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This week’s sneak peek is the opening splash of Chapter Eight: Caricature in Illustration. In this chapter, I discuss doing caricatures for illustration jobs for publications and other kinds of clients. I go over how “narrative” is a crucial part of successful illustration work, the differences between doing caricature for caricature’s sake and doing it for illustration work, the influence of style and some of the challenges live caricaturists face in taking what they do in a live setting and applying it to publication work. This chapter is 10 pages long and contains 17 illustrations, all of which are examples of some of my illustration work.

Book delivery update: The main book shipment arrived in the U.S. last week on the 21st at the docks in Long Beach, California. Bizarrely, the shippers are estimating a delivery to me here in Minnesota on Oct. 11th. That means it took 10 days to travel all the way across the Pacific ocean from Korea to California, and it will take 20 days to get from California to Minnesota??!? Wow. Frustrating. Hopefully it will come in earlier.

As always you can place a Pre-Order here.

See other chapter sneak peeks here.

These just saw print in the latest issue of Cleveland Magazine for their “Best of Cleveland 2011 Awards” feature:

Best of Food: Luxury Sunday Buffet

Best of Entertainment: October “Dead Ride” zombie bike race

Best of Drink: The “Slap Shot”…

A fun little project. They wanted bold and colorful… Here are the pencil sketches:

This segment (which I did NOT work on) aired on the Cartoon Network’s animated MAD show recently, and if you hang out on the internet at all you will find it a total riot:

This week’s Sketch o’the Week is actor Leslie David Baker, AKA Stanley Hudson from the TV Show The Office. I have to admit I have never seen a full episode of The Office, although I have no doubt the show deserves all of it’s many accolades. In the meantime… what a face!

Last week I was privileged to be a part of the inaugural Kenosha Festival of Cartooning which took place, fittingly enough, in the lakeside town of Kenosha, Wisconsin, on September 14th-16th. Kenosha is located right between the cities of Milwaukee, Wi to the north and Chicago IL to the south, on the shores of Lake Michigan. It’s a lovely little burg (actually not so little, I was told it’s the fourth largest city in Wisconsin behind only Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay) that was primarily an auto-manufacturing town until Chrysler mostly packed up and left in the early 1990′s. Since then it’s mainly a bedroom community for Chicago-Milwaukee, although it has three universities in UW-Parkside, Carthage College and Gateway Technical College. It also has an active art community with a nice museum, and a wonderful new sculpture-garden along the harbor.

The festival was organized by Anne Hambrock, wife and right-hand-woman to creator of the syndicated comic strip The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee John Hambrock, who was one of the participating cartoonists.

Besides John and myself, the guests cartoonists were Between Friends creator Sandra Bell Lundy, creator of Pooch Cafe Paul Gilligan, editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune Scott Stantis, Disney and freelance animator Tom Bancroft, and John Read, the publisher of “Stay Tooned” magazine and the curator of “One Fine Sunday in the Funny Pages” exhibit. All the guest artists did presentations either at the Kenosha Public Museum, UW-Parkside or Carthage College. There were a few panels as well. I spoke to a couple of illustration classes at UW-Parkside, participated in a panel on “cartooning in the digital age” and did a presentation on the cartoonists/USO trips I’ve been on to Germany, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. I wasn’t able to catch all of the presentations as I had some work to get done, but the ones I saw were great and the entire festival was a lot of fun and I think a big success.

Here’s a podcast of a radio interview the group did with host Greg Berg of WGTD on the Morning Show:

The Cartoonist’s Interview

John Read’s “One Fine Sunday in the Funny Pages” exhibit, featuring the originals of 130 comic strips and cartoons that all appeared in newspapers on Sunday, April 11th, 2010, was really the star of the show. If you ever get a chance to see this show, do not miss it. It’s impressive enough to have such a large collection of original art from Sunday strips period, let alone the mind-boggling fact that they are all from the SAME SUNDAY.

Anne and John, other folks who helped with and sponsored the event and the people of Kenosha were tremendously friendly and hospitable. I had a great time visiting with them and the other cartoonists, some of whom I’d never met and all of whom I greatly enjoyed the company of. Hopefully there will be another Kenosha Festival of Cartooning in coming years… I’ll attend the next one as a “fan”!

The MAD Blog returns from a brief hiatus while we changed servers and did a whole lot of “behind the scenes” changes to the website. Most of the changes you will not notice, but the website was completely recoded from PHP to ASPX and is now much more mobile-friendly than it used to be. There are still plenty of tweaks that need to be done on that latter front, but now if you visit the website on either a mobile phone or an iPad, you will see a special version of the site that is optimized for either device. Both mobile and iPad versions use HTML5 rather than Flash, and are streamlined for a better experience that caters to the device being used. The interfaces are still a work in progress, but it’s a little step into the future…

Here’s what the mobile home page looks like:

The iPad home page still needs work, but looks basically like the main site one. There are still some issues—mostly visual. The mobile version is distorting the aspect ratio of images from the various sections, and the iPad interface needs to be redesigned a bit so it both uses less animation (too slow and unwieldy) and fits all on one screen (no need to scroll), plus some other tweaks needed.

