This week’s sketch is a quick study of the Jonas Brothers.

…is rearin’ his ugly head once again.

I’ve got a ton of stuff still on the board after finishing up four different assignments last week and getting a start on two other big projects:

• Big MAD job- These big ones have been few and far between lately, but I’m now working on a meaty 6 pager that is a combination classic movie parody and political piece. This one is slated for #505 due out in August.
• MAD Animated Show art- More super-secret artwork for the upcoming MAD animated show on the Cartoon Network. This will be ongoing for the next 5 months or so.
• Animated character design- This for a UK based company.
• Illustrations for a famous comedian- Have to keep this under wraps for a while… hope to get to share it soon.

Last week I wrapped up an emergency spot for MAD for a side project, all the pencils for that big MAD parody, a second version of the movie poster I was working on (more on that perhaps later in the week) a full page illustration for Penthouse, some pencils for the WB animated show and roughs for two other projects plus my usual workplace poster illustration job. Whew. It’s great to be busy but I need a vacation…

Here’s that latest workplace poster job, all the other stuff will need to wait until publication for me to show it here:

Q: I was reading through your blog and came across a post about doing magazine illustration where you mentioned something called a “kill fee”. What is that, and have you ever had to deal with it?

A: A “Kill Fee” or “Reject Fee” is a clause in an illustration agreement between a publication and an illustrator that specifies a set amount of pay if the final illustration is rejected (i.e. “killed”). The kill fee clause used to be a standard part of any independent contractor agreement, but I see it less and less these days. Most old school publications still have the kill fee in their agreements, but some newer clients do not. Usually the kill fee is 25% of the agreed upon full fee of the project.

It doesn’t sound like a very good thing for an illustrator to agree to. Basically it gives the client the power to reject the final illustration and not to use it, and then only pay the artist a fraction of their invoice. It does seems like a pretty open ended death trap, especially since there are no criteria for reasons why a client might reject the work other than they decide they don’t want to use it. As an artist it’s hard to swallow the idea that you might spend a lot of your time doing a piece of art with the risk of getting paid only 25% of what you expected to get. The clause does make sense when you remember that what you are really selling to the client is not your time but the copyrights to use your illustration. If they decide not to use it, then they didn’t do what they were paying for the rights to do. It’s confusing but as I have said many times before you have to separate the physical time and skills it takes to produce your work with the commercial applications of that work. It’s quite possible the work still has commercial value if the image is not too specific and the rights could be sold to another party… in the real world that doesn’t happen to often as usually the illustration you do is tailored too closely with the specific job but the copyrights are still yours to sell to someone else. Of course you can do that anyway depending on the agreement’s other terms, but the idea is that the copyrights are not tied to your time in producing the work and neither is your payment for the copyrights.

The kill fee also puts the onus on the illustrator to deliver good work, which as a professional yourshould be working hard to do no matter what… but not everybody does. You also need to deliver something the client is expecting to get, and not something completely different. Likely Grant’s question is referring to a post I wrote about how an artist friend of mine ended up getting the kill fee for a job he did where he didn’t deliver what the client was expecting:

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 theme 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.

That’s an example of how the art directors got surprised by a different final illustration than they were expecting. Likely they saw pencil sketches and expected the rough caricature they approved to be rendered in the crosshatched style they liked. In this case the exercising of the kill fee it was mostly the illustrator’s fault. I can’t blame the client for wanting to protect themselves from being required to publish or pay for something they have essentially little control over the end result of, especially when they work with a new illustrator they are unfamiliar with. It’s my job to deliver them something they want to use so the kill fee never becomes an issue. Proper communication and hard work usually takes the kill fee clause out of the equation.

I have only once ever gotten paid a kill fee, and I partly blame myself for the problem. It was a cover illustration for the Minnesota Twins magazine in the early 1990′s, which I had done some caricature and humorous work for. The art directors of the magazine called me and asked if I could do a realistic portrait of baseball player Kirby Pucket for the cover. I had never showed them my realistic work as I hadn’t really done any since my college days a few years previous, but being a young kid and full of self confidence I said “sure I can!”. The pencil drawing turned out fine and they loved it, but IMO the airbrush rendering could have been better. They seemed to be fine with the final result but I was told later that the Minnesota Twins brass, who got final approval of the magazine before it went to press, didn’t want to use a portrait and went with a photo instead. Personally I think had the airbrush painting been more impressive they would have went with it, but instead I got the kill fee. I think I gave the original painting to one of my nephews, but regardless I don’t have it anymore.

