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Weird Chicken

2008-09-23T18:57:18+00:00

The Saga of Hopalong Kroninger

2008-09-21T22:21:28+00:00

As the 1:10 from York City chugged into the Westport station, I wondered if I'd recognize my mysterious visitor. As the smoke rose from the train wheels, bonneted ladies with squalling children descended from the iron monster. My eyes danced around the milling crowd of women, children and derby hatted pasty bank clerk types. Just as I had decided that the stranger wasn't among them, the smoke started to lift and I saw a black garbed apparition slowly pull a long dark cheroot from his waistcoat and fire it up. He wore a battered Stetson over his crop of silver hair. He casually looked around and then his eyes alighted on me and he sauntered over...pausing before me. He blew a thick cloud of acrid smoke in my face. "Hopalong?....Hopalong Kroninger?" I coughed. "Stop yer jawin' sonny", he snarled, "Let's hit the trail!" We piled into the old pickup and headed east. He said not a word as we rattled on toward the ranch while a sad country-western tune wailed on the truck's cranky radio (I Got Tears In My Ears From A'Lyin" on My Back In My Bed Whilst I Cried Over You). When we pulled into the ranch, the smells of steaming vittles filled our nostrils....the wimmen folk had been busy. The stranger eschewed all talk of food and wanted to get right down to business. "Show me them hosses", he grumbled. We went over to the corral and leaning on the rail fence his steely eyes surveyed the herd. After a moment he said, "That one!" "But...but", I stammered, "El Diablo ain't been broke!" Just then the maverick pony came over to us with his ears pinned back in a menacing manner as if to say," These are my fillies, hit the high road Jack!" Hopalong reached out and deftly extinguished his cheroot on El Diablo's nose. The horse didn't flinch....just glared at his opponent. "Jes' the way I like 'em", Hoppy said, "Saddle him up". I stood in awe and admiration as my dark-suited visitor deftly checked the girth and hiked it up a couple of notches then easily swung into the saddle. He held the ornery mustang in check as he drawled, "Which way did they go?" I pointed north and he smiled doffing his Stetson (see picture), reigned Diablo north and galloped off leaving me and the wimmen in a cloud of dust. I never saw him...or El Diablo again. But that evening, we thought we heard gun-play in the far distance.

A colorful Joke

2008-09-08T22:10:36+00:00

Hannity and Levin

2008-07-18T20:55:20+00:00

Two fellas we could well do without. Daily they spew their vicious propaganda on Mickey Mouse's ABC radio. They are considered true Americans by a large listenership....sadly. Sean Hannity and Mark Levin. This is sorta what they look like.

With friends like this...who needs enemies?

2008-07-10T20:38:38+00:00

One of my favorite jokes.

2008-07-08T21:36:09+00:00

From the "Hightower Lowdown" newsletter

2008-03-12T21:09:06+00:00

Another for PJBF

2008-03-10T18:49:56+00:00

I hope Patrick won't mind that I show the recent cover I did for Rethinking Schools. I want to belatedly jump on the Flynn bandwagon in praising one of the greatest art directors of our time. The cover is sans masthead, headline and other cover copy of course.....just did it.

Impeach

2008-01-06T22:39:28+00:00

Here's to representative Robert Wexler for turning the gun against Cheney and urging the Judiciary Committee to schedule impeachment hearings. And if you haven't read Naomi Wolf's "The End Of America" yet.....read it.....please.

MY LIFE ON THE SLANTED BOARD...Chapter 28, "Stripping For Playboy"

2008-01-01T23:37:02+00:00

I worked for Playboy magazine for fifteen years. I illustrated stories and sometimes did caricatures for their "Jazz Polls" and "New Year's Resolutions" pages. But the last five or six years was spent in doing two comic strips for them. Hefner, who is a lover of cartoons and cartoonists decided at a certain point that he should have a comic strip section in the magazine. He already had Kurtzman's "Little Annie Fanny" but this was to be a separate comic strip section apart from that feature. Many of us were asked to create strips. Hefner asked if I'd care to create a couple of strips. I submitted several ideas and the two he chose were my "Reg'lar Rabbit" and "5-Cent Mary". They would alternate in each issue every month. I drew Reg'lar Rabbit in pen and ink instead of my usual linocut medium and then colored it by using Pantone Adhesive colored film. He was a little Farmer Brown kind of guy and inhabited a place I called Boondock. There were only rabbits in Boondock. I thought a strip about a horny rabbit would suit Playboy's editorial requirements nicely. In one strip, a movie company comes to film in Boondock and we are introduced to the famous movie star Rabbit Redford. Reg'lar (as I like to call him) was always chasing and hitting on little rabbit cuties like Ginger Sue who asks him in one strip if he'd like a "roll in the hay". Reg'lar responds with, "DIGGITY DAWG...ah nevah thought you'd say THAT, Ginger Sue!" He hustles her off to a nearby hay stack where she produces, from the picnic basket she was carrying, a "roll". "Whut's yer pleasure,POPPYSEED or SESAME?"...to which our hero mutters to himself in a thought balloon, "Ah wuz in mind of some hot crossed BUNS!" 5-Cent Mary was actually named after a real person...a prostitute who serviced the fisherman down by the docks in my home town New Bedford. I met her once. My dad and I were sitting in a diner having breakfast early one morning before going fishing one day when lo and behold...5-Cent Mary sat right down next to me. I was just a little kid but I knew who she was because she was famous around town. She asked me if she hadn't seen me in church once. I said, "No." She must have had me confused with one of them Christians or something....I belonged to a proud Atheist household and had never graced the interior of a church. At any rate, that was the extent of my relationship with the famous 5-Cent Mary...but I always loved her moniker....hence my strip title. Hefner loved it because he was a huge fan of John Held Jr. and when you draw a cartoon in linocut with characters in 19th century garb...it come out looking like Held whether you like it or not. When I realized this, I had second thoughts about doing it but Hefner liked it so much I complied. 5-Cent Mary spent her time fleeing from 1800's cops and popping in and out of bed with various "johns". In one strip she is in bed with a musician. We can tell he's a musician because we see his cello leaning against the chair where his pants and shirt also reside. Suddenly in through the open window comes a terrifying shriek," A-I-I-I-I-E-E-E-E-E!" Mary says,"What's that?" The musician, without missing a stroke says, "High C". 5-Cent Mary, Hefner and I decided, should be rendered in just black and white to preserve its antique flavor. All the other strips were in color. Out of about ten sketches for each strip, I might get maybe three or four OK'd by Hefner who was the sole arbiter of the cartoons in Playboy. He was an amateur cartoonist himself. The art director Arthur Paul told me that Hef had put a couple of his own cartoons in the first issues of the magazine. I would deliver my sketches to the cartoon editor Michelle Urry (who unfortunately died last year) in the New York office and then she would fly out to California once a month and have a meeting with Hefner. My roughs would come back with a little "OK" in red on the ones he liked. Twice he made a little doodle off to the side suggesting a mouth expression for Reg'lar Rabbit and once he suggested putting in a little guy holding a beer to fill an empty space in a "5-Cent Mary" panel. These two little doodles hang proudly on my studio wall... after all, how many people have cartoons drawn by Hugh M. Hefner?

