Q: Knowing that you’re a huge Batman fan, which version of Batman (TV or movie) do you feel came closest to living up to the character and who would be your favorite villain? Also, I know you’ve had some of your work animated, but did animation itself ever appeal to you as a career?

A: Please forgive the self-indulgence of answering a more personal opinion question here. Let’s take the second one first, as it’s the more pertinent professional query. I never considered animation as a career because I don’t have the patience for it. I might have been able to do character design given proper study and application, but it just didn’t interest me much. If anything, I think I’d be best at storyboarding animation as I enjoy graphic storytelling more than anything else. I have gigantic respect for those that do work in animation, as it takes enormous talent and skill to do so. I guess I’ll just continue to be a fan of great animation and enjoy it from the theater chair or my couch.

As to the Batman question, this comic I did for the ISCA magazine Exaggerated Features pretty much say it all:

Click for a closer look…

Click for a closer look…


Click for a closer look…

I did that before seeing Batman Begins or, of course, The Dark Knight Returns. I liked the first film a lot and loved the second. Best of the live action stuff IMHO, but nothing beats the Paul Dini/Bruce Timm version from Batman: The Animated Series. The perfect blend of the peak of human physical potential, mental detective skills, use of great wealth for equipment and advantage, and the vengeance driven psyche without going overboard with the darkness and psychotic angle. Greta stories, great style, great show. To be fair, I never watched The Batman, Batman Beyond or The Brave and the Bold shows.

Favorite bat-villain: it’s not a very original opinion but the Joker is the greatest comic book villain ever created. Ever. Period. End-of-story.

Actually, I do love the old 60′s show and can appreciate a comic take on the character. That cartoon above was done from a traditional comic-book fan’s perspective, which usually accounts for zero sense of humor about their beloved characters.

Thanks to John Nelson 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!

Q: Can you share how much time an average project (such as the “workplace posters”) takes you to produce? Does your Cintique make a difference in that timeframe?

A: That’s a question I get often and it’s one that is impossible to answer. Each project is different and factors like multiple revisions, complexity of the image and even just “having a bad drawing day” come into play.

Specifically, I will say one of those workplace posters take me about 1 1/2 to 2 days to do from sketch to final, although complexity of the scene makes a difference. This one:

…took only a long day to do. This one:

…took closer to three days. A page in MAD takes about 2-3 days from rough to final colored art. Splashes about 3-4 days:

Click for a closer look…

Painted illustrations like this one:

…take me a lot longer. I can basically noodle away on these things forever. The one above probably took two days to paint, but I could have spent two more days tightening it up further.

It’s all relative. Some days things just flow off the end of the pencil almost effortlessly, and some days I wear out a whole eraser trying to get one stupid hand right. As for the Cintiq, at first it actually slowed me down as I spent too much time rendering things that ended up printing so small the detail was wasted. Now I have my technique with the Cintiq down, which includes doing most of the rendering/coloring at 50% of zoom, so it does help make things go faster.

Thanks to Nick Nix  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!

Q: You must have accumulated a ton of digital artwork since you’ve been working as a professional illustrator. How do you go about saving, backing up and archiving your files so that you never lose them?

A: That’s one of the things that sucks about digital artwork—you are one electrical surge away from losing it all unless you are careful to back things up.

I tried several methods to make sure I properly backed up all my work. First, I would pick up my computer, open the drive bay door and attempt to shake out all the 0′s and 1′s that made up the binary code of my art files, scoop them up and keep them in empty coffee cans in my basement. This did not work well because all those 0′s and 1′s got all over the place and I was sure I’d lose some and when I poured them back in later to reconstitute my image, Harry Plodder’s nose would be missing or something. Worse, those 0′s and 1′s were apparently so small I couldn’t even see them, and I was afraid no matter how hard I shook the computer some would be stuck in there. So, I abandoned that idea.

Next, I thought I’d print the binary data out on paper, put them in folders and file them away. That way, although I’d have to retype it all should my original files get lost (no big deal, how long could that take?), they’d be safe for posterity. This idea I also abandoned when my first attempt to print the binary code of a MAD page went through an entire ream of paper before my printer started smoking and I pulled the plug.

Finally, I decided to everything up on DVDs. This is also not the best method, as DVDs apparently deteriorate or at least as technology becomes more advances and formats change, early DVDs become harder to read. My newer Macs don’t like my very oldest DVDs anymore. I had to use a friend’s computer to read these files and transfer them to a thumb drive to store elsewhere.

These days I have a double redundant backup plan. I have two external hard drives hooked to my studio computer. One is used as a Mac OS X “Time Machine” drive, which in general backs up all my files. The other drive uses a program called SuperDuper that backs up just my documents and art files daily. That was all three drives would need to fail at once to lose anything.

Eventually I might turn to cloud storage for another alternative. These files are big and it would take a long time to back this up on Dropbox or similar, but having an offsite storage plan would even guard against fire or some other localized natural disaster

Bottom line- BACK UP YOUR FILES. Disaster will strike, eventually.

Thanks to Matthew Cox 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!

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!

Q. You may have covered this already but when drawing clothes, do you look for real examples in perhaps magazines to see how a material would crease in certain positions. Or do you just imagine in your head how it would look? So basically my question is, Tom, how do you draw clothing so well!?

A: I’m not sure I would agree that I draw clothes all that well, but thanks for the kind words. I do think I have improved quite a bit in the last few years on how I draw clothes, particularly simplifying the folds and such so they don’t look overwrought and too “wrinkly”. I was guilty of that early on in my career, and have learned over the years that less-is-more, and that if the folds and wrinkles you draw describe what is going on well, you don’t need that many of them. To answer one of your specific questions, I mostly just imagine these things in my head when I draw them, as I do not have the time or need to get references for every position of every figure.

With regard to drawing clothes, I would first cite a piece of advice I received from longtime MAD artist and current art director Sam Viviano. Sam told me he often will sketch out a figure as if they were nude first, then draw the clothes over the figure. In this way he both avoided the tendency to miss the accurate drawing of the figure beneath because he would be so busy thinking about the dynamics of the clothing, and made sure the figure looked like they were really wearing the clothes rather than them being painted on (see most superhero comics). I do this sometimes, and it really does help when you are struggling with a figure.

Drawing clothes is like drawing anything, you need to make good observations and understand the basics of what you are drawing to do it convincingly. This is especially true in cartooning, where simplification demands an understanding not only how something works, but what the most important basics elements are. Things like seams, buttons, cuffs, collars… knowing how they basically work and developing a repertoire of how to draw them is essential. There are not that many different kinds of clothing… pants are pants with only superficial changes in look and design. Knowing how pants are generally constructed means you can draw any type of pants by just observing the details. Certain types of pants, like jeans, are almost universal in their sameness. Men’s suit jackets are almost all the same, and follow the same tendencies with movement. Ditto shirts, skirts, etc.

That said, when people ask about drawing clothes, mostly they are asking (as you have) about how to draw folds and wrinkles so they look convincing. That really isn’t all that complex when you think about it. Clothing tends to wrinkle, crease and fold the same way with the same actions, positions and movements, with only the type of cloth making a difference. A thicker and coarser cloth, like a wool sweater, will wrinkle and fold in a bigger and less complex manner than thinner cloth like silk, for example. The dynamics of the folds and wrinkles are the same, however. Learning the basics of how clothing wrinkles and folds will get you through 90% of all the drawings of clothing you do.

The more you have movement from a “neutral” position (i.e. the way clothes would hang from a hanger) the more wrinkles and folds are evident:

Understanding the dynamics of where cloth is pulled and where it gathers helps to figure out where the stresses and folds happen. Folds and creases always emanate from a stress point, usually a joint like the elbow, knee, shoulder, crotch, etc. In a bent elbow area, for example, the outer part of the elbow is “pulled”, and therefore stretched with little or no creases/wrinkles. However in the crook of the elbow, the cloth gathers and is compressed together, creating folds:

Even in a neutral position, the weight and clingy nature of clothes will cause some creases and folds:

There are lots of different kinds of folds that you see all the time. Here are a few to look for:

You are (usually) wearing the perfect reference for learning to draw folds… your own clothes. Take a look at how the cloth gathers across your chest, how your lower pants legs gather past the knee as they go down to the cuff at your ankles, what happens when you sit down with the folds at your knees and waist… observation and experimentation with drawing will build that repertoire of folds and how to draw them.

Finally, I’d recommend the following resources for learning how to draw clothes:

Drawing the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm- If you do not own this book, you are missing one of the essential learning tools for drawing of the past century. IMO it’s the best overall book on drawing the human figure ever published based on its simplicity, conciseness, ease of understanding and richness of content. There are many more comprehensive books on various specifics out there, but this one is a must have even if it is dated-looking. Short but brilliant chapter on drawing folds in clothes, especially useful on learning how men’s suits are drawn.

Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery by Burne Hogarth- It is not often I recommend a Hogarth book, because I am no Hogarth fan. I think most of his books are overly complex, with impossible and convoluted figures in positions that defy physics, and ridiculously over-drawn and over-rendered illustrations. This one, however, is shorter and less pretentious than most, and breaks down the types of wrinkles into fairly easy-to-understand categories… just imagine his illustrations with about 1/10 of the wrinkles he overdraws on them and you will get the idea.

