My fellow Cartoonists With Attitude Matt Bors and Jen Sorensen will be at Powell’s Bookstore on Burnside this Friday at 7:30pm. Here’s how Matt describes it:
Jen Sorensen and I will present a live slide show and reading of our comics and Jen will be signing copies of her new collection of cartoons, “SlowPoke: One Nation, Oh My God.”
We’ll be doing some live drawing as well, showing folks how we cartoonize McCain’s numerous cheeks and Obama’s massive smile.
Found via the Daily Cartoonist, this clip of cartoonist Steve Brodner shows how wonderful traditional media can be. The watercolors are fascinating to watch. I couldn’t hear the audio, because my work station doesn’t have speakers. I imagine it’s insightful and witty. What else would it be?
The NY Times Arts & Leisure section has a wonderful profile of Al Jaffee, the cartoonist behind MAD Magazine’s long-running “fold-in” gag and “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” series.
Among the many great MAD cartoonists, the most influential for me as a young, budding toonster were Sergio Aragones, Mort Drucker, George Woodbridge, and Jaffee. Drucker had spot-on caricatures, and Woodbridge had such a biting style. But Jaffee and Aragones drew what I considered proper “cartoons” by proper “cartoonists”: they wrote and drew their own stuff in a less realistic, more funny style. And they hit on a wide variety of subjects, from current events, politics, fashion and pop culture, to more sinister aspects of modern American society. I love this fold-out as described in the NY Times profile:
July 1968: “What is the one thing most school dropouts are sure to become?” A picture of teenagers at an employment center folds into a piece of artillery with a kid stuffed in it, and the answer: “Cannon fodder.”
Jesus, that’s brilliant. Bitter, angry, caustic - yet funny. It’s something I aspire to with every In Contempt strip I draw. Glad to see Jaffee continues to put out his stuff, despite cancer and advanced age, with a technique I am still too timid to take up: water color and gouache. Photoshop has made things too damn easy.
UPDATE: Point of order, my wife points out that in the first cartoon Popeye does not, in fact, choke on the spinach. He just eats it and dies. STILL, I say, it’s funny that two different cartoonists used Popeye dying from spinach as a joke.
There’s an entire Women’s Studies thesis waiting to be written about the Foobs today. Elizabeth’s abject terror and panic that Anthony will think she’s a two-timing ne’er-do-well would be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic and queasy-making. The fact that Anthony isn’t being a total douche for once (“Gosh, sorry you’re terrified about being caught alone with a man after sundown … I didn’t realize that this phone could call the 19th century”) just makes it ickier. Presumably Liz will agree to Anthony’s inevitable proposal to “make it up for him,” setting a firm foundation for a future life of quiet desperation and self-loathing.
For the unindoctrinated, “Foobs” are the characters in For Better or For Worse.
Shaenon Garrity wrote the definitive case against Anthony a couple months ago.
