspecting lobster would be safe in a place like Sandusky, OH… but that is far from the case. Especially if they are unlucky enough to be kidnapped by a vending machine company!!!

Hermann Mejia, me, Mark Fredrickson and Sam Viviano

For the past two days I’ve been having fun at the annual International Society of Caricature Artists‘s convention, held this year in Sandusky, Ohio at the Kalahari Waterpark Resort.

Every year this convention is something special, but this year they had four guests of honor/speakers, all from MAD Magazine. They included MAD art director and longtime MAD artist Sam Viviano, MAD cover artist Mark Fredrickson, MAD illustrator Hermann Mejia and myself. I was greatly looking forward to not only seeing my good friend Sam and many other friends for the ISCA, but as I had never met Mark or Hermann before this would be a great treat.

Mark and I led off the speaking presentations on Tuesday the 4th. I started and gave a rousing presentation for which nearly everyone in the audience stayed awake.

Hey, you in the second row… WAKE UP!

Mark’s talk was next and he had a gigantic number of slides ranging from his early work through his heyday as THE airbrush illustrator to his current success in fully digital illustration.

The enthralled crowd

I have been a huge fan of his since the 80′s when I was doing a lot of airbrush work, and recognized many of the pieces he showed from those days. It was fascinating to hear his outlook on illustration and the airbrush. I had heard from other sources that he had gladly given up the airbrush when digital painting tools had reached a point that allowed him to do his work on the computer, but it was still surprising to hear how much he disliked the mess and process of physically airbrushing a piece. He said he was contemplating quitting the business before the computer came along and he was able to toss out his airbrush for good. His later digital work is as impressive if not more than the actual paintings from a while ago were, so he made the transition successfully.

On Wednesday Hermann and Sam did their presentations.

Hermann Mejia

Hermann’s name has long been bandied about as a guest speaker for these conventions because his work is on a whole different level of awe-inspiring greatness than mere mortals. He really is a rare talent, and his presentation was stunning. He shared lots of his paintings, both digital and traditional, as well as his fantastic sculptures.

Great stuff!!

His sculptures were just as amazing…

I was surprised at how he combines digital and traditional mediums so seamlessly. He showed some originals that demonstrated how we would paint figures and elements separately and then scan and combine them to make his amazing parody splash pages.

He concluded his presentation with a video of him doing a drawing/painting of Willem Dafoe which was amazing.

This video will hopefully be on YouTube soon…

Sam’s presentation was a nice combination of a history of MAD and the story of his own career. He knows a lot about MAD and it’s long history, and put together a great show about MAD’s origins and how his work and career paralleled and eventually collided with the magazine.

Sam Viviano

Some Sam MAD work…

Some other great work of Sam’s

Sam’s very humble in that he doesn’t give himself enough credit for the visual impact he’s had on the magazine in the last decade. It was great to see his work, both the MAD stuff everyone is familiar with and his other work.

We wrapped up the evening with a panel Q&A with all of us. Sam answered 95% of the questions and we other three played cards.

Panel of Idiots

The rest of the time we spend meeting and chatting with attending artists, drawing and getting drawn. I was a little shocked to find Sam, Mark and Hermann suddenly get inspired to sit down and do some drawings on Tuesday night, but it was great fun.

We also signed the original art that was done by artist Glenn Fergusen for the cover of the ISCA’s Exaggerated Features magazine… a great piece.

With Glenn and his signed art

These conventions are always a blast. If you do caricatures for a living or as a part of the illustration/cartoon work you do you owe it to yourself to attend one of these someday.

This week’s sketch(es) are coming live from the International Society of Caricature Artists‘s annual convention. As I mentioned before, I am one of four guest speakers from MAD Magazine at the event being held this week in Sandusky, OH, the others being Sam Viviano, Mark Fredrickson and Hermann Mejia.

Often times the guest speakers catch “the bug” (and I’m not talking about H1N1) when at the convention and start drawing like the 220 plus other artists do all day and all night. So last night we found ourselves drawing each other in the main competition hall:

At the table clockwise from left: Sam Viviano, Mark Fredrickson, Hermann Mejia, Bob East, me.

Here are the sketches I did of my fellow MAD men:

MAD art director and longtime MAD artist Sam Viviano

MAD cover artist Mark Fredrickson

Incredible MAD artist Hermann Mejia

I’ll post some of the drawings they did of me when I steal them away for a scan.

I’m speaking today at 1:00 pm at the International Society of Caricature Artists‘ annual convntion and competition, held this year in beautiful downtown Sandusky, Ohio. I’ll be followed by former airbrush legend and current digital painting master Mark Frederickson. Tomorrow’s speakers are MAD art director and long-time MAD artist Sam Viviano and wünderkind Hermann Mejia. Tomorrow evening there will be a panel of all of us answering questions as well.

I’m greatly looking forward to this, in part because I have never had occasion to meet either Mark or Hermann. Funny we’ve been mainstays in MAD for over a decade each and yet never had occasion to meet. Funny world.

Look for a full report on Thursday.