Q: I would think drawing caricatures in a theme park would be stressful simply because many times you have people – often friends or family of whoever is being drawn – looking over your shoulder, watching, and telling the person how much it does or doesn’t look like them. What happens when you realize you’ve started off on the wrong foot? Do you just plow through and try to correct it, or have you ever torn off the sheet, crumpled it up, and said, “OK, let’s try this again”?

A: I very seldom ever start over. Likeness in caricature can be achieved in a variety of ways… sometimes all you have to do is get one thing exactly right, like the eyes for example, and it will carry you through other questionable decisions. I sometimes describe a caricature that was going off track but ends up as a pretty decent likeness as a leaping, over the head sideways catch in deep center field with the sun in your eyes. Worst case I can always use my eraser, but I will go whole days without using it.

The rare time that I see I have blown it from the very beginning I will stop and start over. I can usually tell within the first minute or so that this is the case, and will do something creative line pretend to sneeze on the drawing or break my lead in mid stroke, or just say to myself but out loud: “Gotta remember… no warts. NO WARTS.” and then grab a fresh sheet of paper.

As for dealing with “the peanut gallery” and their comments as I draw, that is part of the job. Most people are complimentary when they make comments, so the few that aren’t are easy to ignore or make fun of. A little eye rolling or my own comment about how unoriginal their comments are will usually shut them up. I also personally have found that as I became more and more into bodybuilding the number of smart assed comments by onlookers have gone steadily down… one of the benefits of having 18″ arms!

Thanks to Ed Placencia 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!

According to this article on NorthJersey.com, a new documentary on the career of the late, great Will Elder screened at the 2010 Toronto Jewish Film Festival back in April to a “pleasantly surprising” turnout.

“The Mad Playboy of Art” takes a look inside the life and career of Will Elder, one of the principal founding artists for MAD Magazine and long time collaborator with Harvey Kurtzman. The film is being made by Elder’s son-in-law Gary VandenBergh.

From the article:

VandenBergh said that Elder was an artist who set the tone for the visual perspective role at Mad Magazine, a bi-monthly satirical magazine, which began as a comic book. The director said that Elder deserves credit for the magazine’s visual style.

Elder became one of the most influential artists at the magazine and spurred other irreverent magazines and humor featured on “Saturday Night Live,” National Lampoon and “The Onion.”

As huge a fan as I am of Will Elder, it’s a stretch to say Elder alone deserves credit for the magazine’s visual style. While his “chicken fat” technique is one that continues to this day to be a mainstay of MAD art (it’s something I always love to include in my work), I think the visual style of the magazine was as equally set by artists like Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Mort Drucker, Al Jaffee, Don Martin and George Woodbridge as it was by Elder. Also, Elder was gone with Kurtzman by 1957 and appeared in only 44 total issues while the continued contributions of the previously names artists and many others over hundreds of more issues shaped the evolving MAD into the magazine that peaked in the 1970′s with over 2 million copies per issue sold.

That said, no doubt Elder’s sadly short run in MAD was very influential on the magazine’s future, and his continuing work like “Little Annie Fannie” in Playboy continued to delight and influence cartoonists and illustrators for 30 plus years. A documentary on his career will be at the top of my “must see” list.

VandenBergh says the film screened in Toronto was unfinished, and he needs funding to complete the documentary. Hopefully the exposure he got at the film festival will get him the money he needs to finish and distribute the film.

The Huffington Post has an article/slideshow posted on their website called Street Portraits Gone Wrong: The Funniest Caricature Drawings Ever featuring thirteen different examples they found of caricatures that the artist “got wrong”. I know many of the artists who did these drawings. Here are some samples:

This one is a Joe Bluhm

This is by Dorney Park, PA artist Chris Chua

This one is by Chris Rommel

See all thirteen and vote on the one with the most “WTF?” on the Huntington Post website.

Poor Chris has four different samples in that slideshow.

The funny thing is that several of these are terrific caricatures, proving the author of the piece is clueless… although a few of them are pretty bad. They didn’t look too hard, obviously… there are some truly hideous caricature examples out there where the recognizably of the subjects as human is a stretch.

This week’s sketch is a very quick warm-up doodle of actress Brooklyn Decker. I have no idea who Brooklyn Decker is or what shows she’s been in, but I ran across an interesting photo of her in a magazine that was begging to be drawn.

My contribution to issue #504 was an expansion of the “Toyota Story” idea by writer Desmond Devlin. Originally I did the spoofed movie poster for the MAD website, so they had me revise the image to open the two additional pages of story. I had to make the car into more of an anthropomorphic character, as well as beat up the Toy Story characters a bit more. Here is the original image:

Click for a closer look…

And the revised one:

Then there followed two pages of “story”, which I also did in a fully painted style… sort of a cross between the actual Pixar look (which it would have taken me ages to exactly mimic doing traditional painting) and my more cartoony rendering style. Here are a few sample panels:

Pick up MAD #504 for the rest of this sorry article…

On news stands June 16th and in comic book stores and subscriber mailboxes now!

