The National Cartoon!st Issue 1 by National Cartoonists Society

Tom RICHMOND caricatures Jim BORGMAN reflects Stephanie PIRO illustrates Mell LAZARUS divulges

The

National

A PUBLICATION OF THE NATIONAL CARTOONISTS SOCIETY Vol. 1, No. 1

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Pearls Before Swine’s

STEPHAN PASTIS and BILL WATTERSON

create comic strip history

D o Y o u C a r t o o n ? n N C S A r c h i v e A r t n “ C o m i c S c r i p t e d ” n R aTHENATIONALCARTOON!ST r e , U n p u b l i s h e d A r it

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Same Size

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The R.Easterbrook & Co. 914 Radiopen — an example of the pen nib that CHARLES M. SCHULZ used for

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(Same size)

Peanuts ÂŠ2014 Peanuts Worldwide, LLC

nearly 50 years to draw every Peanuts daily.

Charles Schulz

Peanuts daily for Dec. 26, 1962, from the original art (reproduced here same size)

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Comic Scripted Course description: Production of cartoon drawing suitable for reproduction and submission to publishers. Prerequisites: None

GARRY TRUDEAU

and cartooning seemed to be the easiest avenue to do such a thing.

Chad Carpenter, creator of Tundra. If I have anything to answer for, it’s making the comics page safe for bad drawing. WILL EISNER, detail from the book The Dreamer by Will Eisner, (Kitchen Sink Press, 1986)

Garry Trudeau, in response to a question about the politicization of the comics page, in an interview with the Santa Barbara Independent. This is the tragedy of my limited drawing skills. I’ve always regarded this medium as a valid literary form capable of doing much more than telling jokes.

Will Eisner, on comics, in an interview with Susan Vaughn in The Los Angeles Times.

Matt Groening, on why some of the characters in his animated series Futurama resemble those from The Simpsons.

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Finally, this: all my life I’ve loved the word “cartoonist.” Lately, though, I’ve noticed that the term is falling out of use and being replaced by the term “comics artist.” … Among my graduate fiction students I’ve become known for my impassioned mini-lectures urging them never to call themselves artists, but instead to call themselves fiction writers or short story writers or novelists. That’s what you are, I tell them, that’s what you do. You may well be an artist, but it’s always better to let other people call you that. Call yourself an artist and you might be more inclined to talk about it than do it; call yourself a writer — or, dear graduates, a cartoonist — and you’ll be more inclined, more personally and professionally compelled — to get up every day and go to your studio to work. And the work, trite as it sounds, the challenge and the pleasure of the work, in doing the work, in making the work, of being present for and in the work, is the only thing that matters.

Tom De Haven, journalist, teacher and author whose novels include the Derby Dugan “Funny Paper” trilogy, in a commencement address at the Center for Cartoon Studies, May 2012.

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A comic artist ain’t no different than you or me or anybody excep’ he knows how to draw pitchers an’ is crazy in the head. Popeye the Sailor Man

BELA ZABOLY, detail from the original art, Dec. 16, 1942

I never wanted to get a real job in my life,

From the Maricopa (Tempe, AZ) Community College course information sheet.

Drawing is just slog, slog, slog … until what you have in your head approximates to what emerges on the drawing board.

months about a lost artistic career until some-

Ronald Searle,

one showed him Punch magazine and he real-

....................................... JAMES THURBER

1857, he suddenly went blind in one eye (from a detached retina) and despaired for

ized, if worst came to worst, he could always become a cartoonist.

From an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail

Q: Is the cartoon an art form? A: Yes, the cartoon is a marriage of Image and Language. And

Commerce. Image marries Language, quickly tires of its nonstop chatter, dumps it, hooks up with Commerce, then a couple years

James Thurber,

later finds itself living in a double-wide with a kid and an uncertain paycheck, working the night shift at an unsavory truck stop,

on why he drew such oddlooking women, as related by Charles Saxon in his collection Honestly is One of the Better Policies (Viking, 1984).

while Commerce runs off with Telemarketing. That’s what a cartoon is.

Richard Thompson, in an interview in The Washington Post.

This guy … works in a penthouse apartment — a duplex — and that’s where I work too, entirely surrounded by foam-cushioned furniture and all the lush evidences of wealth. If this is a sample of the way cartoonists operate, I’ve been wasting my time making movies.

Bob Hope, on his role as a cartoonist’s assistant in the 1956 movie That Certain Feeling. I never saw myself so much as an actor.

I wanted to be a cartoonist like Charles Schulz and create my own world and be able to have a studio at home and not commute and be able to be with my family.

Mark Hammill, of Luke Skywalker fame, on a career choice.

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They look very attractive to my men.

I called it a novel in cartoons. Graphic novels are called graphic novels because people are ashamed of the term “cartoon,” which is idiotic. I’ve always been thrilled to be a cartoonist, and I’m proud of it, and like the term. I see no neeed to upscale the work I do with some meaningless choice of words like “graphic.”

Jules Feiffer, on his book Tantrum (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), in an interview in The Atlantic.

I was taking this writing course, and I was getting straight A’s. The teacher asked me one day, “I’d like for you to come home and have dinner with me and my wife.” … We talked about writing all through dinner, the great writers that we were. After dinner he shoved his chair back and says, “I guess you’d like to write the great American novel.” I said, “No sir … I want to write the great American comic strip.” And you never saw such a look on a guy’s face. He was like I’d hit him with a brick.

Mort Walker, in an online interview with Bob Andelman at mrmedia.com.

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MORT WALKER, from the endpapers to Backstage at the Strips by Mort Walker (Mason/Charter, 1975)

on inspiration, in an interview published on the occasion of his 90th birthday in the Times Online (UK).

Quarter of Paris during his student days. In

I didn’t call it a graphic novel.

JULES FEIFFER

French artist who lived in the raffish Latin

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George Du Maurier (1834-96) was an Anglo-

GEORGE DU MAURIER

Inspired?

Chairman Steve McGarry mac@stevemcgarry.com THE NATIONAL CARTOON!ST Art Director Frank Pauer NATIONAL CARTOONISTS SOCIETY BOARD Honorary Chairman Mort Walker President Tom Richmond First Vice President Bill Morrison Second Vice President Hilary Price Third Vice President Darrin Bell Secretary John Kovaleski Treasurer John Hambrock Membership Chairman Sean Parkes sean@seanparkes.com National Representative Ed Steckley ed@edsteckley.com NATIONAL CARTOONISTS SOCIETY COMMITTEES The Cartoon!st Frank Pauer Ethics Steve McGarry Education Rob Smith Jr. Greeting Card Contracts Carla Ventresca For general inquires about the NCS and the NCSF email: info@reuben.org The National Cartoon!st is published twice a year by the National Cartoonists Society Foudation, 341 N. Maitland Avenue, Suite 130, Maitland, FL 32789. The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the NCSF. Contents ©2014 National Cartoonists Society Foundation, except where other copyrights are designated. All artwork contained herein is ©2014 by the respective artist and/or syndicate, studio or other copyright holder.

The National Cartoonists Society website: www.reuben.org

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NATIONAL CARTOONISTS SOCIETY FOUNDATION

The

National 14

NCS Reuben Awards Weekend Photos from this year’s event in San Diego, California

Drawing Caricatures with Tom Richmond

Basic theory and the five shapes by the celebrated MAD Magazine cartoonist

The Pearls of Pastis and Watterson An unlikely duo create comics for the ages

Jim Borgman – Exit Stage Left An interview with the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist

Stephanie Piro – A Woman’s Perspective One of the Six Chix talks about writing and drawing in your own voice

Owning Up to the Syndicates with Mell Lazarus A conversation with the creator of Miss Peach and Momma .............................................

1 SAME SIZE 3 COMIC SCRIPTED 7 FIRST PANEL by STEVE McGARRY 40 NCS ARCHIVES 44 FROM THE COLLECTION OF … 52 THE NATIONAL CARTOONISTS SOCIETY 58 DO YOU CARTOON?

n behalf of the National Cartoonists Society and its charitable arm, the National Cartoonists Society Foundation, it is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the inaugural issue of our new

publication, The National Cartoon!st. The NCS was founded by a group of prominent

cartoonists in 1946 and, over the years, our ranks have included some of the greatest names in the profession — from Milton Caniff, Joe Shuster and Rube Goldberg to Charles Schulz, Mort Walker and Jeff MacNelly. Among the superstar cartoonists who are active members of the NCS today are veterans such as Jack Davis, Lynn Johnston and Sergio Aragonés, industry legends like

By ..........................

Steve McGarry

Cathy Guisewite, Jim Davis and Jim Borgman, and such fast-rising stars as Stephan Pastis and Mark Tatulli. Our membership includes some of the world’s top cartoonists in every avenue of the profession, from newspaper comics to comic books, editorial cartooning, advertising and animation. The NCS exists, in part, to foster good relations between cartoonists. Most of us in the profession lead a fairly solitary existence, so the chance to meet up with peers and colleagues at regional chapter get-togethers … or better still, at our annual Reuben Awards weekend … is very welcome. But the NCS offers much more than the opportunity to share insider gossip and discuss nib techniques over a libation or two! As a group, we try to advance the ideals and standards of cartooning, and help and encourage newcomers to our profession. We aim to stimulate interest in cartooning by the general public and we use our talents and financial resources to

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First Panel

Read it. Post it. Follow us.

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@NATCARTOONSOC

@NATIONALCARTOONISTS

THE NATIONAL CARTOONISTS SOCIETY

THE NATIONAL CARTOONISTS SOCIETY WEBSITE: www.reuben.org

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support cartooning museums, libraries and schools. with the NCS to try and achieve these goals, in addition to providing financial assistance to cartoonists and their family members in times of need. This debut issue of The National Cartoon!st is the first of a series of new projects we will be unveiling over the summer of 2014 that we hope will interest, excite and inspire cartoonists and cartoon fans alike. From a free app that features the art of hundreds of legendary cartoonists … a series of free videos featuring some of cartooning’s greatest names … a program to provide cartooning resources to students and teachers … to a national program of children’s hospital visits! Finally, those of you who have attended San Diego ComicCon in recent years may well have visited our huge NCS Booth and met some of our luminaries. We are delighted to announce that we are expanding our presence at comic conventions coast to coast … so if you see the NCS logo, stop by and say hello! Please join us in support of these programs by following the NCS on social media and bookmarking our new site at www.reuben.org … and enjoy this first issue of our new magazine, The National Cartoon!st. Steve McGarry Chairman National Cartoonists Society Foundation

Steve McGarry

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A two-term former President of the National Cartoonists Society, Steve is the current Chairman of the National Cartoonists Society Foundation, the charitable arm of the NCS. He received the prestigious NCS Silver T-Square Award in 2012 for his “outstanding service to the profession.” Having designed record sleeves for a number of new wave luminaries in his native England, including Joy Division and John Cooper Clarke, Steve became one of Britain’s most successful newspaper and magazine illustrators in the 1980s, before creating the long-running comic strip Badlands (right) for Britain’s biggest-selling daily newspaper, The Sun, in 1989. Later that same year, after signing his first U.S. syndication contract, he relocated with his young family to California. His sports and entertainment features, including the syndicated strips Biographic, Kid Town and Trivquiz, appear in newspapers worldwide, from the New York Daily News to the South China Morning Post, and Steve’s magazine clients include SI For Kids, FHM and a host of European sports and teen magazines. Six times nominated for a Silver Reuben, he was the first artist in history to receive Illustrator of the Year Awards from both the National Cartoonists Society and the Australian Cartoonists Association. He has also recently ventured into the world of animation, most notably working with Illumination on “Despicable Me 2” and “The Minions.” He lives in Huntington Beach, Calif., with his wife, Deborah, who is the colorist on the long-running daily cartoon strip Baby Blues. Their twin sons, Joe and Luke, are award-winning artists and also form the Los Angeles indie band Pop Noir. See more of Steve’s work at www.stevemcgarry.com and on the new soccer site www.thetogger.com. Follow @stevemcgarry on Twitter

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Our charitable arm, the NCSF, works in tandem

Coming to a comics convention near you! SEEN IN SAN DIEGO:

Left, Chris (Hagar the Horrible) Browne autographs books.