There is also a Richmond Illustration Inc. iPad app in the works!

Q: Since I was a kid, I always wondered about Alfred E. Newman. He is one freaky looking guy, with one eye higher than the other. And that creepy smile…  He’s an icon, yet also genetics-gone-awry. Who created him, and when?  I’ve always been curious about Mad’s Cover Boy.

A: Ahhhh… who created Alfred E. Neumen? That’s a question that has no certain answer, but a lot of interesting history.

An ad for dentistry, circa 1910

Pictures like the ones above have been cropping up since MAD first adopted the image of the smiling, idiotic boy who would eventually be known as Alfred E. Neuman. The true origins of MAD‘s ‘mascot’, will probably never be known for certain. Images of the smiling, gap toothed boy have been a part of American pictorial history since at least the early 1900′s, and some evidence points to his appearance in the later 1800′s. His image, in various depictions and by various artists, has been seen in advertisements for “painless dentistry” (often with the the phrase “It Didn’t Hurt a Bit”) and medicines, political postcards belittling Roosevelt’s run for a third term in 1941, logos for cafes and soda bottles, Broadway playbills, and assorted other places. All were obviously depictions of the same kid although done by different artists… freckles, goofy grin with the missing tooth, big ears, wide head and messy red/brown hair. His catch phrase “Me- worry?” (MAD would later add the “What…”) began to appear with his image as early as 1914. Alfred’s true origins remain a mystery.

Legend has it that in 1954, MAD editor Harvey Kurtzman, while in the office of Ballantine Books editor Bernard Shir-Cliff, spotted a postcard with a picture of the “Me- Worry” kid on the bulletin board. He had seen and was intrigued by the various versions of the image he’d come across over the years. He was convinced that the boy depicted on the postcard in Shir-Cliff’s office was the original, or one of the earliest incarnations. Shir-Cliff gave Kurtzman the postcard, and Kurtzman used the image several times in the early MAD comic books.

The boy’s first appearance was not in the comic but on the cover of the MAD Reader, the first MAD reprint anthology. He first appeared in a regular issue of MAD on the cover of issue #21, which was a fake mail order catalog form, and the boy’s image was a small part of one of the fake ads. When MAD became a magazine, the boy’s face appeared in the center of a decorative border that was used in early issues, complete with his “What, Me Worry?” catch phrase. He also began to appear in cameos in various inside articles. Readers noticed, and letters began to arrive asking about the “What, Me Worry” kid. Obviously Kurtzman’s fascination with the gap-toothed simpleton’s mug was contagious. In issue #27, a full page picture of the kid was published in black and white on the inside back cover, and higher quality prints were made available for 15 cents… no word on whether they sold well or not.

So far the grinning boy had no official name. He’d been referred to as the “What, Me Worry?” kid, Melvin Coznowski and Mel Haney, but not Alfred E. Neuman. According to Kurtzman, that name was used in MAD and other E.C. comics as a gag name for various jokes unrelated to the kid’s image… it was taken from the Henry Morgan radio show, which used it as a bit character’s name. Morgan got it in turn from a hollywood musical director named Alfred Newman. Kurtzman credits readers for putting the unrelated but mentioned name to the face. He was officially referred to as “Alfred E. Neuman” in MAD #29, in a one page ad parody.

Al Feldstein took over for Kurtzman as editor as of issue #29. Feldstein and Nick Meglin, a young associate editor, recognized in Alfred the kind of mascot potential that was seen in images like the Playboy Bunny. Feldstein advertised for an illustrator to do a definitive, color illustration of Alfred E. Neuman for a cover. He found advertising illustrator and painter Norman Mingo. Mingo’s rendition of Alfred appeared on issue #30, and Alfred has appeared on nearly every cover of MAD ever since. He quickly became the face of MAD, representing MAD‘s unique brand of irreverent humor and satire. Alfred has since become a bona-fide giant part of the American zeitgeist, referred to in all manner of media and pop-culture.

Mingo’s classic original Alfred from issue #30

Unfortunately, MAD‘s runaway popularity made it and Alfred a target for lawsuits. MAD was sued several times by the late fifties by people claiming copyright infringement, saying they owned the rights to one of all those depictions of Alfred prior to MAD‘s adoption of him. In the mid sixties, one of those cases made it all the way to the Supreme court. Helen Pratt Stuff sued MAD for the use of the boy’s image, claiming her late husband had created and copyrighted the image in 1914 as part of a postcard not seen in print since 1920. Stuff had renewed the copyright in 1941, and she had successfully sued several other people who she claimed infringed on the work. MAD was able to prove in Federal Appellate Court that Stuff had both failed to protect the copyright by not contesting every known use of the image, and that the image had been in use by others prior to the filing of the copyright in 1914. All previous copyrights were invalidated by the courts. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling. Alfred remained the face of MAD.