I’m sure there are others, but these are the two on my bookshelf.

Thanks to Rob Rollason 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!

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!

Q: When you teach new artists your techniques for drawing caricatures in a theme park, what are some common problems you see?

A: Everybody is different, of course, but there are some issues that in the 20 plus years I have been training theme park artists I have noticed seem to be typical of many beginning live caricaturists.

Fear of line- This is very typical and to be expected. Live caricature is an exercise in fearlessness and audacity, where you make bold, confident lines on the paper like you have been doing it for years. New artists almost always lack this fearlessness and confidence, and their lines are timid, sketchy, and lack the spontaneity and strength that is so important to live caricature. Fortunately this is a cosmetic issue, and easily overcome once the artist decides to trust their lines and commit to them. At first this kind of going-for-broke linework results in a number of bad, disjointed drawings, but very quickly the artist’s lines start clicking and then the difference in the results is remarkable.

Small Cranial Mass Syndrome- Many beginning artists seem to struggle with giving their subjects too small of a top of a head (the cranial mass/hair area). I am not sure why, but I have seen it enough to know it is definitely a common issue. My theory is that the artists are so concerned with the features of the lower face (eyes, nose, mouth) that they unconsciously make this area more prevalent and therefore bigger, while making the top of the head smaller. I correct this by explaining how, in traditional portraiture, the head mass is equal above and below the horizontal center of the head, which is the line of the eyes. Giving someone a small cranial mass and a big lower face/jaw is a great head shape exaggeration . . . if the subject’s face is deserving of it. It might not be, however, and applying an exaggeration arbitrarily to any face is distortion, not exaggeration. I tell them they they should stick to the equal mass rule unless they want to consciously change it for exaggeration purposes. I remind them that they will draw as many people who need to be exaggerated with a big top of a head and a small lower face, than they will the other way around.

Asymmetry- This is a byproduct of the “no sketching” method of quick-draw caricature and the sequencing technique we use, but many artists struggle with their faces being a little lopsided or otherwise asymmetrical. This is just a matter of being conscious of the issue and making sure when you start to draw each feature you are aware of its relative position to the other features and the rest of the face, so you don’t draw one eye too low of make one side of the face father from the center line than the other. No face is truly symmetrical, but most people perceive them as such, and to me badly off is very noticeable.

Those are just a few of the more common problems. Everyone has their own, unique hang-ups and strengths.

Thanks to Ryan Roe 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!

Q: Have you ever been asked to do a job that you weren’t comfortable with for philosophical or ethical reasons? How did you handle it?

A: Yes, I have had a few occasions where I have been approached to do some job that I was not comfortable doing. I handled it by politely turning it down.

What kind of jobs? Well, I am a pretty open-minded sort of guy, so there isn’t a whole lot of things that would bother me to the point of refusing to do work associated with it. There are shades of definition in everything, but in simplest terms I won’t do work that conclude the following:

• Pornography
• Promoting drug/alcohol use to kids
• Blatant and/or malicious racism, sexism or any other type of hate or discrimination directed at a person or group of people

A lot of what I feel falls into those categories is open to debate over definitions. Nudity is not pornography in my book, as long as it is done tastefully and is important to the context of the illustration and whatever story it is illustrating. I do work for Penthouse, and the first thing I told them when they called me was I would not do any real pornography, to which they said they would only consider me for work I was comfortable doing. Some of it has involved nudity, but I was allowed to present it in the way I wanted, and have been very happy with the work I have done for them over the years. I have not crossed my idea of “the line”, and they have not asked me to. I have been asked several times to do work for porno publications and websites, to which I have said a polite, “No thanks”.

As far as drugs and alcohol, I’d be reluctant to do any job that truly glorified the use of drugs in general, but if it is aimed at kids then that is out of the question. That includes cigarettes. I have done plenty of jobs that depicted drinking alcohol, usually in humorous ways, and some that treated drugs in the same way, but again that is not quite what I mean by “promoting drugs or alcohol”. Mostly it would come down to if I thought the article in question was promoting the use to kids, or presenting the use of really bad drugs as being acceptable at any age… I’m talking heroin, crack or the like.

As far as the discrimination thing goes, there is a difference between un-PC level humor and real, intentional hate speech. Those jobs must past the “sniff test”—if they smell bad they are bad, and I pass. Some people may disagree that something I thought was just an off-color or somewhat insensitive joke to be a horribly hateful, racist thing, but there are plenty of people in the world who are way too sensitive about that kind of thing, and everyone has their own ideas about that. If I feel what I am doing is not meant to be hateful, I am content with that decision.