MY LIFE ON THE SLANTED BOARD...Chapter 27, "Poster Boy"

2007-12-29T21:28:13+00:00

So...there I was...wintertime...slogging through New York with my portfolio delivering and picking up jobs at my regular places, N.B.C., New York Times, Gourmet Magazine, Fortune...and getting sicker as the day went on. The flu I guess. I had an upset stomach, headache and an all-over queasy feeling. I was glad when I got to my last stop...the National Lampoon. I dropped my finished job on Mike Gross' desk and turned to leave when he leaped up and said something to the effect of, "Randy...you're the VERY person I need! I've got a photo shoot in an hour...you've got to pose for us!" I told him how sick I was and I hoped to make it home before I started throwing up or something. Now..... Mike had become a very close friend of mine and therefore had seen me on the stage and had decided that I was the very "ham" he needed for this particular job. He pleaded and pleaded with me. I was his only hope....his salvation. What could I do? I relented....I said I'd do it. He whisked me into a cab and we sped downtown to a photography studio where other Lampooners and a pretty young model and some props and a costume for me awaited. Before I knew it I was posing for a poster for a show which was to be held at The New Palladium in the Time-Life building. It starred Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, John Belushi and others (the beginning of what became Saturday Night Live"). In the poster, I was to be a little clownish guy trying to get this pretty girl to laugh by showing her a rubber chicken under my top hat, lighting matches giving myself a hot foot and smashing ice cream cones into my forehead. I end up successfully making her laugh when I open my raincoat and expose myself. The hardest ordeal was smashing myself, in my now fevered brow, with cone after cone of Haagen Dazs ice cream in... take... after take... after take as assistants dipped into a large tub of ice cream and fashioned cones for me. Later, after grueling hours of this, I was finally released and sent merrily off to Grand Central sharing a cab with the pretty model who was my son's age. She said, "I don't want you to feel bad that I laughed so realistically when you opened your raincoat.....I was just thinking of something....er.... funny....it's what we call 'method acting'". In the next month, the posters appeared all over the streets and subways of New York City. I would walk past the plywood walls of a construction site and see about 20 of the posters all in a row. The graffiti artists, of course, had a field day adding little "artistic" touches to it. They would of course draw protuberances of various sizes extending out of the raincoat from my groin. One had the girl exclaiming..."IT'S BLACK"! At that time, my wife was in a play in New York and was on the subway with one of the other actors one day when they pulled into Grand Central Station. This other actor had never met me so when they emerged from the subway car and were face to face with one of the graffitied posters, my wife nonchalantly gestured toward it and said, Oh, by the way..... this is my husband!"

MY LIFE ON THE SLANTED BOARD Chapter26

2007-12-19T19:32:11+00:00

Feeling as though I needed a hobby or some diversion from my illustration work, early on in my career, I decided to try out for some parts in our local Westport Community Theater productions. It was a pretty good group, existing as it did in a town that was full of professional actors and people in related arts. So began my small career on the amateur stage. I was in many plays over the next years until finally my freelance work got so demanding that I could no longer afford the late night rehearsals and the pressures of performances. My wife was in some of the musicals with me...she owns a marvelous singing voice. At the first illustrators' conference in Santa Fe, she joined the pianist and entertained everyone in the hotel lounge one night. Eventually though, she got tired of me always being up front on the stage while she languished in the back lost in a chorus so she promptly went professional, joining AFTRA, SAG and Equity and working in soaps, films and the stage in New York. She was once in a bus and truck tour with "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest". I went to see every performance when they were fairly close to home... sometimes working backstage on jobs.....cutting linocuts while the actors hovered around me.................but I digress...........back to my acting experience: In Music Man, I played the second lead (the part Buddy Hackett played in the movie). I only went out for comedic parts. I also never tried out for lead parts because they often had extra rehearsals and I couldn't afford the time away from the slanted board. As it was, rehearsals often went into the wee hours and I would have to go home afterwards and work on jobs while the rest of the cast went beddy-bye. I opened the second act with the "Shapoopie" song which forced me to sing solo with a full orchestra which is harder than it looks. I was supposed to be way back on the stage but I had them bring me up front so I could be nearer the orchestra and the benefit of the conductor who pulled me through the song by "mouthing" at me so I could get the timing right. I also danced in that show and worked out a few tricks like flipping my hat to the lead actor who was a really boisterous funny guy. We had fun prancing across the stage with canes and straw hats. I was in a play called Scapino...again playing second banana (the buddy of the lead guy). Tom, the lead was a very good comic actor (he was a police reporter in real life) and saved my bacon once when he looked into my glassy stare one night and realized that I had definitely forgotten my next line. He improvised brilliantly until I finally recovered myself. I used to like to add stuff to my part and in Scapino, I had a field day. One thing I did was during a terrific comic harangue where I rampaged around the stage waving, banging and shaking a heavy tire chain. I was supposed to be a rather meek little guy (type casting) that was trying to impress this girl with my ferocity and what I was going to do to a certain character when I found him. So I padded my part. I swung the chain around crashing it into chairs, a table and the floor....I worked it out so that the chain would end up swinging up through my legs supposedly hitting me in the groin. I doubled over feigning great pain while the audience roared. I inched my way (still doubled over) to the girl while the audience roared on. I waited...hunched over until the audience laughter started subsiding and just as it did....I slowly rose from my hunch and recited my next line to the girl.....but.....I did it in a high falsetto voice...."Scared ya, didn't I?" More laughter. The best thing about Scapino was the opening where I was the first to hit the stage....I mean I was the first to HIT the stage. Two big stagehands actually would pick me up in the wings and throw me through the air onto the stage. Every night I would bang the hell out of my knees. I started padding them up under my costume. Speaking of getting hurt...we did Scapino in a theater without a raised stage so the audience was right in front of us...very close. As I swung the chain around one night I slammed it down right in front of the audience and I saw a guy in front jump his legs back quickly....I thought I had hit him and it threw the rest of my scene off a little as I kept stealing glances at him to see if he was bleeding. Fortunately I hadn't hit him. In "Madwoman of Chaillot" I played the "Sewer Man", but I was also in a crowd scene at one point where we all kind of milled around on the stage. Bored with "milling", I decided I would juggle. I developed a little routine where I would stand down at stage right and juggle three balls...going higher and higher until they practically "kissed" the lights at the top of the stage...then I would bring them down, down and down...finally finishing by popping one ball up to my wife the "flower girl" on a balcony. The juggling went fine through all the performances but I admit that it was a little hairy the night my friends Alan Cober and Jerry Pinckney decided to trek into Connecticut to attend the show. As I juggled, all I could see was Alan's long legs sticking out of the first row....a little unnerving but I made it through without dropping a ball. As the Paris sewer man, I was able to get a few laughs out of the audience with lines like, "Those newspaper reporters are crazy. They say we keep a gang of women down there in the sewer and that we never let them up to see the light of day! It's totally ridiculous....we let them up every Christmas and on their birthdays!" I also added to my part by improvising a bit where I was putting on a pair of boots. I borrowed my father-in-law's boots that were much too big for me so that I could put them on with the toes facing the wrong way and then as a parting shot...twist them around facing front.....always got a laugh. I went on to be in Threepenny Opera, Arsenic and Old Lace (I played an Irish cop) and others. At an end of the year party one year We put on a little play just for the members. It was a Shakespeare spoof. In order to spice things up, I suggested to the other players that we all get stinking drunk before we went on thereby adding a little something to what I thought was a drab playlet. They wholeheartedly agreed and we proceeded to down several bottles of vodka back stage. We had a wonderful time doing the play and were amazed at how good we were and how funny we were. My wife says it was the worse thing she ever saw. Oddly enough the rest of the crowd thought so too. The next day....I felt very strange. I didn't have any desire for my regular 4 martinis, 17 glasses of red wine, and 2 beers that had gotten to be my daily regime..........but I had them any way out of habit. That night I experienced an overwhelming feeling of dread.....I thought I was going to die. I phoned friends and said goodbye. The next day the doctor told me I had suffered a "severe hyper glycemic episode".....a huge sugar overload to the brain or something. It was a super anxiety attack. I had never had an anxiety attack before so I didn't recognize it as such. I recited my drinking schedule to the doctor and he said, "Well....I think you better cut back a bit on the drinking." I vowed that if I was going to have any more of those attacks, I would never take a drink again and.....I haven't to this day. Every time we'd finish a play, the cast would want to give the director a present at the cast party. It was always the same.... someone would say, "I have a great idea.....let's have Randy make a cartoon about the play and we'll all sign it!" So I would draw a big picture usually representing everyone in the cast and crew....carefully delineating every fault and foible we went through to bring the play through. Sometimes my whole family was involved in the play. One of my sons, my mother-in-law (who was the set designer for many years), my father-in-law (who was instrumental in set construction and even acted in Madwoman) and my wife. Sometimes we would donate pieces of furniture or props or clothing like cowboy hats etc. to the production. Many years after I had quit the acting, I joined my wife for two years studying "The Method" in New York just because I was curious about it......but I resisted going back on stage because my illustration work was just too demanding in those years. I missed it......I missed peeking out through the curtains to see who was in the audience, the admiring fans coming backstage afterwards, the comraderie of the other actors, the gut-wrenching panic and "why do I do this to myself?", "butterflies-in-the-stomach",agony of standing in the wings about to go on when you can't remember your first line..........which comes to you immediately as you take the stage. I missed it terribly but I was an illustrator and I had pitchers to make for the peeple. So.....years had passed and I was working on a Playboy job that had to be sent out the next day, when I was called upon to deliver a prop or something on opening night of the WCT's new play. It was in the next town over so I left my unfinished job and sped over to deliver it. As I was rushing out of the theater to return home....I was stopped by a frantic director. One of the cast had suddenly taken ill and couldn't make the opening night.....I was their only hope. "But...I have to do this complicated job.....it's a rush....!!!" They all begged me to go on......it was a very small part....I could learn it in a few minutes. The whole cast pleaded with me........ I said a hesitant......."OK". I was immediately rushed into make-up....with only minutes left until the curtain, my lines were read to me for memorization....my movement on the stage was drummed into me as I struggled into my costume....and.....before I knew it I was hustled up a prop stairway in the backstage darkness....placed in front of a prop door......and left alone.......I listened for the cue......when it came, I opened the door and blinked at the splash of the lights which raked over the heads of a full house.....they laughed at my costume........a warmth spread over me.......I was on the stage once more.

