Facebook is a really great resource for keeping in touch with family and friends… unless you let it get out of control.

I originally started my Facebook page with the intention of having it a combination of personal and professional “friends”, so I never refused a friends request. Almost 2,500 friends later, it was starting to really become a headache. I was getting wall posts from people asking me to critique their work, was constantly being tagged in “photos” of people’s art so I would go there and take a look at it, I was tagged in notes that I had nothing to do with and it was impossible to sift through all the status updates on my wall. My page had become so unwieldy that I decided I had to burn it down and start from scratch.

So, for any of you who were on my Facebook friends list, I now have separate personal and professional Facebook pages.

The professional one can be found here, or accessed via the blogroll banner on the right of this blog page (scroll down to find it). Any and all are welcome to follow me there, and I will be doing a few things special for the Facebook page… although most of the content will also appear here on The MAD Blog. So, I hope you will all follow me if you are on Facebook.

As for the personal page, that is going to be reserved for those people whom I have actually met in real life or those with whom I have had a significant amount of personal correspondence with. There will be basically no art or work related updates on the personal page now, so believe me when I say unless you are interested in my dry and boring personal life, you won’t be missing anything. Still, if you fit that description and actually want to hear about how my daughter is off to college in three weeks, that after every visit to the orthodontist I greatly regret getting braces at 44 and how my surgically repaired left shoulder is finally allowing me to push 300 lbs on the bench press again… then by all means visit and make a friend request.

I’ve operated a caricature concession business at the ValleyFair! amusement park in Shakopee, MN since 1991, and one thing that park has been missing is a real “character brand”… Disney of course has Mickey Mouse and co., Six Flags has the Warner Bros. cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck as well as the DC Comics superheroes, Universal has the Hanna Barbera characters like Yogi Bear as well as Universal movie characters, a deal for comic strip characters, the Marvel Superheroes and now Harry Potter.

Valleyfair had the Berenstein Bears and a couple of home grown characters called Colonel Ohmpa-pa and Chocolate Moose… no doubt the sales on Colonel Ohmpa-pa merchandise left a little something to be desired. The Berenstein Bears had a reasonable recognition level but nobody got real excited about seeing Papa Bear and company.

Well those days are over. Today Valleyfair announced the 2011 opening of “Planet Snoopy”, a 9 acre ‘Peanuts” themed area that will be include 6 new rides and 7 “rebranded” rides as well as lots of Snoopy and gang themed shops, food stands and decor. One of my caricature booths is located smack in the middle of this area, so we will be getting a facelift and probably seeing our quotient of drawings of kids skyrocket.

Having drawn caricatures in the old “Camp Snoopy” that is now “Nickelodeon Universe” in the Mall of America, I know that this will be pretty well received, especially around here. People weren’t too happy when the Mall of Amercia’s theme park lost the Peanuts licensing. Sparky was from St. Paul and the people of this state are pretty proud of him being a native Minnesotan. It’s fitting that these characters are going to be represented in a local theme park. Maybe Jeannie Schulz and some representatives from Peanuts will be on hand to see “Planet Snoopy” open up next spring.

Read the official press release here.

Debuting today on the National Cartoonists Society website is Thursday “Member Spotlights”… brief looks at NCS members/ legends in cartooning. Fittingly enough, the first spotlight is on cartooning giant Milton Caniff, the namesake of the NCS’s “Milton Caniff Award” for lifetime achievement in cartooning.

These spotlights are written by NCS member Leif Peng, and a new one will appear each Thursday on the NCS blog. I’ll be reminding folks to check them out… they are short and insightful glimpses into the work and behind the scenes careers of some great cartoonists and members of the National Cartoonists Society. As the library of spotlights grows you will be able to find an alphabetical listing of them all on the NCS’s blogroll.

Click for a closer look…

This week’s sketch is a cop out… sorry. This was a pencil rough for a recent poster illustration of a goofy halloween party scene. I’ll post the final art sometime soon.

As I mentioned before this is one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever done for MAD. I just thought Desmond Devlin did a smart job on the writing and I had the opportunity to have a lot of fun with the subject matter. Here’s a few images from the article…

Click for a closer look…

Click for a closer look…

Now go out and buy a copy, you clod!

