© 2010 MAD Magazine and E.C. Publications, used with permission

… no, sadly this is not the title of a new book from MAD. That would be one beat-up book by the time readers got done doing the fold-ins… all 426 of them.

How do I know Al has done 426 fold-ins for MAD? Thanks to Doug Gilford, the author of The MAD Cover Site, that’s how.

Some weeks ago I posted an announcement from MAD calling for birthday wishes to be sent in for Al, who turns 90 on March 13th. The well wishes had to be actual cards, letter, etc. and not your garden-variety easy e-mail. Doug decided to give Al something practical and, apparently either having an enormous amount of free time or no desire to sleep or spend time with his family, he cataloged every appearance of Al’s work in the pages of MAD including issue number, the title of the piece, Al’s credit on it (writer,artist or both) and any collaborators on each… all 788 of them. That count might not be accurate as I sort of zoned out in the 600′s counting them all, but it’s a lot. It also includes a small number of reprints of some of Al’s work from previous issues, but they are only a small fraction of that total. Some issues Al has had as many as 6 different credits of original stuff. That’s what I call a body of work.

Check out Doug’s exhaustive list for yourself! Al will probably need to take a nap after reading it. Actually he’ll probably drop and do 50 push-ups, draw three MAD features and then take a nap.

Only use this when the need is overwhelming. Do not abuse.

Q: Has your PC ever gone down in the middle of a big job\tight deadline? How do you handle this? Has travel ever affected you meeting a deadline?

Yes, I once had my hard drive melt on me in the middle of doing two big jobs. It went down on a Monday while I was working on a job due that day and had a MAD job to finish by Wednesday. The disaster happened to my formerly trusty Dell Workstation… here’s my blog post from that day:

Well, it finally happened. This morning I am coloring happily along in PhotoShop when the blue screen of death pops up on my PC monitor. For the most part Windows XP is a very stable OS and I sometimes go weeks without rebooting, but this one was bad. I instantly lost all the work I had been doing as the computer began dumping physical memory to reboot. Unfortunately it went downhill from there.

Apparently my Dell workstation uses a hard drive configuration called “RAID”, which as I understand it is for drive mirroring and server/data security. I don’t need those things, but they came with the system so I had them anyway. As it turns out, RAID drives are specially configured, and when your RAID goes south so does your drives… and all the data on them. So, my computer went from a fire-breathing graphics monster to a useless pile of crap in .5 seconds. I have to get “Grey’s Anantomy” done by Wednesday and was supposed to have a poster job done by today.

This was an emergency. I could not afford not to be working on this today. I could go to Best Buy and get a crappy PC anytime, but getting a good PC with the right hardware is not as easy. So, being down on PC’s anyway at the moment, I went to the one place in town I could walk in, buy a computer that would have the graphics firepower to do what I needed and get home in time to get back to it… yep, I went to the Apple Store.

Came home with a souped up Mac Pro with 4 GB ram, 2 x 3.0 Ghz processors and a 512 MB graphics card. I figured I’d see if those commercials about opening the box and starting to use the computer were accurate. Let’s just say that after one automatic firmware upgrade download, one firmware installation crash, one hour on the phone with tech support and a total reinstall of the system software I am still not using it and those commercials are a load of garbage. Right out of the box my ass.

Well, back to the cyber-battle. If I blow my deadlines I will be very angry with Michael Dell and Steve Jobs, in that order. This may put a damper on blog entries in the foreseeable future….

I eventually got the Mac Pro working that day, and finished both jobs on time. That happened in 2006, and just a few months ago I retired that Mac Pro and got a new 27″ iMac, so I stuck with Apple.

Dealing with deadlines when traveling is all about making sure your travel won’t be a problem for the deadlines. I usually get behind on my jobs and need to pull and all-nighter or three to get caught up, so I do my best to get that out of the way before I travel. Then if needed I bring whatever I need to keep on track with me. Hopefully that is nothing, but as I hate being totally behind after a trip I usually bring some project along to mess about with… The Lovely Anna likes to sleep in and I like to get up early on vacations, so I have some quiet time in the mornings to get stuff done.

Thanks to Leo Kelly 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!

MAD writers Arnie Kogen, Dick DeBartolo and Desmond Devlin were tasked by CBC Radio to come up with MAD style titles for the 2011 Oscar nominated films. In this short radio interview, they compare what they came up with and discuss a little about their thought process (or lack thereof). I would make a joke about their having faces made for radio, but that is too obvious.

Many thanks to Doug Gilford of the excellent MAD Cover Site and the MAD Mumblings forum for the heads up!

S   W   A   M   P   E   D  ….

