Regarding Bil Keane‘s passing… they say you measure your life by how many other people’s lives you influence. If so, Bil led as influential a life as one can. Yesterday I was called and interviewed by both the New York Times and NPR about Bil (in my capacity as current president of the National Cartoonists Society), and have heard and read about his passing in at least two dozen places in the last 24 hours. He was certainly one of the most beloved cartoonists both by the public and within the industry, ever.

The image above is an original Family Circus Sunday that was given me recently by Jeff Keane, who has been doing the strip for a long time now. Jeff agonized over finding a strip that I’d like the subject of, and when he came across this one with Billy dressed as Batman, he stopped agonizing. It’s one of my favorite originals I own. Thank. Jeff… and thanks Bil for the decades of smiles. Want an example of the power of great cartooning? As a parent, there was never a time when I asked my kids who was responsible for leaving the TV on or messing up the living room and they responded “Not Me!” that I didn’t look around for that ghostly scapegoat.

The cartooning world lost a true giant yesterday. Bil Keane, creator of The Family Circus, has passed away at age 89.

I’ll never forget the first time I met Bil…

In 1999, Anna and I attended our very first Reuben awards in San Antonio. I was a new member and basically knew no one, so we walked about wide-eyed seeing all the legendary cartoonists milling about like Charles Schulz, Jack Davis, Jeff MacNelly and many more. One of those legends I knew and admired the most was Bil Keane. “The Family Circus” was a staple in our home growing up, and while my cartooning tastes took a bit of a more “MAD” direction as I grew up, I always had a soft spot for that feature. Not knowing what Bil looked like, I had someone point him out to me.

“Bil always emcees the Reuben ceremony,” I was told. “You’ll get to see him do that tonight.”

Knowing that “The Family Circus” was a very sweet and gentle strip, I mentioned I was surprised they didn’t have an emcee with a little more of a sharp-tongued approach.

“Just wait. You haven’t seen Bil emcee yet,” they replied.

I sure hadn’t. I was laughing so hard throughout the awards I barely recall who won what. To say Bil Keane was only quick-witted is like saying Olympic superstar Usian Bolt is just “sort-of fast”. He was one of the funniest guys I’d ever met. Anna and I shared a shuttle with he and his wife Thel from the airport to the site of the 2002 Reubens in Cancun, and enjoyed their company and stories of how they met and about their wonderful family. One of the things we talked about was Hawai’i, where Anna and I were planning a trip. Bil told us about a hotel he and Thel always stayed at on Waikiki, and when Anna and I visited Honolulu we spend a few nights in that same hotel. Upon check in, the bellman asked what I did for a living as he was checking in our bags. When I told him I was a cartoonist, he said they had a regular guest who was a cartoonist they all knew and thought was a great guy… that was, of course, Bil Keane.

His son Jeff is a good friend of mine, and we have spent a lot of time together on USO cartoonist tours as well as working on the NCS board, where he was president preceding me. I got to hear a lot of great stories about his dad, who also did cartoonist USO tours to Vietnam during that conflict.

Bil was one of the true legends of cartooning. An active member of the National Cartoonists Society, Bil served as president from 1981-1983 as well as emceeing the Reubens for many, many years. It was a true honor and privilege to have been able to meet him and get to know him a bit. He will be sorely missed, and my heart goes out to Jeff and his wife Melinda, their kids and their entire family.

Few cartoonists left a legacy like Bil did. We were all lucky to have enjoyed his talent for so many years.

This week’s sketch is done in honor of Number One Son Thomas, 15, who thinks Zooey Deschanel is “the greatest person in the world”… Translation: “She’s hot.”

…so says MAD Magazine via their official blog, The Idiotical. They also posted this some weeks back:

MAD isn’t exactly know for their subtlety.

By the way, if you haven’t been regularly visiting The Idiotical, you are missing out. The guys at MAD have been serious about updating this thing, and with multiple posts a day it shows. Some posts use previous content from the magazine that has some up-to-the-minute current relevance, some of it is wholly original content, and some are sneak peeks of upcoming features in the magazine. All of it is funny. Sometimes brutal, but funny. Make it a daily stop for some much-needed chuckles.

