General
August 28th, 2006 | Posted in General
Judging from the flood of e-mails and phone calls I recieved yesterday, the rumors of the death of the comics pages are greatly exaggerated. Yes, that was “me” making a cameo appearance in the 8/27 Sunday strip “Pearls Before Swine” and, yes, I really did draw that caricature of Barbara Streisand in it. No, it was not my idea to be labeled “probably the best caricaturist in the country”… Stephan exaggerates much more than I do in my drawings. Here’s the strip: Click for a closer look I met “Pearls before Swine” creator Stephan Pastis at an NCS Reuben Awards weekend in San Francisco in… READ MORE
August 26th, 2006 | Posted in General
I get questioned a lot about the state of MAD movie parodies, usually from people lamenting them as shorter, less frequent and sometimes weaker than the ones in the past. There was a time when the latest issue of MAD could be counted on to have at least one movie parody and one TV show parody in it, and often more than one. The parodies averaged over 6 pages in length, and the targets were usually highly regarded dramas and films that were either critically acclaimed, box office hits or both. Artsy, off the wall films like “A Clockwork Orange” got the MAD treatment as… READ MORE
August 25th, 2006 | Posted in General
A few days ago I added a new category of post called “Tutorials” in an attempt to allow readers to easily find these features without the need for a cumbersome search. It turns out that isn’t the best solution, as it will eventually require people to click over multiple pages to find what they are looking for. Instead, I have added two new “Pages” to the blog. WordPress, the excellent blog program I use here, has a nice feature where you can create web pages within the blog for whatever purpose you want. The links to these pages are at the top of the blogroll… READ MORE
August 25th, 2006 | Posted in General
It’s not too often I add links to my blogroll or recommend any websites, because… well… there are lot of really good ones and if I linked to them all that’s all I’d have time to do! That said, there are a few I’ve recently come across that have become musts on the “visit every day” list for me I thought I’d share. Drawn! is, in it’s own words, a “collaborative weblog for illustrators, artists, cartoonists, and anyone who likes to draw.”??ᬨ‚ĆPopulated with contributions from a number of terrific artists including fellow NCS member Jay Stephens, Drawn! is filled with links to great sites, blogs,… READ MORE
August 24th, 2006 | Posted in General
A long time ago a friend of mine showed me a photocopy of a collection of comic book style panels called “Wally Wood’s 22 panels that always work!”. Supposedly put together by the legendary Wood, they showed 22 different panel designs that could be used at almost any time within a comic book story to help give a boring “talking heads” part of a script some visual interest. I thought it was pretty smart. For years I’d been looking for a copy of it. In the last week it’s been getting a lot of circulation on the Internet on cartoon and comic blogs and forums,… READ MORE
August 23rd, 2006 | Posted in General
I’ve gotten many positive responses to the modest tutorials I’ve posted so far on the blog… thanks to those who took the time to tell me they appreciated them. I plan on doing more in the future, including a much more involved one on??ᬨ‚Ćdigital coloring. It occurred to me that as time goes on these tutorials will get buried in the archives of the blog and become tough to find unless someone bookmarked a permalink to each of them. So, I have created a new ‘category’ called “Tutorials” for them. They will now be very easy to find anytime, just click on the category link… READ MORE
August 17th, 2006 | Posted in General
I walked into my local comic shop yesterday and what did I find? I mean besides comics featuring women with impossibly big breasts and men with impossibly big thighs… a brand new issue of Cracked Magazine. I knew it was coming, they’d been threatening to publish it for about a year since it was bought by a group of investors. The first issue was supposed to be out in January. This is August, but what the heck! Here’s a news article about it’s return. I’ll get to my thoughts on the new issue in a minute. First I thought I’d tell the story of my… READ MORE
August 15th, 2006 | Posted in General
A few years ago a colleague of mine who does party caricatures in southern California was contacted by comedian Jay Leno about an ad the artist had in the local Yellow Pages. The artist had used a caricature he had done of Leno as part of his ad, and Leno took exception to that. According to the artist, Leno was quite nice about it, but made it plain he did not want to see his image used for advertising this artist’s services. Leno did not sue, but he did ask for the artist to stop using his image, and if he did not a lawsuit… READ MORE
