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Monty Python Comes to Town

I grew up admiring my buddy, Randy Eno’s work in The National Lampoon when I was in high school and college. Here’s another Randy flashback. See Randy’s editorial cartoon archive here.  –Daryl


One of the really big features I did for The National Lampoon was the spoof on the Monty Python television show. It was about an 8 page spread with lots of funny bits illustrated by me imitating the style of the Python animator Terry Gilliam, the only American in the troupe. To hold the 6 or 8 pages of the spread together, I thought of the idea of a long python snake running along the bottom third of the pages continuing on through the whole feature. In keeping with the idea of imitating Gilliam’s style, I decided to do the snake with an airbrush. The only problem was that I had never used an airbrush before and didn’t have one. So, I borrowed the tool from an illustrator friend who loaned me an old one she had. As I proceeded through the long rendition of the python, the faulty, old airbrush would occasionally spit and sputter creating little blobs in my otherwise nice clean “Gilliam-like” smooth airbrush style. So, everywhere a little blob or spot appeared I’d paint in a bush or shrub to cover the mistake. Needless to say, there were a lot of little bushes and shrubs in my picture.

The rest of the pages were decorated with merciless crtiques of Gilliam’s cut-and -paste, crude, rough style. I portrayed the Queen employing Scotch taped photos of her along with fatuous British-types in an exaggerated, blotchy, messy parody of his hurried, short-hand animation style. I remember putting in the line “when in doubt, draw the queen”.

It came to pass, a short time after this parody was published that Mike Gross, the art director, left the Lampoon to start his own graphic design studio. One of the projects he tackled was a book on the Python folks. When that project was over, the Pythons had come to New York and were doing a stage show at Town Hall. Gilliam, who was always absent from the TV version of the show because he had all he could do with creating the visual parodies that peppered the show, was for the first time performing along with his colleagues in the sketches that TV viewers were familiar with.

Mike decided to have a party to celebrate the completion of the book plus their show in New York. The party was held in a loft; hotdogs, were supplied by a Sabrett wagon, complete with umbrella, parked in a corner of the loft. Besides the Python people, the guests included Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Peter Boyle and others.

I had terrors of running into Terry Gilliam, who I had made so much fun of in the Lampoon spread that I decided that I would avoid him at all costs. It wasn’t to be, however, because I was standing right in front of the elevator when it decided to disgorge, along with others, Harvey Kurtzman with Gilliam in tow. I tried to hide but Kurtzman, who knew me (I don’t remember how he knew me) blurted out, “Randy, I want you to meet Terry Gilliam.” I was dead.

Gilliam shook my hand and said, “Hey, man, I love that parody you did on me in the Lampoon!” While my wife discussed acting with Belushi, I discussed cartooning with Gilliam. At one point he asked if I had kids. I told him I had two boys. He then invited my wife and I and the boys to come to see the Python show at the Town Hall. He asked me to see him after the show and he’d take us all back stage to show us all the Python gear.

A million years later when Terry had become the famous director of Fisher King, Time Bandits and my all-time favorite, Brazil, an actor friend of ours was playing one of the doctors in Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. I asked my friend to say hello to Terry for me the next time he was on the set with him. Later on, I ran into this actor and asked if he had done so. He said, “Randy, I am VERY impressed. I told Terry you said hello and he said that you were his favorite cartoonist!”

Randy Enos

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Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Riding the Rails

The Pyramid of Success

The Day I Chased the Bus

The Other Ol’ Blue Eyes

8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt

Rembrandt of the Skies

The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part One”

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part Two”

Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School

Randy Remembers Tomi Ungerer

Randy’s Overnight Parade

The Bullpen

Famous Artists Schools

Dik Browne: Hot Golfer

Randy and the National Lampoon

Randy’s Only Great Idea

A Brief Visit to Outer Space

Enos, Love and Westport

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

 

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Our Proud Olympic Swimmers

I remember the jocks back in high school were a bunch of arrogant jerks, so the behavior of the American Olympic swimmers is no surprise to me. No one should look to self-entitled athletes as representative of their countries, unless we look to them as representative of the biggest jerks in their countries.

The epidemic of bad behavior among athletes is on ugly display in sex scandals at colleges across the USA, which led yesterday to the interesting resignation of Ken Starr, the former president of Baylor University where he oversaw a coverup of Baylor’s football players’ sexual assaults. Remember Ken Starr? He was the sanctimonious independent prosecutor in charge of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” to bring down Bill Clinton in the 1990’s. What goes around comes around, huh? Irony is a bitch.

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Ryan Lochte, Jimmy Feigen, Gunnar Bentz, Jack Conger and a security guard. (Notice how the swimmers naturally seek out the water.)

My cartoon is based on early news reports that described the drunken athletes breaking a door at a gas station where they stopped to go to the bathroom. More recent reports describe the swimmers peeing on the gas station building because it had no bathroom, with Lochte tearing a framed advertisement off of the building’s wall rather than breaking a door. I suppose my cartoon could be criticized as “inaccurate” but I still think it captures the gist of the event.

This swimmers scandal has stolen the oxygen from the rest of the Olympics and it has given American cartoonists a welcome respite from our toxic presidential campaign. Here are a couple of my favorite swimmer-jerk cartoons:

This one is by Sean Delonas, the long-time cartoonist for The New York Post who has started up drawing again for Cagle Cartoons. The chickens make me laugh.

 

This Steve Sack “dope” cartoon sums it all up.

 

Sometime I think that, if not for Pinocchio, there would only be half as many editorial cartoons. This one is by Dave Granlund.

Watch me draw my cartoon in real time on YouTube below!

 

Now, watch me color the cartoon on Photoshop!

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The Zika Mosquito!

This is the Zika mosquito hitch-hiking from place to place.

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Here he is in black and white. I usually do a special version for grayscale, rather than just gray scaling the color art.

In the video below you can see me draw this bad boy. I thought long and hard about whether to put a “Zika” label on the mosquito, and I made the manly decision to forego the label.

In the video below you can see me coloring the mosquito in Photoshop. It should open 14:40 into the video, that’s no mistake, it just takes out the time. I didn’t edit this one!

3/21/16 update: Here’s my mosquito as it appeared today in the Ouest France Newspaper, France’s highest circulation newspaper. Thanks to my buddy Kianoush Ramezani and his united sketches.org foundation that organizes this stuff. I’m impressed that they put my photo and bio alongside the cartoon.

FranceNewspaperClipping

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Brazilian Cartoonist on Obama’s Visit

President Obama and his family touched down Saturday in Brazil as part of a five-day South American trip intended to focus on jobs. Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff, like most international cartoonists, thinks Obama is more interested in oil than anything else.  Greedy, oil-thirsty, domineering American presidents are an enduring, international theme.  Sometimes it is good to be reminded of the one-dimensional way the world sees us.

The caption at the top of the cartoon translates to: “Obama reaches Rio…”

Obama (dressed as a conquistador) is asking the Brazilian beach-goer, “Where is the pre-salt?”  (The pre-salt layer, according to Wikipedia, is an oil-rich geological formation on the continental shelves off the coast of Africa and Brazil.)

Here are some more cartoons by Latuff about Obama’s trip to Brazil: