posted: May 15, 2013

In 1986 I was broke. Mark Newgarden hired me to come up with ideas for Garbage Pail Kids at fifty bucks a pop. I don't remember how many fronts I contributed but I did a lot of gags for the backs with Mark. For fifty bucks a day Mark would have me come out to Topps in Brooklyn to sit with him and crack jokes. Some would become gags for the backs of the cards/stickers but mostly I think Mark was lonely out there at Topps all by himself and would invite friends on the pretext of working just so he'd have some companionship. It's a lonely life being a Topps employee as Mark was. Truth be told my wife (then girlfriend), Aviva, came up with the idea for Haley's Vomit but the fifty bucks went towards my rent.* What a gal! The painting itself is by Tom Bunk.
*My rent at the time was either $125 or $150 a month. I can't remember which. 50 bucks a throw went a long way.

These are photocopies of drawings by Howard Cruse of some of the back of the card gags we came up with. The idea was to come up with funny stuff featuring the characters on the fronts. One of the many things I learned while sitting at the feet of Newgarden back then was to never hold back an idea no matter how stupid you might think it is. It may actually be good or at worst it might spark a good joke.

 One of the perks of working there----Mark knew that when I was in third grade I was nuts for the painted Batman cards of the 1960s. I kept them in a shoe box which I kept with me pretty much all of the time. Topps re-released the sets in conjuction with the Tim Burton movie in the 80s. When I showed up for work one day, Mark surprized with two, large uncut sheets of the reprinted cards. They're beautiful and they've been framed and hanging on walls in our apartment ever since.

AMAZON: Garbage Pail Kids [Hardcover]: Garbage Pail Kids—a series of collectible stickers produced by Topps in the 1980s—combined spectacular artwork and over-the-top satire. The result was an inspired collaboration between avant-garde cartoonists and humorists including Art Spiegelman, Mark Newgarden, John Pound, Tom Bunk, and Jay Lynch. A new generation of fans continues to embrace this pop-culture phenomenon as Garbage Pail Kids stickers are still being published. Now, for the first time, all 206 rare and hard-to-find images from Series 1 through 5 are collected in an innovative package, along with a special set of four limited-edition, previously unreleased bonus stickers. This exciting follow up to Wacky Packages is guaranteed to appeal to die-hard collectors as well as a new generation of fans.

posted: May 13, 2013

These arrived in today's mail. I took Robert Neubecker up on his offer to swap a books and prints for school auctions. I'm sure these will do quite well for my daughters (plural) school in 2014. I can only hope mine do as well for his. Anyway, if you haven't done it, and your kids schools have auction fundraisers, Robert has hit on a great idea. Take advantage.
Robert's original post: Prints for Charity

posted: May 7, 2013

ATTENTION ILLUSTRATORS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS:

Jesse Reyes and Danny Hellman are organizing a Friends of Bob art auction to raise a little cash to help put a dent in Bob Newman's massive medical bills. We'd love to have you involved!

If you're interested in contributing one or two pieces of illustration art or photography (either original art or ARCHIVAL QUALITY art/photo prints) to the auction, please shoot a quick email to both of us: hellman@dannyhellman.com & jessereyes@mac.com

We haven't nailed down the venue yet, but Jesse is in touch with the SPD. SPD have hosted similar benefit auctions in the past, so hopefully that's where the Friends of Bob auction will happen. Once we know where and when we're doing the event, we'll email you with dates & details.

Any questions/suggestions? Please let us hear 'em!

Here's Christine Curry's account of what has happened so far:

"On Tuesday, March 19th, Bob was in Ft. Myers, Florida visiting his mother with our 9 year old daughter, Ivy. He was at the pool with her, and went to retrieve her goggles. He had a seizure, collapsed by the pool, and suffered severe head trauma. An ambulance was called immediately. He managed to call me from the ambulance to say he was going with Ivy to the hospital because he bumped his head, and that he would call when he got home to let us know he was okay. He was admitted to Lee Memorial hospital’s ICU unit. A bit later, I received a call from his mother from the hospital for insurance information and she told me the situation was worse—his brain was hemorrhaging, and he fell into a coma. Bob was in critical condition for several days, and had to be put on a respirator. His condition finally stabilized, and there started to be small signs of movement and response. In the meantime, much time and energy was spent trying to seek out potential facilities in or near New York City that would take a coma victim who was relying on a respirator. With the guidance and support of many parents at the Nightingale Bamford School, where Lillian and Ivy are students, and after major wrangling with insurance companies, we were able to secure a bed at Weill Cornell Presbytarian Hospital in their Neuro ICU. Bob was transported from Ft. Myers Hospital the morning of April 12th and flown to NYC in an air ambulance. He arrived around 4pm, a bit worse for the wear (the weather was awful, and the flight rough) but lucid and able to respond with his eyes and move his arms slightly. He was finally taken off the respirator, which enabled us to move him to an acute neuro-rehab facility at NYU. Bob is working hard to bring himself back to his strong self and will have to work on this for several months. His speech is improving and he is receiving a lot of physical therapy. In the meantime, in the course of our everyday lives, he is very missed by all of us. Our family appreciates the outpouring of your sentiments and encouraging words. It has been a great comfort to know that so many people love him."

A place to donate cash to help defray the cost of Bob's medical care.
Friends of Bob Newman

update

posted: April 22, 2013

The Art of Harvey Kurtzman

Featuring interviews with Al Jaffee and Robert Grossman
Music by Nik Turner’s Fantastic All Stars
Cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) founded the satirical MAD magazine in 1952 and forever altered the way young readers experienced the media and consumer culture around them.  As the late film critic Roger Ebert explained, “I learned to be a movie critic by reading MAD magazine.  I learned a lot of other things from the magazine too, including a whole new slant on society. MAD’s parodies made me aware of the machine inside the skin–of the way a movie might look original on the outside, while inside it was just recycling the same dumb old formulas.  I did not read the magazine, I plundered it for clues to the universe.”

After MAD, Kurtzman worked with a team of artists including Al Jaffee, Jack Davis and Will Elder on a series of short-lived but influential publications, including Trump, Humbug and Help! At Help!, a fortuitous nexus of nascent sketch comedy and underground “comix,” Kurtzman worked with then unknowns Woody Allen, Gloria Steinem and R. Crumb, among many others. Terry Gilliam, who met John Cleese while working there, considered Kurtzman “one of the godparents of Monty Python.”

The Society of Illustrators in NYC is hosting a retrospective exhibition on Harvey Kurtzman through May 11, 2013:
http://www.societyillustrators.org/The-Museum/2013/Harvey-Kurtzman/The-Art-of-Harvey-Kurtzman.aspx

Original post at Imperium