Q: I read on your blog that you just became the president of the National Cartoonists Society. What is the National Cartoonists Society? Assuming it’s a group of cartoonists, how do I join up?

A: The National Cartoonists Society (NCS) is an organization of professional cartoonists. It got its start back in the early 1940′s, when several cartoonists did a series of “chalk talks” for service men and women during World War II. In 1946, the NCS was officially formed at a dinner event, with Rube Goldberg as its first president, Russell Patterson as vice president, C.D. Russell as secretary and Milton Caniff as treasurer. Later in 1946, the first NCS award for “Cartoonist of the Year” was bestowed to Milton Caniff. Then known as the Billy De Beck Memorial Award, it was given each year to honor one outstanding cartoonist as voted on by the membership. In 1954, the award was renamed the Reuben, in honor of Rube Goldberg.

Since 1946, the NCS has grown to include cartoonists from all walks of the industry: comic strips and dailies, editorial cartoonists, humorous illustrators, animators, greeting card artists, gag cartoonists, comic book artists, advertising and book illustrators, web cartoonists, etc. Initiatives like the Milt Gross Fund, which provided financial assistance to indigent cartoonists and their families, was an example of some of the programs the NCS undertook over the years. In 2005, the Milt Gross Fund was absorbed by the newly formed National Cartoonists Society Foundation, a 501 (C)(3) charitable organization and the charity arm of the NCS. Today the NCSF oversees programs like the former Milt Gross Fund and the Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship, an annual scholarship award given to a qualified student via a juried application process.

Today the NCS is still going strong, with eighteen regional chapters, including one in Canada and some possibly forming in other parts of the world. The NCS has an annual awards weekend called the “Reuben Awards”, where multiple divisional awards are given out as well as the Reuben for “Cartoonist of the Year”. The event also features a slate of guest speakers, dinners and other happenings. The NCS is not a union, it’s a trade association of professionals in the cartooning industry whose main purpose is to promote cartooning in its many forms, recognize excellence in the industry and bring other professionals together to network.

In order to join you have to be a professional cartoonist. By the current guidelines, this means cartoonists who are currently earning the major part of their income from cartooning and have done so for at least the past three years. Their work must be of a high professional quality and their reputation good. Applications must include two letters of recommendation from current NCS members in good standing, a short biographical sketch and samples of current work bearing a signature. You can get all the necessary information here.

It is a great organization, and I am proud to be serving as president . . . I just wish the position paid better (translation: at ALL).

Thanks to J.G. 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!

Yesterday MAD‘s new blog, The Idiotical, posted the splash page I did from the parody of Green Lantern in MAD #510:

Click for a closer look

Interestingly, they also posted the rough pencil sketch I initially sent them to approve:

Click for a closer look

As you can see, the “finger” gag got nixed. I didn’t think that would make it by the editors, but you can’t blame a guy for trying . . . just looking to be a little edgier. Here are a couple of other panels from the parody:

t

I’ll post the table of contents if I ever get a copy of the fershlugginer thing.

Sport Illustrated Kids has quickly become one of my regular clients, much to my delight. That publication was always one of those I’d wanted to do work for, and after doing a project for them back in March I am already working on my third job for the magazine. The current issue just came out with some art I did for an article on funny “trophy mishaps”, infamous stories about how various sports trophies have been dropped, broken or in one case run over by a bus. Here are a few of the spot illustrations I did for the article:

The Real Madrid team drops their Kings cup under the bus…

Maria Sharapova double faulted here…

This cup runneth over…

Tom Watson bogeys this one…

You can see some of these on video here.

From The Life Magazine 2011 Photo Blog Award Winners:

MAD magazine has been called revolutionary, subversive, surreal, hilarious, and a total waste of time. (The latter by its own editors). That a single publication could fill all of those roles for millions of readers, and thrive, across six decades says a lot about both the human appetite for satire and the unique vision of MAD‘s founder, William Gaines. Here, on the occasion of MAD launching its first-ever blog, Theidiotical.com, MAD‘s editor for the past 25 years, John Ficarra, shares some personal photographs of — and lively stories about — Bill Gaines; the magazine’s happily chaotic early years; and the writers and illustrators (a.k.a, “the usual gang of idiots”) who have kept MAD relevant and irreverent since the days when Harry Truman was president.

This week’s subject is karma victim LeBron James.

I’m not a guy who wishes ill will on anybody, but I must say I was happy to see Dallas win the NBA championship rather than have to hear about this jackass getting a ring. James is the poster boy for super-egotistical, narcissistic, spoiled brat athletes. I have to laugh out loud when I read comments by him and his (small) group of supporters wondering why all the hate and saying he doesn’t deserve it. He deserves it. Every bit of it. His one hour TV special “The Decision” (note the caps in the title, like the world has hanging on it) might be the most disgusting example of narcissism every aired on national TV, and that’s saying something with Donald Trump out there. Even in this day and age of people mistakenly believing others should know or care about their opinions on anything, sports fans still admire at least a hint of humility from their star athletes. James doesn’t even pretend to have such. Witness his comments following his loss in the NBA Finals:

“All the people that were rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I’m going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that. So they can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal. But they got to get back to the real world at some point.”

Translation: You all have shitty little lives and I am still LeBron James, so GFY. That’s rich from a guy who is lucky he’s 6’9″ and a physically gifted athlete who can play pro basketball, because he doesn’t have the brains or skills to do much more that flip burgers otherwise.

Wow. Does this guy have ANYBODY around him that can give him some simple advice about how to be a human being, or are they all just head-nodding bobos that tell him 24-7 he’s a god and the rest of the world lesser mortals?

I’ve got news for LeBron: yes, most people out there don’t make millions of dollars playing a kid’s game, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t happy with their lives. I’d rather be doing what I do for a living, with a loving family, the ability to treat others like real people and have the respect of those who meet me than to be a rich athlete with no respect for the rest of humanity, surrounded by money-grubbing yes-men and commanding the respect of no one whom I didn’t buy that respect from. Also, the reason you make millions is BECAUSE of the “little people” you denigrate, who spend their hard-earned money on NBA tickets, merchandise and watch games on TV providing the ad revenues that pay your salary.

I actually don’t care in the least about pro basketball, and ordinarily wouldn’t give it the time of day, but James gets my attention for all the wrong reasons. Monetary success. Humanity fail. Congrats, LeBron.

I knew this set was on the way, now it’s officially announced and available for pre-order. The complete collection of Al Jaffee fold-ins from 1964 through 2010. He’s still going strong, so it’s already missing the latest 2011 fold-ins, but would you rather wait until Al kicks the bucket?? He’s probably going to outlive me, so I’m excited about the books!

Okay… this isn’t really a Ken Burns documentary. This is one of several brilliant videos shot for the NCS Reuben Awards show by Tom Gammill. This one had me in tears… Tom is one funny guy. Hopefully R.C. got a chuckle out of it. If you haven’t seen any of Tom’s “How to Draw” series of videos, get ready for a real treat.

Q: Is drawing/painting on an iPad anything like drawing on a Cintiq (other than screen size)?  I’m weighing my options, as a Cintiq is clearly more expensive than an iPad, but I don’t want to be frustrated by going the cheaper route.

A: There is no comparison. The Wacom Cintiq or any pressure-sensitive tablet or tablet-style computer is FAR more capable for drawing and painting digitally than an iPad.