Right, Bill (FoxTrot) Amend signs prints. Center, actor Jack Black and Luke McGarry autograph posters. Right, Greg Evans, Tom Richmond, John Kovaleski and Daryl Cagle meet and greet fans.

Left, Jeff (The Family Circus) Keane and NCS president Tom Richmond man the booth.

A familiar presence at San Diego Comic-Con for the last decade, the

NCS

is expanding into other comic conventions around the country. Look for the NCS logo and stop by to meet some of the top names in the world of cartooning and comics.

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Check www.reuben.org regularly for updates and follow @NatCartoonSoc on Twitter

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Festival Supreme poster art by Luke McGarry For more information on the Fesival, see FesivalSupreme.com

Following his appearance last year at the National Cartoonists Society booth at Comic-Con,

Jack Black returns this year and brings along his partner in

Tenacious D, Kyle Gass They join artist

Luke McGarry in signing free, limitededition Festival Supreme posters (shown on the opposite page) for one hour only on July 24. Attendance is strictly limited â&#x20AC;&#x201D; follow the NCS on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for additional details.

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One-of-a-kind NCS T-shirts created for San Diego Comic-Con

NCS T-shirts created for previous San Diego Comic-Cons have included artwork by:

Matt Groening

Patrick McDonnell

Sergio AragonĂŠs

Every year, the NCS issues special limited-edition T-shirts to commemorate our appearance at the San Diego Comic-Con. This year, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Batman, some of the biggest names in cartooning have contributed their cape-and-cowl creations for a truly memorable and unique take on the Dark Knight. NCS Comic-Con T-Shirts, past and present, are all available for mail order on the NCS site:

www.reuben.org/sales

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Bongo Comics Bill Morrison with his wife Kayre

Greg (Luann) Evans with his wife Betty

Jenny Robb and Steve Hamaker

Patrick (Mutts) McDonnell

Cartoonist of the Year nominee Hilary (Rhymes WIth Orange) Price with Kristin Gottschalk

NCS president Tom Richmond welcomes guests to the Reuben Awards Weekend

Amateur Cartoonist Extraordinaire recipient “Weird Al” Yankovic with MAD Magazine’s Sam Viviano and Nick Meglin

Sean Parkes

Michael Davis with Terri (The Pajama Diaries) Libenson

Cartoonist and character designer Stephen Silver with his wife Heidi

Over the Memorial Day weekend, the National Cartoonists Society held its annual Reuben Awards Weekend in beautiful San Diego. More than 150 of the world’s top cartoonists gathered at the Omni hotel for the festivities, which included speakers, fine dining and a spectacular awards show. The weekend’s slate of great speakers included Eddie Pittman, Chris Houghton, Greg Evans, Suzy Spafford, Sandra Bell-Lundy,

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San Diego plays host to the NCS annual Reuben Awards Weekend .......................................................................

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Renee Faundo is awarded the Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship

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The legendary Stan Goldberg with his wife Pauline

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Dave (Speed Bump) Coverly accepts his award for Newspaper Panel Cartoon

Scott (The Argyle Sweater) Hilburn with Maria (Half Full) Scrivan

Wiley (Non Sequitur) Miller garners the Reuben Award as Cartoonist of the Year

Brian (Red and Rover) Basset with his wife Bobbi

Chris Houghton and Kassandra Heller

Bunny Hoest-Carpenter, John Reiner and Russ Heath. After Fridayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s seminars, the weekendâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s festivities continued with the NCS Reuben Awards Weekend Welcome Party for cocktails and a buffet dinner. Attendees got to meet and rub shoulders with many of the greats in the profession, see old friends and talk shop. That evening, the party moved across the street to the L Street Art Gallery for karaoke, drinks and laughs.

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Tiffany Zamora and Joe McGarry

1985 Cartoonist of the Year Lynn (For Better or For Worse) Johnston introduces a division award

Deborah McNeely with Michael Ramirez, winner of the Editorial Cartoon award

Rob (Adam at Home) Harrell with his wife Amber Graphic novel nominee Rick Greary

Darrin (Candorville) Bell with his son Emyree and wife Makeda

Matt Diffee accepts his award for Magazine Gag Cartoon

Sandra (Between Friends) Bell-Lundy

On Saturday evening, the Reuben Awards were hosted by

Carolyn Kelly and Mark Evanier

On Sunday, the NCS (in conjunction with the NCS Founda-

master of ceremonies Tom Gammill (producer and writer for

tion) held a public outreach event aboard the USS Midway

“The Simpsons”). “Weird Al” Yankovic received the ACE (Ama-

aircraft carrier, where more than 100 artists did sketches, signed

teur Cartoonist Extraordinaire) Award, and numerous division

autographs and met with fans. The weekend closed out — still

awards were handed out throughout the black-tie-attired night,

aboard the USS Midway — with dinner, dancing and music by

before the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year

Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Michael Ramirez and the De-

went to Wiley Miller, creator of the syndicated strip Non Sequitur.

Luz Band. The event also hosted 38 wounded warriors and their

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Abrams ComicArts’ Charles Kochman

Jose Villena

Chari Pere

Former NCS president, Rick (Soup to Nutz) Stromoski

Ryan (Buni) Pagelow accepts his award for On-Line Comics – Short Form

Christy Higgins with 2009 Cartoonist of the Year Dan (Bizarro) Piraro

Legendary comic book artist Russ Heath accepts the Milton Caniff Award for Lifetime Achievement

Gold Key Award recipient Bunny (The Lockhorns) Hoest-Carpenter

Who will be nominated and win next year at the Reubens? If you’re a professional cartoonist and want to find out in person, join us next Memorial Day when the 69th Annual Reuben Awards Weekend will be held in Washington D.C. For more information about the NCS, see Page 48, or visit www.reuben.org.

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families who enjoyed dinner and sketches from NCS members.

Mike Cope

Longtime King Features Syndicate executive Joe D’Angelo with Mell (Miss Peach, Momma) Lazarus

Heather and Ed Steckley

Sean Parkes is a freelance illustrator, character designer and storyboard artist whose work can be seen worldwide in numerous publications, board games, products and advertisements. Parkes is the Membership Chairman on the Board of Directors of the National Cartoonists Society. For more, see seanparkes.com

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It’s a common fallacy that a caricature is nothing more than a portrait of a person where one or more features are exaggerated for comedic effect. The art of caricature goes much deeper than that.

Dr wing Caric tures ............................

It is a uniquely personal interpretation of not just the facial features of a given subject, but their personality and “presence” as well. ............................ It’s practiced in fine art, editorial publication, animation, comics, cartoons and even on street ............................ corners and theme parks around the world. Done well, a caricature can describe a subject much more completely than a photograph or ............................ portrait could. This article discusses some of my theories on what makes a good caricature, and my basic approach to the art form.

Basic Theory and the

Five Shapes

Tom Richmond

Articles like this always start out with a definition, but “caricature” is a hard thing to pigeonhole into a single sentence. How can you, when the word encompasses the elegant, minimalist lines of Al Hirschfeld to the lavish, value and color soaked paintings of Sebastian Kruger to the graphic, geometrical collages of David Cowles and everything in between? Despite the wild differences in style and technique, “caricature” is the tag that is placed on any of these works of art without hesitation. Obviously there is a connection beyond a common technique, school, or format. So, what are the universal elements all caricatures have that identify them as caricatures? I would say there are three essential elements that transcend style and medium and must be present in a caricature: n RECOGNIZABILITY – That word is a mouthful, but it’s a better one than the word “likeness.” Likeness implies nothing more than the duplication of features, and as I said before a good caricature goes beyond that. Recognizability incorporates a likeness of features, the emphasis of what makes a person unique, and a representation of them in personality and presence. In a nutshell, there should never be any question of who your subject is, it should be immediately apparent. If you can’t tell who it is supposed to be, then it is not successful. n EXAGGERATION – Without some form of exaggeration, or a departure from the exact representation of the subject’s features, all you have is

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a portrait. The level of exaggeration can vary wildly, but there must be some personal interpretation of the subject by the caricaturist. A straight portrait is not a caricature. n STATEMENT – This is the intangible that goes beyond the features and captures the personality or “essence” of the subject. It could be nothing more than capturing an expression that describes that subject’s demeanor or it could editorialize in some way. The artist must be trying to say something about the subject they are caricaturing. It might be something to do with the situation the subject is drawn in, it may just be a play on their personality through expression or body language, it might be as simple as making visual fun of some aspect of their persona or image. Exaggeration itself can accomplish this in some cases. The best caricatures say something more about the subject than that they have a big nose. By my “definition,” a successful caricature therefore looks like the subject, is exaggerated to varying degrees and also has something to say about the subject. In “live” caricature at a theme park, that third item is often turned way down or ignored completely, but in the case of caricatures for illustration, it’s an important part.

makes this person different from “normal,” and you are off and running. The obvious features are easy observations… it’s Johnny and Susie Normal or, worse yet, Johnny and Susie Supermodel that are the challenge. That is where developing an ability to “see” becomes important. There is no face that defies caricature, you just sometimes have to dig a little deeper to find the keys to unlock the more difficult puzzle. In caricature, the old adage of “practice makes perfect” has never been truer. The ability to see doesn’t spring up overnight, and I often tell eager young caricaturists they have about 500 or so bad caricatures in them they have to draw out first before they start noticing the subtle things that hide inside the “ordinary” face. Although I say it’s “impossible” to teach someone to draw caricatures, it’s not impossible to help them develop their ability to draw them. There are many ways and techniques to help an artist develop their ability to see what is in front of them, recognize what makes what they see unique and then amplify that uniqueness to create a successful caricature. THE FIVE SHAPES

I’ve been working with young caricaturists at theme parks for 25 years now, and I’ve learned one very important lesson… it’s impossible to teach someone to draw caricatures. I can teach them to DRAW… that isn’t so hard. Learning how a face looks and works by learning anatomy, how expression changes the features, how the angle the face is at changes the perception of features, how hair grows and falls about the head… those are things that can be taught. Drawing caricatures, on the other hand, is a lot more about seeing what makes the person in front of you unique and interpreting it than it is about making good, confident marks on the paper. I can explain to someone exactly how to draw a circle, but if I place a circle before them and ask them to draw it and they draw a square… well, that is all about seeing and not drawing. The ability to see, and after that the ability to exaggerate what you see for humorous effect in a caricature, that has to be developed. For most that means a lot of drawing and a lot of looking. Have you ever been walking along at the mall or where ever and along comes somebody with some crazy, incredibly distinct face that maybe sports a gigantic nose or a Cro-Magnon brow or some other obviously out-of-theordinary features? Caricaturists have a term for that kind of face… it’s called a “field day.” Think about it for a second… why is that face so ripe for caricature compared to the next person’s? Are the features really that different? If you took a ruler and measured the size of Mr. Schnozz’s nose compared to Mr. Normal, the difference would be minimal. So why is Mr. Schnozz so much easier to caricature? Because you are SEEING a difference based on perception, and that is giving you your springboard for a caricature. One observation of what

