I’m in the lovely town of Kenosha, Wisconsin, right now taking part in the first annual Kenosha Festival of Cartooning. As you can see from the poster above, there is a pretty terrific line-up of cartoonists speaking and participating in panel discussions over the three-day festival. Things actually kicked off yesterday, but I did not participate in any of the public presentations. I spoke to an illustration class at Carthage College. Some of the students didn’t even fall asleep . . . or maybe they just didn’t snore. Anyway it was fun and we did a little drawing at the end.

Today I will be part of a radio interview with all the cartoonists with host Greg Berg of WGTD on the Morning Show, and tomorrow I will be part of a panel at 1:00 pm called “Marketing Yourself As An Artist In The Digital Age“  with Tom Bancroft, Sandra Bell Lundy, John Hambrock, and Paul Gilligan at the Carthage Student Center Auditorium. Then at 7:00 I will be doing a presentation entitled “Cartooning For The Troops”  at the Kenosha Public Museum, where I will share pictures and stories about being a part of some USO cartoonist tours to Germany, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. These and most other functions for the festival are free and open to the public.

John’s wife Anne Hambrock has done an outstanding job putting this festival together. Kudo’s to her and the generous hospitality of the people of Kenosha. They must know I am a Green Bay Packer fan.

This week is another of the sketches I did for my “Secret Agent Man” limited edition print (which are still available! ), this one of Timothy Dalton.

I thought I was being very clever when I did the art for that print. I wanted to make sure I did something that would be appreciated by even hardcore Bond fans. I wanted the poses, attitudes, accessories, etc. to be spot on. I underestimated how hardcore those fans can be, however. I was taken to task over several blunders, like the ruffles on George Lazenby’s shirt being horizontal, not vertical. The worst offense was that I put them all in tuxedos with “wing-tip” shirt collars . . . apparently James Bond wouldn’t be caught dead in a wing-tip collar. Oh, well. Can’t win ‘em all.

About two weeks ago I posted these images briefly because the Cartoon Network’s website listed the “Konan the Kardashian” segment I worked on as airing on Aug. 29th. It turned out that was wrong and it did not air in that episode, but did air last night. So, here again are a few images from that segment (plus one new one):

Fun episode to work on… but I always say that, don’t I?

Late last week I received three advance copies of my book, The Mad Art of Caricature! from the printer via Fed Ex. These are not proofs but actual, bound press copies from the full print run, and are exactly the same as the rest of the books. The printer sends these out in advance of the shipment of the rest of the books, so the publisher can get a look at the final product. The above is a short video of me paging through one of these copies.

I am quite pleased with the printing, especially given the trouble we had with the first set of proofs and the values/color of the illustrations within. The color is great, particularly on the glossy stock. The book is heavy, weighing in at 1lb 9 oz. I would be hard pressed to ask for a better end result as far as the printing goes.

Enjoy the quick look above, and as always you can place an order at www.deadlinedemon.com.

Q: When did you publish your first artwork? And where? When did you publish your first artwork in Mad magazine?

A: My first really published work, not including stuff for local restaurants or ads for realtors or similar, was for the comic book Married… with Children, for NOW Comics (as to how it all came about, you can read about my NOW Comics story here). I did the pencils for Vol. 1, issue #7:

This comic book job was a disaster. Originally the story was supposed to be about Al Bundy getting mixed up in some kind of caper with an “Elvira” type character. But the people at Columbia Television, who approved all the comics before publishing, objected to this either because it was too racy or, more likely, because they didn’t want a possible lawsuit from the Elvia people. Regardless, somehow NOW had the Elvira character replaced with a GAME SHOW HOST (not kidding) and changed the story and some of the environments to suit. Another artist did the new character art. Columbia also thought I made Peggy’s nose too big, so NOW had someone white out her nose and draw this weird looking line in it’s place with what looked like a very well used Sharpie. I had no idea about any of this until I excitedly got a copy in a comic book shop about 6 weeks after I’d turned in the pencils. I was devastated… half my artwork had been replaced.

Regarding the art I did on that job for NOW in 1990- it was awful. Not just sort of bad, but truly terrible. I got that job because I could do decent caricatures and no one with any real credibility in the comics world would work for NOW because they had a horrible reputation about paying badly, late or not at all. My storytelling and drawing were terrible—I was making it up as I went along. That didn’t stop NOW from (mostly) paying me to draw about 600 pages over the next 4 years, and towards the end I was starting to get the hang of it.

My first published magazine illustration was for Mpls/St. Paul Magazine circa in 1991. I can’t really remember the exact details, and I have no tearsheets of that job, nor any other record of it. All I have is an old scan of the original:

I remember I got a call to do it because one of the art directors on the magazine was a former classmate of mine from art school, and they needed a caricature of a local Minnesota politician who had gotten involved in a scandal with some young interns or something. I did the piece in a combination of airbrush, colored pencil and watercolor. This was also some pretty rough work.

My first published job for MAD was a piece called “Gadgets to Make your Home Theater More Like the Movies” written by Dick DeBartolo.