The drawing capabilities of the iPad or similar devices (for simplicity’s sake, I’ll use the term “iPad” to mean all such tablet devices) are distant secondary thoughts to the functionality of their multi-touch screens. iPads have no pressure sensitivity, which is crucial to easily creating thick and thin linework, mimicking the use of natural tools like brushes, controlling the opacity of washes and paint and many other versatile functions. Many pressure-sensitive tablets like the Wacom Intous line also include “tilt” sensitivity, which while not something crucial does come in handy when using certain brushes and creating certain looks, which of course the iPad also does not have. On top of that, the iPad’s screen is designed to only respond to the touch of skin, and there is no precision stylus that works with it. The “styluses” you see that are made for the iPad have marshmallow-like pillows at the end of them, roughly the size of a fingertip, that provide the input an iPad needs but are hardly natural-feeling instruments. The iPad was designed as a finger-tip interface mobile mini-computer, and the ability to draw and paint on it was not something anyone concerned themselves with in its development. Can you do it? Yes, you can. Is it ideal? No.

A Wacom Cintiq, Intous tablet or similar device, on the other hand, has been designed from the ground up with only one purpose in mind: to mimic natural drawing and painting movements and input. You use instruments that feel and react like pencils, pens and brushes. The pressure-sensitivity mimics your hand’s pressure when drawing on paper, or can be used to control opacity, color and other variables to mimic techniques like washes, drybrush, etc. The tilt sensitivity some of these devices have can control the direction and reaction of individual bristles in a brush. This hardware has no other purpose, and is vastly superior to things like the iPad for creating art.

The downside to using Wacom products is that you need a separate computer to do it. There are several PC based “tablet” computers that allow for drawing right on the screen like a Cintiq, but they get mixed results. It depends on your purpose with them. If the idea is to do digital sketching while on the move and you want to do something more than finger-paint, then something like the Hewlett Packard HP-TM2T tablet PC might be your best bet. It has a Wacom digitizer in it, so pressure sensitivity works in PhotoShop (only 256 levels, but that’s as good as it gets with these types of PCs). There used to be a MacBook custom conversion service from a company called Axiotron, but they have disappeared from the face of the earth, and reports of their credibility were not good.

I personally have a 21″ Cintiq at home and a 12 WX portable one for the road. There are a lot of cables and such, so it is not truly portable in the sense I can use it on the airplane or the coffee shop, but it works great in hotel rooms if I need to bring work with me. I use it with a MacBook Air, and it’s great.

Invariably when I post something like this that denigrates the art uses of the iPad, I get a few folks who disagree and then post a link to some brilliant piece of art they created on their iPad. That’s great, bully for you. I could probably do an internet search and find an even better piece of art created by someone somewhere using nothing but a spork, melted crayola crayon bits and cow manure. That is also great, but why would anyone want to do that? Likely someone could assemble a car from it’s component parts using nothing but Popsicle sticks if they put their mind to it, but why would you do that when perfectly good tools are available? Artists are a resourceful bunch, and they can make art using just about anything given the time, ingenuity and determination. My point is that there are easier ways, and in the digital world using devices made to do what you are looking to do is going to be easier and better than doing it with something not designed for your task.

Thanks to Connie Nobbe 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!

Those MAD guys never tell me anything.

I just learned via Big Shiny Robot that MAD not only has an official blog where they will be posting original content, but it’s been up and running since the beginning of May! According to MAD Magazine Editor John Ficarra: “Most blogs are written by ill-informed, untalented blowhards. Given those standards, it’s a perfect vehicle for us!”

The blog is really not officially official yet, it’s in a kind of “soft launch” mode, but it is live and operational.

MAD takes another step onto the information superhighway . . . and still hasn’t been run down by some kid driving a hybrid while texting!

So, visit The Idiotical for MAD lunacy on the web!

Author Mark Arnold just released his two volume history of Cracked Magazine, If You’re Cracked You’re Happy! The books detail the history of the magazine from its beginnings in 1958 through its final days of multiple owners, changes and eventual demise.

It’s definitely not a softball celebration of the perpetual second-fiddle-to-MAD humor magazine. There are candid interviews with former editors, contributors, and staff where punches are not pulled. There is particular venom directed at those who helmed what was left of the publication when American Media International (publisher of tabloids the National Enquirer, The Weekly World News and other things) acquired it as part of a larger purchase that included the tabloid The Globe.