I'm just practicin' up for the election.

2007-12-15T22:08:58+00:00

Besides being wall-eyed with two gouges in his cheeks, a busted nose and elephant ears....he's kind of presidential-looking....in a dopey sort of way.

For "The Muse"

2007-12-02T23:42:10+00:00

Dr. J and Mr. H

2007-10-29T16:03:04+00:00

I just came across this illustration I did in 1992 about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for a friend's self published lower east side New York underground magazine. it has the uninhibited, free craziness I wish I had in all my work but only seem to accomplish when I'm working for very very little or no money. Either that or I had too much Bacon for breakfast that morning.

General Petrocchio

2007-09-14T22:19:25+00:00

Just something that popped into my mind.

OUR PEERLESS LEADER

2007-09-10T16:52:01+00:00

I think maybe we cartoonists will miss the li'l bugger when he's gone.

K.O.

2007-08-08T19:42:24+00:00

What would we ever do without good ol' anthropomorphization?

Two Views

2007-08-03T20:08:47+00:00

Two views of the cat that ate the Wall Street Gerbil.

Prison

2007-08-01T15:23:20+00:00

This was done for my guitar-playing friend...good ol' Tom Trapnell at the L.A.Times. And, even though it is strictly against my religion to use a noun as an adjective, it was, as the young Drawgers are wont to say, a FUN job working these heads in and out of the bars to illustrate an article about the crowded prisons in California. I usually only do one rough but this job prompted several as you can see.

MY LIFE ON THE SLANTED BOARD Chapter 25, "The Union"

2007-07-31T21:47:16+00:00

I shall stray a bit from the art to remember my past life as a Western Union boy back in the 50's. I always worked as a young boy because I was expected to help out the family. Whatever job I had...bakery, golf caddy, Western Union, golf ball factory...I would dutifully turn over my paycheck, meager as it was, to my mom. A work ethic was solidly ingrained in me. So, at the age of 14, I began my life as a messenger for Western Union in New Bedford. In summer, I worked all day and during school, I worked after school until supper time. I worked for them for a couple of years. I had a balloon tire red Columbia bicycle which I laboriously pumped up and down the hills of my home town winter and summer. I liked the job because I got to travel all over town and meet all kinds of people. I delivered telegrams into the great loud woolen mills where the deafening mind-numbing roar of the machinery gave me new insight as to why the average Portuguese workingman talked so loud at home. I delivered telegrams into seedy little bars where alchohol-hardened fisherman would try to cajole me into the singing of birthday greetings (we didn't sing them in those days). But, mostly I delivered telegrams into the homes of the vast Portuguese population who only used their back doors and stairways saving the front for the special occasion like the daughter's wedding day. I don't think I ever went in a front door. They were mostly tenement houses with usually three floors. You had to go through the gate and down the walk to the back entrance and up dark stairs to the various floors. The risk was that once you were in the yard with the gate closed behind you, you would very likely meet the family dog who could get between you and the gate.....such were the perils of the Western Union life. The other peril was the bicycle riding. I whizzed down a line of cars one day to be suddenly slapped into oblivion and sprawled out into the street by an opened door.....I survived as did my trusty Columbia....which did not when I slipped and slid and tumbled, one winter, down an icy New Bedford street rendering my dear red bike a twisted ruin. But...it was a blessing in fact because I then was able to obtain a fake English 3 speed beauty that hastened the delivery of my missives considerably. We didn't wear uniforms at that period in the history of Western Union. I like uniforms and costumes. My N.B.C. art director Dennis Lo once said to me, "Randy, you don't own any clothes...you have costumes!" I doffed my collapsable top hat at him and said, "You betcha!" I yearned for a defining hat for my Western Union adventure so off I went to the Army-Navy store and perused the stock. I found a chauffeur's cap that seemed to fit the bill. I removed the wire so it would flop nicely and wore it from then on. I used to carry my telegrams in my hat (I think I must have seen it in a movie or something). I always envisioned myself a character in a movie. To this day, I sing and whistle background music for myself as I muck horse manure in the morning. It was a great job... but for one period of time. You see, I usually delivered birthday greetings or union telegrams telling striking workers when to go back to work. They were mostly poor people that I was delivering to (with the exception of the newspaper publisher and the doctors and lawyers in the West end of town)...so they weren't used to getting telegrams. I was a little bit of a bizarre intrusion into their lives sometimes. And that was never more the case than when the deluge of death telegrams from the Korean War hit us. We were told never to leave a wife or mother alone after delivering a death telegram. We were told to get a neighbor to stay with them. Needless to say, I didn't get any tips in those days. One image and moment will stay forever burned in my mind was the day I pulled up to the home of a poor black family who were all out in the yard. They at first looked curiously at this strange little white boy on the bike who approached wearing a chauffeur's cap. These were not people who would have ever gotten a telegram. As I walked slowly toward them, suddenly the realization of who I was flashed across the face of an old woman there who rose to her feet... and screamed... and ran into the house. That scream will always be with me. Many years later, on a visit home from art school, I went into the office to see my old boss. He blinked up at me from under his green visor and snapped, "You wanna deliver a telegram for me on your way home?" I said, "Sure....for old time's sake."

My Choice

2007-07-24T22:13:05+00:00

This is my guy. Of course he doesn't stand a chance. Look at his last name..The good voters of the United States have elected 43 presidents and none of them has had a last name that was Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Greek (what was Dukakis thinking?), Danish, American Indian, Inuit, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Turkish, African, Iranian, Iraqui, Lebanese, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Swiss, Korean, Vietnamese, Hungarian, Luthuanian, Russian, Polish, Filipino....well you get the idea. We've had ONE Catholic...no Jew...no women...no blacks They're all (except for Kennedy....and you know what happened to him) nice Protestant members of the Masonic Lodge and have nice "American" names. But.....if somehow the laws of reality were somehow repealed and my boy Kucinich got elected...well...we'd have the best lookin' damn first lady we've ever seen in this country!

MY LIFE ON THE SLANTED BOARD Chapter 24 "Autographs"

2007-07-22T16:20:57+00:00

I'm not one to collect autographs. I have met Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Clancy brothers (and Tommy Makem), Phil Ochs, Buffy Saint Marie, Jim Kweskin, Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Odetta, Doc Watson, Serge Chaloff, Stan Getz, Clarence Ashly, Mississippi John Hurt, Keir Dullea, Ring Lardner Jr., Rudy Vallee, Tom Berenger, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Sammy Davis Jr., Vaughn Meader, Reni Santoni, Robert Blake, Bunny Bleu (porno star), Sterling Hayden, Hayden Herrera, John Updike, Jacques Lipchitz, Whitney Darrow Jr., Milton Caniff, Virgil Partch, Rube Golberg, Norman Rockwell, Tallulah Bankhead, Otto Soglow, Shel Silverstein, Tomi Ungerer, Folon, George Guisti, Milton Glaser, Al Dorne, Harold Von Schmidt, Al Parker, Robert Fawcett, Robert Weaver, John Belushi, John F, Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Rocky Graziano, Carol Burnett, Jonathan Winters, Bob Peak, Mark English, Ed Sorel, Etienne Delessert, Harvey Kurtzman, Bill Holman, Al Capp and Zina Saunders and it has never even occurred to me to ask for their autographs...... but, I must confess, I have accumulated a few here and there mostly from having bought a book of theirs and had them sign it for me. I never got Hugh Hefner's auto graph even though I worked for him for 15 years but I did get a rare item from him....two little cartoon drawings from the frustrated ol' cartoonist himself. In my last 5 or 6 years with Playboy, I did two comic strips and on two occasions he sent me these two drawings which were some suggestions on the strips. But....that's not what I came here to talk about. I came here to tell of the occasions when people have asked me, amazingly enough, for MY autograph. Over the years when you do enough illustrations, the occasional letter comes in asking for an autograph...or a drawing and an autograph. I have always cheerfully complied. It is flattering of course. As a matter of fact, Googling my name, produces a site where someone is trying to sell an autograph of mine for....I think...$137(?). Lots of luck. One day, I found in my mailbox two requests for autographs....small index cards....and a stamped self addressed envelope. I wanted to ignore these rather anonymous requests but the stamped self addressed envelopes got to me and I couldn't bring myself to just chuck them out. I complied. The next day, my mailbox bore three seperate index card request for an autograph. The next day two or three or....five more requests. The days went on and each day brought more requests. I couldn't figure out what was going on but I did notice a strange thing. There was a glaring similarity on the face of every envelope. Each had my name spelled with one "l" instead of two. My sterling powers of detection convinced me that they were all coming from one mysterious source out there. Determined to solve the mystery, I took the opportunity of asking one of my correspondents just where he had gotten my name and address. I felt bold enough to do this because this one fellow had asked me if I wouldn't send a little cartoon along for his son in addition to the autograph he was seeking for his collection which would be passed onto his son later on (this same sentiment about father and son collections was featured in many of the correspondences). So, since he had asked me this extra favor, I felt I could ask him the source of my deluge. He happily answered and sent along the autograph collector's magazine which included my name and address in the latest month's issue. Years later, my name would be stuck in there again and I would get another surge of autograph hounds. It was fascinating, here was this magazine (I've since seen others at Barnes and Noble) which had articles on famous autographs (Lincoln, Franklin and the like) and how they came to be in the possession of certain people etc.. Then there was this big center section where they actually listed the addresses of famous people. There were large lists of movie stars, TV stars, rock musicians, non-rock musicians, dancers, comedians, writers, sports figures and politicians. I didn't see any lists of artists. I turned the pages........ and then I saw it. Tucked away in a small corner of one page there was a tiny box with about 6 or 7 names. I was the only "illustrator/cartoonist". Why was I there? Why was I stuck into this little box off to the side under the title........ "Miscellaneous"? The story of my life.......my miscellaneous life!

PEACOCK REDUX

2007-07-09T20:36:21+00:00

Kroninger reminded me that i should have shown some of my N.B.C. work in my last post....so here goes. Here are a few I could find. Others are on glass slides or very large posters and animated film. They're all in bad shape because after I do a job, I'm not one to care about keeping it. I've thrown out a ton of them.

MY LIFE ON THE SLANTED BOARD Chapter 23, "Days of the Peacock"

2007-07-09T16:40:58+00:00

If you enter 30 Rockefeller Center from the skating rink side...walk past where Diego's murals should be and into the elevator banks and up to the 9th floor...make a right...you come into a large open area ringed by offices where once sat Bill Feigenbaum, Dennis Lo, Jack Heller, Mike Mohammed, Murlin Marsh, Dolores Gudzin, Orest Woronewych and Eugene Kolomatsky...my N.B.C. art directors in the 60's and 70's. I spent many pleasant and fruitful hours there among some of the best friends I ever made in the business. Bill Feigenbaum was a funny, smart film art director who handled all the on- air animated and live action promos. On my barn wall hangs a hatchet I painted up when we did the Daniel Boone promo. Bill was such a funny guy. If you looked up and said, "What a lovely moon tonight!"...he'd say, "Thank you!" Sometimes I'd do a long painting that we would pan to create the ad. I did ads for the brand new "Laugh In"....or more correctly "Rowan and Martin's Laugh In" and we didn't know what to make of this new kind of show that was just comedy without benefit of musical and dance interludes. Dennis Lo had a hobby of making experimental, underground, "no budget" 16MM movies....they were great. Jack Heller went regularly to a pottery class and I still have some of his efforts in my studio along with those of Gene Kolomatsky who joined him there and had a propensity for making X-rated vessels which adorn my studio as well. Murlin and Dolores were the nicest two women who ever art directed me. Dolores went on to write a book that I illustrated. Orest became my best friend and we spent hours and hours in his office discussing the world's problems. He was of high moral fiber. I'd deliver a job to one of them and invariably pick up another one or two from some of the others...every day or so. If there was a big show coming on like a Danny Thomas special, I'd do a picture for one art director that would be picked up by all the other art directors too. Each A.D. had a specific area of endeavor. There was the national advertising, the on-air animated promos, bumper stickers, ads for affiliate stations, station breaker art etc.. Sometimes I could sell one picture to 3 or 4 art directors. Sometimes they would take a drawing of mine and turn it into animation. I once did an ad by using small enamel tiles to make the picture (one of the heaviest jobs I ever delivered). I went on vacation and came back to discover that I could bill an additional amount because Feigenbaum had created an animation of the tiles popping on to create the image. They all hated reps but they loved the artists that would come in and hang out. I became very close with Orest (now deceased) who had given me my first job there. It consisted of 15 paintings in which I had total freedom to illustrate "N.B.C. Sports", "Humor", "News" etc.. No roughs. I made big acrylic paintings and they were used as on air station breaker "posters" for affiliate stations. Orest and Gene Kolomatsky and Joyce and Bill Feigenbaum would visit me in Westport in the summer and together with our children we would go to the beach. When I'd have an illustration in Playboy, I would come up to the offices with my arms loaded with issues and pass them out to everyone and try to get them past the pulchritude to my illustration.....usually unsuccessfully. They loved my little monthly present. At lunch time, we'd often go to Times Square or along 8th Avenue to an interesting little tie store where we would buy these outrageous ties or go to the movies and take in the recent soft porn Danish import that was breaking ground for the inevitable flood of harder, seamier movies and peep shows that soon followed. Gene and I would sometimes wander around the building watching Cousin Brucie spin the platters or visit the soap opera sets. One time, no one stopped me from ambling through a backstage set and peeking around a corner to find myself face to face with a studio audience on a game show. When someone started setting off the occasional bomb in the restrooms at N.B.C.,we were plagued by the frequent forced evacuation of the entire building. It got so tiresome that one time, Kolomatsky the Russian and I just stayed put and chatted away in his office until the all clear sounded and everyone returned to the building unscathed. It was a great time because N.B.C. had inherited the graphic presence that C.B.S. once had with the Ben Shahn and David Stone Martin graphics in their advertising. We were the only network using artwork for promotion. In my 12 or so years there, I drew caricatures of everyone from the soap opera people to the news folks and of course Flip Wilson, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Jack Benny, Johnny Carson etc. etc.. I worked in linocuts, acrylics, pen and ink, colored pencil, watercolor....you name it. And, of course, I did a lot of animation there. It all came crashing down eventually and N.B.C. gave in like C.B.S. and A.B.C. to using photos for promotion. No more great Jack Davis football pictures (he'd drive Kolomatsky nuts because he'd never send in a bill)....no more Enos caricatures....the theatrical agents all wanted their people shown in photographically controlled prettiness. No more giant, full page linocut Danny Thomases for the New York Times. It all collapsed like a thud. The art directors peeled off one by one. Orest went to the burgeoning HBO where he made a real name for himself. Gene went independent as did Mike and Jack. I don't know what Dennis or his lovely wife are doing now...but I'm sure it's "cutting-edge". In the film dept. at N.B.C. were huge trash cans filled with big, thick, juicy 35MM film....destined for the dump. I was looking for a costume idea for Leann and myself...we had an impending party at a friend's house. It was a gang of people who held an annual "Tin Cannes Film Festival" of our various 8MM and 16MM experiments (I showed some of Dennis' films there once). I thought it would be a great idea if Leann and I went dressed in film. I grabbed a couple of big reels and took them home. We hung the film in strips from collars around our necks so that we had long "gowns" of film hanging from our necks to the ground over our black undergarments. As I was putting it together, I looked at the large frames of film. Amazingly enough..... ALL the film I had brought home.....was animation I had done for N.B.C..

