Comic-Con bound!

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If you are one of the lucky million people who will be attending the San Diego Comic-Con this Thurs-Sun, you can get one of these limited edition, signed/numbered, 11″x 17″ prints entitled “Secret Agent Man” in one of two ways:

First, you can visit my booth (#4616) and buy one for $25. I’ll sign it for you. For that kind of money, I’ll even sign my real name.

Second, you can visit my booth and pre-order a copy of my book, The Mad Art of Caricature, and get the print for free! Whadda deal. (Actually, you can either get the free print, or get free shipping. Only at Comic-Con!)

The complete run on this print is 250 copies (plus a handful of artist’s proofs). Once they are gone, they are gone.

If I have any left over after Comic-Con, I will offer them for sale here for the same $25 plus whatever shipping is. Sorry, they won’t be given away with any orders of the book anywhere but at Comic-Con.

Q: How has technology changed how you work?

A: It has revolutionized every aspect of it, from how I get work to how I communicate with clients during the process to how I deliver the art.

I became a professional illustrator in 1990, right as the personal computer was starting to take hold in the world of publication and print. “Desktop publishing” was just starting to get serious, having been mainly a curiosity in the late 80′s and not used by professional publishers. That all changed as the years went by and the software became more powerful and easier to use. Keylining, layouts, paste-up, half-toning, stat cameras and drum scanning became things of the past. The internet also became a giant game changer for other aspects of freelancing.

Getting Work- Time was when you either physically brought in or shipped your portfolio out to a client who was interested in your work. Portfolios are things of the past now, replaced by websites which contain unlimited images and are instantly accessible 24/7. Marketing yourself has swung to using a strong web presence/virtual portfolio as a base, driving client traffic to it via a combination of the old method (direct mail, illustration sourcebooks, etc) and web-based methods (internet search engines and online “sourcebooks” like the iSpot). The versatility, unlimited volume and instantaneous/anytime access to your online portfolio makes a website the perfect showcase for an illustrator’s work.

Doing the Work- Communicating with clients during the job is faster and more efficient than ever before. Only the advent of the consumer fax machine had a bigger impact on this aspect of freelance illustration than when the internet came around. Imagine, before the fax machine, the simple step of sending the client sketches for review and direction took days of shipping back and forth, unless you lived in the same area. The fax and then the internet made it possible to live in Timbuktu, LA and be able to do a job as efficiently and timely for a client in New York City as an illustrator in Brooklyn could do. E-mailing scans, getting direction back, emailing revised sketches, etc., has become a process measure in hours no matter the distance apart. A huge difference.

You would think doing the work digitally wold be the biggest revolution that the advances in technology have afforded, but that is probably the least important. Yes, it’s easier to do certain things digitally than in traditional media, but art is still art and artists make tools conform to their demands not the other way around. There has been no increase in the skill or talent of illustrators because many use a stylus and digital tablet instead of a paintbrush and canvas. The biggest revolution here is that the end results can be revised and reworked much more easily, and if it is already in digital format even the simple process of having it scanned is eliminated.

Delivering the Work- Digital delivery of artwork has replaced the old method of delivering/shipping physical artwork that then needed to be color separated before being stripped into the final print. That saves days of time at the back end, extends deadlines and makes corrections easy and nearly instantaneous. I not upload a CMYK TIFF file of my artwork to some FTP site and the clients retrieves it, plops it into their layout in Quark or InDesign, and it’s off to the races.

More than anything, at least for me, the advances in technology means I can live here in the suburbs of Minneapolis, MN and do work for clients on either coast or anywhere in the world without compromise.

Thanks to Adam Nuñez 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!

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Here’s another peek at part of my upcoming book The Mad Art of Caricature!. This is the opening two pages of the last chapter, “Caricatures and MAD“, where I go into detail about how caricature specifically applies to MAD parodies, some of the unique challenges the magazine demands and a run-through of a MAD job from script to finished art complete with notes on the thought processes and concerns at each stage. DC Entertainment gave me permission to reproduce the MAD artwork, BTW.

Update on the book schedule: Good news and bad news. The good news is I am still planning on debuting ordering the book at Comic-Con as well as web orders next week on July 21st. The bad news is that this will considered a pre-order at this time, because the actual book shipping date has been pushed back until September. I will still have about 40 pages of the book to place illustrations in, write captions for, and get that new content copy-edited, before it can go to press. That will all be done after I get back from San Diego, and the book will then go to press. I am THAT close.

There will be four different ordering options:

• Signed book: $24.95
• Signed book plus sketch of Alfred: $39.95
• Signed book plus random original caricature art from the book: $49.95
• Signed book plus sketch of Alfred and random original caricature art: $59.95

Shipping & handling will be $5.00 in the U.S., $10.00 for Canada and $15 for any other country via US Postal International Flat Rate.

The Alfred sketch is similar to what I did in the Bo book, only bigger. The “random piece of original caricature art” would be one of about 100 or so celebrity caricatures from the book. Mostly they are pencil drawings. A few are inked and other media. They range from 5 x 5 inches to 11 x 14, and some are oddly shaped due to being cut out of my sketchbook. Many are from my “Sketch o’the Week” feature here on the Blog, which I scanned in, cleaned up a bit and then added digital gray washes to for publication. The drawings will be the original sketches… no washes.