It appeared in MAD #399, Nov. 2000. That issue, BTW, was really the LAST completely old school MAD, all in black and white on the old, crappy paper, just like many hundreds of issues before it. Starting with #400, each issue had some form of color in it. #400 was a special issue loaded with color on the slicker paper. #401 had half the issue on the old stock in B&W, and the other half on the new stock in color. #402 was all on new stock, although about 1/3 of the content was still in B&W. #403 was the official beginning of the full-color MAD and, of course, the advertising.

So, there you have it. My sorted sordid firsts in publishing.

If you want to know the first time I ever got paid to do a piece of art, it was to paint a giant copy of the cover of the album Van Halen II for a high school classmate named Lori, who commissioned me for the unheard of rate of $60. I painted it on the back of an 8′x8′ piece of kitchen floor linoleum, and I had to deliver it on my ten speed bike on the other side of La Crescent, MN. I was 15.

Thanks to Marcel Recasens 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!

Over at The Idiotical, the Official Blog of MAD Magazine (this is a very UNofficial blog), they have posted the story behind the cover of MAD #411, otherwise known as the 9-11 cover. The tell the tale of how this:

replaced this:

at the very last minute, following the events of September 11th, 2001. MAD very correctly decided that, despite the innocent marathon scene, having a cover depicting a crowd of people running through the streets of New York with Alfred jumping a dead body would probably be taken in a different way after September 11th. I won’t recount the entire tale here, you can read about it on The Idiotical.

I did learn two new things from MAD‘s post. First, I didn’t know that associate art director Nadina Simon came up with and did that cover image. That is awesome, and so is Nadina. Second, that it was the printer that first questioned if they really wanted to go with that cover.

One thing they did not talk about in the post, was that after #411 came out I found untrimmed and unbound prints of that original cover, presumably taken from the printer by some unscrupulous employee before they were destroyed, showing up on eBay. I alerted the MAD folks and they and the printer dealt with it. I’m not sure how but I think they might have sent Sergio over to the seller’s house to go marginal on him.

Click for a closer look…

This week’s sneak peek is the opening splash of Chapter Six: Beyond the Face. In this chapter, I discuss how other aspects of a person’s figure, physicality, and “presence”, contribute to their caricature. I go over drawing and caricaturing the shoulders and neck in detail, talk about posture, have an expanded “drawing hands” section, and examine the differences in how you treat men and women in caricature, complete with drawing tips and examples. This chapter is 20 pages long and contains over 60 illustrations.

Book delivery update: The book printing is complete and finished copies are now in the shipping process from Korea to the U.S., scheduled to leave port from Pusan on Monday. It’s just a matter of time now! We are still on track for arrival and the subsequent shipping of pre-ordered copies sometime the first week of October. As always you can place a Pre-Order here.

See other chapter sneak peeks here.

One other thing: Of the 106 pieces of original caricature art sketches from the book that are part of the “Original Art” option on the order page, I now have exactly 20 left. So, If that is something you are thinking about ordering, it might be wise to do so soon.

Here’s a set of spots I did recently for Penthouse Magazine, illustrating a story about things people are reluctant or hate to do, or are no good at:

Giving a wedding toast

Telling your girlfriend or boyfriend they have bad breath…

Taking a drunk friend’s keys

Visiting a terminally ill friend…

The story also gives advice on how to do some of these harder things. In most cases I illustrated how NOT to do it.

Kind of busy again this week so I am going to post another of the more finished sketches I did for my “Secret Agent Man” print. This one is of the most recent actor to play James Bond in the movies, Daniel Craig. In the print, I decided to lose the dripping blood and the pain “stars” because I thought that was a little too much.

I’ve been asked why I made Craig look so beat up. I think the answer should be obvious. While all the movie Bonds occasionally took a beating, Craig is one of the few who actually ended up looking like he was in a fight. Plus his and the film’s approach to Bond is a much more gritty and realistic one compared to the pseudo-superhero he was in many of the other films. In fact, having read the original books by Ian Fleming a few times, I think Craig’s Bond might be the closest to Fleming’s original character than any of the others.

Incidentally, the “Secret Agent Man” print art does appear in my book, The Mad Art of Caricature!, which makes this sketch one of the 106 that are being sold as the “original sketch from book” option when you pre-order a copy. Except please don’t request a particular sketch… these are being chosen totally at random. I am actually down to just little over 20 pieces of original art from the book left, so if you are thinking about pre-ordering the book with that option, don’t wait too much longer!

There is a short piece in this month’s issue of SI Kids featuring a few spot illustrations I did. The article is about different types of coaches, and drew a cartoon character version of each “type” showing some of their pro and con attributes. We loosely based some of them on real coaches, but not in their facial features. Things like clothing, accessories and demeanor might remind you of certain real coaches in pro or college sports. None of them are even remotely caricatures of real people, though.  Here are the final results . . . I think the details of the type is pretty self-explanatory between the illustration and the name:

The General

The Geek

The Yeller

The Old Guy

The Kid

The Buddy

And here are the pencil roughs of each: