"Best of The Post: The 1930s" THE SATURDAY EVENING POST January 2, 1960 Part Two

Above: a 1938 George Price cartoon that originally ran in the POST.

The reason I bought this SATURDAY EVENING POST was for its "Special 12-Pages Album of Post Cartoons" feature.  Here are some of the cartoons by Whitney Darrow, Jr., George Price, E. Simms Campbell, Ludwig Bemelmans, Carl Anderson, Colin Allen and others, that originally appeared in the POST in the 1930s.

Just look at the more lush, illustrative style here. The jokes might be creaky or even incomprehensible to 21st century types, but they are terrific to look at.

Below: I like the proto-Henry in the cartoon by Carl Anderson:

Below: The context is: The young woman is confusing the poet Walt Whitman with the then-popular bandleader Paul Whiteman.

Thank You for Ordering RACONTEUR

Sending you a thanks and an "I'm sorry" if you ordered RACONTEUR.

RACONTEUR is late. But I have been promised the books will be printed and bound before the 22nd.

All of the books will be mailed same day that they are printed. (I have the envelopes addressed and ready to go.)

If you ordered RACONTEUR #4 or the package of four comics (RACONTEUR #1, #2, #3 and #4), then I'm sorry about the delay. All of the orders will be mailed upon publication of #4, and that will be in the next couple of days.

Thank you for ordering and if you want to change or cancel your order, you are welcome to contact me at mike [at] mikelynchcartoons.com.

Buy Mike

Here are some things you can buy that have my cartoons in them.

I have some cartoons in these new books from Reader's Digest:

LAUGHTER THE BEST MEDICINE HOLIDAYS

LAUGHTER THE BEST MEDICINE THOSE LOVABLE PETS

LAUGHTER THE BEST MEDICINE @ WORK

LAUGHTER REALLY IS THE BEST MEDICINE

RACONTEUR #1 THRU #4:

The first four issues of RACONTEUR - autobiographical comic book stories by New Yorker, Reader's Digest, Down East and Wall Street Journal Cartoonists - now available. (Although, truthfully, I'm going to run out of the third issue real soon).

CARTOONING BASICS

This 22 page book shows a step-by-step cartoon drawing process to drawing. Plus: you get an original, signed sketch.

DOCTOR WHO: THE SNOWMEN BBC America Trailer Xmas 2012

ADHD: A Charlie Brown Christmas Reunion

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST January 2, 1960 Part One

Above: POST regular Henry Syverson draws his "nebbishes"in a different situation each week. If the figures look familiar, it may be due to that famous "You Want it When?" poster.


Here are all of the then-fresh cartoons that appeared in THE SATURDAY EVENING POST's January, 2 1960 issue.

I found this magazine at an antique mall in Laconia, NH.

 And here's a letter from that issue:

Sempé Galerie

Via Ma galerie à Paris.

Lost 1966 Adaptation of THE HOBBIT by Gene Deitch

From my friend Rod McKie who found it via Midnite Ticket, here's a test film of THE HOBBIT put together in a scant four weeks by Gene Deitch.

Waiting for the Mall Santa

1967 Kenner Brochure

The groovy Saved From the Paper Drive blog shows us a 1967 brochure for Kenner Toys today.

The Charlie Brown School of Dance

Scholarship in Cartooning

Above: Quick --tell me: who is this a caricature of?



I've met hundreds of people who tell me they are cartoonists. That's how they describe themselves. Some of them are professionals, who make a living from cartooning, others are on their way there. At least that's the plan. "I am a cartoonist," they say.

Anyway, a lot of people, regardless of making money from their cartoons, call themselves professional cartoonists.

Cartooning's not like, let's say, podiatry or being a dentist. There's no standard of scholarship in cartooning; there's no federal or local licensing standard for a cartoonist. And my opinion doesn't matter. People have to like your work -- enough to part with money -- and that puts you on the road to being pro.

Which brings me to the above drawing.

One kinda cartoonist a lot of people know is the caricaturist. I see caricature artists at a lot of events.

If you want to come down to sheer numbers, there must be more people practicing Bad Caricature than good. I know some great caricaturists (Mort Drucker, John Reiner, Tom Richmond, Sam Viviano) and I have no idea how they do what they do -- and how they do it so seemingly effortlessly. I admire their work immensely.

At the yearly local county fair, there's always a caricature artist. He's of the big-head-teensy-body school of style. That's OK, if you like that sort of thing. And the drawings are, uh, usually OK. I mean, they know how to draw fat people not-so-fat and ugly people not-so-ugly, etc.