Thanks to Grant Jonen 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!

Q:  I have been looking to your drawings for inspiration, and I have realized that they look very clean and flawless. So my question is do you find yourself making a lot of mistakes when drawing or even sketching? How often do you erase, if at all? What is your tool of choice for erasing? (because I can seriously never tell so it must be damn good).

A: Of course I make a lot of mistakes when I sketch, and I do plenty of erasing. The sketches I post for the “Sketch o’the Week” are usually ones I have “tightened up” a bit, meaning I erase some of the stray lines and use some bolder, stronger lines to make it more defined and less “sketchy”. Also, when I scan them in I play with the values in PhotoShop to strength the lines. That doesn’t mean I don’t have many stray lines or don’t do any erasing. That’s what a sketch is all about… exploring and experimenting.

Here are a couple of raw sketches and studies I did recently for my “Secret Agent Man” print:

As you can see, plenty sketchy and loose. These studies were redrawn as more involved sketches, then transferred to bristol board for final artwork.

As for erasers, I like to use kneadable erasers and occasionally white, plastic ones. I hate pink pearls and gum erasers.

Thanks to Rachel Rivera 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!

Q: I noticed, when trying to re-learn cartooning, that daily and Sunday strips seem to not always have backgrounds. But comic books and MAD mags usually always have some kind of back ground in each frame. Sometimes I find doing backgrounds tedious or even distracting, but I feel I am cheating myself by avoiding them.  I also noticed a similar effect with daily/Sunday’s showing most or all of the shots from the same perspective. Whereas, comic books/MAD see to redraw each from a different angle. Are there reasons why daily/Sunday strips skimp or cheat as opposed to comic books and MAD?

A: What you are really talking about here is the difference between cartooning/illustration done for different purposes and mediums, and not just backgrounds specifically. The approach to graphic storytelling changes depending on factors like the intended print/reader presentation, the kind of story being told, the style of the artist and what is or is not necessary visually to tell the story. However backgrounds are a good example of one of the differences between types of storytelling, so we’ll stick to that specifically.

One of the reasons most comic strips today contain minimal backgrounds is for purely technically reasons. Today’s strips print so small in newspapers that detailed backgrounds or art are lost and become muddy and unreadable. There was a time when strips printed very large and cartoonists doing dailies drew them 15″ wide or larger. With all that room and legibility they had the option of doing more detailed or elaborate backgrounds and art because it could be seen and enjoyed by the viewer. Today’s strips print so small, any detailed backgrounds would become mush, and even detailed character work would get lost… especially on newsprint. Due to those limitations, comic strip artists have been forced to simplify their artwork to tell their stories and gags effectively. Some specific styles are simple anyway, and work well for that reason. Most strips are telling short stories/gags meant for quick reading and consumption, so detailed backgrounds seldom serve much of a functional purpose. As far as changing perspective, some strips do or did do that a lot—Rose is Rose still does and Calvin and Hobbes did it frequently. There are many other examples. That is more of a choice with the artist, their style and the story they are trying to impart visually. Some cartoonists keep it simple and stick with the single frame angle with just the characters changing as they interact. A cartoonist could certainly incorporate “camera-angle” changes into a strip and make it work, even with the shrunken sizes of today’s strips. Likewise some backgrounds can and are drawn into dailies, but they need to be able to hold up to the small print size and the newsprint printing. Comic strips done for viewing on the web or via an electronic device have none of these limitations.

Comic books and features in MAD have physically larger print sizes and better paper, so the technical limitations of the newspaper comic strip are not an issue with them. Utilizing detailed backgrounds becomes a function of the storytelling here, and are used when environments and such are key parts of what the artist is trying to describe. Usually cartoons drawn for this format involve longer narratives and therefore demand more detailed descriptions of the scene(s). That said, detailed backgrounds are not always appropriate or desirable. To saturate every panel of one of my MAD parodies with elaborate backgrounds would not only be overkill, but actually would detract from the storytelling. The eye has no chance to rest as it moves along the story, and is bombarded to the point of over-saturation. The pages as a whole become too busy and dense. I will spend some time on detailed backgrounds in a few panels on a given page, where the scene needs establishing or the action needs to be described in a context, but I also will do limited detail or leave out backgrounds entirely in some panels to keep the story flowing. I’m not being lazy, I’m doing that with the effectiveness of the whole in mind.

So, do not feel you are “cheating yourself” by not doing super-elaborate backgrounds in your strip or cartoons. Ask yourself if they are needed for a reason, if the artwork is more effective with them, and if the final output of the work will support detailed background work. Spend time on them if they will make your work better… that is not always the case.

Thanks to Jim Jackle 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!