MY LIFE ON THE SLANTED BOARD-Chapter 22, "Delivering"

2007-06-27T12:57:34+00:00

In the beginning, I hand delivered all my jobs. In the early days, almost all the clients were in New York City, an hour away from me in Westport. The magazines and newspapers and companies out in the hinterlands couldn't afford "New York" illustrators. Hand delivering gave me the opportunity to visit with my art directors ( with which many of whom, I enjoyed a very close friendship) and roam around the city that was still new to me and very exciting in its hustle and bustle. I was a night person....I worked until 4 every morning and awoke at around 10 or 11. Cutting grass and trimming hedges and listening to birds singing out there in the morning wasn't exactly my cup of tea. I liked the faces and noises of the city. I liked everything about it...even the dirty toilets in Grand Central with the underwear of the homeless guys stuffed into them and the pigeons (the flying rats) all over Times Square walking in amongst the speeding taxis and the big trucks unloading giant paper rolls into the bays at the Times and the glorious entrance way to the Daily News with the huge globe and the lunches at the automat on 42nd St. and the afternoon martinis at the Brass Rail. Art directors (especially those at the Times) didn't start functioning until about noon, so a leisurely late morning train out of Westport allowed me to ride in the dining car and enjoy the landscape whizzing by as I ate a hot lunch and was waited on by gentlemen in white jackets. The downside was that other Westport illustrators would tend to look down on the little schlump who delivered his own work while they were much to busy to do the same. And so it indeed came to a time when the volume of my work precluded me from visiting my beloved New York. For a time, I had an assistant who would take the work in and I even trained him to take stuff to the animation stands and supervise the shooting. When I no longer had the assistant, there were several options on getting your work to the city. The train conductors when they reached New York, would have about an hour off before heading back to Connecticut on another train, so for about 5 dollars they would take your package in and deliver it. Most stuff was going to Madison Ave. and surrounding streets so it was no hassle for them. The train station in the morning at Westport would be the scene of blurry eyed, unshaven illustrators with their furtive packages under their arms. They would almost imperceptively pass it along with a folded bill to a conductor because it wasn't exactly legal for the coductors to do this. Another way to transport the "merchandise" to its destination was to use Godfrey's Stagecoach Service (no horses....I'm not THAT old). It later was taken over by Godfrey's main man Ryder (get it Stagecoach....Ryder?). One would have to drop off the package at Ryder's back door at night and he'd rush it off to the city in the morning. Sometimes dark, shadowey figures would be sneaking around Mr. Ryder's house in the very early morning hours trying to place the package in between the screen door and the house door without waking up the dog who would bark and alert the neighborhood. Later on Ryder starting carrying a gun to extend his work to top security airplane courier service.....and to shoot illustrators who woke up the dog. Another way I had at my disposal was....the wife. Leann had taken to doing acting rounds in New York looking for soap opera work etc. so she went in frequently and would take in packages for me. Her habit was to go into Grand Central...then hit the phone banks there and make a million calls and then deliver my job. One time I had a job due at Mobil which was in the building directly across 42nd Street from the station. I told her to forego the telephonong and deliver it immediately because it was due first thing. She agreed and off she went. My art director at Mobil was Mike gross the former A.D. at the Lampoon. We had become very close friends with him and his wife who visited us often in Westport. That morning at just the time when Leann would be approaching the south side of 42nd St. across from Grand Central, a bomb went off blowing out the window and doors of a travel agency on the ground floor of the Mobil building. Mike and his co-workers were vacated from the building and milled about on the sidewalk where police and firemen went to work. Mike was terrified because he knew that Leann must have been right there and was probably among the injured. He found a phone and called his wife Glennis. He asked her to discreetly call me to see if I knew anything about it. I don't remember the call exactly but I was puzzled....Glen was afraid to say anything. Later I found out that Leann was safe because, as usual, she paid absolutely no attention to me and had gotten off that train and hit the phone banks to make her calls thereby missing the calamity. I don't remember how the job got delivered but it did after the whole mess was cleared up. That was the beginning of tight security in the buildings around New York.....no more waltzing in with your packages and zipping up the elevators to the offices above...a few more bombs in men's rooms at N.B.C. cinched the deal.

MY THREE MOMS

2007-05-11T23:32:12+00:00

My maternal grandmother Serafina De Pedro was working in a cigar factory on the island of Sao Miguel in the Portuguese Acores when she received notice that a man in the United States wanted her to come across the ocean so he could marry her. He had fallen in love with a photo of her in the home of a relative of hers in this country. So, she got on a boat and made the trip. She was 13 years old. They were married and had four children...my mother Isabel being the youngest. My grandmother lived in this country until she died at the age of 86. She never learned to read or write English. She worked as a domestic, cooking and cleaning for rich people. She would cook Portuguese dishes for them. She outlived two of her children...my uncle Tony and my mother. My grandfather had died just before I was born so my grandmother came to live with us...as a matter of fact, she delivered me when I was born in my mother's bed. She was a wonderful, kindly and simple person whose only enjoyment was visiting her sister across town. My sister and I would accompany her on the trolley ride and sit in the musty apartment for hours while they visited and talked Portuguese. My grandmother's sister always gave us very hard stale gum to chew. She had a drawer full that she saved just for us. I think she had saved it for a loooooooong time. My grandmother took care of us while my mother and father worked. She lived with them until she finally went to a nursing home a while after my mother died. I bought her a goldfish to keep her company at the home. My mother Isabel, who everybody called Elizabeth (except her girlfriends who called her Betty) quit school as soon as she was legally able to do so in order to go to work in the factories to help support the family. She was working at the Goodyear plant when she met my father. She didn't like him because she thought he was a show-off. He was always chinning himself with one hand on a bar across a doorway because he was on a crusade to build up his body....he took the Charles Atlas mail order course also. He was innocently trying to improve himself because he grew up with no education and not much to eat. So...she avoided him at work until one day when he forgot his lunch and she shared hers. They fell in love. My mother was a wonderful mother to me and she adored me. Not only that but she saved my life when I was very little. I was sitting on the floor playing with my mother's best friend's little daughter as they sat there visiting. My mother's friend was a nurse. I was hiding marbles from the little girl and decided that a swell place to hide one would be in my mouth so I popped one in. As she looked furtively about I started laughing at her antics and the marble lodged in my throat. I turned blue and could not breathe. My mother happened to look down at me and saw me choking and saw the marbles on the floor and immediately leaped to her feet and grabbed me by the legs turning me upside down and she started shaking me and banging me on the back while her friend the nurse sat with her mouth open. The marble dislodged and fell out. My mother worked very hard her whole life and looked forward to retiring in her fifties and finally being able to be at home and relaxing for the first time in her life. But it was not to be because at the age of 53 she went to the hospital for the first time in her life. She had birthed two children at home. She broke her leg one time and had it fixed up with a cast in the doctor's office. So...at the age of 53 she made her first visit to a hospital for a simple hysterectomy. After the operation, she hemorrhaged and died in the hospital. I was just beginning my career in Westport...my sister was a nurse in Boston. Twenty tears later at the age of 86, my father re-married. His new wife had been my mother's best friend and I had known her my whole life at that point. So I was given another wonderful mother named Beatrice who was one of the most unusual people I have ever known. She was like a saint. She completely devoted herself to helping other people and never doing anything for herself. I don't remember her ever going to the movies or having fun of any kind except to visit with her nieces who she loved with a passion. She was 63 when she married my father and she had never been married before having devoted her life tending to her elderly father and mother while her sisters and brother went off to start families. She had had a boyfriend who went off to Europe in the big war and never came home to her. She spent all her time with my family after knitting me a baby garment when I was born and delivering it to my mother. My father was her family's insurance man. She used to help my father shingle the house and paint it. On Sundays we would sometimes go to the Cape for swimming and she would always come along. When I was young her father...a barber...would cut my hair. He would never take any money for it. She was one of the kindest, most hard working people I've ever seen. She worked almost her whole life in a pajama factory. She was a great cook and seamstress. I think I learned a lot from these three mothers of mine. They all showed a lot of love to me that's for sure. I'll remember them on Sunday....that's also for sure.

