General
November 15th, 2011 | Posted in General
Team Cul de Sac is the brainchild of Chris Sparks, who has worked tirelessly to organize this fundraising program for Parkinson’s research. It’s a part of TeamFox, the Michael J Fox Foundation’s fundraising arm, which in the last year alone raised almost 4 million dollars for research. The fundraiser revolves around the brilliant comic strip Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson, an incredibly talented cartoonist who happens to have Parkinson’s. Team Cul de Sac invitied professional cartoonists, illustrators, artists and animators to donate original art made especially for a book, published by Andrews & McMeel, about Parkinson’s awareness. Part of the profits from the sales… READ MORE
November 10th, 2011 | Posted in General
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… READ MORE
November 8th, 2011 | Posted in General
…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… READ MORE
October 31st, 2011 | Posted in General
I thought about making this a Sunday Mailbag question, but thought it deserved it’s own post since it deals with some pertinent issues on the changing dynamics of today’s publishing world. I have received not a few queries from readers of The MAD Blog, friends and colleagues asking me why I went the self-publishing route instead of shopping the book about to established publishers. A few went so far as to hint I was being hypocritical insofar as they say I have showed some level of disdain for self-publishing in the past. Let me address that last point first. I am not sure where I… READ MORE
October 25th, 2011 | Posted in General
Jeff Dunham’s Achmed the Dead Terrorist character I’ve been alluding often here on The MAD Blog for the last year about artwork I am doing for ?¬?ber-popular comedian/ventriloquist Jeff Dunham, but have never been more specific. That’s because, as usually goes along when doing anything for folks in show business, there are confidentiality agreements galore involved. Some of that work is going to start appearing here and there, and Jeff has told me I can fill people in a little (operational word) on what’s all involved. The image above is one of a series of illustrations I’ve done/am working on of his various characters, this… READ MORE
October 24th, 2011 | Posted in General
Click to embiggen This illustration appears on the cover of The UTNE Reader this month, or at least all but the background. I was very unhappy with the way the printed cover looked, and it was all my own fault. I did the color with this vignetted background, and the art department of UTNE decided to lose the background for the final print. Click to embiggen I should have then gone back and reworked the color, because without the intensity of the reds and darkness of the background, the color fell apart. The yellow cast to the facial colors, that were meant to create the… READ MORE
October 16th, 2011 | Posted in General
Q: Now that you’ve self-published a book, can you share with us how to do it? A: Wow, that would be a LOOOOONG blog post. I did a lot of research for this, including picking the brain of my friend and very successful self-publisher Steve Silver about printers, the process, etc. Much of it was a learn-as-I-went process, especially with the book designing. I had never used Adobe Indesign before, and by the end of the book’s assembly I had become an Indesign Jedi. I could spend an hour or three on a long-winded post, but honestly Steve gave me one piece of advice that… READ MORE
October 6th, 2011 | Posted in General
The interwebs will be bubbling with homages and eulogies for the late Apple frontman Steve Jobs today, most written by people will a lot more passion and insight about the man than I possess, so I won’t go on about it here. However, you can’t lose someone who has had this big of an impact on the world in general without saying something. The terms “visionary”, “creative genius”, “ahead-of-his-time” and “innovator” will be heard and read much in the coming days when describing Jobs. It would be difficult to name someone who has influenced the path of technology and the way in which millions of… READ MORE