I did four parodies for Cracked right after the American Media takeover and it’s subsequent handing over to Weekly World News staffer and cartoonist Dick Kulpa. Being that I was a former Cracked contributor, Mark Arnold interviewed me for the book. I have a rather long two page story about my time with Cracked, which had its good and bad moments. Unfortunately, some of the accuracy of others comments concerning my time with Cracked are… Cracked. I thought I’d set the story straight here:

From If You’re Cracked You’re Happy! Part Too Page 49:

One of the major people who got his start during Kulpa’s regime was Tom Richmond, who started in 1999. Originally, he went to MAD and they gave him the cold shoulder and then he went to Cracked and then after Cracked folded, he went back to MAD and they embraced him mainly because Drucker and Torres weren’t doing as much and they needed somebody to do the parodies.

First off, I don’t think it’s very fair to say I “got my start” from Cracked. At the time I started doing work for Cracked in 1999, I had already done hundreds and hundreds of published comic book pages for NOW Comics and a four issue Marvel Comics mini-series, and was making a living as a freelance illustrator with a lot of decent clients including doing CD-ROM game art, magazine illustration, ad work and other stuff. MAD also hardly gave me ‘the cold shoulder”. They were very receptive and art Director Sam Viviano and editor Nick Meglin gave me a lot of personal feedback and encouragement. I continued to have an open dialogue with them and sent them my new work continuously even while working on projects for Cracked. Saying that I went back to MAD “after Cracked folded” is totally inaccurate. Cracked was still publishing regularly when I stopped working with them, which was a decision on my part based on both the opportunity to possibly work for MAD and the fact that I’d had it with Cracked and they way things were being done there. Finally, Drucker and Torres were still doing regular parodies for MAD at that time as well, and my doing that kind of work was far down the road if I was to do it at all, which was a big question mark.

This next bit needs point by point correction, so I will split up the single block and rebut as needed. It’s all from a quote by Cracked writer Barry Dutter:

Excerpts of quotes by Barry Dutter from If You’re Cracked You’re Happy! Part Too Page 113:

“I don’t know if Kulpa ever told you the story of Tom Richmond. Tom Richmond is a very talented artist and a great guy and he was trying to get into MAD for years.”

About six months, actually. I first showed my work to Sam in July of 1999, which other than a half-hearted showing to Nick Meglin at the NCS Reubens in San Antonio two months earlier in May, represented my first real attempt to get work from MAD. The piece I showed Sam was a parody I had written and drawn myself of the 1998 film Godzilla (the Matthew Broderick one). Later that year I showed the same piece to Dick Kulpa, who had just taken over at Cracked and was calling for submissions. He published it immediately… a parody of a two-year-old film… in Cracked #344, which was on news stands in early 2000.

They always said, “Well, we’ve already got Mort Drucker, what do we need you for because you kind of draw like Mort Drucker.”

That was part of it, but not the whole story. Yes, they said my work showed too heavy a Drucker influence, but they also said they could see I was not a Drucker copy-cat—an important distinction to them. They could see I was headed in the right direction, and wanted to see me continue to develop my own voice and revisit my work with them.

So we hired Tom Richmond and as soon as we hired him for Cracked and made him our star movie parody guy, suddenly he was good enough to work for MAD. At that point, I think Drucker was getting ready to retire and then MAD actually needed a new guy to come in. They stole him away from us.

Sorry, Barry, but this is ridiculously inaccurate. First, I was hardly their “star movie parody guy”. I did a grand total of two movie parodies for Cracked, and the last one was not even the lead feature (that went to a parody of Battlefield: Earth). Part of the reason I quit was because of what happened with that last job I did for them. It was a parody of the movie Gladiator, and I was told this would be done in color as the X-Men parody I had done in the previous issue was. Cracked has a small color section in each issue at the time, with the rest in black and white. The splash page of that parody took me forever, and I spent hours and hours coloring it up in PhotoShop. Then I was told it was being bumped to the B&W section in favor of another color piece. I honestly can’t even remember what that piece was, but that wasn’t the point. The point was I had worked my ass off on that color because they told me it was to be in color, only to find I had wasted all that time and effort. That really pissed me off… very unprofessional.

