Q: This question is concerning line weight with multi-panel illustrations. It’s probably an illustration 101 concern, and I know you touch on it a bit in your inking tutorial, but maybe you wouldn’t mind fielding it for me anyways. Do you illustrate the entire composition on one page or do you pencil and ink the panels separately and then put them together after (example: Two and a Half Wits for MAD)? How important is it to maintain the same average line thickness, with regard to depth, in each panel?

A: I always rough out, draw and ink the entire page of a comic book style page illustration (like I do for MAD) all on one board. Always. I never do separate panels and piece them together.

While your question specifically addresses line weight in inking with respect to doing panels together or separate, that is really a minor point when it comes to the reason why I do this. I’ll address your ink weight concern last, but I’ll get to it.

Doing comic work is like a juggling act. You have to draw individual panels and make them do all the things they need to do, like illustrating a scene, the action within, demonstrating character interaction, providing an image that reinforces the dialogue spoken all the while doing (hopefully) good drawing. At the same time, you have to make each panel work with the ones about it and within the framework of the page they reside on, as well as the page on the opposite side of the gutter. You need to balance the pages and cause the eye to move across them along with the story so there is not only no confusion as to how and where the story continues from panel to panel, but so that your viewer’s eye natural moves to the next panel without having to think about it. This is a major part of good storytelling and layout.

You absolutely cannot accomplish that treating each panel like it is a separate illustration with no regard for how it interacts with the rest of the page.

The first thing I do when I approach a comic-style job is to set up a layout of two pages side by side, as they will appear in print. This is easy for my MAD work, because MAD provides me with that layout and there will never be any ads that interrupt an article. I’ll demonstrate with two pages of story from a MAD job. We’ll use 2005′s “Two and a Half Wits” since you mentioned it in your question:

Click for a closer look…

Here I did some very loose roughs directly on the layout paper to “plan out” the story. The darker word balloon “tails” were drawn in for some reason on the black layout by someone from MAD… not sure why as I would likely have to move them depending on my art. I ignore those. I design and draw out the panels treating the entire two page spread as a single entity. I use the positions and directions of the figures, their actions, the angle of the scene, the depth of the “camera” and whatever other devices I can think up to make the panels interesting on their own but also work together as an interesting and balanced whole. You just can’t accomplish this by doing one panel at a time independent of the rest. When you end up piecing it together, you’ll have a disjointed, unbalanced looked collage.

Here’s the final inked spread for those two pages:

Click for a closer look…

This example is hardly a towering paradigm of storytelling genius. It’s in fact rather pedestrian, but it illustrates the point.

Getting back to your specifics about line weight and doing the panels individually rather than together- it’s rather the same concept. You want to vary line weights to create depth and interest to the art in each panel, but you still want to keep a coherent feel to the entire page. When I ink, I ink all the panels at the same time. I move about the page and do not ink one panel and move to the next. I’ll work on boldest lines and foreground figures first, then move on to more delicate lines and background objects, then on to more details, etc. The weight of the line gets consideration both for what it’s trying to accomplish in a given panel AND for it’s place in the page as a whole. If I did each panel separate and pieced them in, I would probably end up with a similarly disjointed feel I was trying to avoid by drawing the panels all together. This would be especially true if I did the panels not only individual but at random size scales. To do on panel at 150% of print size and another at 200% would affect the preception of the lines from the pen itself… better to do everything together so you have the greatest amount of control over the final product.

Thanks to Curtis Horsburgh 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!

The eternal fanboy question. Turns out (at least for now) in the context of capitalism Batman owns Superman.

Just days after the record shattering sale of Action Comics #1 for $1,000,000.00, a private collector has purchased a copy of Detective Comics #27, featuring the first appearance of “The Bat-Man”, for $1,075,500 at a Dallas auction through Heritage Auction Galleries.

According to the story, the seller originally bought the copy in the 1960′s for $100. Holy Compound Interest, Batman! Assuming he bought it in 1969, that’s about a 25.4% annal return on that investment over 41 years. Thomas Wayne would have been proud!

Cameo of Monroe I did in “Stuporman Returns“

“Monroe” was one of those things in MAD you either loved or hated. Those who loved it really were over the top for it… I was one of those. I loved the strip, it’s dark humor and the incredible artwork by Bill Wray. Maybe it wasn’t for everybody, but it did reach out to a newer, less traditional audience and MAD needed that.

Bill has long ago moved on and is concentrating these days on his fine art work, but he still maintains a blog about his cartooning and had posted this look at the very first Monroe strip’s preliminary pencils and the revised final art. A very interesting look into the start and evolution of the feature.

“Monroe” is still occasionally in MAD, but now drawn by Tom Fowler and in color. Tom’s work is also amazing, but it’s a different kind of amazing from Bill’s. I’m certainly not going to say “Monroe” is not as good nor is it better than it was with Bill doing the art… it is simply a different strip with a different feel today.

Way back in 1954 MAD lead off issue number 12 with a soon-to-be-classic parody of the comic book “Archie”, written by the late, inimitable Harvey Kurtzman and drawn by the late, incomparable Will Elder.

Kurtzman, as is well known, had some disagreements with MAD publisher Bill Gaines over pretty much everything and took his show on the road to the House of Hugh (Hefner, that is… AKA Playboy) to produce the short lived humor magazine Trump! which lasted only two wonderful but expensive-to-produce issues, and also included the likes of Will Elder. Harvey and Will stuck together with Humbug (11 issues, 1957-58), and later had one more shot at a humor magazine published by Warren Publishing called HELP!. HELP! lasted 26 issues from 1962 to 1966, and boasted a lot of talented contributors who went on to make or had made their mark in comics, humor and literature like Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, John Cleese, Robert Crumb, Terry Gilliam, Jay Lynch, Gilbert Shelton, Gloria Steinem, Skip Williamson and Gahan Wilson.

One of the most infamous pieces to be published in HELP! was a story called “Goodman Goes Playboy!”, which was another parody of “Archie” by Kurtzman and Elder… sort of a sequel to their 1954 MAD effort and this time decidedly more racy. It featured their recurring character from HELP!, the straitlaced Goodman Beaver, who goes back to visit his old pals in “Riverdale” only to find the gang has changed… a lot.

I’m not sure if the publishers of Archie threatened or filed any lawsuits against MAD when they ran “Starchie” some 10 years earlier, but they were plenty unhappy about the swinging “Playboy Philosophy” being imprinted on their characters this time, and they called down the legal lightning upon HELP!, Kurtzman and Elder.

During Will Elder’s run on the ill-fated Help! Magazine — one of three such publications upon which Elder collaborated with Mad founder Harvey Kurtzman following the latter’s exodus from the magazine that made him famous — a story starring Kurtzman and Elder’s naïve leading man Goodman Beaver attracted the ire of Archie Comics for taking their signature characters and grafting Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Philosophy” onto them. That story was “Goodman Goes Playboy,” and it resulted in waves of lawyers raining upon the strip’s creators, ultimately leading to Kurtzman and Elder handing the copyright to the story over to Archie and signing an agreement promising never to reproduce it again.- The Comics Journal

Interestingly enough it recently was discovered that the folks at Archie neglected to renew that copyright, so “Goodman Goes Playboy” is now in the public domain and was reprinted in The Comics Journal #262 and subsequently on the internet via TCJ’s blog. Here is the classic reproduced, click the pages for a closer look:

Cover art by Bill Janocha

I received a pleasant surprise in my mailbox yesterday… the newest issue of Stay Tooned! Magazine in all it’s hot-off-the-press glory. I also got a lot of pre-approved credit card offers, but they were considerably less thrilling. Still, anything addressed to me (and I count “Current Resident” as being addressed to me) in the mailbox in the middle of a Minnesota winter is something. When your mail is delivered by dogsled even the junk mail is welcome.

Stay Tooned! is far from junk mail, though… that is genuine “glad to see it” mail.

Publisher John Read continues his string of excellence with another great issue, featuring among other things:

• Profiles:
  • Jack and Carol Bender (Alley Oop)
  • Roz Chast (Gag Cartoonist- The New Yorker)
  • Jeff Koterba (Editorial Cartoonist)
  • Joe Bluhm (Caricaturist, animator, illustrator)
  • Justin Thompson (Mythtickle)
  • Mort Walker (duh… Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois)
• “Honey, I wanna Be a Cartoonist” by John Hambrock (The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee)
• “NCS Cartoonists USO Trip to the Middle East” by Bruce Higdon (Punderstatements)
• “Reflections of a Gag Writer” by Don Hagist (duh… Gag Writer)
• Regular contributions from R.C. Harvey, Scott Nickel and yours truly

It was particularly cool to see my buddy, the mega-talented Joe Bluhm, profiled in this issue.

As usual the magazine is a great read from cover to cover. I have been singing the praises of Stay Tooned! since it’s first issue and for good reason. John’s efforts are herculean and the results are really top notch. If you are either in the cartooning field, aspire to it or are just a fan and you do NOT have a subscription to Stay Tooned!, you are doing yourself a major disservice. If you are thinking “Oh, I can just go there and buy a back issue whenever I want” then think again… the entire runs of issues 1 thru 4 are SOLD OUT. Gone, vamoosed, poof. Go immediately to their website and subscribe so you do not miss out on another issue. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200 (although that would be nice).