The human face is perceived by many as an incredible complex object. There are about 52 muscles in the face, depending on your source and its categorization. Age, sex, race, expression (the face is capable of about 5,000 expressions) weight and environment can all play a role in the look and perception of a given face. Sounds pretty complex. Not really. Every building, no matter how complex, starts out with a foundation and framework. Look at this simple drawing AT RIGHT. Show that drawing to any human being in the world and ask them what it is. Barring a language barrier, they will tell you it’s “a face.” No other information needed. In its most simple form, the human face is made up of only five simple shapes, as shown in the drawing AT LEFT . Place these shapes in their proper relationship, and you have a human face. It really is that simple. Drawing the shapes accurately, so they recognizably represent the subject’s features, is the basis for a good likeness. Beyond that is nothing but details… things like dimples, wrinkles, eyelashes, cheekbones, etc. They

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TEACHING SOMEONE TO SEE

are the decor to your building… the millwork, furniture and drapery that makes the place unique and filled with life. Without the strong foundation, made up by these five simple shapes, it can all come tumbling down. What does that have to do with caricature? Everything. I mentioned a single word in the last paragraph that really is the secret to caricature as a whole no matter what technique or approach you intend to practice: RELATIONSHIPS. It’s the manipulation of the relationships of these five simple shapes that create the foundation for your caricature. In fact, I’d argue that 90 percent of the entire caricature resides in how you relate these five simple shapes to one another. It is the foundation upon which the rest of your building is built, where the real power of exaggeration is realized. Make it good and almost all the heavy lifting is done, the rest merely referring to details. What do I mean by “relationships”? I mean the distances between the five shapes, their size relative to one another, and the angles they are at in relationship to the center axis of the face. Distance. Size. Angle. In traditional portraiture, the head is divided into “classic proportions” meaning the relationship of the features

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are within a certain, accepted range of distance to one another, size and angle relative to the face and head shape. You achieve your likeness in a classic portrait, in its most basic form, by correctly drawing the shapes and then the details of each feature according to the model in front of you while staying within the framework of the “classic” proportions. Of course each face varies minutely here and there, but still you do not stray far from the classic formula. In a caricature, like a portrait, the likeness is also achieved by drawing the features as they really look… but you change the relationship of the features based on your perceptions of the face. The relationships you change are as I listed before: distance, size and angle. AT LEFT, look at these VERY simple drawings that demonstrate how you can change the relationships of the five shapes and create very different caricatures. No detail, and all the shapes are basically the same (with the exception of the head shape, a unique element to caricature) but all are distinctly different and when the details are added will make for highly varied caricatures. The difference is the relationships between the features, and how they have been exaggerated and changed. Caricature

is not about choosing one feature and making it bigger, it’s about all the features together and how they relate to one another. BELOW LEFT are some quick studies of the five shapes next to a few caricature sketches. The relationships differ in distance, size and angle from one another. The bigger the differences are from “classic” proportions, the more exaggerated the caricature. It’s much easier to see the differences when the details are removed and only the 5 shapes are left. It’s also much easier to create those differences at this simple, fundamental level. It’s easy to get caught up in details when the important information rests beneath the rendering. How does one determine the “correct” changes to make to a given person’s feature relationships to make a good caricature of them? Well, that’s the trick, isn’t it? That is where that pesky “seeing” comes in. In his book “How to Draw Caricatures,” Lenn Redman uses a concept called “The Inbetweener” as a basis for almost every observation. It is basically the classic portraiture relationships used as a point of reference for making observations. Every caricature begins with the observations the artist makes about the subject, and how their particular face is perceived by them. MAD Magazine’s legendary caricaturist Mort Drucker has been quoted as saying that there is no “one correct way” to caricature a subject. Any given subject can have several different interpretations with respect to the exaggeration of the relationship of their features… and each may be as successful as the other. That’s one of the unique things about caricature as an art form. Portraiture is basically absolute… Your drawing either looks like the person with the correct features, proportions and relationships, or it does not. Caricature is subjective to a point. The artist’s goal is to draw how they perceive the face, and exaggerate that perception. The result may be different than how others perceive that face, but if the three elements we described in our definition are present it’s still a successful caricature. Hirschfeld used to say he once drew “Mr. Schnozz” himself, Jimmy Durante, without a nose at all, yet it was still recognizable as Durante. That’s not to say that any observation is appropriate… after all you can’t give someone with a small, button nose a gigantic potato nose and call it “exaggeration.” That’s not exaggeration, it’s DISTORTION. You can, however, choose NOT to exaggerate the nose’s smallness but rather find something else to exaggerate. That is the caricaturist’s task, to find what it is about the subject’s face that makes it unique and alter those relationships to exaggerate that uniqueness. N C n n n You can learn a lot more about drawing caricatures from Tom’s best-selling instruction book The Mad Art of Caricature! – A Serious Guide to Drawing Funny Faces, available directly from the author at www.deadlinedemon.com, or wherever art instruction books are sold.

Tom Richmond

.................................................................................................. A humorous illustrator, cartoonist and caricaturist, Tom began his career as a caricaturist at a theme park in 1985 at age 18 while studying art in St. Paul, Minn. He now works as a freelancer for a great variety of clients including Scholastic, Sports Illustrated for Kids, National Geographic World, Time Digital, Penthouse, Marvel Comics, The Cartoon Network, WB Animation, and many, many more. He designed the character “Achmed Jr.” for superstar comedian and ventriloquist Jeff Dunham, for whom he also does product illustration. His art and character designs have been featured on the animated MAD TV show as well as in several feature films and commercials. He is best known as one of the

“Usual Gang of Idiots” at MAD Magazine, where his caricatures and illustrations have been featured in film and TV parodies and feature articles regularly since 2000.

His work has been honored with several awards, including twice being named “Caricaturist of the Year” by the International Society of Caricature Artists, and with NCS Silver Reubens for Advertising Illustration in 2003, 2006 and 2007 as well as for Newspaper Illustration in 2011. In 2012, he received what is arguably cartooning’s highest honor: the Reuben Award for “Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year” from the National Cartoonists Society. Tom is the current president of the NCS, serving in his second term. He works from a studio in his home near Minneapolis, Minn. Follow Tom on Twitter @art4mad

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Right and on the folowing pages, original art from Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis and Bill Watterson. Scans courtesy of Todd Hignite of Heritage Auctions.

STEPHAN BILL

An unlikely duo create comics for the ages By

Stephan Pastis

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Bill Watterson is the Bigfoot of cartooning. He is legendary. He is reclusive. And like Bigfoot, there is really only one photo of him in existence. Few in the cartooning world have ever spoken to him. Even fewer have ever met him. In fact, legend has it that when Steven Spielberg called to see if he wanted to make a movie, Bill wouldn’t even take the call. So it was with little hope of success that I set out to try and meet him last April. I was traveling through Cleveland on a book tour, and I knew that he lived somewhere in the area. I also knew that he was working with Washington Post cartoonist Nick Galifianakis on a book about Cul de Sac cartoonist Richard Thompson’s art. So I took a shot and wrote to Nick. And Nick in turn wrote to Watterson. And the meeting didn’t happen. Bill apparently had

PASTIS WATTERSON something to do. Or more likely, wanted nothing to do with me. Which is smart. But Nick encouraged me to send an email to Bill anyway. I said I didn’t want to bother him. But a week or so later, this Pearls strip ran in the newspaper:

And I figured this was as good of a time to write to him as any. So I emailed him the strip and thanked him for all his great work and the influence he’d had on me. And never expected

to get a reply. And what do you know, he wrote back. Let me tell you. Just getting an email from Bill Watterson is one of the most mind-blowing, surreal experiences I have ever had. Bill Watterson really exists? And he sends email? And he’s communicating with me? But he was. And he had a great sense of humor about the strip I had done, and was very funny and — oh yeah — he had a comic strip idea he wanted to run by me. Now if you had asked me the odds of Bill Watterson ever saying that line to me, I’d say it had about the same likelihood as Jimi Hendrix telling me he had a new guitar riff. And yes, I’m aware Hendrix is dead. So I wrote back to Bill. “Dear Bill, I will do whatever you want, including setting my hair on fire.”

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So he wrote back and explained his idea. He said he knew that in my strip, I frequently make fun of my own art skills. And that he thought it would be funny to have me get hit on the head or something and suddenly not be able to draw. Then he’d step in and draw my comic strip for a few days. That’s right. The cartoonist who last drew Calvin and Hobbes riding their sled into history would return to the comics page. To draw Pearls Before Swine. What followed was a series of back-and-forth emails where we discussed what the strips would be about, and how we would do them. He was confident. I was frightened. Frightened because it’s one thing to write a strip read by millions of people. But it’s another thing to propose an idea to Bill Watterson. The idea I proposed was that instead of having me get hit on the head, I would pretend that Pearls was being drawn by a precocious second grader who thought my art was crap. I named her “Libby,” which I then shorted to “Lib.” (Hint, hint: It’s almost “Bill” backwards.) At every point in the process, I feared I would say something wrong. And that Bill would disappear back into the ether. And that the whole thing would seem like a wisp of my imagination. But it wasn’t that way. Throughout the process, Bill was funny and flexible and easy to work with. Like at one point when I wanted to change a line of dialogue he wrote, I prefaced it by saying, “I feel like a street urchin telling Michelangelo that David’s hands are too big.” But he liked the change. And that alone was probably the greatest compliment I’ve ever received. I don’t want to say any more about our exchange because to do so would probably be to compromise the privacy he so zealously guards. But I will offer you this one biographical tidbit: technology is not his friend. I found that out when it came to

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the logistics of the artwork. I drew my part first and then shipped him the strips. I wanted him to fill in the panels I left blank, and simply scan and email me back the finished strips. I asked him to do this because I did not want to be responsible for handling his finished artwork. Partly because I knew it would be worth thousands of dollars. Partly because I knew he wanted to auction it off for charity. And partly because my UPS driver has a tendency to leave my packages in the dirt at the end of our driveway. (I could just imagine the email I’d have to write the next day: “Dear Mr. Watterson, The first comic strip you’ve drawn in 20 years was ravaged by a squirrel.”) So this left doing it my way. Digitally. And this is when I found out that Bill Watterson is not comfortable with scanners or Photoshop or large email attachments. In fact, by the end of the process, I was left with the distinct impression that he works in a log cabin lit by whale oil and hands his finished artwork to a man on a pony. So I proposed working out our technological issues over the phone. But he didn’t want to. At first I thought it was because he didn’t own one. Or have electricity. But then I remembered we were emailing. And so I soon came to the sad realization that he probably just didn’t want me to have his phone number. Which was smart. Because I would have called that man once a week for the rest of his life. And so we worked through the technological problems via email. And unlike every other technological problem I’ve ever had, it was not frustrating. It was the highlight of my career. The only thing Bill ever asked of me was that I not reveal he had worked on Pearls until all three of his strips had run. And so I did not reveal his participation until the sequence ran. And it was the hardest secret I’ve ever had to keep. Because I knew I had seen something rare. A glimpse of Bigfoot. N C