Clicky to Embiggen…

Currently on the drawing board:

• MAD Job- for #513. Acutally just wrapped that up today. Something for the MAD 20.
• Workplace posters- Not one, not two, but three of these all at once! Speaking of these jobs, artwork above was for a recent one.
• Jeff Dunhan Illustration- Something you should be seeing on T-Shirts and merchandise from Jeff soon… rush job.

That’s actually it right now. Kind of quiet on the drawing board all of a sudden…

Q: I know you do a lot of different kinds of humorous illustration, but you are primarily known for doing caricatures. What first got you interested in drawing caricatures? Was it something you started doing as a kid, or did you discover it later?

A: I started typing out an answer to this one, then realized that the following excerpt from the preface of my book said it better, and I’d already written it!…

From The Mad Art of Caricature!:

When I was a young man, drawing caricatures for a living never struck me as something I was interested in doing. I never opened a magazine and saw a great caricature of some celebrity and realized in a forehead-slapping moment of epiphany, that’s what I want to do! In fact, I wasn’t even aware caricature was an art form. The whole thing kind of snuck up on me, and the people to blame are Mr. Chilson and the Fasen Brothers.

Mr. Chilson was my seventh-grade art teacher at Longfellow Middle School in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1979. The school was so small that we had our art classes in the same room they held the shop classes, sitting on barstools at tall worktables, while another grade’s art class was going on at the same time on the other side of the large workshop. One day Mr. Chilson started a lesson on caricature. I was sitting in the back, not paying attention, as usual, and drawing in my notebook. While Mr. Chilson was explaining what a caricature was, I was drawing one of the other teacher, who was only a few dozen feet away from me . . . except I didn’t know it was a caricature. To me, it was just my drawing of the other teacher.

“RICHMOND!” Mr. Chilson yelled in my ear. “You are in THIS class, not THAT one!” He was standing next to me. One of the drawbacks of being absorbed in a drawing at the expense of paying attention in class was that I never heard the teacher coming. That resulted in many startling yells in my ear. He snatched away the notebook, glanced at it, glared at me, and then instructed me loudly in front of everybody to see him after class as he returned to the front of the room with my confiscated notebook in hand. Resigned to getting detention at the least, I meekly hung back and watched my schoolmates shuffle out following the bell.

Instead of giving me detention, Mr. Chilson sent me around the school over the next several days to draw about two dozen of the teachers, and then he displayed my work in the glass case at the top of the stairs right in front of the art/shop room.  I guess he liked my drawing of the other art teacher—or maybe he hated the guy and sent me around to draw all the other teachers he disliked so they could be ridiculed publicly and I’d be to blame. I was never sure. Regardless, that was my first exposure to the art of caricature, as well as my first understanding of what caricature was.

I then promptly forgot all about caricature for about six years.

In 1985, I was at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, attempting to study commercial art. It had been a year or so, and I’d had only one art class as they were impossible to get into as an underclassman, and the one I was “lucky” enough to get into was a complete waste of time. “Alternative Sculpture” was one of those art classes that was 99% pretension and 1% actual, useful art instruction. I was skipping it one day, hanging about the commons area, when I spied a flyer on the wall asking “Can You Draw?” It ended up being an ad seeking caricature artists to draw at the local amusement park for a company called Fasen Arts. I suddenly recalled Mr. Chilson and my seventh-grade show and thought this would make a great summer job. I secured an interview and dragged an overflowing folder of drawings I’d done from some magazine photos with me to meet with Steve Fasen, an accomplished caricaturist and the owner of Fasen Arts.

I didn’t get the job.

Some weeks later Steve called and offered me a spot at a different theme park near Chicago, about 450 miles southeast. I was later told this opportunity opened up only because someone else had backed out, but that hardly would have mattered to me at the time—nor does it matter in hindsight. I packed up my things and moved to Waukegan, Illinios, where I spent the summer drawing caricatures with a group of very talented artists headed by Steve’s brother Gary, a brilliant caricaturist and illustrator. There I learned a great deal about drawing and cartooning, discovered the realities of making a living as an artist, renewed my appreciation for a certain magazine that would later become an important part of my life, and, most importantly, fell in love with the art of caricature completely and for good.

