to even post the Dreaded Deadline Demon, then you are really, REALLY busy.

Q: I have a question about Caricatures, especially doing live caricature work.  I have watched videos on YouTube and have seen different artists using different tools.  I don’t know if this subject has came up before or not, but I was wondering if you could tell me anything about what kind of markers, brushes, etc. are used in live caricature work?

A: Yes, this question does come up often—so I post the answer every year or so for the benefit of new readers.

There is no “standard” drawing and coloring tools used by live caricaturists. Many use markers for the linework, for which the Dixon Markette is currently the standard. The Design Marker 229-LF used to be the overwhelmingly dominate marker here in the U.S., but the manufacturer discontinued them years ago and the Markette seems to be is the closet thing still available. I’ve also seen artists draw with Sharpies, Crayola markers and Copic brush pens. Then there are non-marker solutions like china markers, charcoal, colored pencil and many more.

For color I’ve seen everything from the “chalk and glove” technique to prismacolor stix to watercolor and paintbrush and many more.

I have always used a combination of a soft graphite and the airbrush. Specifically:

Drawing

I use two different kinds of pencils. Both are “clutch” type leadholders, meaning that they have a claw-like end that grasps the lead. The main one is the Caran D’Ache Fixpencil 3, which is a 3mm leadholder. Most leadholders are 2mm, and the thicker lead is a must for bold lines. These were discontinued for a while but now they seem to be back in production. I use a 6B 3mm lead in it which is also made by Caran D’ache. The other pencil is a Creatacolor 5mm leadholder, which I use with either 4B or 6B leads for big, thick lines in the hair, outside of the face, body, etc. There are a few different body types for that pencil, but all work well.

We also wrap our pencils in something called pre-wrap, or sports wrap. It’s the foam wrap you use for wrapping an ankle or similar prior to taping it up in athletics. You can get it at most drugstores. It’s great for cushioning your hand and wicking moisture away from it when drawing. Prevents callouses and blisters as well.

We use a No. 8 blending stomp for shading, and sand one end down to make it a bigger surface area. It helps to soak the stomp in water for 20 minutes or so and allow it to dry for a few days in the sun to loosen up the binding glue and make it softer.

Color

The airbrush we use is either an Iwata HP-SBS (eclipse) or an Iwata HP-SB Plus. Both are good all purpose brushes with a side feed for easy bottle exchange. The latter is a little finer but also more temperamental. I recommend the HP-SBS for beginners.

We use a set of 13 side-feed airbrush bottles, each with a different color. Iwata makes their own side feed bottles which are usable but not ideal. I have custom hardware specially made by a precision machinist and make my own 1 oz. bottles for my operations. No, I won’t sell any to anyone who does not work with us, sorry. They are expensive to make and I have to spend a lot getting them machined, so I don’t want to run out of them too quickly.

Obviously you need an airsource, so a compressor or tank is necessary. There are a lot of choices depending on if you need it to be silent, have a power source, etc. At the parks it’s noisy already and we have sound boxes or separate rooms from which we run air hoses, so a sturdy tool compressor from Home Depot works great for just a couple of hundred dollars. In the malls we need quiet, and we have a permanent power source so I use silent compressors. Jun-Air is by far the best but they are immensely expensive. If you have no power and need silence, a compressed air tank is the way to go. I’ve never used one but a good airbrush retailer can set you up. Coast Airbrush or Bear Air are a good places on-line to find supplies.

For paint we use Media Com-Art paints, both opaque and transparent colors. They are water based and non-toxic. There is a wide selection of colors, but our palette includes Iron Yellow, Burnt Sienna, Toludene Red, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Black, Lime Green, Hansa Yellow, Transparent Ultramarine Blue, Transparent Violet and Transparent Royal Blue.

Paper

Finally for paper we use a 67lb vellum bristol in bright white, 12 x 16 inches. We specially order the paper and have it cut to that size. Paper Plus carries similar stock and there are a lot of those about.

Thanks to G. Cook 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!

It’s official, you can buy anything on Craigslist.

One of the resin statues of MAD‘s Alfred E. Neuman that were made in conjunction with the film Up the Academy is for sale on Craigslist for a paltry $17,000—which is just a little more that half of what Bill Gaines paid to get MAD’s name removed from the film when it was released on video. There are at least three of these statues in existance, the one being sold by this gentleman, one owned by Jim Halperin, and the one pictured above which is in the offices of MAD in NYC. Pictured above with Alfred is my son Tom and Brady Parham, daughter of caricaturist/Illustrator Keelan Parham.

NCS Directory Bio

It’s a sad day in the comic art world today, as we hear that cartooning great Bill Gallo passed away last night at the age of 88 due to complications from pneumonia. Gallo’s career spanned over 60 years, and he was best known for his sports cartoon feature in The New York Daily News, which he had done since 1960. Although he was ill in recent months, he still continued to do his cartoons, his last one published in the Daily News on April 19th, 2011, just three weeks before he passed away.

Bill Gallo was a highly respected and award winning cartoonist, a two-term President of the National Cartoonist Society, Bill Gallo was awarded the NCS Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998. He was also a recipient of the society’s Silver T-Square, the Elzie Segar Award, and multiple NCS Division awards. Bill was elected to the NCS Gold Key Hall of Fame just last year at the 2009 Reuben awards in Jersey City, New Jersey.

I didn’t know Bill very well, but had met him several times at NCS events and found him to be a consummate gentleman. Here is a New York Daily News article about his career and his passing, and they have also posted a gallery of some of his best work.

Rest in peace, Bill.

Artist Ryan Kittleson of Orlando, Florida wrote me to share a digitally sculpted caricature he did of me for the Me Gallery. He recorded a sped-up video of his creation, done with the program Zbrush.

I’ve never used Zbrush but I’ve seen some cool things done with it. MAD’s Hermann Mejia has done some work with it. I understand there are even three-dimensional “printers” that will sculpt your Zbrush creations somehow.

Anyway . . . great stuff, Ryan—and thanks!

This article over at TUAW is a good examination on how comic books are headed towards the same piracy concerns that almost brought the music industry to it’s knees. It points out how now is the time for the comic book industry to head this off by offering it’s complete line of titles digitally for an attractive price. This certainly is a problem… I see entire issues of MAD scanned and uploaded to file sharing sites almost the instant they are released, and the same happens to virtually all comics. It’s hard to believe anybody can call themselves a fan of comics and comic art while they are literally stealing the work of creators by putting it on the web for free downloading—but some people will apparently do anything to get attention on the internet. The reality is that there will always be some people who are either ignorant, dishonest or just don’t care and will pirate work. You can’t stop that entirely. What you can do is make it easy and affordable for those who are honest and understand that in order to keep the creative arts actively making the stuff they like, they have to SUPPORT those arts by buying the work, to be able do so. There is a limit to how much effort and money you can ask these honest people to pay, but they will do it if you offer them the right option—99 cent song downloads was the magic number. Right now comic book fans don’t have the option to buy digital copies of many (even most) issues the same day they come out… or at all… at any price—at least not for the portable tablet format. Giving it to them, and at a good price point, makes the most sense to make sure pirates don’t destroy the comic book industry.

I would love to see MAD available as a digital magazine.

Of course, in true TUAW fashion, the article credits Apple and the iPad as being the catalyst for this issue. The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) is a website I used to frequent quite a bit, being more than a bit of a machead. Lately, however, I have not visited much because their articles in general have become hopelessly fanboy-centric. So much so that even someone like myself, who owns a lot of Apple products, gets sick of hearing everything spun into how Apple is the Greatest Company Ever and does nothing wrong. This article is still worth reading, though.

Q: I’m just curious and you may or may not be the man to ask but I’m going to anyway, how does MAD magazine get around copyright infringement when you guys do film parodies? I mean it’s a parody but there’s no question about which film the original is, do you ask for permission from the film studio? Has this ever come up I mean it is essentially using the likeness of celebrity figures and a bunch of copyrighted material to create those parodies and I’m just curious how you guys get around it. Or has it ever even come up?

A: Satire and parody are very well protected free speech rights under the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The first amendment guarantees a person’s rights to voice their views or opinions about anything and everything. Those views include the right to criticize something or someone, and that includes making fun of them. Copyrights and the “right of publicity” (the right of a celebrity to protect the value of their own likeness/persona) cannot stand in the way of someone’s first amendment rights insofar as the courts recognize those rights as being applicable. When these expressions of opinion appear in a publication or book, they are doubly protected as those are recognized vehicles of free speech.