Well, not technically on the news stands until Aug 17th, but some subscribers are already receiving copies in their mailboxes so I figured the cat’s out of the bag anyway. BTW, this cover was shown to the crowd at the Comic-Con MAD panel and got a roaring laugh and applause…

MAD # 505 (October 2010)

• Cover (Mark Fredrickson)
• The Fundalini Pages (Sam Viviano, Jeff Kruse, Arie Kaplan, Paul Coker Jr., Emily Flake, Sam Sisco, Gary Hallgren, John Caldwell, Charles Atkins, Dave Crosland, Tom Bunk, Des Devlin, Kevin Pope)
• Glee Blows (A MAD Public Service Announcement)
• Tea Bagger Proof That Obama Is A Terrorist/Socialist (Stan Sinberg, Hermann Mejia)
• A MAD Look At Racial Profiling (Sergio Aragonés, Tom Luth)
• Worst Selling Children’s Books (Jeff Kruse, Scott Bricher)
• Spy vs Spy (Peter Kuper)
• Inspirational Wall Plaques That Never Caught On (Jeff Kruse)
• Planet TAD!!!!! (Tim Carvell, Brian Durniak)
• 9 Ways To Pass The Time In Your Doctor’s Waiting Room (Teresa Burns Parkhurst)
• MAD’s Oh-So Negative True Blood Outtakes (Uncredited)
• BP’s Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill Response (Dick DeBartolo)
• The Strip Club (Joey Alison Sayers, Dustin Glick, Todd Clark, Kit Lively & Scott Nickel, Vic Black, Douglas Paszkiewicz
• If Jesus Walked Among The Gulf Coast (Richard Williams)
• TMZzz (Jacob Lambert)
• Rejected Stamp Collections (Jeff Kruse, Bob Staake, Drew Friedman)
• The Darker Side Of The Lighter Side (Dave Berg, Uncredited)
• The Wizard Of O (Des Devlin, Tom Richmond)
• The MAD Vault -2001 (Various)
• It Happened One Morning (Michael Gallagher, Tom Bunk)
• MAD Fold-In (Al Jaffee)
• Drawn Out Dramas (Sergio Aragonés)

My contribution this issue is one of my favorite jobs ever for MAD. It’s a very cleverly written political satire by Desmond Devlin set within a faux movie parody of “The Wizard of Oz”. I will post a sneak peek tomorrow.

In other news this issue is the first on the new bi-monthly schedule, so expect #506 out in October. I also officially became an old guy with my first ever appearance in “The MAD Vault” aka two pages of reprinted stuff from old MAD issues, as two panels from my parody of “Malcolm in the Middle” appears on page 53. This issue is also my 80th appearance in MAD… as October will mark my 10 year anniversary of my first appearance that’s not too bad. I hope to make it to 100 before I die.

Q: Do you have your work displayed throughout you home, or has your family tried to limit it to just certain areas?

A: That’s an interesting question… what kind of art hangs in the home of an artist?

There’s an old adage that goes “a plumber’s home always has leaky pipes” or “a carpenter’s home always has crooked doors”, meaning that when you do something for a living your house is the last place that same work gets done in. That is certainly true with me, as I have almost none of my own artwork on the walls of our home. I did a pencil portrait of The Lovely Anna and I for our wedding invitation and that original is in our dining room and I did a small watercolor painting of a landscape that is next to our front door. That’s it for my own artwork on the walls of the house anywhere other than the basement. There the original of the Wizard of Oz painting I did for the book Memories of a Munchkin hangs with a print of one of the posters of the Minnesota Twins team I did that has some player autographs on it.

My studio is the place where the cartoon art hangs, including some of my own stuff. Of course I have the original caricatures of me by Mort Drucker, Al Hirschfeld and Sebastian Krüger. I also have several prints of MAD splashes I did with signatures from the cast members on them. I’ve written about them under the topic “The Wall of Shame” before but here is the collection:

Three MAD prints above my drawing board

Two more in the corner…

Click any for a closer look:

Signed by the cast of “Heroes” and creator Tim Kring

Signed by Rachel Bilson and Adrian Brody of the cast of “The O.C.”

Signed by the entire cast of “LOST” (!!!)

Signed by the cast of “Two and a Half Men”

Signed by the cast of “The Sopranos” (sorry, no close up on this one)

I’ve still got to get this new one to the frame shop…

The Big Bomb Theory!!

All great fun, but delegated to the studio. The wall just outside of the studio is the future home of all the cartoon art I’ve collected from other cartoonists, including Stephen Pastis, John Hambrock, Chris Browne, Dave Carpenter, Mort Drucker, Sam Viviano, Jeff Koterba, Sandra Boynton, Jim Scancarelli, Chris Houghton and several others… just gotta get the frame shop working on a few more of them them.

Upstairs is a different story. The Lovely Anna likes Monet, Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Degas a little more than she likes goofy cartoon illustration, so we have a lot of their prints on the walls in the main living areas. She also is a big fan of painter Thomas Arvid, who does realistic oils paintings of wine glasses, bottles and other related stuff. We have several glicees and artist’s proofs of his work in our living room.

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!