That pretty much sums it up, except to add that I continued to draw caricatures all through grade and high school, although I wasn’t really conscious what I was doing was “caricature’. I was just drawing funny pictures of my friends and teachers. I did a series of comic stories casting myself and my high school friends as infants but imbuing them with our current personality traits and faults. Those were caricatures, in a way. Lord knows I got in trouble a few times for drawing my teachers in less-than-complimentary ways. Still, I was pretty dense and never put the term “caricature” and what I was doing together until that job at Six Flags.

Thanks to Rich Griffin 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!

Photo by David Folkman via NewsfromME.com

Back on Oct. 29th, The Comic Art Professional Society (CAPS) had their annual gala dinner where they honor someone from the comic art world… this year’s honoree was the indefatigable and unfoldable Al Jaffee. I was not there to attend (gotta make it to one of those one of these days), so go to Mark Evanier‘s excellent blog to read all about it.

Art by John Martz

It’s that time of year again! Time for all your college students interested in cartooning to send in your submissions for the Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship! :

Jay Kennedy Scholarship

The annual Jay Kennedy Scholarship, in memory of the late King Features editor, was funded by an initial $100,000 grant from the Hearst Foundation/King Features Syndicate and additional generous donations from Jerry Scott, Jim Borgman, Patrick McDonnell and many other prominent cartoonists. Submissions are adjudicated by a panel of top cartoonists and an award is given to the best college cartoonist. The recipient is feted at the annual NCS Reuben Awards Convention attended by many of the world’s leading cartoonists.

Applicants must be students at a 4-year college in the United States, Canada or Mexico who will be a Junior or Senior during the 2012-2013 academic year. Applicants do not have to be art majors to be eligible for this scholarship.

Along with a completed entry form, applicants are required to send 8 samples of their own cartooning artwork (copies only); noting if and where the work has been published, either in print or on the web. (See application for details.) DO NOT send original artwork.

DEADLINE: ENTRIES MUST BE POSTMARKED BY DECEMBER 15, 2011

The applications will be judged by the National Cartoonists Society Foundation (NCSF) and the number of scholarships given out and their amounts will be at the discretion of the NCSF.

If you know of any college students who are cartoonists, whether that is their field of study or not, please let them know about this opportunity. The Jay Kennedy Scholarship has helped several talented artists pay for their schooling, and the more who apply, the merrier! Click here for more info!

Getting caught up on posts… been busy.

This week’s SotW subject is local Minnesota embarrassment Kris Kardashian Humphries. Humphries grew up in the Hopkins area and played college basketball at the University of Minnesota. He quit after his freshman year and went pro, where he has enjoyed a thoroughly mediocre career so far. I hope he enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame (okay, 72 days) being married to Kim Kardashian, as he will forever be more famous for that than for playing basketball.

It’s November, and it looks like I am the featured “Drawing Board of the Month” at The Cartoonist Studio website… they must be running out of real cartoonists to feature.

The Cartoonist Studio is a fun website designed to connect cartoonists with their fans online, showing interested readers a glimpse at the artists, their work spaces, their processes, and more. They also sell stuff, have auctions of original work, and last year conducted a “So You Wanna Be a Cartoonist” contest where the winner received a development deal from Creators Syndicate. Looks like they will be doing the same again this year, with Universal Uclick co-sponsoring the contest.

From their “About Us” page:

We are all cartoonists….duh!

Well, I suppose we can give you more information than that…

We created The Cartoonist Studio as a way to bring us closer to the fans who enjoy our funny little drawings–those characters and scribbles that make our cartoons come to life. They live, breathe and occupy a place in our lives…kinda like our children or our pets or our alter egos (except the last one doesn’t need feeding or bathing). Our fans know our cartoons and now we want them to know us. In other words, The Cartoonist Studio provides one-stop shopping to get personally involved with all your favorite cartoonists and cartoons.

We want to connect with you and get feedback from you. Share your thoughts about our characters, our story lines and our humor. After all, you are the ones who make our world possible…and now we have a place to welcome you to!

Please, come visit us in our studios as the photographs you see here are really our studios. Hope you don’t mind the confusion, clutter and chaos because that’s the way it is and we’re not cleaning it up just for you.

There are currently 22 cartoonists on The Cartoonist Studio, and it is very interesting to visit their virtual “studios” to see where and how they work.

… now if you’ll excuse me, I have to clean up my virtual studio.