David O’Leary and the folks over at Comics Related really scraped the bottom of the barrel and interviewed me for their feature “5 minutes with…” As happens a little too often with me… I was done in only 2 minutes.

Q: Tom, have you ever drawn any cartoons in a style other than the caricature style you do for ” MAD?”
Do you have a “History and Development of Tom Richmond’s Drawing Style?”

A: I guess that depends on how you define “style”.

One way to define style would be the technique or medium being used on a given piece of art. In that respect, I do have a few different styles I work in. There’s my line and color style that is what I principally use for my work in MAD:

Then I have the colored line style, which had a softer and more painterly look:

And my fully painted work, which has no real lines:

I suppose you can also call my crosshatched pencil work or ink and wash stuff different styles as well:

Personally, I do not define “style” as mere differences in rendering. I look at an artist’s style as the way they think and draw—which is mostly independent of rendering technique. By that definition, I don’t have more than one style. It’s all the way I draw, with different window dressing on top.

That’s not to say that some artists don’t work in different styles. I know a few who have such radically different styles (realistic painting vs. extreme cartoon work) that they literally market themselves as two different artists so art directors don’t get confused or think they are getting someone who is a “jack of all trades, master of none”.

As for a history of the development of my drawing style, I do not have any kind of record like that nor any idea of how I would put one together. I see evolution in my work not just year to year but sometimes job to job. I will say that the majority of my style of drawing was devleoped doing live caricatures for 20 years at various theme parks around the country.

As always, I am preempting the Sunday Mailbag on the day after the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Awards  to list the results: Winners are in red:

TELEVISION ANIMATION

• Dave Filoni – Supervising Director / Production Designer, “Star Wars: The Clone Wars”
• Dan Krall – Art Director, “Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated”
• Scott Wills – Art Director, “Sym-Bionic Titan”

FEATURE ANIMATION

• Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders, Directors, “How to Train Your Dragon”
• Glen Keane, Animation Director, “Tangled”
• Nicolas Marlet, Character Designer, “How to Train Your Dragon”

NEWSPAPER ILLUSTRATION

• Sean Kelly
• Michael McParlane
• Dave Whamond

GAG CARTOONS

• Bob Eckstein
• Zachary Kanin
• Gary McCoy

GREETING CARDS

• Jim Benton
• Dan Collins
• Teresa Roberts Logan

NEWSPAPER COMIC STRIPS

• Brian Bassett “Red and Rover”
• Jeff Parker and Steve Kelley “Dustin”
• Richard Thompson “Cul de Sac”

NEWSPAPER PANEL CARTOONS

• Doug Bratton “Pop Culture Therapy”
• Chad Carpenter- “Tundra”
• Glenn McCoy “Flying McCoys”

MAGAZINE FEATURE/MAGAZINE ILLUSTRATION

• Lou Brooks
• Anton Emdin
• Tom Richmond

BOOK ILLUSTRATION

• Sandra Boynton “Amazing Cows”
• Jared Lee “The 3 Wise Guys”
• Mike Lester “The Butt Book”

EDITORIAL CARTOONS

• Bob Gorrell
• Mike Lester
• Gary Varvel

ADVERTISING ILLUSTRATION

• Anton Emdin
• Jack Pittman
• Dave Whamond

COMIC BOOKS

• Stan Sakai “Usagi Yojimbo”
• Chris Samnee “Thor the Mighty Avenger”
• Jill Thompson “Beasts of Burden”

GRAPHIC NOVELS

• Darwyn Cooke- “The Outfit”
• Joyce Farmer “Special Exits”
• James Sturm- “Market Day”

And the winner of the 2010 Reuben Award for ‘Cartoonist of the Year”:

• Glen Keane
• Stephan Pastis
• Richard Thompson

Congratulations to all the winners and the nominees!

Watch my twitter feed for live results of the 2010 NCS Reuben Awards tonight. Link on the my blogroll on the left.

I’m not sure if you heard about this but apparently there was a royal wedding a week or two ago in England. This week’s subject is the bride, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.

This weekend is the 65th Annual National Cartoonists Society Reuben Weekend, being held this year in Boston, MA. I am off to the event early on Wednesday to help with some preliminary preparations and some NCS Board stuff, as I have been serving as one of the vice presidents for two years. I am sure it will be a great time as usual. It’s always fun to get together with some of the world’s most talented cartoonists, get to know everybody better, talk a little shop, stammer a bit when running into some cartooning legend I have admired for years, compliment people on the work they’ve done I have enjoyed this year, and in general feel like a part of the family.

