The Garden As of Mid-August

Everyone can sleep well. Dexter the cat is keeping watch!

Dex was a rather feral cat that was hanging around the woods here. We built him a little hay house made from bales of hay. He immediately moved in, and, a very long story short, he then moved into the actual, real house where he loves to be picked up and patted. Feral no more!

The garden has lots of green tomatoes that will turn into red tomatoes that will turn into a lot of canning and freezing soon. 

Foreground: a basil plant. Peppers (which are not doing too well), squash and cucumbers beyond.

A raised bed of annuals. Some zinnias. More are starting to bloom.

Tomatoes.

The box in front is nothing but weeds since the lettuce spiked and was pulled out. The box in back is all Roma tomatoes. You can see we have that brown-leaf disease, where the leaves shrivel up and the tomatoes can possibly get scalded by the sun. Hopefully, this will not happen. 

And on to the parade of perennials: 

And there was a tree that came down during last week's torrential rains. Double good news: it didn't hit anything valuable and more wood for winter: 

Stan Goldberg Needs Our Support

Some of you may already know that comic book artist (and a wonderful gentleman, fellow Berndt Toast Gang and my personal friend) Stan Goldberg had a stroke last week.

He has been moved from a hospital in Stony Brook, LI to a hospice in The Bronx.

We all hope for a positive outcome, but at this time, the future is unknown.

Cards and flowers are appreciated, but the family requests that there be no phone calls. Please help in considering their request. Thank you.

Stan Goldberg
c/o Calvary Hospital
1740 Eastchester Rd.
New York, NY 10461

There are a lot of people out there who have been touched by Stan Goldberg. He's a guy who started in comics in the 1940s, assisting the creator of the original Human Torch, Carl Burgos. Stan drew MILLIE THE MODEL. He decided on the colors for most all of the seminal Marvel Comics superheroes. He drew ARCHIE for decades. Most recently, he has been creating comics for Papercutz. The man has been drawing professionally since he was 17 years old.

Please consider sending a note or a doodle or a bouquet to Stan. He needs our support.

Photo of Pauline and Stan Goldberg by Mike Lynch.

True Story: Thrift Store Confessional

I overheard this fellow at a thrift store in Windham, Maine last Saturday.  He was a quiet fellow, but took the opportunity of the checkout process to tell the story of his life.

Drawn with no pencil foundation -- just sketched off the top of my head. Pigma Micron 02 and 08. Colored in Photoshop.

Cartoons by Marcel Vertès

Above: the well-worn cover of IT'S ALL MENTAL.


Marcel Vertès' hand can be seen in the 1952 movie version of MOULIN ROUGE. There's a scene where the camera dollies in on the back of and actor playing Toulouse-Lautrec, as he is drawing. That actor, and that hand, belongs to the artist Marcel Vertès.

Ironically, during WWI when Vertès moved from his native Hungary to Paris, he made money by copying Lautrec paintings and selling them on the street. His Lautrec copies can bee seen in the opening titles of MOULIN ROUGE. He would share an Oscar win for costume design for the movie.

So, he was a painter, a Hollywood designer, an Oscar winner … and, for at least a short time, a cartoonist.

IT'S ALL MENTAL, copyright 1948 and 1952 by Vertès was published by Tudor Publishing Company in New York. Here are some of his cartoons, all about analysis. Racy in its day, these are all worth looking at for Vertès' ease of composition. You can definitely see the Lautrec influence here. 

"They're doing nothing, Miss Jones? What's wrong with your libido?"

One of the layout challenges of the book is that, generally, the drawings are on the right side and then the entire left-hand page is devoted to the gag line. My scanner chops off an inch if I scan it that way, so I'll just write in the captions as they appeared.

"When my analysis is finished, I'll be a perfectly balanced woman."

"Thanks a million, Doctor, for making a man of me!"

"That's my mother . . . a saint. No man ever touched her!"

""I refuse to talk until I see my analyst."

"Shame on you, Doctor -- what would Freud say!"

"Doctor, may I talk to you some day about my inferiority complex?"

Editorial Cartoonist Dan Lynch 1946-2014

Editorial cartoonist Dan Lynch died on Sunday, August 10, 2014 in a Fort Wayne, IN hospital. He was 67 years old.

