Is this going to be you tomorrow morning? Hopefully not, but if so here’s an article on hangover cures and if any actually work. The short answer to that is, of course, NO.

Party like it’s 2011 but do it safely, please. Happy New Year, everybody!

Every U.S. publication having periodical publication mail privileges must furnish to the Postal Service and publish somewhere in their publication a “Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation” (required by the Act of August 12, 1970, Section 3685, Title 39 of the United States Code). This is usually done in a publication’s year end issue. Yesterday on The Beat comics blog they posted an examination of the 2010 DC Comics circulation figures. MAD publishes theirs in the last issue on the news stands of the year. According to the figures in issue #507, MAD‘s annual paid distribution average per issue in 2010 was 188,825. That’s up from 2009 by a considerable 40,721 copies per issue. That’s also the highest level since 2007, and bucks a two year decline trend:

MAD Paid Circulation in the last 10 years:

• 2001: 208,645
• 2002: 205,441
• 2003: 207,293
• 2004: 211,473
• 2005: 212,696
• 2006: 190,956
• 2007: 205,890
• 2008: 174,567
• 2009: 148,104
• 2010: 188,825

A lot gets made of how low MAD‘s sales are now since it’s heyday, which naysayers and critics always love to attribute to a vague “drop in quality”. My usual response is asking someone to show me a single magazine that has been publishing since 1970 or earlier who’s circulation figures are not a ghostly shadow of their former selves (if they are still in business that is). I also like to point out that MAD‘s biggest 10 year drop in circulation (number of issues as opposed to percentage) was between its all time peak in 1974 at 2,132,655 and its 1983 average of 783,192. This came during the reign of all the classic MAD contributors at arguably the height of their powers. I seriously doubt there was a “drop in quality” in that decade’s time.

MAD still outsells most comic books by a pretty good margin. To put things in perspective, the best selling single issue of 2010 for DC comics according to that article in The Beat I just referenced?… Brightest Day #0 at 129,446 copies. MAD still outsold that best selling comic by an average of over 60,000 copies every issue. Some of the figures on that DC list are astounding… there was a time when only selling an average of 33,000 copies an issue  (the 2010 average for Action Comics) would get that title instantly canceled. The publishing biz is in a different place these days.

2010 was a pretty good year for MAD. Circulation rose by 27.5%. It increased in frequency from quarterly to bi-monthly. A brand new animated TV show debuted on the Cartoon Network in September. After having only done one actual movie or TV parody piece in 2009 (“Botchmen”) I am currently working on my 5th four page or longer parody in the last 6 issues, demonstrating a return to more illustration/longer narrative features in the magazine. Lot’s to like there.

What’s next for 2011? No idea… but here’s my wish list:

• A raise for all freelancers (or at least those named Tom… you’re welcome, mssrs Bunk, Cheney and Fowler)
• A MAD “app” for iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, etc.
• Another publication increase to 8 issue per year
• A revamped website
• An official digital download subscription
• A raise for all freelancers (did I say that one already?)
• A MAD movie that isn’t “Up the Academy”
• More MAD on the Cartoon Network
• A Christmas fruitcake that isn’t older than the magazine itself
• World peace (right after we get that *#$@# Osama)

Maybe a lot to ask for, but I’ll settle for just the raise.

The Lovely Anna and I went to see “True Grit” this past weekend. I loved it… she was ambivalent. Must be a guy flick. Jeff Bridges was fantastic and the trademark razor sharp dialogue of the Cohen Brother’s films was very prevalent. Sketch done with a Uni-ball Vision Micro-tip ball point pen… not much of a caricature but and interesting face to draw.

A happy 88th birthday to comic book writing legend Stan Lee. Just like he does in all the Marvel superhero movies, Stan’s made a cameo in all my MAD parodies of Marvel superhero movies (two most recent samples below). No doubt he’s thrilled about that and it will be a big topic of conversation at his birthday party tonight…

… or maybe not.

