This week’s sketch is a study of tough-guy actor Stephen Lang, currently formerly starring in the TV series Terra Nova, but might be most famous to the general public for playing the bad-ass Colonel in Avatar. Of course, who could forget his turn as Khalar Zym in last year’s Conan the Barbarian? . . . oh, yeah, EVERYBODY has hopefully forgotten everything about that dreadful movie.

I hope I can be in that good a shape when I am 60.

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Tags: caricature, sketch, Stephen Lang

The second printing of The Mad Art of Caricature! has arrived—just in time as I was down to my last hundred or so copies. They look good, with the same high quality, glossy, color pages and tight binding. No new content, but a few stray typos and corrections were made.

The big news this time around is I have an official distributor, Itasca Book Distributors, which means the book will soon be available through wholesalers like Ingram. What this means is that brick and mortar stores like Barnes and Noble will now be able to order and carry my book. Booksellers basically refuse to carry self-published books unless they have a distributor/wholesaler, which is why The Mad Art of Caricature! has not been available in bookstores. Now I have one, so those of you in the U.S. can possibly find it at your local bookstore, or in the book rack of your local art supply store. I am looking in to sending information to buyers at Dick Blick, Utretch, Pearl and Michael’s art supply chains so they know about the book and may carry it. You could certainly order through any retail bookseller once it’s listed with Ingram through Itasca. That usually takes a few weeks.

Of course you can always order a copy directly from me, signed and all!

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Tags: The Mad Art of Caricature!

…sort of.

The original name of this blog was supposed to be Tom’s MAD Blog!, but in the ensuing craziness that was the website redesign some time ago the graphics came to read The MAD Blog!. I didn’t think much of it at the time, because it didn’t seem very important.

Well, MAD Magazine now has it’s own blog, and while it’s called The Idiotical and not The MAD Blog, it seemed to me that it might be a bit confusing to some people doing a search for “MAD Magazine Blog” that this blog would be one of the top hits. I didn’t want anyone thinking that this blog might be the actual, official blog of MAD Magazine. MAD and DC Entertainment didn’t say a word to me about this, but ever since the launched their official blog, I’ve thought I should make the distinction clear.

So, I have changed the graphics and such to reflect the actual name of the blog, which is Tom’s MAD Blog! to avoid any confusion. God knows I don’t want to be blamed for any of the idiocy going on at the actual MAD blog.

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Q: I work a 40 hour week, 50 weeks a year, and have been since 1978. I see actual retirement in the next ten years. As a artist and freelancer, what does retirement look like for you? No plan at all, freelance part time, or continue present pace until last breath is exhaled?

A: Freelancer artists face the same challenges to retirement that any self-employed person does. You have no employer who is providing a pension plan for you, so sou simply have to plan ahead for it . . .  and the younger you are when you do it, the better. Social Security is almost guaranteed to be long gone by then, so it’s up to the individual to make sure they have some kind or financial security when their working lives come to an end. It’s never TOO late to start doing that, although it’s hard to put money away for tomorrow when you can see many uses for it today. There are many resources out there for figuring out what to do with your money, but really it boils down to two things: How much you have to put away and how long you have before you need to start taking it out. Obviously the more you have to put away the better, but more importantly how long you have for it to earn interest/capital gains/dividends is the real key. The $100 invested at age twenty will be worth many times more at age 65 than $100 invested at age 50. The rule of thumb is that the longer you have to let the money work for you, the more aggressive and higher risk investments you should put the money into, gradually shifting to less volatile and safer but lower yielding investments as you grow older. After that it’s dumb luck with the timing and economy.

When I was in my 20′s I started putting money away in mutual funds and some stocks ostensibly for retirement, but also in preparation for my kid’s college educations. Fortunately I was in a position, with a healthy business owning caricature art concessions in various theme parks, to put a fair amount away each year at an age where I had a long time to let it grow and weather economic ups and downs. Sadly, the last 6 years has seem some massive “downs” right when it was time to start taking some of that money out for the college thing, and the theme park concession business is a shadow of it’s former profitable self thanks to several factors, so anything approaching easy retirement doesn’t look too likely.

Fortunately I do not have a career where once I hit my 60′s I will get downsized or replaced by a younger, cheaper employee—one of the benefits of being self-employed. Nor do I dig ditches or do some other physical work where age will prevent me from doing my job. I love what I do and will only continue to get better at it as the years go by. I am still relatively young (I will be 46 this Friday in fact) so I have at least 25 years of high productivity still in me, which is basically about as long as I’ve been in the business so far. . . so that’s a long time to still be working and (hopefully) continuing to earn a living. Over the next 6 years I will finish paying for the college educations of my three children who will be attending college, which unfortunately will more or less clean out the savings I had accumulated.  When life settles down and it’s just myself, The Lovely Anna and our autistic daughter The Animated Elizabeth, expenses will also settle down and perhaps I can build that nest egg back up a bit for the day when I have trouble drawing or keeping up with deadlines. God willing that is still a long way in the future, but it’s over-late to start planning for that day when it is almost upon you.