So, there you have it… the “Kill Fee” explained. Hoo-hah.

Thanks to Grant Jonen 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!

People often ask me how I find the time to work out and body build amid all the freelance work I take on.

Well, here’s my secret…

Yesterday a new website called The Cartoonist Studio quietly launched into cyberspace. Created by cartoonist Peter Guren and Anthony Leonardi, the website is a virtual visit to the studios of many of your favorite cartoonists and a centralized place to interact with them. In their own words:

We created The Cartoonist Studio as a way to bring us closer to the fans who enjoy our funny little drawings–those characters and scribbles that make our cartoons come to life. They live, breathe and occupy a place in our lives…kinda like our children or our pets or our alter egos (except the last one doesn’t need feeding or bathing). Our fans know our cartoons and now we want them to know us. In other words, The Cartoonist Studio provides one-stop shopping to get personally involved with all your favorite cartoonists and cartoons.

We want to connect with you and get feedback from you. Share your thoughts about our characters, our story lines and our humor. After all, you are the ones who make our world possible…and now we have a place to welcome you to!

The site launched with the eight founding members of The Cartoonist Studio: Tom Batiuk (Funky Winkerbean), Dave Coverly (Speed Bump), Greg Evans (Luanne), The afore mentioned Peter Guren (Ask Shagg), Jeff Keane (The Family Circus), Rick Kirkman (Baby Blues), Mike Luckovich (editorial cartoonist) and Jerry Scott (Baby Blues, Zits). Their virtural studios are all functional and other features like The Cartoon Store (merchandise from the various cartoonist’s work), Greeting Cards (created by the participating cartoonists), the Cartoon Auction (originals and other goodies auctioned by the cartoonists) and the “Cartoon Contest” (where you can enter a cartoon and vote on your favorite) are all “Coming Soon”.

One cool thing that is operational is the “Amateur Cartoonists Cubicle” where anyone can register and create their own cartoon page to showcase their work.

I’ve already signed on and my virtual studio will be added to the site sometime in the next few weeks. I will let everybody know when my page is up and running.

App developer Comixology just released the DC Comics app for the iPhone and the iPad, bringing DC comic’s titles to these mobile devices directly from the publisher. Like Comixology’s Marvel Comics app, the DC Comics app is free and does include a few free comics like the Batman: Black and White series and some preview books. Full issues are $1.99. They look fantastic on the iPad.

So, can this be far behind?:

One can hope…

Uhhhh… let’s jut say I wasn’t in the mood for a challenge this week. Lady Gaga practically draws herself.

I get asked that question a lot because there is a perception that I am a fully digital artist because I deliver most of my work digitally. People are sometimes surprised to hear I still draw and ink on bristol board with a dip pen and brush just like cartoonists have been doing it since the dawn of time, and then scan my work in and color it via the computer and a tablet. It seems odd to some that I bother with the traditional media at all, when I could just do it all on the computer and save time, hassles and ink stains on my studio carpet.

There really is no mystery as to why I still haul out the pen nibs and the inks… the bottom line is I just like working that way, and I like the results I get better than the occasional times I have tried to work straight on the computer.

Why do I like it better? I guess I was probably born about 5-10 years too early to be a truly digital age cartoonist. I’m sort of a half-way mutant. When I started doing freelance illustration in the mid to late 1980′s, computers were still in their infancy when it came to graphics and illustration. I remember having a “Keylining and Paste-Up” class at my art college where we learned to layout text and screened images printed via photostats using waxed back stats or rubber cement, and terms like “leading” and “kerning” had not been replaced by icons and drop menu numbers. I used an airbrush as well as other media for my early illustration work, and of course had always worked on paper or board.