As an illustrator, and especially one who does a lot of caricature work, I often spend a lot of time preparing reference for a given project. I’ve written before about how the internet and image searches like Google image have revolutionized that process in recent years. In the “old days”, illustrators had gigantic “morgue files” stuffed with clipped pictures of people, places and things where they went to find reference for some given subject they needed to draw. I used to have two file cabinets full of celebrity pictures clipped from entertainment magazines that I’d pull out when I needed to do caricatures of somebody. I threw all those files out years ago in favor of internet image searches and DVD image captures. MAD used to send me page after page of printed references for parodies I was assigned. They stopped doing that years ago as well, partly because their art department staff keeps getting smaller and smaller but also because it was just as easy for me to do it myself.

While that is certainly a lot easier than keeping a morgue file, there was still a lot of busy work involved. First, I had to wade through page after page of search results looking for different angles that would given me a nice mix of a subjects face, and if I got lucky some different expressions as well. Image capture from DVD or downloaded video was a problem for me being on a Mac, because Steve Jobs and his Apple gestapo have seen fit to prevent a Mac user from making simple screen captures from commercial DVDs or downloaded video for “copyright protection”, even though my purposes for making these screen captures are 100% legal under “fair use” exceptions to copyright. I had to work around this using a program like VLC to do screen captures, which is clumsy and far from ideal… and that doesn’t help for video I get through iTunes. Finally, I was still a slave to printing out physical references on my studio printer because it is too awkward to put a computer monitor next to my drawing board and use a mouse to bring up whatever picture I need to look at out of a hard to navigate folder full of different images, then look back and forth as I try to draw. So, I would download a bunch of pictures and open, resize and place them in a PhotoShop page, and then print them out. Here’s an example I printed out for the parody of “30 Rock” I did a few years ago:

Well, technology marches on. Thanks to advances in hardware and software, last week I went 100% digital on my illustration reference for a big MAD TV parody I am working on… no printing, easy captures from any video source and a convenient and easy to navigate collection of photos simple to organize and access right next to my drawing board like a printed reference. It worked great and I can’t imagine going back to the hours I spent creating reference pages like the one above.

Here are the elements that have enabled me to make this happen:

Capture It!- I found this little shareware program recently after doing a search to see if someone had finally created a capture program that worked around the stupid and pointless Apple rules about capturing video on a Mac. You can capture any window or selection on your screen, INCLUDING video windows from DVDs or iTunes video, and automatically saves them in the format of your choice to the folder of your choice. Whatever you are not capturing is darkened on the screen and active areas follow your cursor around the screen without interfering with whatever you are doing, and doing a capture is as easy as a keyboard shortcut. The program also captures screen movements as video, which would be great for doing computer tutorials… of course many other programs do that. However this is by far the best and easiest for doing video screen caps. Highly recommended.

Apple iPad- Combined with iPhoto, the iPad makes an ideal way to organize and view your references. I collect all my references, be they screen captures or internet search images, into folders split up into one for each character and things like environments, objects, etc. A simple drag and drop onto my iPhoto icon places those references into iPhoto and each folder becomes a separate “Event”, keeping them organized. Then a sync of my iPad transfers them to that device.

Organization and access to the references couldn’t be easier or faster. No more endless digging around the piles surrounding my drawing board for the one page of reference I can never seem to find when I need it. A simple touch of any “event/folder” brings up a screen of thumbnails that allows me to easily scan my reference collection for whatever picture I want, then a quick touch brings up that image. I can use the “pinch” and “spread” movements to zoom in or out as desired, and swiping across scans to the next or previous image instantly. Touching the back arrow goes back to the thumbnails or back to the list of folders again to find other images. Best of all with the iPad, it literally sits next to my drawing board like a piece of printed reference so it’s easy to draw from.

I’ve got to say, this was a breath of fresh air for me on this latest job, which is packed with different characters and lots of environments that demands a lot of specific reference to get right. Not only did it save maybe as much as a day of copying, pasting, resizing, organizing and printing, I saved a lot of paper and ink not printing out a bunch of pages I’m just going to throw out when the job is done.