Original Pearls By Chris Sparks In early June several Team Cul de Sac team members got together at Richard Thompson’s house outside of Washington, D.C. We were joined by two particular TCDS members, Bill Watterson and Stephan Pastis. Stephan was the first to commit to Team Cul de Sac and brought early attention to the project. Then, as you may remember, Bill did a painting of Petey for the cause. It was Bill’s first public art in 16 years, and the publicity surrounding his donation put our project on the cartooning map — and helped raise nearly

artwork to be auctioned $125,000 for the Michael J. Fox Foundation. Bill, who has become a most vocal supporter in the quietest way possible, delivers the goods. And he did it again in his collaboration with Stephan on Pearls Before Swine. Bill had sent me an email a few months earlier that he had a TCDS secret, and then a few weeks before the strips appeared he told me the news about the Pearls dailies. For the first time since December 1995, Bill’s art appeared in newspapers. I had the privilege of having breakfast with Bill on June 4, and I handed him the

morning paper. I watched as he read his first newspaper work in 19 years. The print was a little smaller than he remembered from the good ol’ days, but I don’t think he’d mind me saying that he was grinning from ear to ear. I know I was. A huge thank you to both Bill and Stephan for all of the support they have given Team Cul de Sac. Support that will pay even greater dividends: At Bill’s request, the artwork is being sold for Team Cul de Sac on behalf of Cul de Sac’s Richard Thompson, who is battling

Parkinson’s Disease. The original artwork for the three comic strip collaboration between Bill and Stephan will be sold at Heritage Auctions on Aug. 8, with proceeds from the sale benefitting The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. Profits from the sale of the art (Heritage is also waiving the seller’s fee and will contribute half of the buyer’s premium) will be donated to the Foundation. To follow the auction, visit HA.com. For more on Team Cul de Sac, see teamculdesac.blogspot.com.

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Except for the three Ronald Searle originals on the wall, the office looked the clutter of just another move. Empty boxes awaited more files, shelves were just half-full, a pile of discarded books sat in the corner. A stack of slips reminds everyone about his new contact information. He’ll be there past midnight, boxing up a lifetime of work. After 32 years of editorial cartooning at the Cincinnati Enquirer, Jim Borgman was leaving. Just walking away from the 19thfloor corner office, with spectacular views of sports’ stadiums below, the Ohio River and Kentucky to the south, and to the west, the area of town where Jim was raised. He’d probably be the first to tell you that while it may be about location — as in that west side of Cincinnati — it is not about this corner office. There’ll be no memorial

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to cartooning left here. The one that took 32 years to build is already in place. Two days before Jim was to leave in 2008, I slipped into a chair across from him, and with pizza and soft drinks resting on the same drawing board where he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 — and the Reuben Award a couple years later — we chatted about his leaving and his legacy, staying out of the spotlight and big doughy people. — Frank Pauer

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o what, like, 30 years ago did I sit across from you at this drawing board? (Laughs) Yeah, this very table. They told me I could take it with me.

I remember then how you were struggling with style, trying to find your own voice. You know, I feel like it was (laughs) a particularly painful growing period for me, but maybe it feels that way to everyone. In the early days, on any given day you could look at my cartoon and figure out who I had been looking at the night before (laughs). I went through a MacNelly period, I went through an Oliphant period. Peters, Searle, Booth. Unlike a lot of people I didn’t grow up wanting

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through. You finally integrate that stuff, and then you’re just drawing. There was a period in the early-to-mid ’90s where it felt like I was in the zone, and each day I was inventing something new. In Smorgasborgman, your first collection, you cite a laundry list of influences, from Searle to MacNelly, Heinrich Kley, Springsteen (Borgman laughs). Aside from any stylistic influence, what did they bring to your drawing board? Springsteen I think about a lot. He’s been an ongoing influence for me, and I think the reason is not only the great heart he brings to everything, but his sense of place. He didn’t try to be universal — he tried to be particular. He talked about the boardwalk in Jersey and particular streets. And doing that it felt like our story. That’s what I came to like about that part of my cartoons — when I’m able to plug into that sense

S TA G E

to be a cartoonist. I suddenly had this job before I had done all the kind of minor league development. So I was really learning while on stage. There seem to be a few geniuses who seem to spring full grown onto the scene, but most of us have worked our way through these influences to come to some sort of synthesis of our own.

of place, you know, these big doughy people that populate my cartoons. Those are people I live among, those are people I’m watching when I’m having breakfast with my mom at the Delhi Big-Boy. The houses they live in are authentic to this area. So once I had this mid-western voice established to my work I felt more comfortable.

And that synthesis arrived . . . ? I started in ’76. I’d say that by ten years down the road — that sounds like a long time — I was no longer thinking so much about how to draw. It had gone from conscious to unconscious. And I think that’s when you start having fun. When you’re not thinking so much about whose style you’re working in, whose voice you’re speaking

What about, say, Searle, who doesn’t bring that sense of what’s going on in his neighborhood? No, he doesn’t. For Searle I think it’s almost all style. That amazing electricity in his line. (Looks at the Searle originals on the wall in his office) What sometimes looks like abandon. Certainly artistic

Getting back to that Springsteen sense of place, you once said, “I didn’t savor the big moments as much as chronicling the smaller changes. How the news trickles down to everyday lives, how people adjust and cope.” Yeah, that’s him, isn’t it. Did he say that or did I? You did. (Much laughter) That’s good. I mean, there was a point in my career when I became less interested in what was going on in Washington and more interested in what was going on in my neighborhood. I never abandoned Washington, of course,

but I felt a little like a fraud, drawing all these Washington-centric cartoons from Cincinnati, where people are working and raising their kids. They don’t have this luxury to study House bills and all this wonkish stuff. I’m grateful that some people do, and I’m grateful that I had a job where I could, but after a while it just feels like you’re talking to yourself in this town. So I started doing more and more what I call domestic cartooning, people in their houses talking to each other about stuff. It’s usually not profound, but it’s kind of how the news finally drifts down and impacts them. I started feeling like I was on a more authentic road. So you’re in the neighborhood, but then you’re the only one who can draw. It came to be, over time, a conversation that I was having with readers in this town. I still marvel at how impossibly intimate my relationship with these

readers became. I’m on the 19th floor of a downtown office building, but when I meet Cincinnatians they feel they know me. And I feel like I know them, too. It just turns out that we’ve been exchanging a couple sentences a day over coffee (laughs). You’re not talking down to them as much as engaging them. That’s a nice thought. I hope that’s true. I never thought the point of political cartoons was to necessarily make you laugh or to make you do anything — just be on the wavelength of what’s going on in the world and try to capture it. People have been writing me as I leave. I’m amazed at how many of them write, ”You made me laugh. You made me cry.” The laughing part — I’m proud I can do that sometimes. But to be able to say that you did a drawing and it affected someone, it touched their heart — that’s a pretty big

muscle, artistic courage to just put lines down and not fuss with them. When you look at those originals there’s something moving through his pen, a real energy that I love. At my worst, my lines get very static; at my best they have that quiver to them that I think I learned from Searle.

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deal. I’m proud of exercising that whole range of what drawings can do. So you made them laugh, you made them cry — what about those readers who are just pissed off? (Laughs) You read my blog! The blogosphere just brings out the worst in people. Well, look — I’m a fairly liberal person in a town that’s strongly Republican. I’ve been rowing against the current all these years, politically speaking, yet they still tolerate me. Probably the most common comment I get is, “I don’t always like what you say but I do enjoy your cartoons.” (Laughs). It gives me the sense that there’s a lot of people for whom I’ve been the devil’s advocate in this town. That’s OK. A place like this can get pretty tight if somebody isn’t out there insisting on some elbow room. But you’re not elbowing them that hard. If you looked at my work long enough you’d certainly see my political bent. But I don’t think that day after day I’m ideological in my work. An awful lot of it is just common sense. Observations. And a lot of it has nothing to do with politics. I would always dip down and do a Bengals or Reds or cicada cartoon. It’s an instinct, that after I’ve tested everyone’s patience, to bring us back together and talk about something less volatile. It’s a natural cadence to my work.

ber in high school drawing Paul Simon off of an album cover. I think I was drawn to caricature initially. But it was an adopted interest in college to start learning about cartoons. A friend was into very old political cartoons — Puck and that kind of stuff. I was interested, but not so much. Then I found Oliphant and MacNelly in the papers. My mom would clip them out and send them to me. Did you end up doing political cartoons for the school paper? I think I did one in my junior year and then each week in my senior year. You have to remember — I got [the Enquirer] job in like January of my senior year, so I had done a dozen, or 15, political cartoons. Your entire portfolio! (Laughs) That was my entire portfolio when I was hired to do this job. And you might think that they were fabulous cartoons. They were not fabulous cartoons (laughs). They were very derivative, obviously, and not very astute. But this is my hometown, and like a bumpkin I sent my work in to the editor. [Enquirer editorial cartoonist] L.D. Warren had retired a couple years earlier. Dwane Powell had then come in, but that didn’t work out. They were passively looking for someone

We should back up a bit. Did you do cartoons in college? Yeah. Were they editorial cartoons — was it some obvious progression from there to here? It’s a pretty unlikely story. I was a junior at Kenyon when I was given the assignment of doing caricatures of famous Kenyon alumni. Rutherford B. Hayes. Paul Newman. Jonathan Winters. So I did these David Levine-type caricatures. That was my first time in print, to speak of. But you must have already cartooned some —something they would have seen. You knowwwww … barely. I remem-

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and I think they figured that since I was from here I might understand the political scene better. I didn’t, but I didn’t tell them that. And so I arrived very, very green one week after I graduated, having drawn maybe 20 cartoons. My first

month here I doubled my life’s output (laughs). Were you an art major? Yeah. What had you otherwise thought about doing? I’m astonished how little I gave it any thought. I think I imagined myself painting somewhere, or doing prints. My mentor in college was a print-maker, a lithographer doing obscure imagery and stuff, and all of us were his disciples. Where I thought that was going I don’t know. So there you are, one week after graduation, hired as the editorial cartoonist of a major metropolitan daily newspaper. (Laughs) Yeah. What do you think they were thinking? I think they thought they could mold me, is what it amounted to. They probably thought OK, the guy can draw and he doesn’t have many political opinions — which I was very up front about — and so we can make him a Republican cartoonist to replace L.D. here. But it was immediately clear: I was a kid of the ’60s, and that was not a natural fit for me. As I began developing and reading more and more I was not in line with the Enquirer’s editorial philosophy. Did that ever come to a head? It was only a couple years later that I was starting to get job offers. I went to my editor and said, “You know I would understand it if you wanted a cartoonist who was going to be more in line with your political philosophy here, but it’s not me, and if it’s not me maybe you could tell me now while I have other options.” And the word came back, “No, we like you and think readers understand that when your signature is on it it’s you talking and not us. If you’re going to do strong work you’re going to have to feel strongly about it. So go to it.” That’s a pretty remarkable thing to be told when you’re 24.

the ones that have more soul in them. But initially — I think I tried early on to be that angry young man in my cartoons. It just didn’t fit me. I don’t have that Olympian voice that Paul Conrad or Herblock had. I admire them, but I don’t have it in myself. For me, the art form has been more about me picking up the rock, turning it over and holding it up to the sun to see how the light bounces off of it. I have a fairly strong set of principles and political beliefs, but at the end of the day I’m OK with it if people just looked at my work and considered it. If it made them firmer in their own opposing viewpoint, that’s all right — I had some role in the debate. It’s by putting it out there that you spark other people’s voices, and that’s where my faith is. So aside from growing up with these people, where did the visual spark come from? I started looking at George Booth at one point. And it was his characters that sort of got me going. It was that sense of, like, a world he lived in and these people who populated it. It was all unarticulated, but there was this feeling that there was this world there, and it would be interesting to find that world myself. My own world. And that’s when I started doing more of those common man scenes, which developed into a whole vein of my work.