Second, my working for Cracked made zero difference to the guys at MAD. One of the things I couldn’t stand about Kulpa and Cracked was the “boy, does MAD hate us!” delusional mentality they had. I think it was the only thing they could try and hang their hat on . . . even in it’s hey-day Cracked was always second banana to MAD, and once the top talents left when Cracked‘s page rate plummeted and the professional staff left, they were not even in the same hemisphere as MAD, let alone in the same ballpark. Cracked was no threat to MAD, but for some reason Kulpa and Co. believed MAD thought they were and was worried about Cracked “making a move”. Almost every editorial comment Kulpa made in Cracked mentioned MAD and pointed out some ludicrous claim as to why Cracked was “#1″ or threatening to be. My thinking was always “why don’t you shut up and work on producing a magazine that actually does give MAD a run for its money?” It was like they thought the minute a copy of Cracked was released, some intern at MAD ran into the staff room with a copy and they all sat around pouring over it, bitching and taking notes. NOBODY AT MAD CARED ABOUT CRACKED, especially after it went downhill in a hurry with American Media as owners. They didn’t have to, they were busy producing a great product. It was only in Dick’s head that MAD paid them any attention. The only reason MAD offered me work was because my art improved considerably over the course of the 10 months between my showing it in July of 1999 and again at the Reuben in early May 2000. They didn’t “steal me” from Cracked. Lots of artists did parody work for Cracked and MAD never went after any of them. They only cared about my working for Cracked insofar as they wouldn’t offer me work as long as I was being published in Cracked at the same time. They didn’t even offer me work or promise to, they simply said they would use me at some point, but they didn’t know when. Either way, I was done with Cracked. Had I not ever gotten a chance at MAD, I do not think I would have done another job for Cracked at that page rate or after the lack of professionalism they had been demonstrating.

Third, Mort was not retiring. He and Angelo continued to do movie and TV parodies for years after I started with MAD. Neither are retired today, for that matter… why they don’t do more work for MAD is a question for them. If anything, MAD was looking for someone to do color parody work for their upcoming switch to color, but I was still a ways away from proving I was capable of doing that at a level MAD would be happy with.

Tom was a great guy and it’s every artists dream to work for MAD instead of Cracked, so he left us and Kulpa felt betrayed.

It may be Dick felt betrayed, but my leaving was as much his fault as it was my getting a possible opportunity with MAD. Cracked‘s page rate was a dismal $100 per page for finished art, and that was when they actually paid you. That rate wasn’t just for the art, by the way. I also did all the text and word balloon production, delivering them a fully print-ready page with editable text. They paid less than peanuts… more like peanut shells and dust. Kulpa also pulled stuff like that bumping my color piece to black and white, or changing the aspect ratio of the art to accommodate some odd margins when the work was designed as a full bleed. He did that on my first piece for them, making all the panels distorted (squashed horizontally without the corresponding vertical adjustment) and ruining the artwork. The thing was, if you were getting paid next to nothing the only thing you really had was seeing the work in print, and he would take that part away sometimes with this kind of stuff. He was famous for decisions like adding word balloons to what was supposed to be pantomime cartoon features and other similar things, much to the surprise of the artist when they opened the printed issue. It wasn’t a tough decision to leave Cracked, that’s for sure. The magazine was spiraling into the abyss, with work being published that was barely above fanzine quality (some of it was still good, but a lot was being done on the super-cheap by students or amateurs). At least I got paid for all my work with them . . . which is more than some people can say, I’ve heard.

For a complete and accurate story behind by brief time at Cracked, you can check out this post.

I’m not saying that Mark’s books are totally inaccurate or not worth reading… in fact I heartily recommend them if you have an interest in the Cracked story or the history of humor magazines. I can only speak for myself and what I have addressed here.