When MAD first got started as a comic book, they made fun of genres of pop culture like westerns, horror movies, spy stories, etc. However they very quickly turned their guns on specific subjects like Dragnet, Tarzan, Superman, Batman and other comic book, media and serial strip properties. They were obviously very nervous about it at first. “Bat Boy and Rubin!” by Wally Wood in MAD #8 was filled with many background signs that made it very clear this was a “lampoon” of Batman, a copyrighted character of National Periodicals (later D.C. Comics). Possibly this stemmed from National Periodical’s reactions to “Superduperman!”, a parody of Superman also by Wood in MAD #4. Eventually MAD became well known for their continuing parodies of films and television shows. They probably changed the names at first to make sure there was no confusion that what they were doing was parody and not a licensed representation of the show, but honestly outside that possible argument they probably need not bother changing the names for legal reasons. Its part of the fun and the lampooning, so it’s continued to this day.

MAD has been tested several times in court, but I don’t know of any specific suits relating to movie or TV parodies. There were some threats that never made it into actual legal action. According to Maria Reidelbach‘s Completely MAD, MAD‘s parody of “The Barefoot Contessa” entitled “The Barefoot No-Countessa” drew the ire and a lawsuit threat from Ava Gardner. Universal Pictures made some threats over this cover from MAD #89:

Neither threat ended up in court. Likely their lawyers understood that MAD‘s first amendment rights would trump any suit brought against them. MAD has never, to my knowledge, asked permission to parody anything. Eventually movie and TV studios would send packets of promo materials to MAD in hopes they WOULD get skewered in the magazine, as it was considered not only great publicity but an honor. I sometimes get contacted by the actors or creators of a show or movie telling me how much they loved seeing themselves or their show lampooned in MAD.

Two more relatively recent incidents come to mind that illustrate that point, and also how lawyers sometimes don’t communicate real well with their clients. In 1981 some lawyers representing Lucasfilm Ltd. threatened to sue MAD over the appearance of the character Yoda in MAD #220, which contained the parody “The Empire Strikes Out”.

The editors of MAD forwarded to these brilliant legal minds a letter they had just received from said lawyer’s client George Lucas in which he called the artist and writer of that parody, Mort Drucker and Dick Debartolo, “the Leonardo Da Vinci and George Bernard Shaw of satire”. I guess they decided not to go forward with that lawsuit after all. Similarly MAD received threats of a lawsuit from a lawyer on the “Peanuts” team after they lampooned the famous comic strip in the magazine. Again, MAD forwarded a letter that Charles Schulz had recently sent them saying how much he loved the send up and was pleased to be skewered in MAD. No word on the employment status of either lawyer(s) after those incidents.

MAD‘s most famous copyright/parody case actually went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Irving Berlin et al. v. E.C. Publications, Inc., Irving Berlin and some others tried to sue MAD for one of their “sung to the tune of…” pieces where MAD‘s poet laureate Frank Jacobs would rewrite the lyrics to a well known song making fun of some third subject. They sued for $25 million, wanting one dollar per song per issue printed of the collection The Worst from Mad No. 4, which featured the article. The Supreme Court sided with MAD in 23 of the 25 songs named in the lawsuit, saying that the use of transfigured lyrics were sufficiently “transformative” that it was not violating the creator’s copyrights on the tune(s). The loser’s appealed, and the Circuit Court that heard the appeal sided with MAD again, this time on ALL 25 songs. Ooops. Another appeal was denied by the Supreme Court, giving MAD a complete victory. There were other examples. MAD‘s right to make fun of whatever they wanted to make fun of was always upheld in court, until the legal threats and lawsuits basically disappeared entirely.

The likenesses of the actors in the parodies are also covered under the first amendment right to free expression, so a right of publicity suit would be a long shot at best, and most likely a waste of time.

Thanks to Jamie Linfoot 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!

Go visit your local comic shop and getcha free comics!

This video is pretty long but well worth the time. John Kascht is a terrific caricature illustrator who I met when he was a guest speaker at one of the International Society of Caricature Artist’s conventions. This video isn’t just about drawing Conan O’Brien, it’s about the caricature as an art form and the application of this art form in depicting celebrities that the world is intimately familiar with.

Many thanks to Marv Sohlo for the heads up on this!

It has become apparent to me over the last few weeks I am going to have to step back from doing daily and involved writing on The MAD Blog for much of the month of May. My regular work, my theme park operations starting, and trying to finish the book, is taking it’s toll—something has to give.

The MAD Blog will cut back to a Monday, Wednesday (Sketch o’the Week), Friday and Sunday (Mailbag) schedule through the end of the month. With the possible exception of a quick news post here and there, these will be the only days with active posts, and some of those posts might be a little on the lighter side. A more regular posting schedule and some more substantial writing will return in June.

Thanks for everyone’s understanding.