Q: Hey, Tom, I’m a daily reader of your blog and would like to hear you talk about getting started, i.e. your first steps into the cartooning field.

A: I can certainly tell the story of how I got started in cartoning but it wouldn’t apply much to today’s market. Circumstances change with time and what was true then is no longer true now, just as breaking into the cartooning field in the 60’s was different than it was when I did it in the late 80’s.

I went to college at a small art school called the School of Associated Arts in St. Paul, MN, where there was zero cartooning in the curriculum. I was on my own when it came to learning cartooning or incorporating it into my career plans. What made an eventual cartooning career possible for me was getting a summer job doing caricatures at a theme park near Chicago, IL. I worked with some very talented cartoonists and artists, including illustrator Gary Fasen, current DC Comic’s superstar Doug Mahnke, WB animator and children’s book illustrator Dave Kamish and many others who went on to have successful art and cartooning careers. I learned a lot about cartooning, caricature and humorous illustration working with those artists and applied what I’d learned to my schooling where and when I could. My first freelance cartooning job was doing caricatures for a morning radio show advertisement that I did for one of my college professors who had a design firm.

In 1989 went on to manage a caricature art concession at Six Flags, Atlanta for Fasen Arts, and while there I “broke” into cartooning via a comic book company called NOW Comics. One of my fellow caricaturists, Chuck Senties, had gotten a job drawing a title called Ralph Snart for NOW, and had let me know they were looking for an artist to draw another title for them called Married… With Children. I sent them some sample pages and became the penciler on the book.

That was really my first big break in the field, but it was a combination of luck and circumstance. The luck was hearing about it and applying at a time they were looking for an artist capable of humorous comic book work and caricature. The circumstances which made it possible were several. First, in 1989-90 the comic book field was in a golden age where comic books sold by the millions of copies and almost anybody who could breathe and draw even a little bit could get a job in comics. Second, NOW Comics had a bad reputation for not paying or paying late, and no one with any real experience wanted to work for them. Third, in the meantime I opened up my own caricature concession operation at Underground Atlanta and had that and my Six Flags jobs to pay my bills so I did not care much about that second point.

Anna and I, and our baby daughter, moved back to Minnesota in 1990 and I opened up another caricature concession at a small theme park called Valleyfair. I was still doing Married… with Children and did a miniseries for Marvel called The Coneheads as well, and I also started to pursue other freelance work by showing my portfolio around the Twin Cities and talking to other illustrators. I got a few local jobs for publications like Minneapolis/ St. Paul and Twin Cities Business magazines, but quickly realized the local market was too small for me to make a go of it with freelance. I started advertising in a source book called the Directory of Illustration, a nationally distributed illustration ad book. I didn’t get many clients from that ad, but I did get a few that gave me a lot of work, chiefly among them Business and Legal Reports where I did several comic book style booklets for school distribution on anti-smoking/drinking/drugs and similar themes. This client wanted digital files so I was forced to learn to use the computer for my work, something I had not ever done before. That would prove important.

Each year I continued to build my freelance clientèle slowly, adding a few new clients each year and gradually building my income from freelance up over time. I also added caricature operations in Missouri, Louisiana and Massachusetts along the way. A few jobs doing the images for some humorous CD-ROM games from Parotty Interactive and Hasbro got me deeper into the computer illustration end of things. Some more high-profile clients like Time Digital, National Geographic World, Detour, General Mills, Broadcasting and Cable and several pro sports team magazines helped increase my visibility. Continued advertisement in the DOI source book would get me a few new jobs and one or two new clients a year.

Eventually I got serious about working for MAD, and pursued that for about a year before they acquiesced and gave me a few assignments. It’s hard to believe but it was eight years ago next month I got my first MAD assignment. Since then MAD has been a steady client (among others) and many other clients have come and gone. Freelancing is both a blessing and a curse.

Two things were crucial in giving me the means and tools to eventually make a living as a freelance cartoonist / illustrator.

The first was the caricature art concession businesses I at first worked for and then my own that I started up and ran. That experience at first exposed me to some talented and knowledgeable cartoonists from whom I learned a great deal and through that job I developed my caricature and cartooning skills far moe than i would have in art school. Opening my own businesses doing caricatures allowed me the financial freedom to pursue my freelance career at my own pace, not having to worry about house or car payments, or buying shoes for my kids. Without that, I’d have had to resort to a “day job” and likely would never have been able to keep at the freelance thing long enough to make a go of it.