But did following L.D., who had a very conservative voice, affect your earliest work, thinking that maybe you should be careful in how you began? You’d think. But, no (laughs). Naiveté can be a gift sometimes. I was far more formed by the editorial cartoons I was looking at than by the writers around me. I wasn’t thinking strategically, I was just thinking about what I wanted to say. Not playing it safe. No. A guy from the paper who liked me came in one day and said, “You better watch your ass. You shouldn’t be getting away with the stuff you’re getting away with.” (Laughs.) I think it startled every-

body. That my body of work has been popular within the context of this newspaper and this town is not a natural fit. In your first collection there’s a lot less of those doughy folk that you love to depict. I just assume there was a conscious effort to do national-topic cartoons because that’s what you thought you had to do as an editorial cartoonist? Yeah. And in those days you also thought, “OK, now I’ve got a job, how can I get syndicated?” At the time it seemed unexciting the days I had to lower myself to do local topics. I say all that in quotes, because in time I feel like those are the ones that really matter. They’re

What about a cartoon that you’ve done — or a series of cartoons — that have had some direct effect on an issue. Boy . . . so rare. There were a few cases. Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer, had an exhibit here at the Contemporary Arts Center in the early ’90s. Our sheriff, who was a prosecutor at the time, shut it down because in his mind it was pornographic. He had just gotten Hustler out of town, and was building steam as a kind of puritanical sort of force. I didn’t have strong feelings about Mapplethorpe, but I felt this was going in the wrong direction. So I was really leaning into him and the tide of opinion began to turn against him. I don’t know how much of it was me, but the show re-opened and he was sort of shut down for a while. Did he ask for the originals? No. (Laughs). Local boy makes good.

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There can’t be many cartoonists with my story. I bet there once was. I bet it was once more common for a person to cartoon in their own hometown. Given that, how different do you think your work might have been if you had, say, spent most of your career in San Diego? I remember Signe Wilkinson telling me that when she went to San Jose she was doing her kind of characters. Her editor told her, “People don’t look like that in California.” And it dawned on her that he was right. So I think she started drawing thin people jogging and stuff (laughs). I tend to think that wherever I went I would have absorbed the culture of the place. Whether I would have gotten good at capturing a place other than the one I grew up in I don’t know. I also don’t think I would have been a very good cartoonist in a big city. I thrive better where I’m not in the spotlight. I don’t have to perform on the big stage, I can just hear myself think and follow my own vibe. This place has been good for me that way. I thought that was why a lot of humorists came out of the Midwest. We have this perspective on things. You can see where life is happening from here, but it’s not . . . here (laughs). Not many television reality shows based in Ohio. (Laughs) We’re good observers here in the Midwest. Speaking of careers, you’d once said that growing up you wanted to be a priest or a zoo-keeper. Do you think that you achieved some — — Perfect synthesis? (Laughs) Yeah, I do. It sounds funny, but there is actually some truth in that. A priest has that sense of right and wrong, a moralistic thread. A zoo-keeper is just watching the animals (laughs). Editorial cartoonists do the perfect synthesis of that. Do you think most readers realize just how hard this job is? I hear the “Is that all you have to do? One cartoon a day?” kind of thing, or “I don’t know how you come up with one every day.” I imagine that most readers picture us living a lot more frivolous and whimsical a life. I grind away all day, mostly. I come down to the office virtually every day, work in the newsroom with my sketchbook full of notes and

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stare deep, deep, deep into that white paper for most of the day. Any work that you’ve come to regret? (Long pause) I’m not sure I’m going to be able to come up with a good answer to that. I’ve always felt like this is a work in progress. It’s a conversation, so what I say today is not necessarily my bottom line. It’s where I am today, and as the debate goes on I may end up in a different place. I’m not sure I challenged my biases enough about Ronald Reagan’s message. He had a hold of something that was true. I didn’t like him, and I still don’t end up on his side of the debate. But that’s true of a lot of presidents. I thought Carter was a dunce. You know, draw the guy with a big smile and make fun of him. But now I look back, and he wanted to base foreign policy on human rights. That’s a pretty damned profound thought, and we just thought that was all silly. Would I go back and change things? I suppose, but not enough to worry about. You don’t always have that clear, moral vision at the outset. You hope to get there. I think most of us know that your first wife died unexpectedly in 1999. I can only imagine how that must have affected you personally, but how did it affect you professionally? That’s a great question. (Pauses) Lynn was a fabulous partner. I look back and think that, during those 20 years together, I was able to focus on my work in an

almost inordinately pure kind of way. When she died I realized what a luxury that had been, because then I was a single dad with two kids. Now I was the one up late paying the bills, and arranging to get to the parent conferences and working around all the things a parent has to do. And your attention gets divided. I think there was a period of several years, at least, where a, you’re just getting back on your feet emotionally; and b, you start realizing that this is the way that most people’s lives are. Split attention, cutting corners, taking shortcuts, trying to hold it together with spit and duct tape and body English. I was out of that golden era, where I could come in here and had the luxury of just massaging a drawing all day long. It was several years before I got back on my feet that way. I remarried in 2003, and we’ve found our way back to that feeling again. I guess we were fortunate that you got in while the getting was good — it’s not the best of times for editorial cartooning. It’s like the rapture for cartoonists — we’re all just at once ascending into the sky. In some ways it makes sense — if you’re the bean counter who’s running a newspaper you can get rid of this position without missing a beat in your production. I was given the luxury of a nice voluntary severance package, so I’m not really talking about me, and my publisher had a lot of reluctance to allow me to take the buyout. But looked at another way, it’s like Matt Davies said to me, “Newspa-

So it’ll just be more of these big, doughy people. Yeah (laughs). The mascot here is the flying pig. It’s a long story — this was a butchering capital for a long time. So I seized on that, and that’s going to be my main character — a little flying pig who lives in a chili parlor. Beyond that I don’t know much more (laughs). I don’t think it’s going to be very political. At the moment I don’t feel like talking about politics.* pers are burning their heirloom furniture to heat the house.” People like cartoonists and columnists give a newspaper its personality. So in one sense it’s easy to cut them but it also seems pretty shortsighted — you just become another cold news deliverer. Readers have a lot of options of where to get their news, and if you haven’t made yourself distinguished in some way with personality and color then why should they choose you? What about filling this chair? I’d be more happy moving on if I thought there’d be some kid coming in to take this spot. But even at this, by moving on I may have protected the jobs of a few people out in the newsroom, younger people who are starting to raise their families and who may grow into their voices. It’s appropriate to move on at a certain point, but it’s harder for me knowing that there may be a Sprite machine here where this drawing board is (laughs). What are you not going to miss about leaving? I never liked being in the spotlight. I always liked that my picture didn’t run in the paper — my work could be known without me having to be out there. Nonetheless, this job does require you to be somewhat of an ambassador for the paper. It never fit me right. But you did do a lot of school talks, presentations to various groups. . . I did as much of that as I could, and it was all good, but it never fit my personality. I will just like doing the strip in anonymity, and not being out as much as this position required me to. I’ve also gotten

tired of defending my point of view to angry people on the phone — I won’t miss that. I won’t miss meetings. I don’t know how much I’ll miss the work itself. Are you going to miss covering the election? Yeah, if I had my druthers the timing would have been different. But it’s a funny thing about the stuff you have to do — you don’t know how much you like it because you have to do it. That’s going to be the revelation for me: when I look up in a couple months and don’t have to do anything with the news. Will it just fade away for me or will I find some impulse that wants to comment? But come January, you’ll be doing a weekly piece for the Enquirer. Will this be anything like Wonk City? How did that come about? Mark Alan Stamaty did a thing called Washingtoon for The Washington Post that ran on Mondays on the op-ed page. Mark went on and Meg Greenfield called and asked if I’d like to do something in that spot. It’s like getting a call from the Vatican. So I concocted this thing, and did it for two years. It had a continuing character and it was sort of about life as I imagined it to be inside Washington. It was all made up — I did it from here (laughs). Nobody ever remembers it to me, and I don’t think it made much of an impact, but it gave me an appetite for trying to tell a story. That’s something you don’t get to do in editorial cartooning. So I think that primed me to do Zits, and it primed me to what I’m going to do here next, once a week for the paper. I always liked what Phil Frank did. Mike Keefe did something called Cold Facts Avenue. Just the concept of doing a comic strip on

* Unfortunately, that weekly series never came to fruition.

your town and not caring if it made any sense outside of your readership really appealed to me. It’s very intimate.

Everyone else seems to be doing children’s books. I don’t think about children’s books so much, but I once did a series about where you get your ideas that became a poster. That’s a subject that interests me — the creative process. What it’s like living a life where you have to come up with ideas everyday. I’d like to maybe do a book on that. You were using those party-hat characters as far back as your first collection. Long time ago. It’s been in the background all these years. Ever pinch yourself and think — for the most part — that it couldn’t have been better? I really do. I really do. I think how unlikely it was to find a job that pulled together all the things I’m good at. I can’t design anything better — caricature, writing, I get to read and sit and doodle and daydream. I get to chew on these thoughts that interest me and then draw them in a way that will engage people. I feel really, really lucky. And I think about my dad, a sign painter on the west side of town, a real working-class part of town. We got the Enquirer every day and spread it out and did the Jumble together and read the comics and all that. It’s not like I lived thinking, “Boy, if I could only work for the paper.” That was too lofty a thought — nobody in my family did that kind of stuff. That anyone would have said that I would grow up to be the face of the Cincinnati Enquirer still just seems impossible to me. And when I think of my dad, who died years ago, he would have thought that was something really cool. N C

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P I R O

STEPHAN E She’s the Saturday Chick. Sometimes Sunday, too. The rest of the week she self-syndicates the panel Fair Game, runs her own T-shirt company and an extensive CafePress store at cafepress.com/saturdaychick, designs jewelry, illustrates books (her most recent collection is My Cat Loves Me Naked) and teaches kids how to cartoon. Throw in an hour on the phone, too.