So, the short answer is I plan to keep working as long as I am able and clients want to buy my work. I subscribe to the Al Jaffee philosophy, in that work and keeping active is what keep you young. At 91 Al is a marvel of health and still doing incredible artwork. I would love to be able to have someone say that of me at that age.

Thanks to John G. Kase 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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Tags: freelance illustration, retirement

Clicky to Embiggen . . .

Here is my 2012 page in the illustrator’s sourcebook The Directory of Illustration no. 29. I had to search for quite a while to find images from the past year (or ones I had not used before and liked) for this one. It just seems like I didn’t do many smaller/stand alone images that would work well in this kind of layout. . . too many $#@%$@ crowd scenes last year!

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Tags: advertising, Directory of Illustration

As many regular readers know, I am an avid listener to audiobooks at certain stages of my work in the studio. I can only listen to them when doing inking or coloring, which is more of a rendering process for me and less a conceptual one and therefore allows my mind to focus on both the work and the story. I’ve found these to be a great way to stay on task during grueling marathons of finish work.

Regular readers might also be aware that I am a big fan of Stephen King‘s writing, especially his epic Dark Tower saga, which are some of my favorite audiobooks to listen to. I probably put those on once a year and relive the journey of Roland and his ka-tet through the bones of a slowly dying land called mid-world. The original narrator was the incomparable Frank Muller, who was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident in 2001 and was never able to narrate again, eventually passing away in 2008. George Guidall took up the Dark Tower narration mantle and did a different but equally terrific job bringing the books and characters to life.

Naturally, I was very excited to hear King was going to visit the Dark Tower mythos in a new book called The Wind Through the Keyhole, which was just released on Tuesday of this week. It’s a backstory, as the full Dark Tower tale was told through to the end (or was it?!?) in the final book, The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower, back in 2004. Other than the short story Little Sisters of Eluria which appeared in the collection Everything’s Eventual in 1998, this is the first Roland tale to appear in book form outside the series. I saved up my Audible credits to buy The Wind Through The Keyhole audiobook on Tuesday and figured I’d listen to it right away and then do a review here on The MAD Blog.

Sadly, that is not going to happen.

Sharp-eyed readers may have caught that I wrote I was a “big fan of Stephen King’s writing” a few paragraphs earlier. Very true. What I am not a fan of is Stephen King’s narration. King has narrated several of his stories on audiobook, including Bag of Bones, Needful Things and assorted short stories like Hearts In Atlantis. He is an awful narrator. There is really no nice way to put it. His voice sounds like his sinuses are draining into his throat, with a perpetual mucas-y, nasal smacking that is just under the annoyance-level of nails raking a chalkboard. I was appalled when I saw “narrated by Stephen King” on the audiobook cover, and I didn’t even make it past the foreward—although I did fast forward to a part of the story itself just to see if King pulled some kind of miracle off and became Rich Little since his last foray into narration. Nope. This one will have to be enjoyed the old fashioned way—read with my eyeballs.

This is enormously disappointing.  I do not know what King was thinking when he narrated this book himself. I know authors can be funny ducks when it comes to their work, and I can totally understand that they would feel they can bring something to “their baby” on audio that a narrator could not, but honestly there is a reason why professional narrators exist . . . they bring a talent to the table no amount of familiarity with the work can match. This is especially true for a SERIES like the Dark Tower, which has very distinct and rich characters and has already had seven books narrated by two of the best in the business. I assume King insisted on doing this himself (because no one in their right mind would suggest he do it himself), and he must be surrounded by a bunch of bobos and yes-men who don’t have the guts to look him in the eye and say “Steve, this is a bad idea. You are not a profesisonal narrator.” What a shame. Thomas Harris has the same problem apparently . . . although he’s not a bad narrator, he’s just not as good as a real professional would be. King is bad. Historically bad.

The narrator of a book makes a gigantic difference in the enjoyment of the material. A good narrator can make a marginal story sparkle and a bad one can ruin the best of books. Personal opinion enters into the equation, of course. My favorite narrators are Muller, Guidall, Simon Vance, Frederick Davidson, David Ian Davies, Barbara Rosenblat, Jim Dale and a few others. I cannot stand the work of narrator Scott Brick, who seems to attempt to give the same hang-wringing, face-distorting über-emotion to a reading of a car manual as he would Othello. I simply cannot listen to the man narrate, thus books like the Bourne Trilogy and many others are denied me.

So, sadly, is this new Dark Tower audiobook. Sorry, Mr. King, but you dropped the ball on this one. Please fire all the people who didn’t advise you not to narrate this audiobook, and hire people who keep the best interests of you and your fans in mind for future audiobook productions.

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Okay, so it’s not really a “sketch” per se, but rather a theme park example I did on my trip to my park in New England of The Avengers star Robert Downey Jr. Bear in mind that the purpose of an example like this is to demonstrate the results of our live caricature techniques, so the drawing and painting reflect that quick, totally freehand live style.

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Tags: caricature, Robert Downey Jr., sketch

All due in the next week to 10 days:

• NBA promotional cover project
• Marlin Workplace poster
• 6 page MAD Parody
• Illustration for Warner Bros. Consumer Product line
• MAD TV show segment art
• Jeff Dunham illustration art
• My Directory of Illustration page artwork

Sooooo…. things might be a little sparse here on The MAD Blog for the forseeable future.

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The show “What, Me Worry? 60 Years of MAD” opened this past weekend at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Fransisco, CA.  Here’s one of many pictures you’ll find on the CAM Facebook page:

Clicky to Embiggen…

Shown above: MAD #1 cover reproduction, hand-colored by Marie Severin; Hex! splash page by Jack Davis from MAD #2; Melvin! splash page by John Severin, from MAD #2; cover to MAD #3 by Harvey Kurtzman; splash from Dragged Net! by Will Elder from MAD #3; cover to MAD #4 by Harvey Kurtzman; splash page from Shadow! by Will Elder, from MAD #4; house ad by Wally Wood from MAD #5.

From the Cartoon Art Museum Website:

The Cartoon Art Museum’s latest exhibition, What, Me Worry? 60 Years of MAD celebrates the rich history of MAD from the original comic book through the black-and-white magazine to its latest incarnation as a full-color bi-monthly publication supplemented by online content.  This is the museum’s first exhibition to include both the MAD comic book and magazine.

The MAD creators, known affectionately as “The Usual Gang of Idiots,” are among the most highly regarded in the cartooning world, and works from nearly every major MAD contributor will be featured in this gallery.  Exhibition highlights include cover artwork by MAD creator Harvey Kurtzman; pages from the MAD comic book by Will Elder and John Severin; early magazine-era artwork by famed artists Mort Drucker, Don Martin, Wally Wood and George Woodbridge; MAD Fold-ins by Al Jaffee; painted covers by Sergio Aragonés, Jack Davis, Kelly Freas, Norman Mingo. Jack Rickard and Richard Williams; The Lighter Side of… by Dave Berg; Spy vs. Spy by Antonio Prohias; a look at Tom Richmond’s creative process; the dazzling caricatures of Sam Viviano; comics from contemporary contributors Chris Baldwin, Evan Dorkin, Peter Kuper, Ted Rall, Keith Knight and Joey Alison Sayers; a look at MAD Magazine around the world; and much, much more!

The show runs through September 16th. I will definitely be going out there to see it, and will likely be doing some kind of signing or something at that time. I will make that announcement here when the dates get set.

WOW! What a show. I can’t wait to see it. If any blog readers get a chance to visit in the meantime, please share!

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Tags: Cartoon Art Museum, MAD art show

Q: I am contemplating a resurrection of my own cartooning talents that I abandoned years ago, and am considering the art of caricature as part of that. Do you think it would be beneficial to study real life portraiture first, then go into caricature? I think if you could master a good portrait, caricature would be easier to accomplish. Would you show a sample of one of your portraits that you have done? I, along with most of the visitors to your site, would be quite interested in seeing one.

A: No question that having a strong grasp of realistic drawing will only help an artist’s skills with caricature. The knowledge of how a face really works, both anatomically and in capturing an accurate and realistic likeness, and the ability to draw it well means that when you then turn your focus to the exaggerations that make caricature, you have a strong foundation upon which to work.

Sadly, caricature is something that an artist can fake a little too easily, and I have see a great many live caricaturists do this to the detriment of their own skills and the public perception of live caricature in general. By “fake”, I mean getting away with doing poor drawings because caricature is “supposed to be exaggerated” and the general public is all too willing to forgive a bad likeness or poor underlying substance because they think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I especially see many live caricaturists trying to do these outrageous exaggerations from the very beginning of their careers rather than take the time to build a solid foundation of strong drawing skills first. Their caricatures look wild but fall flat in terms of likeness and structure because they do not have the necessary foundations of good drawing and the command of the facial features necessary to pull that kind of extreme exaggeration off. The all want to be Sebastian Krüger, but miss the fact that Sebastian studied realistic portraiture and fine art painting for years before becoming one the world’s greatest exaggerated caricaturists.

Portraiture does take a different set of drawing muscles, though. Back when I was a college art student, the school I attended turned their nose up at cartooning and caricature. I was not allowed to do much cartooning in any assignments. Fortunately I was pretty competent at the realistic stuff as well. When I got the job doing caricatures during the summer, at first I struggled to get back into the swing of realistic drawing after a summer of nothing but caricatures. It took a few weeks to get that out of my head and get back to realistic proportion. Believe me, I THOUGHT I was drawing realistically but everything was just a little bent and exaggerated. Eventually after a few years of this I was able to switch back and forth at will.

Today I might be hard pressed to do a really good portrait. It would certainly take me a long time to do. I have done nothing but cartooning for years now. However several years ago I went to a live drawing co-op once a week where we did a series of ten minute poses and then one long 2 plus hour pose. I found it did not take long to get some of my realistic drawing skills back. Here are a few of my life drawings/portraits from those co-op sessions (although a few of the quicker figures might have been studies from a book… no way to tell after so long). I know I posted these a few years back but they are the most recent “realistic” work I have!

WARNING: some of these were nude models. CLICK on the images for a closer look.

Thanks to Tony August, Surrey, BC, Canada 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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