Phil Spector's new hair

2007-04-28T20:19:15+00:00

Why am I wasting time doodling Phil Spector when I have so many other things to do? Because he's a caricature waiting to happen. Well.....he'll have to wait.....I haven't gotten him yet!

The Agony of Defeat

2007-04-12T18:03:27+00:00

Nancy posted a "Scrabble" so I thought I'd submit a "Bingo".

MY LIFE ON THE SLANTED BOARD: Chapter 21 "Art School"

2007-04-01T19:18:39+00:00

I went to art school in 1954 to study painting because while I had a love for cartoons and illustration when I was a little younger, as I prepared to exit high school, I had decided that I should pursue a higher calling in life....I should think more classically....more seriously than cartoons or illustrations. I wore black all the time and tried not to smile as much......that was a beginning. So off to the Boston Museum School I went. I roomed with a high school friend who was attending the New England Conservatory of Music. He was a classical trumpet player but talked like a jazz musician. Each morning he would leap out of bed at the last minute and start yelling, "Where's my axe...where's my axe?" He was constantly misplacing his trumpet for some reason. He also papered his alcove above his bed with pictures from that new girly magazine Playboy (who I'd be working for in six years). One day he bounded up the stairs....rushed into the room and jumped on his bed wildly tearing all the pictures down just barely in time as his visiting grandmother entered the room. We each paid six dollars a week for a twelve dollar double room. We ate our meals across the street in the basement of another rooming house where we could get very cheap meals or around the corner at an inexpensive restaurant. The first evening at the rooming house found us all gathered in the room of another of our high-school classmates who was attending engineering school. There were four of us from our high school there. As we revelled in our new found freedom from home in New Bedford, a cacophony of sounds issued from below us in the street. It was a drunk who was loudly carrying on. We raised our window and shouted to him to shut up. He looked up and inquired as to what street this was. "St. Stephens Street", we shouted back. He said, "Who's that.....the patron saint of silence?" My best friend at school during that first year was Jarvis....or Jerry Rockwell...Norman's oldest son. He said he was the black sheep of the family and his father never painted him (which wasn't true....he shows up in Boy Scout calendars and he had just been on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post). He was older than me, having been in the Air Force and was now doing his art schooling. He always had a science fiction book in his back pocket. We ate together every night and talked about everything but his father. The school was an old fashioned painting school that was free and loose to the extent that some students even brought their dogs in. Cathy Capp (Al Capp's daughter) didn't have a dog so she walked around school dragging a little fake furry tail on a leash. Even though the action painters of the New York School were starting to make a lot of noise in the art world, The Boston Museum School held on to the traditions of Rembrandt, Jack Levine, Hyman Bloom and Ben Shahn (who taught classes in the summer). We were still under the shadow of the John Singer Sargents housed across the street in the museum and wallowing in the throes of Social Realism. The head of the painting department was Karl Zerbe....a German Expressionist painter who had an allergy to oil paint so he had adopted encaustic as his medium of choice. As a result, the upper classmen and women who were lucky enough to have him as a teacher, tended to paint in the same medium. It was a little strange to walk through painting classes that were filled with heated palettes...large hot plates. The smell of heated bees' wax was in the air instead of that delicious smell of oil paint. Some upper classmen specialized in fresco painting and would get a section of wall in our basement corridors to practice on. Each year they would be covered over by new murals. I remember watching some of the older students in the graphics classes. There was Reba Stewart who was a wood cutter and Donald Kelley who did etchings and another guy (can't remember his name) who was working on a lithograph of Charlie Chaplin the whole year long. I would watch him bent over his stone....all covered for protection except the small area he was working on. I remember him noodling all day long, with a carefully sharpened litho pencil, on a jacket button. There was a painter also named Yutaka Ohashi who ended up marrying Reba Stewart later on. Yutaka was an odd duck in that sea of traditional painters because he was an abstract painter and created big mainly black and white compositions not unlike Kline except that they had a little touch of the old world Museum School in there. Peeking out through his blacks here and there, one could detect some smatterings of gold leaf. I used to watch him working from numerous sketches on the floor on newspapers. He worked with house painters' brushes and was our first look at Abstract Expressionism and the faraway New York School. Another painter I raelly liked was Justin Curry who spent all his time painting buildings with fire escapes. I liked them. In the morning we had three hours of drawing from a model. I would walk to school, buying on the way, a cigar and a candy bar....my breakfast. I would puff on the cigar through the morning drawing session. In the afternoon, I either went to my painting class or took art history, perspective, graphics or design class. In the painting class, we only painted from basic shaped objects that were painted white. The idea was to look hard into that white to see the colors. later on we painted a trompe and still life stuff. No figure work until third year....I didn't stay that long...I only went for two years. In my second year of art school, I met my future wife and a new best friend named Jim. Jim never wanted to go to painting class....he would just repair to the graphics room and work on woodcuts. He had arrived one day out of nowhere and announced to me that he owned nothing but the clothes on his back and the straight razor in his back pocket. Leann and I had a lot of fun with him and his girl at various Beacon Hill parties attended by the bohemian art students of the day. Jim had no money so he couldn't buy wood to cut. He took to carving his cuts in the seats of wooden chairs in the graphics room and then taking a print off them. I lived with three other art students in what was essentially a whore house down on Dartmouth St.. We shared one long room with a little bathroom and a cooking alcove. At the end of the room was a large window looking down on the street over Back bay Station. The neighborhood doesn't exist anymore. Across the street was a great little old fashioned art store. Down stairs was "Finn's Irish bar"....Mr. Finklestein the owner also owned the "hotel" we lived in. The upper floors were for students and other long term residents and the lower floors were for sailors and their "dates" which they would acquire in the bar. The sounds of Irish music was ever present in the air. I befriended the crippled desk clerk who was an aspiring poet and would spend all night talking with him in the small lobby while watching the whores coming and going with their sailor boys. I hardly ever slept....Boston was just too damn interesting to sleep through. In the morning we would shout and bang on our window waving at our perspective teacher who would pass by the hotel on his way to work. he never acknowledged us. When we confronted him at school about it, he said, "I'm not going to wave at you in....THAT place!" Next door to us lived the famous painter Hyman Bloom but we didn't know it. There was a drummer upstairs who was also an art student. He gave me the nickname I went through art school with.....LIPJAZZ....because of my affliction....diarrhea of the mouth. Later in life, a friend of mine who was a writer wrote a prize-winning poem about me and Leann in art school called "Lipjazz and the Pony-Tail". Toward the end of the school year I started a large abstract painting that I intended to enter in the Boston Arts Festival. It divided our "shotgun" apartment in half. With Leann's help, I carried it down the street when it was finished and entered it. Hans Hoffman who was the judge that year, picked it to be in the Festival. Some of my teachers didn't even get in. I love the review I got in a Catholic newspaper which read...."Enos' 'The God' suggests nothing but an evil oriental spirit". One day while I was diligently painting away on a still life or something, my painting teacher Reed Kay, snuck up behind me and grabbed a hold of my right ear (it still hurts) and dragged me out of the studio. Without saying one word, he paraded me down the hall...then down a stairway and down another hall and into the school library. He wordlessly sat me down at a table and went to fetch a book. I waited. He came back and opened the book in front of me and then pushed my nose into Rembrandt.....and left. Thirty years later, Leann and I returned to visit our old haunts and the Boston Museum School which now had grown in size quite a bit. I just took a chance and went to the graphics department and asked if they had any old wooden chairs that had the seats carved....(remember Jim?). They didn't have any. It's too bad because I really wanted to buy them. I'm the only one that knows they were done by.....Jim Dine.