Personally I can attest to the particular attention that is paid to Alfred to this day by the MAD editors and creative team. I was told early on that any depictions of Alfred should be based solidly on the Mingo original. Artists are not allowed to do 3/4′s or profiles of Alfred… we can only draw the front or back of his head directly. I was told not to try and ‘caricature’ Alfred or place my own stamp on his features. Very few artists have earned the right to do their own versions of Alfred… Sergio, Jack Davis, Mort Drucker, Paul Coker Jr., Sam Viviano and John Caldwell are the only ones that come to mind to me. Alfred is also never to have a word balloon or have words coming from his mouth (although the editors have broken this rule themselves many times in the magazine’s table of contents, where they have an Alfred “quote” feature). His expression can be changed in certain circumstances, but that is rare and needs editorial approval. What Alfred is doing and how he’s doing it is also very thoroughly discussed and directed. The folks at MAD are very protective of Alfred and want to make sure he doesn’t do anything out of character. Because of their careful protection of the character, Alfred remains Alfred today.

I’ve added Alfred now and again into some of my parodies as a background character. You don’t see that too often anymore except by Sergio. I should do it more often…

Alfred by me, done as an icon for this site

If you are interested in a lot more detail about Alfred’s origins and his history in MAD, I would recommend the book Completely MAD by Maria Reidelbach. It contains an entire chapter on Alfred, and includes details of some of his appearances outside MAD, his history in the magazine and lots of the early images I mentioned here. In fact, it’s a good book for the history of MAD in general. You can also check out this wikipedia entry.

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!

The MAD Blog is going on a short hiatus for this week, because I am changing host servers. Any new posts I do will be lost anyway, so I might as well take a breather until the site is up on the new host.

The next new post will be this week’s “Sunday Mailbag”. Until then behave yourselves, Internet . . . and stay out of my yard.

Q:  What advice would you have for someone thinking about getting into live caricature? I’ve been doing them for about 3 years now but still have much to learn. It started out as something I did for fun/practice and lately I have been selling them. The thing is I’m used to having a lot of time, often times days to find a person’s likeness, color, etc, drawing and redrawing until I’m satisfied. Usually in illustrator/photoshop but also paper on occasion.  How do I know when I’m ready to go live? Is there a way to get my feet wet first before diving in head first?

A: Unfortunately the only way to learn to do live caricatures is to do it. No amount of reading or practicing from photos will really prepare you for drawing live. It’s a catch 22 because you can’t get the hang of live work without drawing live, and you can’t (or rather shouldn’t) start drawing live as a professional until you get the hang of it. It’s something you have to develop an eye and instinct for, and no amount of studying will accomplish that.

With new artists that work with us at our theme park operations, I or one of my artist/managers spend about two days working with them, teaching them theory, techniques and that kind of thing. They get to draw the other new artists for practice and to try out the things they have learned. Then they spend the next week or so doing practice live drawings from volunteer theme park visitors who are willing to sit for 10 minutes or so knowing the drawing is just for practice (they don’t get to keep the drawing unless they want to pay for it, however). I estimate they have to do about 100 live caricatures over 4-5 days before their lines and the confidence in them gets to the point where they are doing a “sellable” drawing. Then they can start doing them for money and continue to develop their abilities as they move forward.

It’s easy at the theme park, because there are always people coming by who are willing to be a guinea pig for a rookie caricaturist, so there is a constant flow of volunteers for practice. On your own it’s not so easy. My suggestion is to volunteer to draw at charity events about town, at local schools at their homecoming or other events, or just set up in conjunction with some festival or fair… anywhere there is going to be a crowd of people. Even at the local park or mall will work, but it’s best to align yourself with some specific event or charity so you have an excuse for giving them away. Then get as many drawings under your belt as you can, drawing them in the way you want to do your live work. After half a dozen of these events, you will get comfortable and confident, and your instincts and eye will begin to develop.

If you want to know the absolutely best way to learn to do live caricatures, get a summer job at the nearest theme park caricature operation. As long as the owner actually spends time preparing you to draw live, you’ll have a chance to learn a few things and then 3 months of boot camp-like constant drawing develops your skills like no other experience does. By the end of a summer of theme park caricatures, your drawings will be light-years ahead of where they were at the beginning. Not everyone can just drop their lives and do something like that, but it is an ideal way to do it.

Thanks to Kyle Maloney 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!

This week’s sneak peek is the opening splash of Chapter Seven: Drawing Live Caricatures. In this chapter, I go over the challenges of doing quick-draw style caricatures from a live model(s), discussing techniques on approaching and executing the drawings, a complete step-by-step of the process, plenty of tips and things to consider like line weights, common problems and pitfalls to avoid, and finally ending with several sample drawings from photos. This chapter is 20 pages long and contains over 55 illustrations.

Book delivery update: As I wrote earlier in the week, I have received a couple of advanced copied of the actual bound book off the presses, and the rest of the books are currently somewhere on the Pacific steaming their way to Long Beach, California. Once they arrive in the US and go through customs they will begin the overland trek to me here in Minnesota. We are still on track for arrival and the subsequent shipping of pre-ordered copies sometime the second week of October. As always you can place a Pre-Order here.

See other chapter sneak peeks here.