I also discovered that Apple either forgot to place the same restrictions on it’s iPad or realizes the policy of preventing screen captures of video is dumb, because you can do screen captures from any video directly on the iPad by pausing the image, then pressing the “Home” and “Power” buttons at the same time for a second or so. You hear a “click” like a camera and the entire screen is saved to your iPad’s iPhoto program, even iTunes video stills. Using a simple image editor allows you to rotate the picture or crop it if you need to. Unfortunately there is no way to move these pictures into new or existing folders within iPhoto, but they will reside in your iPad’s photo folder, so they are still easy to access.

Finally, the images themselves are fantastically clear and bright… no muddy printing to get in the way.

The only drawbacks are that I can only view one picture at a time… which I have to admit I do miss as it makes doing caricatures of a given subject a little easier when you have to do multiple caricatures of the same person and do not rely on a separate reference for each unique caricature. The other drawback is that my iPad’s power charge will eventually run out after a lot of hours of using the screen and browsing pictures. We are talking many, many hours though, and hooking it up to a charger when I take a break usually keeps it charged up enough to keep me going. At worst I can plug it in while I am using it, although the cable limits your moving it about somewhat.

After so many years of having reference pictures or printed pages littered about me in piles, it’s odd to have such a concentrated source of reference and such an uncluttered work area. I loved it though, and won’t be going back. 21st century indeed!

Q: I read in your blog post about the increasing scarcity of original commercial art that you have never done a cover for MAD Magazine proper. I was wondering when we are going to see a Richmond cover?

A: The post the question is referring to is here, if anyone is interested.

The answer to your question is likely next door to never. MAD‘s covers are a different animal than the interior art, and most require a certain style of artwork that is not my forté: the realistic painting.

MAD covers are singular and necessarily high impact gags that the editors and staff spend a lot of time considering and working up before handing off to an illustrator. The majority of them need a more realistic style of illustration to work with the juxtaposing of the expected and the unexpected/lunatic twist that are their hallmark. That’s why it’s no accident that the vast majority of the 478 covers of MAD (since it became a magazine at issue #30) have been done by painters like Norman Mingo (97 covers), Frank Kelly Freas (30), Richard Williams (62), Jack Ricard (33), Roberto Parada (13), C.F. Payne (8), most recently Mark Fredrickson (67) and selected others (source: Mike Slaubaugh’s MAD Lists). You might notice that most of those artists I just listed also either have never contributed or only very occasionally contribute to the interior content of the magazine. MAD cover artists tend to be from a different group than interior artists.

There are a few obvious exceptions. One is when a cover calls for a different art style than the Mingo/Freas/Fredrickson type of realistic painting. That might be when a cartoon character like Bart Simpson is on the cover, or the gag itself needs a different style to be effective.

The other exception is that of MAD legends like Mort Drucker (42 covers), Jack Davis (14), Sam Viviano (16), Al Jaffee (5) and a very few others who’s work is so readily identified with MAD that their very presence on the cover is part of the cover’s appeal. Even then, the cover’s content needs to fit with that artist’s particular style.

Given that MAD is also now only 6 times a year down from the 8 or 12 that it had been since the 1950′s it is even less likely that I’ll ever see my artwork on the cover of MAD. Don’t feel too sorry for me, though. If one of the arguably greatest and longest tenured MAD artists ever, Sergio Aragonés, has only done two covers in his 40 plus years of working in the magazine (TWO!?!), I can hardly feel bad about not having done one myself. Wally Wood only did three, Don Martin only four, George Woodbridge and Harry North only one apiece… and Angelo Torres, and Dave Berg? ZERO.

However, as I mentioned in that previous post, I did do two covers for MAD Kids:

And one “cover” for a special MAD advertising insert/mini magazine:

So it isn’t like the MAD staff doesn’t think my artwork isn’t fit for a cover… the right situation just has not arisen yet. You never know… there are occasionally multiple cover issues and the “call for a different art style” exception that might one day see me get assigned a cover illustration for MAD. That will be a lot of fun if it ever happens, but I am not expecting it.

Thanks to ABJ 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 your questions and I’ll try and answer them here!

No matter your faith, nationality or planet of origin, here’s wishing peace, health and happiness to you and your family at this special time of year.