Laverne's Lottery Lumpen

2007-03-29T20:44:36+00:00

This Lumpen was inspired by a trip to the grocery store and is dedicated to my cat Laverne. Leave me explain this preposterous perplexion: My lovely cat Laverne eats Friskies cat food like millions of other American cats. I buy her several different flavors such as...Poultry Platter, Ocean Whitefish Dinner, Salmon Dinner, Gourmet Grill etc.. Now, each of these comes in a version with sauce. Laverne doesn't like the sauce. The problem is Ocean Whitefish Dinner and Ocean Whitefish Dinner in Sauce come in identical colored cans as do the others. You have to watch out for that little "in Sauce". Some times I goof and get the sauce so I have to take it back to the grocery store and exchange it. I usually take it to the "Customer Service" counter and make the exchange. So....the other day I put my can of Ocean Whtefish Dinner in Sauce in my pocket and proceeded to the Super Stop & Shop. I went to the Customer Service counter and there was one woman in front of me. I waited patiently with my Ocean Whitefish Dinner in Sauce in hand....and I waited....and I waited while this woman proceeded to make lottery ticket purchases. "Give me two Lucky Bucks" "Give me five Slam Bangs" "Give me ten Lollapalloozas" "Give me three Daily Whammos" "Give me seven Super Double Trouble Humdingers".....and so on. Each time, the attendant would carefully tear off the purchased tickets and take the money and ring it up. I waited. Then I waited some more. It went on endlessly. I finally left the line and put the Ocean Whitefish Dinner in Sauce back in my pocket...picked up a cart and proceeded to my shopping chores. When I got to the cat food shelves, I took the Ocean Whitefish Dinner in Sauce out of my pocket and put it on the shelf and took a can of Ocean Whitefish Dinner off the shelf and put it into my pocket and went on to finish my shopping. So...you see...if Laverne liked Ocean Whitefish Dinner in Sauce, I never would have made this picture....so it's dedicated to her. "Is that a can of cat food in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?"

MY LIFE ON THE SLANTED BOARD: Chapter 20 "Cartoonists"

2007-03-28T21:38:18+00:00

In the last chapter,I mentioned Pete Wells. He was an old Yale graduate who never grew up. His walk had a boyish bounce to it. He always had a pipe or cigar clamped in his jaw. He had been in the navy in WWII and kept an abiding interest in sailing his whole life. He also played old time jazz on a bass saxophone. Well....it actually looked more like the bass saxaphone was playing him as he sat there in front of the cradled monster and blew 'til his cheeks puffed way out and he hung on for dear life as the booming instrument belted out New Orleans jazz numbers. He played regularly every Wednesday at lunch break from the Famous Artists Schools and sometimes I would go to the little restaurant and listen to him play along with other cartoonists and illustrators. The school provided us with slanted boards but more often than not, Pete preferred using a lap board propped up against it like the old time cartoonists favored. He always put in his large blacks with a #290 pen rather than a brush which would result in nice big wet puddles of ink. Pete showed me how to dry up the puddles with a lit cigar held right over them. He wore a green eye shade sometimes...so I did too. The greatest thing one could do in life was to draw funny Pete thought. When told about a smart good-looking and accomplished person, Pete would say...."Yes, but can he draw cartoons?" If the answer was "No" as it invariably was, Pete would say, "Then...what good is he?" When you approached his desk, he would say, "And your problem is?" And his favorite exclamation of delight was..."OSKY WOWWOW!" The best thing he did for me was to occasionally take me along as a guest to the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) meetings which were held in New York at the old actors' club...the Lambs club. Some of the actors were honorary members of the NCS. They often had guest speakers so I got to see and meet some of my favorite people like Jean Shepherd who was there one night on the stage building up a nice juicy rant about the awful commercial world and how an artist must do his own thing regardless of what the establishment and commercial interests thought. Walt Kelly eventually wandered over from the bar and started shouting retorts saying things like ..."Well...you can talk big....you don't have sponsors....the rest of us work for papers that carry ads and we can't be so free..." A spirited exchange followed. The cartoonists were all upset, speaking of Kelly, because Walt had been denied membership in the Society of Illustrators (even though Rube Goldberg had been one of the founders). There was bitterness about that and I wonder if it didn't affect me somewhat causing me not to join SI until late in my career. It always jars me now to see the Steve Canyon strip hanging in the hall at the Society. Another evening at the NCS, Tomi Ungerer was the guest and he told a story about how how an art director had called him once to ask if Tomi was sending his work around with another guy. Tomi said he wasn't and the A.D. said someone was coming around showing stuff that was identical to Tomi's work. Ungerer immediately put the detective wheels in motion to find out who it was. The offenders name was finally secured and Tomi called him up and told him that if he didn't stop copying him....he would kill him. He had no more problems with that guy. My friend Pete and others there were not amused at this story because they were of the mind that Ungerer himself was a rip-off of one of their own....AND...he was sitting in the front row right in front of Tomi. His name was Arnold Roth. Another evening at the NCS brought forth Shel Silverstein. Before the talk started, I spotted him leaning over one of his drawings that was on display. As I approached, I could see that he was furiously picking at the drawing with his fingernail. I snuck up behind and said, "Don't touch the artwork!" He answered, "Never use European rubber cement!" I noticed he had a cast on one leg and was supporting himself on crutches. He explained that during one of his forays for Playboy (he did great reportage spreads for the magazine from all parts of the globe), he had gone to Africa and was crossing a large deserted plain in a Land Rover when the monthly bus came along..... and hit his vehicle. Another time at NCS, I was standing at the bar next to Jerry Robinson and some other comic book guys and realistic strip guys. In front of us stood Otto Soglow...his small dwarfish, self trying to get in on the conversation with no success. Finally the creator of "The Little King" shouted out, "Hey....how come all you realistic guys never talk to me.....I'm a realistic guy too..... I can't help it...that's the way people look to me!" I never joined the NCS because I felt a little out of place among all the strip guys and gag cartoonists. There weren't many "illustrators" there. There was Roy Doty but even he had done comic strips. I just didn't have much in common with any of them. But...I do belong to the Connecticut chapter of the National Cartoonists Society and go to all the meetings. There is nothing better than sitting in a room full of 100 or so cartoonists all night. The air is filled with hilarity. They are some of the nicest, kindest, and less ego-driven individuals I have ever had the pleasure of being around. When I die, the grandest thing that could ever be said about me would be..."That Randy...he was a great cartoonist!"

MY LIFE ON THE SLANTED BOARD: chapter 19 "I Yam Wot I Yam"