While Dick De Bartolo is not actually a monkey as depicted above (this was the only caricature I have drawn of him, hence the silly post title) he will no doubt be doing plenty of monkeying around on “Stu’s Show” today on Shokus Internet Radio.

If you are not familiar with Shokus Internet Radio, it’s a… wait for it…. radio station on the internet. Stu Shokus has a live broadcast on Wednesdays, and callers and e-mailers can pose questions to his guests who are “top celebrities from the world of television, both in front of and behind the cameras”. Writer extraordinaire Mark Evanier is a frequent guest

Today’s show will feature Dick De, who is not only a longtime writer for MAD Magazine but a writer for many classic TV game shows including “Match Game” and “To Tell the Truth”. The show will air today live from 4-6 P.M. Pacific Time, and you can call in with your questions and comments for Dick De toll free at (888) SHOKUS-5 or e-mail them at comments@shokusradio.com.

Dick De is an entertaining fellow, so it should be fun to hear. I don’t believe the show is accessible via podcast or “on demand” anywhere, but they do rebroadcast it at the same time during the week… but then of course you can’t call in and ask any questions, now can you?

A special thanks to my friend and fellow caricaturist Jim Batts for the heads up!

Last year I participated in a charity fundraiser called “National Doodle Day“, which auctions off drawings and sketches by a host of artists, authors, actors, directors and celebrities each year in May. The proceeds benefit Neurofibromatosis Inc., a “non-profit organization whose mission is to provide services to individuals with Neurofibromatosis (NB) and their families. NB is an unpredictable disease that cases tumors to form on your nerves, sometimes resulting in disfigurement, paralysis, deafness, blindness or cancer.”- From the Doodle Day website.

I received my packet for my doodle contribution a week or two ago, and took the liberty to do my “sketch o’the week” directly on the official doodle card. Last year I did a caricature of actress Gillian Anderson, who is one of the forces behind the charity event, along with a familiar looking alien:

This year I did the above caricature of LOST star Jorge Garcia, which I hope will sell big considering the auction will take place as the last few episodes of LOST are airing.

This 5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″ sketch will be mailed off to the National Doodle Day folks today and will be available for bidding when the auctions commence sometime in May… I will make an announcement with a link when that happens. In the meantime, you can check out the doodles they’ve gotten so far here, and if you would like to inquire about contributing a doodle for auction, you can contact the organizers at doodleday@nfinc.org.

The nominees for the National Cartoonists Society‘s highest honor, The Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year have been released to members for their vote. The nominees are:

• Stephen Pastis
• Dan Piraro
• Richard Thompson

Stephen Pastis is the creator of the popular comic strip Pearls Before Swine. Dan Piraro is the mastermind behind the syndicated daily panel cartoon Bizarro, and Richard Thompson writes and draws the syndicated strip Cul de Sac. This is Pastis’s second time on this list, Piraro’s eighth and the first for Thompson.

Nominees for the NCS divisional award categories will be announced sometime in March.

A new record for the sale of a comic book was set yesterday when a copy of Action Comics #1 sold for one million dollars.

Today thousands of 80 year old men are cursing their dead mothers for throwing out the copy they owned in 1938… I’m still a little pissed about the Star Wars bubble gum card collection my mom tossed in 1980.

The issue was sold through Metropolis Collectibles and the ComicConnect.com auction site. The seller was a guy who either paid a lot less for this comic when he bought it (the previous record of a sale of a comic book, also Action Comics #1, was for a paltry $317,000) or who’s mom that did NOT throw out his copy of Action Comics #1 in 1938.

The buyer is a guy who has way more money that anybody could ever need and either doesn’t know that Action #1 has been reprinted about a hundred times and the story and art is the same in the reprints as it is in the copy he bought for a million dollars or doesn’t care.

… with a sudden number of quick deadline jobs. One is using real, live paint! I’ll try and do some scans of various steps on that one just for fun… I don’t often get to haul out the brushes and paints these days.

Here is my latest Marlin Co. workplace poster job, I posted the pencil roughs a few days ago:

Click for a closer look…

Here’s the caption/text that will appear under it:

Living a healthy life so that you’ll stay at your peak years from now?

Please keep yourself in gear with a healthy diet and as much exercise as your doctor allows. Every time you engage in vigorous physical activity, it’s like making a deposit into your health bank – and years from now all these deposits may well turn out to have greatly enriched, and lengthened, your life.

Hey, why not feel like you’re on top of the world?

These images make more sense, I think, when I also include the “inspirational message” that the illustration is supposed to reinforce.