In 1990 I started doing comic books, and while I didn’t do much inking on those titles (David Mowry and the legendary Marie Severin inked my penciled pages) I penciled about 600 plus comic book pages over the next 5 years which went a long way to getting me ingrained in the pencil/bristol dynamic. Besides, at that time the Wacom tablet was still a pipe dream (there were some tablets but they were clunky at best) and drawing on the computer meant using a mouse… and that was impossible.

To be honest, I can’t really recall when I made the transition from natural media color to digital color work. I do remember doing a series of kids comic books for an educational company on topics like “Don’t Smoke”, “Don’t do Drugs” etc., and this client insisted I do them as vector based files. This was maybe 1992 or ’93. At the time the PC I had was way behind the Mac in terms of the version of Adobe Illustrator, so I went out and bought a PowerMac specifically for this series of projects. I scanned in my inked drawings and then used a program called “Streamline” to convert them to vector shapes. This worked okay to an extent, and I was able to click and fill with flat color and add some gradation effects, but it was a far cry from really coloring my cartooning on the computer.

At some point in the mid 90′s I bought a Wacom tablet, an ArtZ II if memory serves, and using PhotoShop started scanning in my work and doing grayscale and color digitally. I don’t recall my first digital illustration but I know when I was doing work for Cracked I was doing both grayscale and color for those parodies. By the time I made my move to MAD I was delivering 95% of my work digitally… but I was still doing the drawing and inking with natural media and I still do that today. I never took a class in digital art or in the use of PhotoShop or any other computer program… whatever I do I learned through experiment, trial and error (and error, and error, and…)

Maybe it’s hard to teach old dogs new tricks, but I love the feel of the paper beneath my hand. I like the drag and friction of the pencil tip and pen point along the surface of the board. I like the imperfections and charm of the interaction between the fibers of the paper and the pencil and ink. Mostly, I don’t like the computer getting in the way between me and what I am drawing… when I draw on the computer I feel like I am looking through a window and it is separating me from the work. Coloring is different… that can almost be mechanical when you are talking about coloring line art. It’s the drawing that I need to feel I am a physical part of. The surface of the tablet/Cintiq is too slick and glassy… even using the replacement felt tip I don’t feel like I’m working the surface properly. Using the Cintiq helps a lot with drawing, but the tactile feel still just doesn’t work for me.

I do envy a little the artists who can and do work directly on the computer from a commercial standpoint. That must be a lot faster and more efficient than slogging through drawing and erasing and inking and scanning. I also think the results they get can be fantastic and very bit as good as someone who does it the old fashioned way… I am by no means bad mouthing doing everything digitally. Speaking strictly for me, I just don’t like doing it that way and don’t like how my work turns out when I attempt digital drawing and inking.

There is also one benefit to working traditionally that working digitally does not give you… I end up with a piece of original art instead of a bunch of 1′s and 0′s on a magnetic metal disk somewhere. There may come a day soon where there is no more original art from commercial illustration… original comic book pages and cartoons will become a thing of the past. That will be a sad day. There is something to be said for holding a piece of original art in your hand, knowing it started out as a blank sheet and an artist spent their time and creative talents turning it into something wonderful… that they physically interacted with the surface of the paper and left their art, and a little bit of themselves, behind on it. I like sitting back and looking at the physical evidence of the hard work I put into a job rather than saving the file and turning off the computer.

Call me old fashioned, but that’s just the way I like to work.

Hard to believe but we are only one month away from the start of San Diego Comic Con. I managed to attend for the first time in a few years last year, and it looks like I’ll make it again this year. I still haven’t figured out how to get a booth space or Artist’s Alley table of my own… at least not before I’m living in a “retirement community” somewhere… so you can find me at the National Cartoonists Society booth a few times during the show as well as a signing at the DC Comics booth. If and when specific times are available I’ll post them here.

Also, and this is still somewhat tentative, it looks like there will be a panel discussion about MAD Magazine and the upcoming MAD animated show on the Cartoon Network on Saturday morning. Again, it is tentatively scheduled for 10:00 and some of the possible participants include MAD Magazine editor John Ficarra, MAD Art Director Sam Viviano, legendary MAD artist Sergio Aragones, myself, MAD Story Editor/Producer Kevin Shinick and as host, MAD Creative Exec Peter Girardi.

When the definitive time and panel participants are announced I’ll post that here as well. Hope to see you in San Diego!