Some weeks ago I blogged about a relief effort being organized by the National Cartoonists Society Foundation, the charitable arm of the National Cartoonists Society, on behalf of the Hodge family. Disney story artist and Big Idea productions director Tim Hodge‘s son Matthew was seriously injured when his car was struck by a train last August and remains in a coma. Tim being self-employed, the Hodge family has short term medical insurance that will not fully cover all of their bills, and Tim’s available time to work is limited by the care Matthew needs. This effort, Help the Hodges, is headed up by current NCSF board member Chad Frye, is aimed at providing some financial assistance to the Hodges in this difficult time.

A lot of artists have stepped up and sent in some great cartoon artwork, which is being auctioned off on eBay. I’m embarrassed to say I am not one of them, primarily because most of the original artwork I have that is worth anything at all is in limbo waiting to be returned to me from the show that ran early last fall at the Toonseum in Pittsburgh. I kept waiting to get that art back so I could send in something from MAD that might actually get them a couple of bucks… but I am still waiting for that art to be returned so I am sorry to have missed out.

Anyway, there is plenty of great stuff left, but this latest bunch of auctions is likely the last. So, drop on in and check out what’s still available.

My pal Eddie Pittman, cartoonist extraordinaire and the creator behind the new serial web comic (graphic webel?) Red’s Planet is doing his own little promotion for Help the Hodges. Eddie had a limited run of the preview of Red’s Planet printed up for friends, colleagues, etc. They were never meant for sale or to be available to the general public. However Eddie is offering his fans to get their hands on a copy with a donation to Help the Hodges. There are multiple levels of donations and corresponding goodies from Eddie, including some original sketches. Check out the details here.

Bobble Rep, the iPhone app for which I did 543 (yes, the number keeps going up as members of congress get replaced) caricatures for, keeps getting a lot of praise and attention. Developer Ray Griggs called me the other day to say the app was listed as the number one recommended “Educational” app by the just released book Incredible iPhone Apps for Dummies by Bob “Dr. Mac” LeVitus.

Upon getting a copy of the book, I did indeed read a very positive review of the app on page 30, listed first under “Education”. The author mentioned the internet firestorm set off by the apps initital rejection by Apple, and it’s subsequent approval. I was surprised to see I even rated a mention in the review!

From Incredible iPhone Apps for Dummies:

Tom Richmond created all the artwork for this app. If the images in Bobble Rep look familiar, you might recognize Tom’s work as a contributor to MAD Magazine or from the movie “Super Capers”. I just love the art in this app, and it seems to resonate with just about everyone who checks it out.

My kids were pretty impressed that their dad got mentioned in a … For Dummies book. I thought it was pretty cool as well. Of course Ray and his programmers, including Stevo Brock, really deserve all the credit. It was Ray’s idea and he conceptualized the whole thing, while Stevo did the programming with the database backbone. After reading the entire book I found a whole bunch of great and useful apps I didn’t know about and am now using, as did The Lovely Anna. The reviews in the book are thorough, the choices are good and there are plenty of tips on the use of the apps listed.

BTW, as long as we are talking about Bobble Rep, here are the three newest additions to the 111th U.S. Congress since the app’s release in November:

California’s John Garamendi and New York’s Bill Owens just got included in the app with the most recent update. Massachusetts’ Scott Brown will be in the next update, coming soon.

Better late than never for the “Sketch o’the Week”. After all that writing about the unedited Robert E. Howard Conan stories now available I couldn’t resist doing a sketch of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1981 role that launched him to action hero superstardom. I remember seeing that movie in the theater as a kid (don’t recall how I got into an “R” movie at age 14… I suspect I might have used less than honest means). The film is a weird amalgamation of elements from many different Howard stories, and was cheesy fun.

I just noticed I forgot to put the gum on the bottom of his shoe… I must be losing it.

It occurred to me as I was about to start this post with “I am a big fan of Robert E. Howard‘s Conan the Barbarian stories and…” that I start a lot of posts that way. This seems especially true when it has to do with authors of book series: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, J.R.R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, J.K. Rowling, Stephen King… maybe I am a sucker for epic tales and the continuing adventures of recurring characters. However, when I say I’m a “big fan of” something, I always mean it.