The second element was my being forced to incorporate the computer into my work. Fortunately I was fascinated enough with the computer to take the time and put the thought into how to make the computer work for me in order to accomplish what I needed to with my commercial work. There is no question that the coloring techniques and digital delivery that is a part of most of my work today got me more than a few jobs over the years.

Thanks to Philip Wiley or 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.

I’ve written a lot about the latest incarnation of the misguided Orphan Works Act, so rather than rehash any of it I’ll just point to this post for the facts and serious issues the bill raises to creative professionals. Briefly, my stand on the bill is that it has serious implications for those who make a living creating new creative works for publication and commercial use, and that the supposed purpose of the bill (to preserve work that is truly “orphaned” so it is not lost in time) would be better served with new definitions and laws for “fair use” of a copyrighted work.

I was talking with illustrator great C.F. Payne about the bill the other day, and he brought up another problem with the bill I had not considered. Chris is a tireless advocate for professional illustrators and their rights, and he knows of what he speaks. He mentioned a potential serious issue wherein an artist may find himself being sued for “infringing: on his own artwork! H.R. 5889 contains the following clause concerning “derivative works”:

‘‘(f) COPYRIGHT FOR DERIVATIVE WORKS AND COMPILATIONS.—Notwithstanding section 103(a), an infringer who qualifies for the limitation on remedies afforded by this section with respect to the use of a copyrighted work shall not be denied copyright protection in a compilation or derivative work on the basis that such compilation or derivative work employs preexisting material that has been used unlawfully under this section.’’.

What this means: Anyone who goes through the process of declaring a work “orphaned” (i.e. they could not find the author via a “reasonably diligent search”) can then use the artwork as a basis for a “new work” known as a derivative work. They can then copyright the new work and sell it to whomever they like. Even IF the artist comes forward and says they were the original creators of the work the new work was derived from, they are powerless to dissolve the copyright of the derivative work’s creator.

Here’s a scenario: An unscrupulous stock art company employs a dozen researchers who scour old magazines, publications and the internet looking for work without immediate identification. They go through the process of finding it “orphaned” (a process that is still vague and ambiguous). They then hire a group of artists to create derivative works in the same style, changing it just enough to be legally called “derivative” (only 10% according to precedent). Now they copyright it and have a large body of stock illustration that they sell to publishers at cheap prices, damaging creator’s livelihoods and dampening the creation of new works. Under this scenario, I could sell someone the rights to use my caricature of Snoop Dogg for an article and find myself at the wrong end of a lawsuit by a stock house claiming I infringed on their copyright, as they have a rip off version of that same caricature done by a copycat artist and copyrighted in their stock art collection. As long as they could show they performed the steps to find that caricature orphaned, I can do nothing under the language of this bill even if it’s proven it was my work used as the basis of their derivative. I can open up a magazine at any time to see that rip off of my caricature staring back at me and can do nothing about it.

The bills are now introduced and will be a part of the legislative session. Below is a link to take easy action to let your US congress representatives and senators know you oppose the bills and raise the concerns needed. I’m not a big fan of form letter communication, but if you don’t have the time or inclination to write an actual letter to your elected officials, then this is better than nothing.

This link will take you to a selection of form letters from which you can choose. By entering your address it will be forwarded automatically to the appropriate congressional and senate representatives. Do so today and add your voice to those who are justifiably concerned about this serious issue.

Tags: bill, copyright, Orphan Works Act

Here’s a quick sneak peek at some of the artwork on the parody of “30 Rock” I did for the most recent issue of MAD:

Pencil Roughs for Splash Page- Click for a closer look…

Final Splash- Click for a closer look

I also really enjoyed the show itself, which I found clever and funny. It’s always better, considering the time it takes to do one of these, to have some emotional reaction to the subject matter from which to draw energy. Love it or hate it, either give you some source with which to work. Indifference is the killer… that’s when it becomes difficult to “get into it” and it shows in the final work.

Tags: 30 Rock, Art, MAD Magazine, Parody

Tags: 490, June 2008, MAD Magazine

No time for a real sketch this week so here is one of the small preliminary drawings I did for a politically orientated product job a few weeks ago. This one is of “Mr. Honesty” Carl Rove. One of these days I’ll be able to post the finished art from that project.

Tags: caricature, Carl Rove, sketch