Frank Pauer: I think most of us know you for your print work, but you took a roundabout way of careers to get here. Stephanie Piro: When I started to submit my work to magazines — must have been in the late ’70s — nobody would publish it. I kept getting rejections. Very nice rejections, but I wasn’t selling anything. When I showed cartoons to friends people seemed to respond to them, so I thought I would cut out the middleman and go the craft show route. I taught myself silk-screening, which wasn’t easy, and I did just very simple silk-screening — just black line on very cheap T-shirts, which was all I could afford. The first craft show I went to I had these feminist shirts and all these women gathered around and laughed and laughed. At this time there wasn’t a lot of humor geared toward women, as there is now. I sold all the shirts that

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WOMAN’S

PERSPECTIVE

And you turned that into a lucrative venture. This was in 1984, so I started a company called Strip T’s Design Company. I did that for a number of years. People responded to them and I did very, very well selling T-shirts. And through the shirts a licensing agent spotted them and wanted to license my stuff to calendar companies. For a number of years I had calendars with different companies. Greeting cards were another deal. But all the while you were still attempting to break into magazine cartooning. I was still submitting to magazines and couldn’t get published. Finally, after having this whole other career Glamour magazine bought my first cartoon. Do you remember the gag for that first one? Yes, it was a line I actually took from a speech I had to give. My husband used to give a Robert Burns Supper every year and I was chosen to do a “toast to the laddies.” One of the lines was “I like the concept of men ... it’s the reality I have problems with.” I used it in one of my early feminist cartoons, which Glamour bought, and went on to buy many more. Did you grow up with an interest in cartooning? I did, from my earliest ability to read. I grew up on Long Island, and there weren’t any bookstores close by. Once in a while we’d have to go to the airport — at that time it was still Idlewild — and there was a bookstore there. My mom would buy the Peanuts collections, and I probably learned to read with those. I don’t even remember it in the newspapers. It had such an impact on me — I just loved Charles Schulz’s line. I don’t think anyone has been more expressive with such deceptively simple looking lines. I just fell in love with black and white pen and ink work. My parents bought the Charles Addams collections, the New Yorker collections. My mother had scrapbooks of cartoons that she had cut out of magazines through her teen

years. She also liked Ronald Searle. We always had cartoon books around. And Edward Gorey. You attended the School of Visual Arts. Did you attend the school specifically to pursue cartooning? Did they have much to offer in that regard? No, I wanted cartooning classes, but ended up with fine art the first year and illustration the second. There weren’t many cartooning classes that I remember. I would have loved animation, but as I remember the few classes I was hoping for were filled. I did have Burne Hogarth for art history, so that was the closest I got. What was the best thing that you came away with from the school? Mostly that it was a very freeing, liberating experience. It was the ’60s after all, and I had wonderful teachers. I remember I had Robert DeNiro Sr. as a life drawing teacher, and Steve Kaltenbach, who was a terrific conceptual artist. And so then all through the ’80s you were still pursuing print publication. It was very funny: Cosmo had a young editor who wouldn’t buy anything but he really liked my work. He suggested that I take all these cartoons and do a theme. So I put together all these relationship cartoons, and he loved them. He even took them around on his lunchtime to other editors to get them published. No one did, but they became my book, Men! Ha! Do you think that some of your work was rejected because you were a woman, or was it for the work? Maybe early on, though a couple of my supporters were guys. But yeah, I think I was too overtly feminist. From a woman’s perspective. Sometimes I tried to say that to women’s magazines that I was submitting to: “You know, you’ve got all these guys writing from a woman’s perspective, but how about how women feel? Why not open it up?” The New Yorker has done that, but the New Yorker humor is kind of . . . Occasionally not very funny? (Laughs) A couple people I do find funny. Even cartoonists that I like, sometimes when they’re in the New Yorker

they’re less funny. (Laughs) I think that cartooning had always been kind of that ’50s, white male profession. It was a guy thing. There’s still a difference in what people find funny, but it’s changed a lot. It’s easier. Although now that it’s easier, there are less places to get published. At what point did you realize that you had a specific voice? I think it was when I was trying to do the strip The Terrible Tea Time, about two women who lived in a post-apocalyptic society. I just really got into it. I had a good time doing those. I always liked single panels, but I really liked developing the characters for that strip. The older I get, the harder it seems now. While I might have ideas for a strip I

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I had brought, and that started me on a T-shirt career. Which was a back door to cartooning. I was selling cartoons, just not to a publication.

don’t think I could ever do it at this point. Six Chix is perfect. While you mostly do singlepanel gags, Six Chix demands that you also think in a strip format. Is your approach to these any different? Oh, it’s very different. When I do a single panel, I write first. I’ll write and write and write — I love writing. The hard thing is that you have to draw it all up. You have to stop writing and then you get to drawing and all you want to do is draw and draw and draw. And then it’s like, “Oop — got to write again.” With the strip, it’s a slower process. It opens up more in the way of drama and character-driven ideas. Characters interact, whereas in a panel they’re more declarative. You tend to think more in a single panel than sequentially. I guess I was always a single-panel person, because I like that succinctness of saying everything in a sentence. I tend to be wordy — I might have one sentence but it’s a long sentence. I also feel like I have a rhythm when I write a panel. Once in a while an editor will want to change something, or drop a word, and it just changes the rhythm — it ruins what I’m saying. In an interview you did with Sandra BellLundy, you said that you couldn’t work for the New Yorker because “you can’t submit on a weekly basis.” Yeah, I just don’t work like that. I’ll probably write for a week — or two — and then draw for a week. The people who are really dedicated in getting into

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I think there’s a real difference of perception in humor that appeals to men and humor that appeals to women. I think that it used to be that a lot of male editors would look at a strip for or about women and go, “Eh, this isn’t funny.” I read someplace about how we respond to humor and that men respond to the one-two punch; women like a little story. I love what Sandra Bell-Lundy does. Terri Libenson. I love those storydriven, women-centric strips.

the magazine — I don’t think I’ll ever get in. I’ve tried everything to get in. Still? Well, I tried about two years ago. I took an issue and I pasted over all the cartoons with my cartoons — I think I even did the cover. I thought I’d at least get some kind of response. It didn’t come back for three months and it came back without even the standard rejection note. Nothing. You write primarily for women. I do. It’s funny, I feel like I’m speaking directly to women but the people that actually write me fan mail are guys. I think some of them get crushes on the women that I draw and I don’t know if they think that’s me. Not really! (Laughs). The inner me – the way I was when I was like … 20. But to whom you write makes a difference.

The drawing may come more easily, but the writing is the real work. You know, there are cartoonists who buy writing, and basically just illustrate. Nothing against that, but when you write and draw it’s your voice. Completely. I think it has a lot more impact and power if you do them both. It takes years before you get your own voice. I try to be very dispassionate about my work. After they’re finished I’ll think, “If somebody else did this, would I think it was funny?” As for style, you don’t mess around with a lot of detail. My work’s been called minimalist. I love characters. I actually really, really love dialogue. I just like the starkness. That’s just myself — I love to look at other people’s details. Do you think your style compliments your writing, or does the art help drive the words? I visualize when I’m writing and I sketch. If I draw something too well in my sketches I can’t reproduce it. I don’t pencil — if I try to ink it in it looks very stiff. As a result, I paste up a lot. I draw something and I like the way a piece looks, and I know I won’t be able to redraw it. So I’ll cut that character out and paste it onto another part. I can’t pencil

— it’s all straight from the pen. So do you either use a lot of paper or — I recycle, I recycle. I do use a lot of paper. I am, in my own way, a perfectionist. [Pencilling] is a skill I wish I had. I wouldn’t be wasting so much paper.

at the library it’s girls who come. Are they more interested in sequential art, animation, strips — Some of the kids are very big into anime. But what I do is basically come up with a project. Someone wanted to do some cartoons about zombies. So I drew a square and said, “This is your room, your house. You’re being attacked by zombies. How do you deal with them?” So they drew themselves inside the box, then they would pass the paper around

So most everything is pieces and parts. Oh, yeah. The computer has just been a Godsend. I draw my own panel border, and it always wants to go off to the right. I’ve learned that you can skew it [in Photoshop]. I clean things up on the computer. And my handwriting — some people want my handwriting. Other people find it A sample strip from The Terrible Tea Time indecipherable. I had a font made and they couldn’t so each kid would draw a zombie of a do it — it made the commas look like different style. Then I gave them all a apostrophes. sealed envelope with ways they could destroy the zombies. I made copies of Essentially what you’re doing with your all of them so I could keep the origipaste-ups is what many others are simply nals, and they got the copies to destroy doing in Photoshop anyway. in any way they wanted. They went Yeah, I have to do it hands-on. crazy — one girl tried to eat hers. They were ripping them up, crumpling them, Speaking of hands-on, you also work stomping on them. I wanted them to part-time at a library and, among other have fun, and express what they wanted things, run a cartoon club. to do. I’ve been running the club for kids on a monthly basis. It started out being all What’s your favorite part about teachgirls. Maybe it’s just girls who want to ing? do things anyway — if I put on events The enthusiasm. And the talent. The

kids who come to the cartoon club are the very bright kids — they’re very creative. Girls grow up and discover boys or whatever and move on and may never pick up a pen again. But for that little time there, they’re very enthusiastic about it. I’ve always loved the spontaneity of kids’ art. They don’t much think about it. Right. I never wanted to do the thing where you draw a circle, and then two circles. I wanted to encourage them to develop their own style, their own voice. It’s funny — a lot of them, instinctively, pencil first and then ink them after. You don’t really have a single, named character. If you developed a strip with continuing characters, could you describe them? Before I was syndicated, Jay Kennedy called me and wanted me to develop a panel about the friendship of two women. I did about 75 cartoons. The characters I drew in The Terrible Tea Time were my ideal characters, and I kind of used them in the panel. If I did anything I’d like to use those. Maybe now they’d be accepted for their quirkiness and bad behavior. But back in the late ’70s, one of the rejections was, “Very smart and sexy. But not for us.”; Somebody else said, “I think they’re funny, but I’m not sure.” (Laughs) N C

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A few years ago, the idea was hatched that the NCS should be doing more to preserve the images and voices of the cartooning legends of our time. Once the NCS Foundation was on its feet, it was decided that the NCSF would be the perfect choice to guide this new project to produce video interviews of those cartoonists. The premise: One luminary cartoonist interviews another. Having had a few too many drinks and apparently standing in the wrong company, I happened to be selected to do the first cartoon luminary-on-luminary interview. Although in my case, I think it’s dim-bulb (me)-on-luminary (the great Mell Lazarus). My friend, Mell, graciously agreed to be the guinea pig interviewee. What follows is a short excerpt from those interview sessions held over two days at his California home and studio. Rick Kirkman: I want to talk about syndicate contracts, because you’re kind of a leader in cartoonists’ rights with syndicates. How did all that come about? Mell Lazarus: It was very simple. I just refused to sign anything other than something that gave me the advantage. My very first contract meeting was with the New York Herald Tribune Syndicate, who wanted Miss Peach, but wanted to own it — with 15year increments, with their option to renew at the end of each 15-year period. I was very young, very innocent, but I was not so innocent that I realized that the contract didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t fair. So I refused to sign it. The guy said, “OK,” and I left the contract on his desk. I went home and told my wife what happened. We really needed that contract, we needed the money and she said, “Why don’t you talk to Elliott Caplin,” who was one of Al Capp’s brothers. “Get some advice from him.” And I did. And he said, “Mell, what they offered you is everybody’s contract. That’s what Al signed, that’s what Milton Caniff signed, that’s what Sparky Schulz signed. They have to control the rights to the thing.” And I thought about it and discussed it with my then-wife, and we decided that I was going to call the Herald Tribune Syndicate back and re-think this thing. Before I could get to the phone it rings, and there’s this very nice voice with a Southern accent. He said, “Mr. Lazarus? This is — I’ve forgotten his name; he was a great guy — I’m the vice president of the syndicate and I just heard about the deal they offered you that you rejected. I don’t blame you. That’s not a deal — it was a pronouncement. I suggest that you come down and we talk again

