Back a few months ago I wrote a post about a brightening future for MAD, citing that I knew about a few endeavors on the horizon that boded well for introducing MAD to a whole new audience, but couldn’t talk about quite yet.

Yesterday’s announcement of a new MAD animated series on the Cartoon Network was one of the things I was referring to. I can’t say more because the details about the production of the show and how it will incorporate MAD features is still confidential.

Regardless the announcement is great news for MAD. I’ll share more as I am allowed. Here is the part of the official press release that concerns the MAD show:

MAD: Produced by Warner Bros. Animation and using the iconic MAD magazine, published by DC Comics, as inspiration, MAD is an animated sketch-comedy series utilizing a chaotic mix of animation styles and twisted humor to pull back the curtain and expose the truth behind movies, TV shows, games, pop culture and, of course, curtains! Classic MAD magazine characters and features such as Alfred E. Neuman and Spy vs. Spy pop up, and no subject matter or individual will be safe from MAD’s barrage of parodies and sketches.  In the end, viewers won’t get even, they’ll just get MAD!  Sam Register (Teen Titans, Ben 10, Batman: The Brave and the Bold) is the executive producer.  Kevin Shinick (Robot Chicken) and Mark Marek (KaBlam! The Andy Milonakis Show) are the producers.

We continue our ink wash caricature sketches of the characters from the TV show “LOST” with the brooding Josh Holloway, who plays James “Sawyer” Ford.

Josh is one of only two actors from the show I have ever met. You can read the entire story of the meeting here, but the short version is that I got him to sign a print of my splash page from the LOST parody in MAD, and he was genuinely thrilled to have been drawn in MAD. He asked how he could get hold of a print like the one I had, and complimented me on the artwork. I also met Maggie Grace who played Shannon at the same time. She was equally enthusiastic about having the show lampooned in MAD.

Lots of stuff going on right now, including a short but fun MAD piece for #504, more animation storyboards, a movie poster, a special project for a colleague and I’m just wrapping up the illustration for the 2010 National Cartoonist Society Reuben Awards T-shirt. Whew.

Here are some goofy images I did recently as part of what will be an animated gag for a TV show promo. Babies, baby… I got a lot of practice doing these at the theme parks:

The blog TV Series Finale happened upon my and Mark Evanier‘s posts of that gorgeous Jack Davis TV Guide spread, and the blog’s senior editor Trevor Kimball did us one better. The scan we linked to wasn’t the best of that image (and according to them was even missing a page!), so he dragged out his collected copy and did a proper scan of the entire illustration. Click on the image above for a much better look at this gem. Thanks Trevor! Also, visit Trevor’s post to see some additional black and white illustrations Jack did in the same issue.

Jack Davis is not only an alum of the University of Georgia, but he’s been drawing the Georgia “Bulldawg” for them for a long, long time. The above video is from the university’s Bulldawg Illustrated, which no doubt has been frequently illustrated by Jack. The video is a gem not just because they talk with Jack, but it shows him banging out a drawing of the Bulldawg at his drawing table overlooking the river. Check out the way he holds his pencil! We are also treated to seeing him ink with a brush and do a quick color wash job on it.

Great thanks to Mark Evanier for the link.

Q: How can one produce a caricature of someone that exaggerates their features without insulting them?  Various sites I’ve seen, including yours, exhibits a lot of great likenesses that don’t look offensive (since they’re not of me) so how can I assure myself the “subject” will have as much fun as all of us?

A: The only 100% correct answer to that question (at least the second part) is “you can’t.” The old adage “you can’t please all of the people all of the time” is definitely in play when it comes to drawing caricatures, especially where live caricature is concerned. I have seen the most innocuous and downright flattering of caricatures be rejected by the subject just moments after the most brutal and exaggerated of drawings was received with great delight by another subject. You cannot control the emotional makeup of the subject you are drawing… they will react how they will react. You can only control your drawing and your intentions with that drawing. It’s what you are trying to accomplish that matters.

I think there is a big difference between the caricaturist that intentionally tries to upset their subjects and the one who is trying to just do an honest caricature. Caricature to me does not need to be derogatory, it just needs to be honest. Honesty means that you give the face what it is demanding it be given, and not go searching for what is not their nor look for flaws that are virtually meaningless with respect to the entire face. Some caricaturists seem to think they more mean spirited and nasty their drawings are the better they are. That’s far from the truth. A good caricature captures the subject and the things about the subject that makes them unique. When the exaggeration (or distortion, as many of the attempts I’ve seen at super-exaggeration end up becoming) overpowers the likeness or the capturing of the personality of the subject, then that caricature is a miss. I’ve blogged about this before, and recently linked to a great blog post by my pal Ed Steckley, a caricaturist who can do those kinds of wild exaggerations without letting them become the focus of the drawing but tempers them the honest eye of an objective artist.

The bottom line is that if you draw people with the intent to create a caricature with a strong likeness and exaggerate to the degree the face “asks for it”, you will find most people respond well. You’ll get a few without a realistic self image who would probably object if you drew a flattering portrait, but those people wouldn’t be happy with anything and were idiots for even sitting down in the first place. If you approach your caricatures looking to exaggerate first and capture likeness and personality second you will find your subject’s reactions less favorable. Your intentions with your drawing are all that are within your control.

Thanks to Andrew Probert 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!

Looks like Jeremy is going to be doing a bunch of these hilarious spoofs of the goofy how-to videos you see all over the internet. Check out his YouTube channel for all the fun.