This year’s Reubens have two significant points for me:

First, I am once again nominated for a divisional award in the Magazine Illustration/Magazine Feature category. This is a huge honor, but as this will be my eighth nomination in this division and so far I have actually won zero times, I am betting heavily on one of the other two to take home the hardware. It would be nice to win this year, as I will not be submitting work for consideration the next two years because of significant point number two.

Second, I will be taking office as the 34th president of the NCS, taking over for Jeff Keane who has done a great job leading the organization for the last four years (that’s two terms).

I was somewhat reluctant to take on this responsibility, which I am told made me the perfect candidate. It will be a lot of work for what I recently found out is absolutely no pay (funny, that was not disclosed to me until it was too late!), but after some thought I decided to accept the nomination for two reasons:

One- it is a great honor. This organization has and has had members who have been no less than those who have defined the art of cartooning for over half a century. To have been nominated and ultimately elected by a group of people whom I greatly admire and respect is a tremendous honor, and I hope I can come close to living up to expectations.

Two- The NCS has done a lot for me. I’ve made lifelong friendships, met many of my heroes, gotten invaluable advice and guidance from many individuals I greatly respect and admire, been honored with several nominations and a few awards, and made some networking connections that have helped me in my career. I look at my time serving in office as giving back to an organization that has given much to me.

I’m looking forward to serving the NCS as president for the next two years. Hopefully any movement to impeach me gets tied up long enough for me to duck out gracefully.

Q: In the illustrations requiring text, such as background signs, posters and the like, do you illustrate them free-hand or use the computer?

A: That depends on what feel or context I am looking for. In cartooning, no matter how “hand drawn” a particular computer font might look, it still lacks the warmth and truly hand-drawn charm of lettering done by the artist. If I want that sort of feel, I will do the lettering by hand. For example, I do basically all the “sound effects” lettering in my MAD jobs by hand:

A panel from MAD #492′s Ironic Man parody with hand lettering

More hand lettering from “Yell’s Kitchen”, MAD #470

In the case of lettering or text that are supposed to represent professional signage or printed matter within an illustration, I would use the computer to create precise lettering, but would then try and make it blend into the image by fading or “distressing” it so it wasn’t an obviously pasted-in element:

A recent poster illustration

Close up showing doctored text

another example of an inserted computer font

I am a pretty lousy hand-letterer, so I will use computer fonts when and where I feel I can get away with it and don’t need the hand-lettered feel.

Thanks to Ken Best 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!

BATMAN BLACK & WHITE: BATMAN BY SERGIO ARAGONES Statue

This is destined for a place of honor in the studio! I’ll have to get Sergio to sign it for me…

After my post on Wednesday about how the accurate drawing of features does not necessarily create the only path to a caricature’s “recognizability”, I received an interesting email from my friend and superstar cartoonist Rick Kirkman, artist of the widely syndicated comic strip Baby Blues. Rick mentioned how he sometimes does a type of caricature with his strip and its animated TV version, where he has to “Baby Blues-ize” famous people—and I’ve seen him do it for soldiers on the USO trips we’ve taken. He also mentioned how this is frequently done on The Simpsons, Futurama and other animated shows. Another friend, Pearls Before Swine creator Stephen Pastis, does a similar thing with a self-caricature in his strip.

The trick to this, as Rick points out, is to stay true to the character design so the caricature looks like it belongs in that cartoon’s universe. A tough thing to pull off sometimes, and one that definitely requires the use of elements other than the facial features to create recognizability.

The above “caricature” of me was done a few years ago using the “Simpsonize Me!” website that promoted the Simpson’s movie. That website is now closed down, but I did the above with a little bit of customizing back then.

I did this sketch of rock guitarist Slash to demonstrate my side of a little disagreement I was having with a fellow caricaturist. We were discussing what makes a successful caricature. While we both agreed that being able to instantly recognize who the subject was constituted the most important aspect of a successful caricature, he insisted this hinged on “likeness” of the features, and I said that was not necessarily true. This caricature of Slash has no features, but it is unmistakeable. A viewer recognizes a person or personality on more levels that just their face. Body posture, signature clothing or “look”, accessories, setting—these all play a part in the “recognizability” of a subject. Some caricaturists use this as a crutch because they have trouble capturing recognizability through the features alone, but a good caricaturist will use a combination of elements, both the features/expression and extras, to create a strong caricature.