Click for a closer look…

As promised, above is the splash page and here are some images from the parody of “Mad Men” in MAD #508.. written by Arnie Kogen:

All images © 2010 E.C. Publications/MAD Magazine, used with permission.

I am beyond swamped after both my vacation and my unexpected two day layover in Phoenix, so this will have to do as “Sketch o’the Week” this week. This is one of the panels from my parody of “Mad Men” in MAD #508, sketched on bristol board prior to inking. This panel features Jessica Paré as Megan and Jon Hamm as Don.

Hopefully MAD will finally let me post a sneak peek at the artwork soon. The issue is out and has been for weeks, but there is some kind of special something or another going on with it and they asked me to wait to post any of the finished art. MAD just gave me the thumbs up on posting a sneak peek, so look for that tomorrow!

The official ballots have been issued to all professional members of the National Cartoonists Society, and the nominees for the Reuben Award for “Cartoonist of the Year” are:

• Glen Keane
• Stephan Pastis
• Richard Thompson

Glen Keane is an animator, author, illustrator and director who’s credits include The Little Mermaid (Ariel), Aladdin (Aladdin), Beauty and the Beast (Beast), Tarzan (Tarzan) and most recently Tangled (Rapunzel) for Walt Disney Studios. He has recieved the received the 1992 Annie Award for character animation and the 2007 Winsor McCay Award for lifetime contribution to the field of animation. This is Glen’s first nomination

Stephan Pastis is the artist/writer/creator of  the daily comic strip “Pearls Before Swine”, syndicated by United Feature Syndicate. He won the NCS divisional award for “Best Comic Strip” in 2003 and 2006. This is Stephan’s third nomination.

Richard Thompson is the artist/writer/creator of  the daily comic strip “Cul de Sac” syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate, as well as an illustrator and cartoonist on other features. He is the creator of the weekly cartoon series “Poor Richard’s Almanac” which runs in the Washington Post, and his illustrations have appeared in numerous publications including U.S. News and World Report, National Geographic and The New Yorker. He has won NCS divisional awards for Magazine and Book Illustration in 1995 and Newspaper Illustration also in 1995. He won a Gold and a Silver Funny Bone Award in 1989 from the Society of Illustrators for humorous illustration. This is Richard’s second nomination.

The winner of the 2010 “Cartoonist of the year” will be announced on May 28th at the annual NCS Reuben Awards dinner in Boston, MA.

Congrats on the nominations!

…in Phoenix for almost 48 hours on our way back from vacation. Thanks to mechanical problems with our flight out of Hawaii and a 3 hour delay there we missed our connection out of Phoenix to Minneapolis. Thanks to the winter storms back home and hundreds of canceled flights in and out of Minneapolis/St. Paul, the earliest flight back home for us was the red-eye at 12:55 am… TUESDAY.

In the immortal words of Alfred E. Neuman: “ECCCCHHHH!”

Q: Like yourself I prefer to ink and scan. I do use a digital pen for all the colouring, washes and so forth but for the fine detail of the lining I prefer the real thing. So, I notice not all of your artwork is black outlined, some of your work you colour the lining to match the area it is next to, so perhaps a brown for the lining around the skin, blue for jeans, gray for hair and so on. So my question is, do you alter the colour of the lines in Photoshop or do you use inks or paints on paper first and then scan it in?

A: A few years ago I began experimenting with a colored line style of illustration that was essentially my MAD line and color style but with… wait for it… colored lines. It didn’t change my approach at all but made the final results more painterly looking and softer, which many art directors like better than the more cartoon looking black line.

Here’s an example:

Click for a closer look…

I ink the illustration as usual with black ink, then color the lines in PhotoShop. It’s easy to do. First follow these instructions to create the linework on it’s own otherwise transparent layer:

1. Scan line art as grayscale image
2. Create a new blank layer, rename it “Inks”
3. Go to the “Channels” palette, there is only one channel called “Gray”
4. At the bottom of the channels palette, click the “dashed circle” icon entitled “Load Channel as Selection”
5. In “Select” drop down menu, select “Inverse”
6. Go to your “Inks” layer
7. Press “D” on your keyboard to reset swathes so full black in active color
8. Press “Option” + “”Delete” to fill selection with black
9. On background layer, press “Command” + “A” to select and then “Delete” to delete line art on that layer
10. Convert to RGB or CMYK

With the line layer as the active layer, go to the layer’s palette. Above the list of layers, there is the word “Lock:” followed by several icons. Click the first icon, the box with the checkered pattern. This locks the transparent areas of the layer. After that, color will only “stick” to the lines, allowing you to paint them any color with the brush tool and maintain the line integrity.

Thanks to Scott Evans 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!