I read the Conan books way back in junior high, and enjoyed then thoroughly. They were fun to read, made up of short stories that were easy to consume in a reasonable amount of time, and there was something about the character of Conan that was magnetic. Sure, some of the stories were much better than others and a few of them seemed oddly out of place, but through them all the Conan character acted as the glue that held the whole together. He was elemental, living by a crude code of honor and carving an empire with his heavy broadsword. Fun stuff. I still take them out and read them every once and awhile. I’ve got some dog-eared copies of the Ace paperbacks with the Frazetta or Boris covers.

It wasn’t until later that I learned the Conan stories I was reading were not all Howard’s work. In fact, most of the stories were heavily edited, some were Howard stories that he wrote for other characters but were rewritten by others as Conan tales, some were stories written by others based on scattered notes found in Howard’s papers after his death and some were pastiches written entirely by someone else. The “someone else” were two gentleman named L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. They were two American science fiction and fantasy authors who’s original work, such as they had, never attained a great deal of popularity nor was much known outside the circles of enthusiasts. They corresponded with Howard about his stories, particularly Conan, and helped put together a chronology of the character as Howard’s short stories were not written nor published in any chronological sequence. After Howard’s death (he committed suicide in 1936) they collected his works and with much editing, rewriting and pastiche writing, published them as the 12 volume Conan books most readers today are familiar with.

Now, I have a soft spot in my heart for those books, and I do not fault de Camp or Carter for their efforts. However even as a kid I could tell some of those stories were awful compared to others, and some seemed like stories belonging to other eras like the American old west that were weirdly out of place. That all made sense when I read some of the series’ prologues and discovered the de Camp/Carter intrusions. For decades, outside of finding and buying expensive back issues of very old pulp magazines, the original and unedited Howard tales were unavailable to the general public.

I am happy to say that is no longer the case. Del-Ray has finally published (well, they’ve been in print for 7 years but I just discovered them) a three volume set of the original and unedited Howard Conan tales: The Coming of Conan the Barbarian, The Bloody Crown of Conan and The Conquering Sword of Conan. Actually these stories are not even the edited versions that originally appeared in the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the Depression Era, but the unaltered Howard originals as he would have published them himself (you can get the stories edited as originally published in Weird Tales in the single volume The Complete Chronicles of Conan). Comparing the raw and untampered Howard originals with the homogenized de Camp/Carter versions is like comparing a Corvette to a go-cart. Howard’s stories are supercharged with energy and life, ferocious in their storytelling and the de Camp/Carter ones are…. not.

So, here’s a chance for all you Conan fans out there to read the Cimmerian’s adventures as Howard really envisioned them, in the order in which they were written and published. If you haven’t read any Conan stories, or are only familiar with the 12 volume series (and perhaps weren’t that impressed by them), give these a try. Fantasy has rarely been a better read.

Every once and awhile I will pull out some artwork from an old job that might have been interesting to share what it was about. Yesterday I cleaned out a storage room in our house and ran across a pile of old art that I had done for a series of CD-ROM games back in the late 1990′s.

I’ve said many times you never know where your work might end up being used, and sometimes the most unlikely of projects will come your way when you freelance. If someone had said to me that I’d be “illustrating” a series of CD-ROM games I would have scoffed… after all even in the 90′s games like Myst and The 7th Guest were the standard for graphics… lavish and realistic images were the rage, not goofy cartoon stuff.

However there was a subset of games, mostly aimed at children, that used cartooning as their basis. Some of them were quite clever and funny, like SpyFox and Pajama Sam from Humongous Entertainment.CD-ROM games were very popular, and I found myself doing some art for a few odd ones for a company called Parroty Interactive and one for Hasbro.

Parroty Interactive “Games”

I use the term “games” loosely as these really weren’t games. I’m not sure what they were. The best description might be that they were a parody of both a CD-ROM game and some other subject… like if some company wanted to make an interactive CD-ROM based on some TV show, movie or some such, this might be what they came up with, only with a MAD Magazine flavor. Parroty had a pretty successful hit with “PYST“, their parody of the afore mentioned “MYST” game, so they started producing other “humor” CD-ROMs.