As promised, here are some of the images from my parody of the new Harry Potter movie in MAD #507, written by Desmond Devlin:

Splash page- Click for a closer look…

Here’s the pencil rough of the splash- Click for a closer look…

A few panels from the story:

I got a bit of a surprise when The Lovely Anna mentioned she’d like to appear in this parody, specifically as the character “Mafalda Hopkirk”, who Hermione impersonates to get into the Ministry of Magic in the film (and the book). Thus:

Yes, that’s The Lovely Anna in the striped suit being bossy…

My apologies to actress Sophie Thompson who, in the unlikely event she has actually seen this, must think I’m a lousy caricaturist since this clearly looks nothing like her yet she played Mafalda in the movie. Sorry Ms. Thompson. Take solace in the fact that, as everybody knows, when The Lovely Anna is happy…

What are you waiting for, clod?!? Go out and buy a fershlugginer copy already!

This week’s SOTW is “Today Show” weatherman Al Roker. After the Sunday Mailbag question on what I used for my weekly sketches I decided to try some new things just for fun. This was drawn with a Pigma Micron marker/pen with a few touches from a Pitt brush pen added.

On news stands and in comic book shops today:

MAD # 507 (February 2011)

• Cover (Mark Fredrickson)
• The Fundalini Pages (Sam Viviano, J.C. Duffy, Rick Tulka, Nate Fakes, Teresa Burns Parkhurst, P.C. Vey, Zachary Baldus, Bob Staake, Eric Scott, Glenn LeLievre, Tom Cheney, Tom Bunk, Jeff Kruse)
• Harry Plodder and It’s Dreadful What Follows (Desmond Devlin, Tom Richmond)
• What if Mr. T Ran an Orphanage (Jeff Kruse, Hermann Mejia)
• Spy vs Spy (Peter Kuper)
• The Strip Club (Tom Bland, Jacob Lambert, Kit Lively & Scott Nickel, Jason Yungbluth, Jason Coates, Feggo, Joey Alison Sayers)

• The MAD 20- The Dumbest People, Events and Things of 2010

1. The BP Oil Spill (Tony Barbieri, Richard Williams)
2. The Obama Presidency (Barry Liebman, Jack Syracuse)
3. Mel Gibson’s Rants (Sam Viviano)
4. Egg Recall (Dick DeBartolo)
5. Lindsay Lohan, Jailbird (Uncredited)
6. Tiger Woods Plays Around (Matt Lassen, Scott Bricher)
7. The Firing of Shirley Sherrod (Jeff Kruse, Drew Friedman)
8. LeBron James (Desmond Devlin, Jack Syracuse)
9. The Jersey Shore Cast (Hermann Mejia)
10. Leno Steals Back The Tonight Show (Roberto Parada)
11. Pope Benedict XVI (Frank Santopadre)
12. Steven Slater Flips Out (James Warhola)
13. Lady Gaga Dresses In Meat (Barry Liebman, Scott Bricher)
14. Glenn Beck’s Unity Rally (Jeff Kruse, Ward Sutton)
15. The Unstoppable Toyota (Scott Bircher)
16. The iPhone 4 (Anton Edmin)
17. Jesse James (Scott Maiko)
18. The MAD Fold-In (Al Jaffee)
19. The Mosque at Ground Zero (Dave Croatto, Garry Hallgren)
20. Tea Party Candidates (Frank Santopadre, Ty Templeton)
21. MAD 20 Addendumb (Paul Coker)

• A MAD Look at Twins, Triplets and Beyond (Sergio Aragonés, Tom Luth)
• The Upsides to a Nationwide Bedbug Infestation (John Caldwell)
• The MAD Guide to Man Boobs, Vol. 2 (Ryan Pagelow, Drew Friedman)
• Drawn Out Dramas (Sergio Aragonés)

My contribution was the art for a 6 page parody of the latest Harry Potter movie, done prior to the movie’s release (always tough) but for once there aren’t any scenes from the parody NOT in the film because they got axed or changed at the last minute, or that were never in there to begin with. I’ll post some sneak peeks at the parody art on Thursday.