MAD # 504 (August 2010)

• Cover (Scott Nickel, Mark Frederickson)
• The Fundalini Pages (Dave Croatto, P.C. Vey, Jacob Lambert, Evan Dorkin, Sarah Dyer, Tom Bunk, Jeff Kruse, Charles Akin, Darren Johnson, Gary Hallgren, Ryan Pagelow, Sam Viviano, Duck Edwing, Paul Coker, Kiernan P. Schmitt, Bob Staake )
• MAD Rates the iPad (John Caldwell)
  
• Toyota Story (Desmond Devlin, Tom Richmond)
• Beiber Versus… (Some Photos via Dreamstime.com)
• A MAD Look at the Twilight Saga (Sergio Aragonés, Tom Luth)
• The MAD World of… Lying and Cheating (Stan Sinberg, Marc Hempel)
• The A-Hole Team (Uncredited)
• Mr. T Tweets While Watching The A-Team (some photos via Dreamstime.com)
• 9 Unmistakable Signs That You’re Not Quite Over Your Ex (Teresa Burns Parkhurst)
  
• Reich Guard (Uncredited)
• The Strip Club (Dan Thompson, Dustin Glick, Christopher Baldwin, Scott Nickel, Douglas Paszkiewicz, Ted Rall)
• The KFC Triple By-Pass! (Dick DeBartolo, Irving Schild)
• More Sarah Palin Speaking Contract Demands! (David Shane, Drew Friedman)
• Spy vs Spy (Peter Kuper)
• 12 Reasons we Hate Cell Phones (Barry Liebmann, Peter Bagge)
  
• Scamazon.com (Scott Maiko, Some Photos via Dreamstime.com)
• Pestco (Jeff Kruse, Photos via Dreamstime.com)
• Archie Marries Jughead (Charlie Kadau, R. Sikoryak)
• The MAD Vault- 1992 (Various)
• One Afternoon in the Confessional (Hermann Mejia)
• MAD Fold-In (Al Jaffee)
• Drawn Out Dramas (Sergio Aragonés)

My contribution to this issue is a three page article that expands on the “Toyota Story” concept I worked on as a web only poster a few months ago. The poster got reworked a little and became the article’s splash page, and then two pages of story was written by Desmond Devlin. Look for a sneak peek of that tomorrow.

So what are you waiting for? Go out and buy a copy, clod!

A few years ago I linked to a number of videos by comedian, impressionist and caricature artist Piotr Walczuk. Piotr (pronouned “Pee-aht”). I thought it was about time to post one of his more recent ones. Piotr was given the rare opportunity to audition for Saturday Night Live last year… something almost any comedian is dying to get a chance at. His impressions are…well, IMPRESSIVE. It’s fascinating to watch his face and mannerisms take on the look of the people he is imitating. He’s a darn good caricaturist as well.

After hanging out with Piotr last year at the San Diego Comic Con, he was kind enough to record a voicemail message for my cell phone in the voice of Sir Ian McKellen… which is cool but know I get people who call me and when I answer tell me to hang up and not answer when they call back so they can hear my voicemail message. Then they don’t leave a message. Very annoying.

That reminds me, I owe Piotr a caricature.

Check out his web page for more impressive impressions.

Uh oh! Looks like the mailbag is empty!

Actually I have several mailbag questions that deal with drawing hair, but that is more suited for a tutorial and not really for the mailbag. My apologies to those who sent the hair inquiries… I hope to get to that as a tutorial one of these days. Otherwise I am fresh out of questions.

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!

Beginning this week I’ve decided to henceforth take Saturdays off of posting on The MAD Blog. There are decidedly fewer visitors on Saturdays and it will give me more time to work on a good Sunday Mailbag each week. Plus I get to sleep in.

So, it’s with great regret I must apologize to my faithful Saturday readers for no longer giving them something to enjoy as they begin their weekend:

Sorry, Mom.

Over on the WashingtonPost.com’s terrific cartooning and comic’s blog Comic Riffs, Michael Cavna writes an open letter to “Amercia’s Documentarian” Ken Burns suggesting he film a documentary about cartooning in Amercia… and the sooner the better for several reasons:

First, the state of the American cartoon is in such tremendous flux: Staff political cartoonists have been disappearing from the newsroom landscape quite precipitously in recent years, as the American newsroom itself has been remade for deeply transitional times. The American newspaper comic strip, to put it simply, is seeing great change in terms of syndication and online delivery. The New Yorker is a bastion for the American magazine cartoon, but such print outlets are fewer, many cartoonists say. Meanwhile, audiences for the comic book and the graphic novel have exploded in recent decades.

Second, there are some longtime cartoon legends who still walk, and talk, colorfully among us. At the National Cartoonists Society’s Reubens Awards some days ago, I spoke with sports cartoonist Bill Gallo, whose historic tenure at the New York Daily News stretches back to World War II; George Booth, a longtime cartooning icon at The New Yorker; and Mort Walker, whose strip “Beetle Bailey” is the last newspaper comic approved personally some 60 years ago by publisher William Randolph Hearst. All three cartoonists had so much boyish glee in their eyes, who knows — they might outlive both Ken Burns and myself. But the larger reality is, they represent a generation of near-nonagenarians (one that includes “Family Circus’s” Bil Keane, and the 80something Mell Lazarus, among numerous others) who have great stories to share now.

This is absolutely true. Many of the giants of the cartooning industry are getting pretty old and nature will be taking it’s due course as it does for all of us eventually. Many of the legends of MAD Magazine like Mort Drucker, Jack Davis and Al Jaffee are also in their 80′s, along with greats like Arnold Roth. This was more apparent than ever at this year’s Reubens, where many of these iconic cartoonists were either absent entirely or not as active as they have been in the past. An era of cartooning will be basically over when these superstars leave us, and while they are still around and able to share their experiences and stories there should be an effort to document them and their impact on pop culture and Amerciana.

Caricaturist and cartoonist Joe Vissichelli goes one further in an e-mail he sent out today calling for those who want to see this happen to drop a personal note to Mr. Burns at the following address:

Mr. Ken Burns
Florentine Films
P.O. Box 613
Walpole, NH 03608

Joe is right in that an outpouring of interest in this subject might get Mr. Burns thinking about such a project. I’ll be sending my note out today.