My art responsibilities varied from doing hundreds of images for one project to just a few dozen as some smaller aspect of another. Here are the three Parroty Interactive CDs I worked on:

Star Warped

Cover art by Sam Sisco!

This was the project I did the most work for. A lot of it was just in black and white, as they had some color artists that were doing the colors and formatting the images for the game. The “game” was set in the bedroom of two brothers who were Star Wars nuts in Modesto, California. Their room was the game environment, and each POV had click-able elements that would take you to various mini-games like “Whack the Ewok” or the “Yoda Fortune Teller”, or other interactive things. I designed the bedroom environment:

This was an actual physical painting, not digital.

There were several other points of view of the room, and some side rooms as well. They included close ups of things like fake foreign Star Wars posters, spoof toys, etc.

Some of the “games” included the gene-splicing machine, where you could splice the genes of a Star wars character and some celebrity to end up with…

The X-Fools

This was a parody of the X Files that had two FBI agents chasing down aliens. I did a number of different images for this that were part of sections like dossiers on some of the show’s villains and files on fake television shows that would be aired if aliens controlled TV (example” NYPD Grey, “E.T.E.R.” or “Spacefeld”):

This was from one of the villain dossiers

Mully and Sculder

Winblows 98

This was a rip on Windows. I did a number of images for another selection of parody TV shows that we’d see when Bill Gates took over TV like “Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood”, “Touched by Bill” or “Lifestyles of the Filthy Rich and Famous”. When doing a Google search on the game’s name I was shocked to find someone had uploaded some of the spoof shows from the game on to YouTube (!!):

Hasbro’s “Super Scattergories”

This game was the CD version of the popular board game. I did 40 different images that were used as a visual word finder, where you had to identify all the objects in the image that started with a certain letter:

This was all done very early on in my use of the computer for illustration, and I had obviously not developed my techniques for coloring that I am using today. However the images were also supposed to be as simple as possible so the more rudimentary techniques actually worked. Of course none of these games are available anymore, and I doubt they would work with today’s computers anyway.

Uh oh! Looks like the mailbag is empty!

When I get some fresh questions concerning cartooning, illustration, freelancing, MAD Magazine or other similar subjects I’ll be happy to answer them as best I can. E-mail me your questions and I’ll try and answer them here!

This YouTube video is from an episode of the 90′s TV series “Horror Hall Of Fame” and features the story of EC Comics and their marvelous line of horror comics from the 1950′s. Bill Gaines is interviewed for the piece, which was filmed only a year or so before his death.

I’m afraid the video quality is not good, but it’s passable. It’s fun to hear about the classic E.C. Artists like “Ghastly” Graham Ingels, Johnny Craig, Joe Orlando and of course Jack Davis. Al Feldstein is also interviewed as well as a few others with E.C. connections.

Actually the most frightening thing in the video is the straight laced woman in the beginning doing the public service message about how most comics “are killers. They kill time. They kill imagination, and the kill the urge to read books.” I wonder how many fewer creative geniuses we’d have had making some of the most brilliant storytelling art imaginable if idiots like Frederick Wertham had gotten their way…

A top o’the hat to Mark Evanier for the find.

Plenty on the board right now-

• MAD job- TV show parody, due… oh crap! Tomorrow!! By the way, this parody represents the first “continuity” (meaning movie or TV show parody) I’ve done since I did “Watchmen” about this time last year. That sucks.
• Workplace Poster- My usual monthly assignment
• Animated film segment storyboards- After designing the animated characters for RG Entertainment’s new movie, I am now storyboarding the animated four scenes from the otherwise live action film. One scene down and three to go.
• Movie Poster- This got put on hold while I do the storyboards.

Here is the pencil sketch and final art for last month’s workplace poster. Not one of the more inspired themes…

Rough pencil sketch

Final Art

I am seriously under the gun with a deadline, so no time for a new sketch this week. In honor of the season premiere of LOST here’s a old sketch of one of the show’s stars, Michael Emerson. aka Benjamin Linus aka “that bug-eyed bastard”.