MELL LAZARUS Owning up to the syndicates

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and I’d like to expand your participation and your rights in this matter.” It knocked me cold, actually. Next day I went over there and he had a new contract, in which the 15-year ownership and then a renewal of the 15-year ownership by the syndicate — all that was gone. Every five years was the opportunity to renew the contract. It wouldn’t carry over. It would end. And then we’d have to sit down and renegotiate. Which is a dream. I accepted that, and we did it. And every five years I was able to increase my percentage a little bit, my share of the revenue. I got more and more leeway from the syndicate with the strip, my creation, which was appropriate. And it’s been that way ever since. How long were you with the Herald Tribune? Not long. Maybe five years. And then they were bought by another syndicate, the New York Post Hall Syndicate. I was with them for a while, and then they were sold to another organization, the Chicago Sun Times, and that’s when I really enjoyed the experience. The people at the Sun Times were extraordinary. They were so liberal with their contracts and the deals. There

was a sense of fairness that I hadn’t run across before in the industry. You’ve been with more syndicates than anybody. Yeah, but there was a continuity, because I kept the right people on board all the time. I currently don’t have a [written] syndicate contract. Rick Newcombe, who is president of Creators Syndicate, and I shook hands a long time ago. He said, “We’re not going to be signing contracts anymore. We’re not going to negotiate. We’re just going to continue the way we are now.” It’s been a fantastically successful merger. But you’ve been responsible, though, with Creators and Rick Newcombe, in kind of changing the whole way that syndicate contracts are being offered. Well, I’d like to think that’s the case, but Rick was as convinced as I that the basic contract is terrible. You create something, you walk in and give it over to another organization who begin to write the rules. And that’s not the

............................................... Mell Lazarus Photo by Rick Kirkman, Woodland Hills, California, April 13, 2013

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Left, A Miss Peach daily from 1959; below, the first Miss Peach collection from 1958.

way to go. You have to agree to everything. And Rick and I agreed on everything. As I said, we haven’t renewed our contract. It ran out a long time ago. We’ve been working on a handshake for about 25 years now. I trust him, he trusts me, and here we are. You got your rights and the shorter contract very early on — the people at the Chicago Sun Times were amenable to that. Why do you think it took so long for that to spread out to other cartoonists? (Chuckles) Well, it — What’s so special about you? (Laughter) What’s so special about me is that I have a big mouth and I use it. I spoke to the Newspapers Features Council at least a dozen times — and to the cartoonists who were connected with it, especially. Get your rights, control your rights. Change a deal if you don’t like it. Threaten to quit. If they still want to keep you they’re going to go along with you. Of course that made me the charm boy of the syndicates. I mean they became enemies. Friendly enemies. Of course they didn’t approve of all that. But eventually, I think, they’ve become more liberal over time. Did you ever talk to (The Family Circus’) Bil Keane about his experience when he tried that and King Features played hardball with him? We talked about it a lot. We conspired to get his rights back. His wife (Thel) joined the fray, and she had a lot of guts. Eventually he got his rights back. It was like a ground breaker. He and I then enjoyed the same relationship with

the syndicates that I’d had for years. I don’t know what kids sign anymore. For a long time I was like the guardhouse lawyer for cartoonists. They would always be sent to me for advice. People I’d never met in my life. And I would tell them all the same thing: Decide what you want and stick to it. The worst that they can say is no. And you go to another syndicate. Sooner or later, if the strip is saleable, they’re going to agree with you and give you what you want. I think, unfortunately, a lot of cartoonists are so tempted, because they have that dream of being syndicated, they feel like they need to snatch up just about any offer that comes along. Yeah, and it’s perfectly natural if you’ve had no experience and you’re dying to get into the business. I understand that and don’t put anybody down for doing that. But you can do better than that. The syndicates thrive on your material; you thrive on their sale of your material. It should be fairly easy to come to terms that are fair to everyone. Not “We own this thing and if you don’t do what we want we’re going to kick you out and put somebody else in.” Which is the attitude that the larger syndicates held for years. It was fun. It’s not as though I had earned another place in this business other than the ability — or lack of ability — to make people laugh. Well you’re definitely a trail-blazer in that respect. In that respect, yeah. The newcomers don’t come to me anymore. They don’t even know who the hell I am. (Laughter) N C

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NCS Archives

Specialty art drawn by National Cartoonist Society members for publications issued to coincide with the Society’s annual Reuben Awards Weekend.

Rube Goldberg Reuben Award-winning Cartoonist of the Year, 1967

from the Reuben Awards Dinner program, April 21, 1964

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Dik Browne Two-time Reuben Award-winning Cartoonist of the Year, 1962, 1973

Hagar the Horrible, Hi and Lois ÂŠ2014 King Features Syndicate, Inc.

from the Reuben Awards Dinner edition of The Cartoonist, April 21, 1975

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Hilda Terry

Beetle Bailey ÂŠ2014 King Features Syndicate, Inc.

from the program of the fifteenth Reuben Award Dinner, April 25, 1961 (detail)

Mort Walker Reuben Award-winning Cartoonist of the Year, 1953

from the Reuben Award Dinner program, April 21, 1964

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Charles Schulz Reuben Award-winning Cartoonist of the Year, 1955

from the April, 1967 issue of The Cartoonist, on the occasion of the Society’s 21st anniversary

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ÂŠ2014 John L. Hart, FLP

Unpublished specialty art drawn by cartoonists from private collections.

From the Collection of ...

Brant Parker Reuben Award-winning Cartoonist of the Year, 1984 Wizard of Id specialty sketch, undated, same size

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Dale Messick The Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award, 1997

Brenda Starr specialty sketch, 1988

Jeff MacNelly Two-time Reuben Award-winning Cartoonist of the Year, 1978, 1979

Perfesser Cosmo Fishhawk specialty sketch drawn for cartoonist Bob Zschiesche in a copy of The Other Shoe, December 1980, same size

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Russell Myers

ÂŠ2014 Bill Watterson

Broom-Hilda specialty drawing drawn for a school class, 1974, same size (detail)

Bill Watterson Two-time Reuben Award-winning Cartoonist of the Year, 1986, 1988 Calvin and Hobbes sketch in a Festival of Cartoon Art catalogue, 1986, same size

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Bill Mauldin Reuben Award-winning Cartoonist of the Year, 1961

Presentation sketch in a copy of The Brass RIng

Jerry Robinson Batman sketch in a Festival of Cartoon Art catalogue, 1986, same size

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Mike Peters Reuben Award-winning Cartoonist of the Year, 1991

Presentation sketch in a copy of Clones, You Idiot… I Said Clones

Frank King Reuben Award-winning Cartoonist of the Year, 1958 Autograph card, ca. 1925, same size

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Archie and friends pencil drawing in a copy of Archie – His FIrst 50 Years, same size

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Stan Goldberg

Lynn Johnston Reuben Award-winning Cartoonist of the Year, 1985 Presentation sketch in a copy of I’ve Got the One-More-Washload Blues …, same size

Mel Casson Presentation sketch in a copy of Ever Since Adam and Eve, same size

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The National Cartoonists Society (above)

Willard Mullin Reuben Award-winning Cartoonist of the Year, 1954

cover art from the program of the 16th annual Reuben Award Dinner, April 23, 1962

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ABOUT THE NCS The National Cartoonists Society is the world’s largest and most prestigious organization of professional cartoonists. The NCS was born in 1946 when groups of cartoonists got together to entertain the troops. They found that they enjoyed each other’s company and decided to get together on a regular basis. Today, the NCS membership roster includes more than 500 of the world’s major cartoonists, working in many branches of the profession, including newspaper comic strips and panels, on-line comics, comic books, editorial cartoons, animation, gag cartoons, greeting cards, advertising, magazine and book illustration and more. Membership is limited to established professional cartoonists, with a few exceptions of outstanding persons in affiliated fields. The NCS is not a guild or union, although we have joined forces from time to time to fight for member’s rights, and we regularly use our talents to help worthwhile causes.

PRIMARY PURPOSES OF THE NCS n To advance the ideals and standards of professional cartooning in its many forms. n To promote and foster a social, cultural and intellectual interchange among profes-

sional cartoonists of all types. n To stimulate and encourage interest in and acceptance of the art of cartooning by aspiring cartoonists, students and the general public.

THE HISTORY OF THE NCS The seeds for what evolved into the National Cartoonists Society were planted during the volunteer chalk talks that a number of cartoonists did during World War II for the American Theatre Wing. The Society was born at a specially convened dinner in New York in March, 1946, that saw Rube Goldberg elected as president, Russell Patterson as vice president, C.D. Russell as secretary and Milton Caniff as treasurer. A second vice president, Otto Soglow, was subsequently added. Within two weeks, the Society had 32 members: Strip cartoonists Wally Bishop (Muggs and Skeeter); Martin Branner (Winnie Winkle); Ernie Bushmiller (Nancy); Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates); Gus Edson (The Gumps); Ham Fisher (Joe Palooka); Harry Haenigsen (Penny); Fred Harman (Red Ryder); Jay Irving (Willie Doodle); Al Posen (Sweeney and Son); C.D. Russell (Pete the Tramp); Otto Soglow (The Little King); Jack Sparling (Clare Voyant); Ray Van Buren (Abbie an’ Slats); Dow Waling (Skeets); and Frank Willard (Moon Mullins). Panel cartoonists Dave Breger (Mister Breger); George Clark (The Neighbors); Bob Dunn (Just the Type); Jimmy Hatlo (They’ll Do It Every Time); Bill Holman (Smokey Stover); and Stan McGovern (Silly Milly). Freelance cartoonists and illustrators Abner Dean, Mischa Richter and Russell Patterson. Editorial cartoonists Rube Goldberg (New York Sun); Burris Jenkins (Journal American); C.D. Batchelor (Daily News); and Richard Q. Yardley (Baltimore Sun). Sports cartoonist Lou Hanlon and comic book cartoonists Joe Shuster and Joe Musial. By March 1947, there were 112 members in the National Cartoonists Society. At the end of 1946, Milton Caniff left Terry and The Pirates to create the adventure strip Steve Canyon, which debuted in 243 newspapers to instant acclaim. The following May, he became the first artist formally honored by the group as the “Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year.” The trophy was a silver cigarette box, engraved with Billy DeBeck’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith characters. The Billy DeBeck Memorial Award

THE REUBEN AWARD for

Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year ....................... 1946 Milton Caniff Steve Canyon 1947 Al Capp Li’l Abner 1948 Chic Young Blondie 1949 Alex Raymond Rip Kirby 1950 Roy Crane Buz Sawyer 1951 Walt Kelly Pogo 1952 Hank Ketcham Dennis the Menace 1953 Mort Walker Beetle Bailey 1954 Willard Mullin Sports cartoons 1955 Charles Schulz Peanuts 1956 Herbert Block Editorial Cartoons 1957 Hal Foster Prince Valiant 1958 Frank King Gasoline Alley

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1961 Bill Mauldin Editorial Cartoons 1962 Dik Browne Hi and Lois 1963 Fred Lasswell Barney Google and Snuffy Smith 1964 Charles Schulz Peanuts 1965 Leonard Starr On Stage 1966 Otto Soglow The Little King 1967 Rube Goldberg Humor in Sculpture 1968 Johnny Hart B.C. and The Wizard of Id Pat Oliphant Editorial Cartoons 1969 Walter Berndt Smitty 1970 Alfred Andriola Kerry Drake 1971 Milton Caniff Steve Canyon 1972 Pat Oliphant Editorial Cartoons

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©Chad

1960 Ronald Searle Humorous Illustration

Frye

1959 Chester Gould Dick Tracy

continued until 1953. The following year, the Reuben Award was introduced. In 1948, Caniff was elected NCS President. Rube Goldberg was named Honorary President and Al Capp became the second “Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year.” In 1949, the Society volunteered to help the Treasury Department in a drive to sell savings bonds by sending NCS members out on the road. A nationwide, seventeen-city tour was undertaken by teams of ten or twelve cartoonists and a 95-foot-long traveling display. Through the Society, NCS members have continued to serve the nation in person and through their art. Teams of cartoonists have toured war zones and military installations around the world in cooperation with the USO. Others have entertained at VA hospitals. NCS members have also contributed to many U.S. government programs; their efforts have benefitted NASA, USIA, the Treasury Department Savings Bond division and the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. Other beneficiaries have been the Boy Scouts of America, the American Red Cross and the United Nations. The tradition of lending our talents to worthy causes continues to this day. In 2001, for example, NCS members in the syndicated community dedicated their newspaper strips and panels to a Thanksgiving initiative that raised some $50,000 for victims of the 9/11 attacks, and members contributed a further $18,000 through the proceeds of a private auction.

