The artwork for the cover of the new issue of UTNE Reader:

Click for a closer look…

The job was a caricature of Kim Kardashian representing our 24/7 narcissistic society. The art director wanted me to convey how even a casual stroll shopping for someone like her becomes a staged event, and how the public seem to be willing sheep in the process. Here is the final pencil sketch (done on a mock layout with dummy text) and final color art:

Click for a closer look…

Click for a closer look…

I was the folks at UTNE’s choice to leave out any shadows on the dress and have it be a flat pattern. Their call. It does make Kim’s figure stand out more, but it looks a little out of place as well. I adjusted the values on the left side so the text popped better, which made for a nice “atmospheric perspective” effect while still leaving the large crowd intact.

Q: I read in your blog post about the increasing scarcity of original commercial art that you have never done a cover for MAD Magazine proper. I was wondering when we are going to see a Richmond cover?

A: The post the question is referring to is here, if anyone is interested.

The answer to your question is likely next door to never. MAD‘s covers are a different animal than the interior art, and most require a certain style of artwork that is not my forté: the realistic painting.

MAD covers are singular and necessarily high impact gags that the editors and staff spend a lot of time considering and working up before handing off to an illustrator. The majority of them need a more realistic style of illustration to work with the juxtaposing of the expected and the unexpected/lunatic twist that are their hallmark. That’s why it’s no accident that the vast majority of the 478 covers of MAD (since it became a magazine at issue #30) have been done by painters like Norman Mingo (97 covers), Frank Kelly Freas (30), Richard Williams (62), Jack Ricard (33), Roberto Parada (13), C.F. Payne (8), most recently Mark Fredrickson (67) and selected others (source: Mike Slaubaugh’s MAD Lists). You might notice that most of those artists I just listed also either have never contributed or only very occasionally contribute to the interior content of the magazine. MAD cover artists tend to be from a different group than interior artists.

There are a few obvious exceptions. One is when a cover calls for a different art style than the Mingo/Freas/Fredrickson type of realistic painting. That might be when a cartoon character like Bart Simpson is on the cover, or the gag itself needs a different style to be effective.

The other exception is that of MAD legends like Mort Drucker (42 covers), Jack Davis (14), Sam Viviano (16), Al Jaffee (5) and a very few others who’s work is so readily identified with MAD that their very presence on the cover is part of the cover’s appeal. Even then, the cover’s content needs to fit with that artist’s particular style.

Given that MAD is also now only 6 times a year down from the 8 or 12 that it had been since the 1950′s it is even less likely that I’ll ever see my artwork on the cover of MAD. Don’t feel too sorry for me, though. If one of the arguably greatest and longest tenured MAD artists ever, Sergio Aragonés, has only done two covers in his 40 plus years of working in the magazine (TWO!?!), I can hardly feel bad about not having done one myself. Wally Wood only did three, Don Martin only four, George Woodbridge and Harry North only one apiece… and Angelo Torres, and Dave Berg? ZERO.

However, as I mentioned in that previous post, I did do two covers for MAD Kids:

And one “cover” for a special MAD advertising insert/mini magazine:

So it isn’t like the MAD staff doesn’t think my artwork isn’t fit for a cover… the right situation just has not arisen yet. You never know… there are occasionally multiple cover issues and the “call for a different art style” exception that might one day see me get assigned a cover illustration for MAD. That will be a lot of fun if it ever happens, but I am not expecting it.

Thanks to ABJ 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 your questions and I’ll try and answer them here!

Click image for a closer look…

In October I got a rare opportunity to do some cover art for MAD… not “THE” MAD Magazine but their little brother publication MAD KIDS. I did the cover of MAD KIDS #7 a year or so ago, and was given the opportunity to do the cover for MAD KIDS #13 this fall… they must have had limited options! Since the issue has been released, I can now share the artwork here.

This job was unique in that I was being asked to somewhat ape the look and feel of the art style of the “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” movie that came out last summer. They wanted me to put my own spin on it, add some gags and in general make it MAD-like. The concept was a loose spoof of the famous Norman Rockwell painting “Freedom from Want” (the Thanksgiving scene MAD has ridiculed many times over the years). The main gag they wanted was Anakin carving the “turkey” with his light saber. Art Director Sam Viviano sent me a rough doodle and I come up with this pencil:

I wanted to add a couple of gags just to make it more interesting, hence Yoda levitating the salt shaker, the alien eyes in Dooku’s stuffing, etc. Since the piece needed to be painted in the “Clone Wars” style I just went straight from the pencil into PhotoShop and worked each character out as well as the table, elements on the table and the light saber’s “trail”. Here are some close ups of parts of the image:

Here’s the final cover image with all text and graphics in place:

I’m not particularly knowledgeable about applying textures and the like in PhotoShop, so I found it hard to capture the very textured and 3-D “gaming” look of the actual film visuals. MAD must have been happy with it, judging by the job they gave me for the MAD 20 in issue #497… which will have to wait until December for me to post about. Incidentally, MAD Senior Editor Jonathan Bresman emailed me a link to this article about the cover and issue on StarWars.com.

I’d love to do the cover of the actual main magazine someday, but the editors like a much more realistic look than my drawing and painting style, so unless and until they have a special cover art need that I can fulfill I will likely not be seeing my work on the cover of MAD anytime soon.

All these jobs from last month are seeing print, so here’s another I can now share. This one was an odd job as it started out way back in June, then got shelved, changed subject matter and finally went to final.

The client was Contingencies Magazine, a publication for the insurance and financial industry. The original concept back in the early summer was to do a cover showing primary candidates from both parties fighting over health care issues. The client wanted a few concept sketches, so I did the obligatory “race” concept and one where the candidates were doctors surrounding a patient and trying to push their particular “prescription” for health care on him. Here were the roughs:

They liked the exam room concept, so I fleshed out the idea more, including some rough caricatures of the various front runner candidates at the time.

At this point the idea got shelved because they felt it was too early to do a story about primary candidates as they would probably change as the actual primaries neared. As it happens they were dead right. Last month I got the call to continue the concept, but now we needed to replace those candidates that were out (Tommy Thompson, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich and John Kerry) with ones that were in (Joe Biden, Fred Thomspn, Sam Brownback, Christopher Dodd).

You’ll notice I also redid the caricatures of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama… the originals were rough and not very successful. This was approved and I went to final. I had done another cover for this magazine a few years back, so I went with the same technique for color as I did on that previous job… sort of a combination fully painted and line art. Here’s the final and some close ups of a few areas:

Click for a closer look