Still, I don't know how this caricature business works. I guess you put out your WILL DRAW YOUR CARICATURE $20 shingle, and then, sit back and see who parts with their money.



And now there are these stick figure things, like the one above I nicked from a friend's MySpace page. They all look like Matt Feazel cartoons (a guy whose work I admire) or like Jeff Kinney drew them (ditto). And I see them on cars. They cost a couple of dollars per figure if you want to buy them for your car, by the way. And people do. Some businessman is getting rich.

And then some businessmen skimp, which brings me to the image at the top.

THE BOB NEWHART SHOW, the one from the 1970s, is out on DVD. Seeing the images is what started this rant. I rented the first disc of the second season which has these menu pages:




OK, who ARE these people?

From the sitcomicsonline descrip:

The main menu screen is a very interesting one. [That's damning with the faintest of praise now isn't it? - Mike] Each disc (and disc side) has a different design featuring a drawing of two (or more) of the regular cast members (caricatures, I think) [The poor guy isn't even sure what to call them - Mike] on a different background drawn to look like a set. Disc 1/Side A features drawings of Carol, Emily and Bob. Disc 1/Side B features Howard and Jerry. Disc 2/Side A features Howard, Carol and Bob, Disc 2/Side B features Emily and Jerry. Disc 3/Side A features Jerry, Bob and Emily, Disc 3/Side B features Howard and Carol.

It's just astonishingly feeble work. Heaven knows what the story is behind these illustrations. Maybe the DVD people had an employee whose brother's cousin knew a kid who would do it for free. I don't know. Hard to believe that this art was accepted. It's ugly and it sure looks wrong.

But the way to making money -- becoming a pro -- is to get money for your work.

You can, to paraphrase the 2000 Year Old Man, put you hand on a rock and look up the sky and proclaim TODAY I AM A CARTOONIST and, well, there you have it. And then you go on LiveJournal or DeviantArt or Wordpress and start "publishing."

Sometimes I hear that when you criticize, you are not being supportive. This is fine for a toddler, but this is the real world and you gotta draw Bob Newhart like Bob Newhart, OK?

OK!!

-- This was en edited version of a 2009 blog entry.

Alex Raymond Lives

Just wanted to talk about Alex Raymond and his continuing influence today ...

Today, the pictures do the work. And such wonderful pictures.

Above is a daily strip titled RIP KIRBY by the great Alex Raymond. Mr. Raymond also drew FLASH GORDON, JUNGLE JIM, and SECRET AGENT X-9.

After serving in the Marine corps in WWII, he created his fourth syndicated comic strip: RIP KIRBY. Mr. Raymond served as president of the National Cartoonists Society from 1950-51. He died in an automobile accident on September 6, 1956. Alex Raymond's art influenced Frazetta, Williamson, Stout, and Mark Schultz, among others.

I haven't much to add except a story about a time when I first came to NYC and assisted a comic book artist.

I took a class from a comic book artist at Parsons in the 1980s. I soon was assisting him in his freelance comics work, working my regular job from 9-5, then off to his studio to work until midnight.

Every once in a while, he'd would hold up a photocopy of art (by Wally Wood, or some other EC great), and tell us young assistants, "LOOK at the KNOWLEDGE." And I find myself using those same words today.

Look at the juxtaposition between light and dark. Look at the line work -- the difference between sky and water in the first panel. Look at that knowledge.

There is a reason why Alex Raymond's name still comes up. Looking at this 56 years after his tragic death, it all becomes apparent. But I don't have to work at writing about it. The pictures tell you.

-- This was an edited version of a November 29, 2006 blog entry.

Related: IDW's Library of American Comics reprints RIP KIRBY and Flash Gordon.

Interview: Robb Armstrong

Just looking at that photo above, of JUMP START cartoonist Robb Armstrong on a speaking engagement, makes me want to attend. He looks like he's having the time of his life.

NoHo interviews Robb Armstrong, whose comic strip JUMP START is in about 420 papers.