If you have ever run across some of the incredibly inane videos on YouTube offering “expert” advice on stuff like drawing caricatures, then you will be laughing until the tears are running down your cheeks over the video above.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many useful and good video tutorials and resources on YouTube and about the web, but so many of them are useless and contain no real information whatsoever. Witness these incredibly lame caricature instructional videos I blogged about some time ago from the so-called “Expert Village”. Not only does the lady doing the instruction not tell you a single piece of useful info, but the drawing she is “working” on was lifted from a caricaturist named Kirk Bjorndahl.

The above video was done by caricaturist Jeremy “Jert” Townsend and perfectly lampoons these types of no-info instructional videos. The only flaw to it is the length… most of the useless how-to videos only last 2 to 3 minutes total. Jert worked too hard on it! He should produce an entire series of “SuperExpertUSA” videos, they’d be a YouTube sensation.

NO!!

Yes!!

Earlier this week editorial cartoonist Mark Fiore was honored with a Pulitzer prize for his work, which in an of itself is historic in that Mark’s work does not appear in print… it’s all on the web at SFGate.com, Slate.com, CBSNews.com, Motherjones.com and NPR’s web site.

He’s also making news this week for another reason… one that sounds all too familiar to me. He has submitted an app of his work to Apple for their App Store only to have it rejected for violation of the dreaded “Section 3.3.14″ of 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.

Readers of The MAD Blog will recall a similar letter being sent to the developer of the app “Bobble Rep”, for which I had done over 500 caricatures of every member of the 111th U.S. Congress. That app was also rejected by Apple, who apparently found my caricatures “obscene, pornographic, or defamatory” and cited that it ridiculed public figures. Apple relented after only a few days after a fairly substantial firestorm of internet outrage and stories on major news outlets rattled their cage. In fact I have found the Bobble Rep debacle cited on several stories about Mark’s current difficulties, as well as Daryl Cagle‘s similar frustrations with Apple over his politcal cartoon app (which also eventually got approved).

Mark’s story is striking a bit more serious chord than Apple just being overly Draconian in their app approvals. With the introduction of the iPad, the focus of content for these devices moves out of the convenience of having a few apps in your pocket and into the promised land of a media delivery/consumption device that could revolutionize the way the world get’s its news, entertainment and information. Suddenly Apple’s control freak approach threatens the development of the very technology it is supposed to be innovating by placing restrictions and outright rejections upon the content that would be consumed via their devices. Apps for publications and newspaper content won’t be very useful if it only lets us see stuff that Apple and Steve Jobs thinks we should see, and rejects things they don’t like.

Even so, Apple does have the right to decide what it will or will not allow on it’s App Store and on it’s device. I am certainly not going to argue that point. Apple isn’t the publisher, so arguments that a newspaper gets to decide what it will publish and what it won’t are irrelevant. Apple is the delivery system. Apple is the newsstand/bookstore that makes you pay a fee (buy it’s device) to browse. Apple is the cable TV station that gets to decide what programming if offers even as it charges you to look at it’s listings. Bookstores can sell whatever book they want. TV stations only air shows they want. They don’t have to carry pornography or content it deems inappropriate even if it’s legal where they operate. They don’t have to sell books that they don’t like the subjects of or air TV shows that don’t support the ideology of their ownership.

That said, levying editorial content restrictions against app authors will lead to Apple’s eventual downfall. It’s one thing to limit useless and tasteless apps on an iPhone, but when they are crowing about the iPad being the future of media content consumption with one hand and pushing back the very content providers people want unless they tow the line to their satisfaction and limitation with respect to that content, consumers will quickly move on to other devices that do not tell them what they can or cannot see or consume. The dollars of the consumer will sort this out eventually.

The marketplace and competing iPad-like devices will win out. Apple is crazy if they think they can limit free speech and expression like this and still come out on top. Jobs apparently hasn’t learned his lesson from the 80′s, when Apple’s closed format and heavy handed approach to it’s operating system and hardware versus the open sourced and use-on-any-hardware approach of Bill Gate’s Windows resulted in the overwhelming dominance of Microsoft in the PC market… a dominance that continues to this day. It was big news the other day when Apple’s share of the PC market touched 8%. Other devices that don’t put these kinds of restrictions on it’s content and allow for the use of technologies like Flash, which Apple also stubbornly refuses to allow on its devices, should eventually squash the iPad if Apple doesn’t change it’s tune (or in Mark’s case… “toon”). What’s at stake is not just a couple of pocket apps on your iPhone, but the possible future of media content delivery.

UPDATE: Fortuitous timing on my part. Apparently Apple is asking Mark to resubmit his app likely with the intention of approving it ASAP. Mark commented via an interview:

“I feel kind of guilty,” he said. “I’m getting preferential treatment because I got the Pulitzer.”

Just go with it, Mark! Apple needs to be taken to task each and every time they pull this kind of thing until they understand even though it’s their sandbox if they want the world to pay to play in it they have to allow some kids who aren’t in their Super Secret MacHead Club.

Click for a closer look…

You’ll have to click on the image above to see the amazing goodness of the great Jack Davis at his greatest. It was posted by the mysterious “DD” on the MAD fan message board MadMumblings.com. Speculation is that it is a foldout from a 1965 TV Guide showing the NBC fall lineup of shows, or possibly an ad commissioned directly by NBC for TV Guide or some other publication.

Nobody drew dense crowd scenes like Jack. He would tell you the rich and earthy colors he got with his watercolor was a result of using lake water rather than tap water to paint with… I imagine his original paintings might have smelled a little funky using that bacteria-ladened mixture. You can hardly argue with the results.