2007-03-23T22:22:04+00:00

My chief mentor and the man who is responsible for me being in this business is now dead but I shall remember him always as having faith in a young green kid (I WAS actually lime green when I was young and not the rosy pink I am today) and giving me my first job as an instructor in the Cartoon Course of the Famous Artists Schools. His name was Forrest Sagendorf but was always called "Bud". The "Schools" called him in from his job as cartoon editor of King Features in New York to head up their brand new Cartoon Course. I was in Westport Connecticut just married and planning to go back to Boston after the summer to continue studying painting in order to achieve my life-long ambition of becoming a starving artist in Greenwich Village U.S.A..I was looking for a summer job and my mother-in-law brought me over to Bud's house one day for lunch. Bud was a famous guy because aside from being a cartoon editor, he also drew the Popeye comic books. He asked me if I could draw cartoons to which I boldly replied, "Of course, anybody can draw cartoons....I am a PAINTER!" He said...."Fine....draw up some cartoons and I'll show them to the boss." And so my life as a cartoonist began and along with it, Bud hired me to work with him on week-ends drawing Popeye. You see, the school didn't just hire for summers....they told me that if I wanted to work there.....it would be for life. I looked around and saw a building full of seasoned painters, illustrators and cartoonists just waiting to teach me everything they knew so I said....."Yes!" Popeye was created by Elzie Segar. In those days cartoonists were important celebrities. The public followed the exploits of the cartoon characters ardently and the cartoonists became millionaires. Segar hung around with the likes of gary Cooper and other actors there in Hollywood. Bud was a poor littl;e newsboy who sold him a paper every day. Segar never noticed him until one day when Bud's sister, who somehow knew Segar, introduced her little brother who liked to draw. Segar took him on as a studio helper who's many jobs included chauffering Segar's wife to the clothing shops. Bud swept up around the place and very slowly gravitated into doing a little work on the strips under the watchful eye of the maestro. Segar taught Bud how to draw Popeye and the other inhabitants of Thimble Theater. Bud never drew any other way. He drew Popeye his whole life. he quit high school because segar kept him up so late at night that it was affecting his school life and since he was earning far more than his teachers, he decided to just drop out. while he was in school though, he met his future wife Nadia. At first Bud had a rival for her affections and he got revenge by naming the "jeep" character in Popeye "Eugene" after him thereby engendering mirthful ribbing at school for the victim because the kids all knew what was going on. What happened was that when Segar died, Bud finished up the strips that were undone and bundled them off to King Features in New York. The syndicate didn't even know that Segar had an assistant.....the strips just kept coming in. Finally they summoned Bud to New York and made a deal with him. Bud took the comic books which had now come into being (they weren't around when Segar was alive) and other people did the daily strips. Bud didn't want the dailies because King wanted artist/writer teams on them and Bud wanted to write them himself. For a brief and unsuccessful period, even Al Capp tried writing some....things about white slavery etc......didn't go over big with the syndicate. Later on, along with his comic book chores, Bud was appointed head of the comic-art department at King Features. He came to live in Westport....and at one period of time, I lived right next door to him. I would go over on week-ends and sit side by side with him at drawing boards on his screened porch in the summer. At first, I was only allowed to blacken in Olive Oyl's skirt which was a formidible job because my boss was a stickler for dense solid ultra-black blacks. So...the skirt would get several coats of ink. Later on, he let me create incidental characters. One of bud's hobbies was making "doll" houses. But...they weren't the ordinary kind. He made Popeye's house with incredible attention to detail. All the shingles were carefully set in and the picket fence and porch with a rolled up newspaper on it ....AND...it had a "mother-in-law- room" up on the top floor. This room had no door or windows. Later on he made a wonderful miniature art museum. The pictures in it were all 1"X1" and he framed each one himself. The art was contributed by artists that Nadia wrote to and asked for a contribution. He had a Dali and a Federico Fellini (an amateur cartoonist)....and an Enos....among others......he must have had a hundred or so from famous painters, illustrators and cartoonists. I can't even assess how much he taught me....he taught me everything. He....and Pete Wells who was the co-director of the Cartoon Course. Pete came from the Katzenjammer Kids. Pete was an old fashioned conservative Yaley who always said that a cartoonist was an illustrator who could write and if he was presented with a wonderful illustration to scrutinize....he would casually say..."What's the caption?" Pete taught me how to draw lots of action and expression and how to letter in "OOPS!" if I made an ink smudge. He hated "modern art" and was never thrilled with my little forays into experimentation. He was strictly "old time" and that was really brought home to me about 25 years later when Westport decided to have a little reunion of sorts for all the Famous Artists instructors. It was a gigantic art show of everyone's current work. I hadn't seen these guys for 25 years. I was a well established illustrator and the pieces I put in the show were a bit experimental and abstract and off-beat. I walked into the show and IMMEDIATELY Pete spotted me and ran up breathlessly.....he didn't say hello.....he didn't say "Gosh it's been a long time".....no.....he blurted out: "Quick Randy....look around this partition....somebody put up some really horrible work...and they put your name on it!"

Where's W.C. Fields when you need him?

2007-03-10T21:15:25+00:00

White Supremacy

2007-03-06T22:42:48+00:00

Here's a job I just did about the prevalence of "white supremacy" in this country for the great art director Patrick JB Flynn.

Appreciation of the dance

2007-03-05T19:43:02+00:00

I'm going to keep doing these until I get it right.

The Lumpen Ride Again

2007-03-04T23:37:42+00:00

Here's another in my Lumpen suite which are some experiments in line and limited color.

Another One

2007-02-24T22:56:58+00:00

Another in my "Lumpen" series.

VARIOUS LUMPEN

2007-02-22T23:40:26+00:00

Some experiments with line and minimal color.

MY LIFE ON THE SLANTED BOARD: Chapter 18 "Bulldog Bennet"

2007-02-18T21:53:18+00:00

My first art assignment...my first commission (can it be a commission if you don't get paid for it?)...was for my 7th grade teacher (alas I've forgotten her name). She was a dear sweet English teacher and she was my "home room" teacher. Realizing how much I loved art, she assigned me to make a mural covering the whole back wall of the room. There were blackboards there and since we only used the ones in the front of the room, she thought it would be nice if I was to put a nice big colorful picture there. Later on my career as a muralist continued when my barber allowed me to decorate his barbershop walls with a large india ink mural. All I can remember was that it had a lot of people in it. But I remember the 7th grade mural better. With lots of various colored chalks, I proceeded to create a jungle scene. I must say that I spent many enjoyable hours dilineating the complex vine structure that stretched across the back of our room. Monkeys, parrots and snakes intertwined amongst the bright ferns and leaves, trees and vines. The teacher watched me...the class watched me. I think the teacher, who loved me, enjoyed watching my happy self creating away while the other students carried on the class activity. It was a very enjoyable experience except for the day that the teacher from across the hall appeared at the doorway glowering at me. She was my history and geography teacher....they called it "social studies". Her name was Bulldog Bennet......it arouses my ire just to type those words...Bulldog Bennet. She was infamous in New Bedford. Every school kid in town, whether he went to the Parker St School or not, knew of Bulldog Bennet. She was a notorious local character like "5-cent Mary" the waterfront whore who I propelled to fame later in life by naming my Playboy comic strip after her. But...I digress.....Bulldog Bennet was about 4'10" tall and almost as wide. She had no neck. She piled her grey hair up on her head and back into a bun. She had slanted beady eyes that were far apart and a pug pig nose. Her face was that of a bulldog. She had an annoying habit of sucking in a snort every now and then through her pug nose.....loudly. Well....she stood there in the doorway and said to my home-room teacher (as if I wasn't even there)..."If he only put as much effort into his schoolwork as he does this art work maybe he'd amount to something!" My beloved patron met this remark with quiet indifference. She didn't like Miss Bennet any more than anyone else did. Almost every one of my fellow students entered Bulldog Bennet's class literally shaking in his shoes. She barked out commands and instructed us not only in History and Geography but in all manner of life style etiquette. She was a rabid hawkish right-wing Republican and let us know about it at every turn. In an attempt to curry some little bit of favor to quell my terror of her, I joined her "Stargazers" group which would meet after school hours and...well....star gaze. It didn't do any good. I remained on her hit list. I got terrible grades of course.....I couldn't do anything in that class for fear of saying the wrong thing....or mispronouncing something. She would call you names and ridicule you in front of the class. She seemed to enjoy seeing our pale blood drained faces. She was constantly telling us how well she had done when she was in school and how she wept for days one time because she got an A instead of an A+. I came home with terrible report cards from her class but my saving grace was that my father developed a nice healthy disrespect for her due to the fact that he was a very liberal Socialist and part-time Communist and he knew well of her politics.....I made sure of that. How I made it through the 7th and 8th grade with Bulldog Bennet, I still can't fathom.....but I survived. And what became of the wretch? Much later on in life my father after retiring, did a lot of charity work...driving people to Boston to get their citizenship papers and driving for the Red Cross and helping out at homes for the elderly and infirm where he would take them out for rides. It was at this latter activity that he encountered Bulldog Bennet. She was very old and withered....a mere shell of her former horrible self. She was very senile and barely coherent and he told me that all she ever wanted was ice cream. So....he would stop the van and often go and buy her an ice cream cone. She would be delighted he said and she would chortle and giggle to herself......sitting in the back of the van oblivious to the outer world....muttering.....ICE CREAM.......ice cream!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

2007-02-10T19:21:26+00:00

Happy birthday to George and Abraham and Thomas edison and.........my li'l wifey.

The Obligatory Flea

2007-02-08T23:13:05+00:00

Every print maker at some point must make a flea.....it's the law.....in Connecticut anyway. I just found this print I made a few years ago. The original is huge but i scanned this from a small reproduction of it that was used as a promotion piece one time. My dog hates this picture.

ZINA

2007-02-06T16:36:25+00:00

I just thought it was time for somebody to make a picture of Zina.