Here, he talks about his process:

“By the time Monday rolls around, something has to be sort of written down,” Robb shares. “By the time Tuesday comes around, some visual idea has to be in place; by the time Wednesday rolls around, this thing has to look like a week of strips. Thursday and Friday are sometimes frenzied to get the finishing touches and the photoshop done, and it’s just hours of sitting at a computer. And everything’s turned in by Thursday or Friday, but Thursday, hopefully.” At present, Robb is two weeks ahead of what’s currently in print in the daily papers, and three weeks ahead of what’s in print in the Sunday paper, which he admits is a big shift from his earlier days as a cartoonist where he maintained a six week lead. “And the reason for that is I’m far more self-critical then I was when I was young,” he says. “I thought everything I did was great back then; I was a poor editor. But today, I may not know what’s funny or what’s good, but I do know what’s not funny and what’s not good. In those two areas, I’m actually reaching the level of expert.”

Gardner Rea

My friend Ger Apeldoorn shows us a bunch of Gardner Rea cartoons.

Rea was one of those "clean line cartoonists," and I agree with Ger that he's up there with Gluyas Williams and Otto Soglow. And, if we're being completests, I would add George McManus and Hergé to that list.

Spain Rodriguez 1940-2012

Underground comics creator Spain Rodriguez died at his home in San Francisco on November 5, 2012. He was 72 years old. The cause was cancer.

Creator of "Trashman," and contemporary of seminal underground comics artists Robert Crumb,  S. Clay Wilson and Bill Griffith, Mr. Rodriguez "was one of the seminal, in probably all meanings of that word, figures of the underground comics planet,” said Art Spiegelman in an audio interview in today's Buffalo Post.

NY Times Obituary
Spain Sketchbook from TCJ
Tom Spurgeon has a "Collective Memory" lineup of organized links here

Textbook Company Wants to Buy My Cartoon ... Only It's Not My Cartoon

Not a day after I wrote about how important it is to have a legible signature, I get an email from MacMillan's textbook division asking for permission to use a cartoon in a textbook. They go on to say that this is an urgent matter and I need to respond with a hi res version of my cartoon as soon as possible.

Attached to the email, they say, is a copy of the cartoon.

Only it's not my cartoon. Doesn't even look like anything I would draw. It's signed with an almost illegilble "Mike" in the bottom, right-hand corner. I don't know who this is.

(I try to avoid signing my name in the bottom right hand corner. Back in high school I used to do that, and the high school newspaper layout guy would sometimes snip it off for space considerations. But I digress ....)

MacMillan hires people to do rights clearance. They are paid to find the people who hold the copyright for all material. Looks like whoever did this just searched for "Mike Cartoons" and found me.

Maybe they don't know that there's image recognition software that may be able to help. I mentioned this in my report on the MICE show.

(I know this makes my pal Mark Anderson happy:)

(My cat Dropcloth really was rubbing up against my pen when I drew the above sketch, just like he is rubbing against my typing fingers while I type this.)

I hope MacMillan finds the right Mike!

Maybe there was a scattershot approach to this and some of the other cartoonist Mikes got the same email!

STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS Official Teaser

Here's the teaser to the new STAR TREK movie, with Benedict Cumberbatch playing the baddie. It's a generic kinda trailer, full of good guys looking shocked SHOCKED at lots of CGI destruction. No angles of the USS Enterprise, or Scotty inadvertently hitting his head on a beam -- just dark apocalyptic bleats from the soundtrack and explosions.

The Business of Cartooning: Your Signature

One of the nice traditions of cartooning is that usually, somewhere discretely, there is the signature of the cartoonist. You don't get that, for instance, on the Tony the Tiger drawing on your box of frosted flakes, do you? (But you should. That would be nice.)


Above: How I used to sign my cartoons.

I started looking at some signatures of gag cartoonists through the years. Here are some scans from a few cartoon books. You probably know the names:































Most of the signatures are bold, and some use just a last name, or a nick name (like TAD or VIP). Some sign using their full name.

I thought that I should change my signature to the latter -- from just "Lynch:"


... to "Mike Lynch:"


I made the letters more angular. Sometimes the "L" in "Lynch" looked like a "C."

OK, this may solicit a shoulder shrug. Who cares? It's not a big deal kind of change. But, look: writing my first and last name on each cartoon I draw makes me an easier guy to find.

Case in point:

I got an email from a fellow in London. He had been on his lunch hour, and seen my cartoon in a magazine at the newsstand. This fellow didn't buy the magazine, but remembering my name, he walked back to his office, Googled me and found my site. His UK company was going to do a big ad campaign, and would I be willing to draw some cartoons for it?

Like I said, we have a custom of signing our name. This is not just a nice custom, but a way to generate revenue.

-- This has been an encore presentation of a blog entry from April 28, 2010.