LOCATION The official headquarters of the National Cartoonists Society are in New York City, with the Society’s business offices located in Maitland, Florida.

CHAPTERS In addition, the NCS has chartered 17 regional chapters throughout the United States and one in Canada. The early 1990s saw the introduction of regional chapters within the NCS. Created to encourage a deeper participation and interaction among NCS members while furthering the aims of the Society, these chapters also afford members a more active role at the national level. The Chapter chairpersons also serve as members of the NCS Regional Council, which serves and advises the NCS Board of Directors. In addition, the position of National Representative on the NCS Board of Directors is held by a Chapter Chair who

1973 Dik Browne Hagar the Horrible

acts as a conduit between the NCS Board and the Regional Council. There are also many active Regional Chapters, including chapters in: Chicago, Connecticut, D.C., Florida, Great Lakes, Long Island, Los Angeles, New England, New Jersey, Manhattan, North Central U.S., Northern California, Orange County and Southern California, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Southeastern US, Upstate New York and Canada. New Regional Chapters are continually forming. The Regional Chapters convene on their own schedules, usually three or four times a year. They engage in a variety of social and professional activities and are always happy to receive visiting NCS members.

1974 Dick Moores Gasoline Alley 1975 Bob Dunn They’ll Do It Every Time

NCS MEMBERSHIP

1976 Ernie Bushmiller Nancy

There are four classes of membership in The National Cartoonists Society:

1977 Chester Gould Dick Tracy

n REGULAR MEMBERS are professional cartoonists, the quality of whose work has

been judged and approved by the Membership Committee. n ASSOCIATE MEMBERS are those individuals who work as professionals in the

1978 Jeff MacNelly Editorial Cartoons

cartooning industry or whose expression of interest has been established. n HONORARY MEMBERS are cartoonists, surviving spouses or patrons of the art for whom the Society desires to express its esteem and appreciation. n RETIRED MEMBERSHIP is granted to existing members 65 years of age and older and retired.

1979 Jeff MacNelly Shoe 1980 Charles Saxon The New Yorker

If you are a professional cartoonist and are interested in applying for a Regular Membership or if you work in an allied field and feel you would qualify for one of the limited number of Associate Memberships, please contact: National Cartoonists Society 341 North Maitland Avenue, Suite 260 Maitland, FL 32751 407-647-8839 info@reuben.org

1981 Mell Lazarus Miss Peach 1982 Bil Keane The Family Circus

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Cartoonists who are currently earning a substantial part of their income from cartooning and have done so for at least the past three years; Work must be of a high professional quality and their reputation good. Application must include two letters of recommendation from NCS members, a short biographical sketch and samples of current work bearing a signature. Applications must be accompanied by a check covering one year’s dues, which will be refunded if the candidate is not accepted by the Membership Committee. A candidate is eligible for membership when accepted by a unanimous vote of the Membership Committee. If you are a professional cartoonist and are interested in applying for a Regular Membership, or work in an allied field and feel you would qualify for one of the limited number of Associate Memberships, please contact: Sean Parkes, Membership Chair 16647 E. Ashbrook Drive Unit #A Fountain Hills, AZ 85268

Durkin

ELIGIIBILITY FOR REGULAR MEMBERSHIP

1983 Arnold Roth Humorous Illustration 1984 Brant Parker The Wizard of Id 1985 Lynn Johnston For Better or For Worse 1986 Bill Watterson Calvin and Hobbes 1987 Mort Drucker MAD Magazine

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1991 Mike Peters Mother Goose and Grimm

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE OF THE NCS The National Cartoonists Society’s officers and Board of Directors are elected by secret ballot of the entire membership. The Board meets twice a year and a general business meeting is held annually during the NCS Reuben Awards Weekend. There are several standing committees, including Ethics, Social Media, Education and Publicity. These committees function as clearing houses for information pertinent to the rights of cartoonist members, help to air grievances and post warnings about any dubious practices of the firms with which cartoonists do business. The NCS, however, is neither a guild, nor a union.

1992 Cathy Guisewite Cathy 1993 Jim Borgman Editorial Cartoons 1994 Gary Larson The Far Side

OTHER NCS ACTIVITIES AND FUNCTIONS

1997 Scott Adams Dilbert 1998 Will Eisner The Spirit 1999 Patrick McDonnell Mutts 2000 Jack Davis Humorous Illustration 2001 Jerry Scott Baby Blues and Zits 2002 Matt Groening The Simpsons 2003 Greg Evans Luann 2004 Pat Brady Rose is Rose 2005 Mike Luckovich Editorial Cartoons

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©Mark

1996 Sergio Aragonés MAD Magazine

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1995 Garry Trudeau Doonesbury

The Cartoon!st, the official newsletter of the National Cartoonists Society and distributed only to NCS members, covers the professional and personal activities of the NCS membership. It also contains general information of interest to the professional cartoonist, such as copyright laws, new publications, preservation of comic art, upcoming regional and national shows, events and conventions. The National Cartoonists Society sponsors special cartoon-related excursions abroad. Recent destinations have included Canada, England, Ireland, Italy and Australia. The NCS and its Regional Chapters have also organized cartoon auctions for charity, art shows, educational seminars and golf and tennis tournaments. The National Cartoonists Society maintains relationships with other organizations for professionals in cartooning and various other fields of communication, both domestic and foreign. It works especially close with newspaper and publishing groups. The NCS also often provides introductions for American cartoonists traveling abroad. Through the National Cartoonists Society, members have served the nation in person and through their art. Teams of cartoonists have toured war zones and military installations all over the world in cooperation with the USO. Others have entertained regularly at VA hospitals in various parts of the country. NCS members also contribute tirelessly to certain US government programs; their efforts have benefitted such agencies as NASA, USIA, the Treasury Department Savings Bond division and the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. Other beneficiaries of members’ talents have been the Boy Scouts of America, The American Red Cross and the United Nations. In 2001, the NCS organized the Thanks & Giving Tribute in the nation’s newspapers, syndicated cartoonists raising some $50,000 for the September 11 fund. The National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Awards Weekend is a gala annual event, which takes place at a locale selected by the President, Board and the NCS Foundation. There, during the black-tie Reuben Award Dinner, the prestigious Reuben Award (a statuette designed by and named after the NCS’s first president, Rube Goldberg) is presented to the NCS’s

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2006 Bill Amend FoxTrot 2007 Al Jaffee MAD Magazine 2008 Dave Coverly Speed Bump Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year. Cartoonists in various professional divisions are also honored with special plaques for excellence. These “Silver Reuben” awards are voted on by a combination of the general membership (by secret ballot) and specially formed juries overseen by various NCS regional chapters. Members and their families have enjoyed the annual get-together at recent locations such as: Washington, D.C.; New York, New York; Chicago, Illinois; Pasadena, California; Scottsdale, Arizona; Boca Raton, Florida; Toronto, Canada; Cancun, Mexico; Hollywood, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; Boston, Massachusetts; Las Vegas, Nevada; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; San Diego, California and even on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.

THE NCS FOUNDATION The National Cartoonists Society Foundation is the charitable arm of the National Cartoonists Society. The Foundation was formed in 2005 to continue the charitable and educational works that have been a hallmark of the NCS since its inception in 1946. The National Cartoonists Society Foundation is a registered 501(c)(3) charity that works in tandem with the NCS to advance the ideals and standards of the cartooning profession, to stimulate and encourage aspiring cartoonists through scholarships and educational programs, and to provide financial assistance to cartoonists and their families in times of hardship, through its Milt Gross Fund. The Foundation also encourages the active involvement and participation of NCS members in the charitable and educational projects undertaken by the Foundation, thereby utilizing the Society’s greatest assets and strengths. The NCS has a treasured tradition of members donating their expertise and talents to good causes in person and through their art.

2009 Dan Pirarro Bizarro 2010 Richard Thompson Cul de Sac 2011 Tom Richmond MAD Magazine 2012 Brian Crane Pickles Rick Kirkman Baby Blues 2013 Wiley Miller Non Sequitur

.................................................................................................................................................................................................. National Cartoonists Society, Inc. 341 North Maitland Avenue, Suite 260 Maitland, FL 32751 Phone: 407-647-8839 Fax: 407-629-2502 For further information, visit the NCS website at: www.reuben.org

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“Do You Cartoon?” The Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship is here to help. In these tough financial times, no one looks forward to taking on student debt. Now in its eighth year, the annual Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship aims to make that burden a bit lighter for those college students with an eye on a career in cartooning. To that end, the scholar©2014 Juana Medina

ship awards $5,000 annually to a rising Junior or Senior. (Applicants do not have to be art majors to be eligible.) But it’s more than just money that’s provided — it’s also an opportunity to meet professional cartoonists at the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award Weekend. The National Cartoonists Society Foundation has helped students from the College for Creative Studies, Ringling College of Art & Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Rochester Institute of Technology, Savannah College of Art and Design, and UCLA.

Juana Medina

The most recent recipient is Renee Faundo, a character animation major at the California Institute of the Arts. The first winner of the Jay Kennedy Scholarship was Juana Medina, who now teaches at the Corcoran College of Art & Design. She has just turned in her illustrations for a children’s book called Smick, written by Doreen Cronin (Click, Clack, Moo; Duck for President), which will come out in 2015. Juana has also signed a multi-book deal with Candlewick Press, for “a series loosely based on my childhood adventures, in my native Bogotá, Colombia, with my sidekick and dog-friend, Lucas.” The first of these books should be out in the Fall of 2016. (Juana also designed the promotional art for this year’s scholarship.) Chris Houghton, the second scholarship recipient, is currently a Storyboard Director

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Chris Houghton

Diana Huh

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on an upcoming Nickelodeon show called “Bad Seeds,” scheduled to premiere in early 2015. He has had similar duties on the animated TV shows “Wander Over Yonder,” “Gravity Falls,” and “Fanboy and Chum Chum.” In addition, Chris has done work for Adventure Time comics, Simpsons comics, MAD Magazine and his own creation for Image Comics, Reed Gunther. Other recent recipients include Diana Huh, a storyboard revisionist for the Titmouse Inc./Netflix show “Turbo FAST,” and Charlotte Mao, who works at Launchpad Toys in San Francisco, a mobile gaming company that develops educational ©2014 Renee Faundo

children’s apps.

Charlotte Mao

The Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship was established in memory of the late King Features editor, and funded by an initial $100,000 grant

Renee Faundo

from the Hearst Foundation/ King Features Syndicate as well as additional generous donations from Jerry Scott, Jim Borgman, Patrick McDonnell and many other prominent cartoonists. For more information, visit cartoonistfoundation.org

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