He had a three-decade career at the Journal-Gazette, before a stroke, just two weeks to the day after 9/11, caused him to take an early retirement.

His son, Kelly Lynch, from the Journal-Gazette obituary:

“I maintained for a long time that the guy who was my dad kind of vanished that day in September, but there were always pieces of him left,” Kelly Lynch said. 

Born in Fort Wayne on Dec. 8, 1946, Dan Lynch was a near life-long resident of northeast Indiana. He studied at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and Indiana University in Bloomington. 

His three-decades career included a stint at the Kansas City Times and finished at the Journal Gazette. A nationally syndicated cartoonist, Dan Lynch’s cartoons appeared in Time and Newsweek, as well as in hundreds of newspapers around the country. 

“Dan had (what I thought was) a fabulous drawing style,” said Julie Inskeep, publisher and president of The Journal Gazette. “And, in the 20-plus years he worked at the JG, he provided a vast array of cartoon topics – always welcome, though not always in agreement with our editorial board. But he got people to think and react in his special and powerful way.” 

Dan Lynch also wrote books, was a musician and had a passion for steam locomotives and railroads.

Services are this Friday. Information at the link.

Dan was, to my knowledge, no relation, which is too bad. Another cartoonist in the family would have been wonderful. My condolences to his family.

DOCTOR WHO Series 8 Launch Trailer in LEGO

Here's the original trailer:



And YouTuber Slitheen99 has created this LEGO version here:



Compare the versions side by side:

Gag Cartoon Business: How Long Do You Wait?

During the first couple of years I was sending cartoons to magazines, I was fortunate to be part of the Berndt Toast Gang, the legendary group of cartoonists in Long Island. Many hours of shop talk with fellow pros really helped me.

Some years ago, during a Berndt Toast Gang get together, I was sitting at a table having lunch with some cartoonists. Valerie Costantino was there, and we were, as usual, having an intense conversation about gag cartooning. Valerie was always intense about cartooning, and it showed in her quick, confident cartoon style. She was selling gag cartoons to all of the top markets.

"What do you do when you don't hear back?" was the question.

What should a cartoonist do if a month has gone by, and there's still response to a gag cartoon submission? No rejection note, no email, no phone call, nothing.

Do you wait, do you call, send a polite email? What?

I told her I wait 30 days, and if I don't hear anything, I assume that there is no sale.

There was some debate around the table about this.

My feeling is if you are sending cartoons to magazines, then you need to be a shark: constantly moving. If my batch of 10 cartoons does not sell at, for instance, the Wall Street Journal, after 30 days, then it's time to mail that batch to another business market.

I miss Valerie, and those conversations with her about markets and how we conduct our business. Cartooning is the only profession I know where you're pals with your competitors!

Valerie passed away ten years ago. She had been battling cancer for years. She did it bravely and quietly. She preferred to talk cartooning over her health. I think of her when I get asked questions about markets. Valerie was one of the many great cartoonists in the Berndt Toast Gang.

We used to go up to the New Yorker offices together. In 2004, her new comic strip was ready to launch with the Washington Post Syndicate, and she had cartoons in Reader's Digest and Harvard Business Review. I think it was just a matter of time before she got into The New Yorker.

My point, as I reminisce with you, my friend, is that we do not know how much time we're going to get. If you're going to cartoon, get on with it. Val sure did.



This is an edited version of a blog post I wrote on April 9, 2009.

Doctor Who - Series 8 - Episode 1: Deep Breath OFFICIAL BBC One Trailer

Part 2: Paul Coker Draws 89 YEARS IN A SAND TRAP by Fred Beck

Two weeks ago, I posted some of the wonderful drawings by Paul Coker from the book 89 YEARS IN A SAND TRAP by Fred Beck, a humorous hardcover about golf. It's copyright 1965 by Fred Beck and was published by Hill and Wang in New York.

That posting generated some serious cartoon interest!

So, here are the rest of these great mid-century cartoon drawings by one of the greats of the greeting card industry and MAD Magazine.

It's 3AM and My Pants Are Beeping

Here's a true story from my sketchbook: every month, on the same day, my pants beep. It always gets me in a panic and I can't sleep.

Drawn with a Micron Pigma 8 pen, with some Photoshop colors overlaid in a hurry.