Those who order at my Comic-Con booth will be getting a special Comic-Con deal: their choice of free domestic shipping or a free signed-and-numbered print I will be selling for $25.00 otherwise.

Right now shipping looks to happen in mid to late September, which is when the printed books should arrive.

You can pre-order The Mad Art of Caricature! here. Shipping to commence immediately after printed books arrive.

For those who need a MAD fix before the next issue comes out in August, here’s something to tide you over—a special issue collecting just about all the mockery and ridicule MAD lavished on the Harry Potter books and film franchise over the years. It’s 80 pages of spell-binding “Humorous Stupidous”, including the parodies of all eight movies:

• “Harry Plodder and the Sorry-Ass Story” (artist: Mort Drucker), MAD #412
• “Harry Plodder and the Lamest of Sequels” (artist: Tom Richmond), MAD #424
• “Harry Plodder and the Pre-Teen Nerds are Actin’ Bad” (artist: Hermann Mejia), MAD #443
• “Harry Plodder Has Got to Retire” (artist: Hermann Mejia), MAD #460
• “Harry Plodder and the Torture of the Fan Base” (artist: Tom Richmond), MAD #480
• “Harry Plodder is a Hot-Blooded Putz” (artist: Hermann Mejia), MAD #501
• “Harry Plodder and It’s Dreadful What Follows” (artist: Tom Richmond), MAD #507
• “Harry Plodder is Definitely Halted- Adieu!” (artist: Hermann Mejia)

All eight parodies were written by Desmond Devlin.

That last one is not reprinted from an earlier issue, but is an all-new, never-seen-before spoof of the latest (and last… at least until they do a “reboot” in about 10 years) Harry Potter film with seven pages of Hermann’s incomparable art. I did the art on three of the eight… I personally can see a real progression in my artistic development from “Harry Plodder and the Lamest of Sequels” done in 2002 and “Harry Plodder and It’s Dreadful What Follows” done in 2010.

There is also quite a bit of additonal spoofery including riffs on the books themselves, an Al Jaffee “Harry Potter” fold-in, Sergio Aragonés‘ “A MAD Look at Harry Potter”, and other fun stuff. It’s in comic book shops now and on news stands July 19th.

So what are you waiting for, clod? Go out and buy a furshlugginer copy, already!

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I’m cheating this week and posting this digital painting instead of a “Sketch o’the Week”. A few people saw this as part of my The Mad Art of Caricature book cover and asked about it. I did it specifically for the book cover, based on an earlier SoTW. It’s your basic Photoshop job.

As a big Batman fan, I found this custom Lego model of the Batcave to be mind-blowing. Creator Alex Schranz used approximately 9,000 Legos, and incorporated a neon lamp for the lighting effects. It’s “68 bricks high”, which is a little over 25 inches.

I just don’t get Legos. I understand for some people it’s nearly a cult, and there is a lot of creativity and problem solving involved to build something out of these plastic bricks… but no matter how good you are with them, whatever you end up with still looks like it’s made out of Legos.

When the gang at MAD decided to start an official blog called The Idiotical, they weren’t fooling around.

Since it’s launch last month, the blog has consistently been updated with daily (and often multiple daily) bits of bloggy goodness including plenty of original material as well as some classic MAD stuff that has some sudden relevance (like the MAD parody of Columbo after the passing of Peter Falk), and other surprises. They’ve creatively illustrated new humor content with some existing MAD art, done a bunch of all-new stuff, sprinkled in some looks at interesting things like the Spy vs. Spy 50th Anniversary art and custom figurines, and are even posting some preliminary art and pencil sketches of current and upcoming features in the magazine. In short, they are making it into a place to visit daily for a couple of laughs.

If you haven’t visited it yet, check out The Idiotical.

Uh oh… looks like the mailbag is empty!

Well, it’s not really completely empty, but the only ones I’ve got right now are of the “can you teach me how to cross-hatch?” or “how do you exaggerate people in caricature?” which aren’t really questions so much as they are requests for long and involved tutorials, and are needing a lot more time than I can give for this weekly feature. A good Sunday Mailbag question can certainly involve an image or two and a somewhat long answer, but anything like a tutorial is a different matter.

So, if you have questions concerning cartooning, illustration, freelancing, MAD Magazine or other similar subjects I’ll be happy to answer them as best I can. E-mail me your questions and I’ll try and answer them here!

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In the next few weeks I’ll be posting a few sneak peeks at some of the pages in my upcoming book The Mad Art of Caricature!, ordering of which will debut at Comic Con in less than two weeks! Here is the opening of chapter one. The chapter consists of 12 pages and contains over 25 illustrations.

Chapter one includes my definition of caricature, what I think a good caricature needs to accomplish to be successful, what makes a bad caricature and how to avoid it, and the process of developing your “eye” for caricature.

You can pre-order The Mad Art of Caricature! here. Shipping to commence immediately after printed books arrive in late September.