Readers love celebrity obituary cartoons, and until now I’ve waited for the celebrity to die before I drew an obit cartoon. Bill Cosby seemed like the perfect opportunity to make an exception to that rule.
Drawing celebrities is easier now than in the old days. I used to struggle to build a “morgue” of photos of everyone I might have to draw on short notice. I had a lot of file drawers dedicated to scraps of paper with little photos of everyone who might find their way into a cartoon. Those days are over, now every cartoonists simply goes to Google, does an image search and a page full of wonderful photo scrap comes up. Easy research!
In fact, since everyone does the same research now, I’ve noticed how common it is for caricatures to resemble one another. Here’s a recent Bill Cosby cartoon by my buddy, Taylor Jones.
With a Google Images search it usually turns out that one photo is better than all the others – and cartoonists often pick out the same one to work from. Here’s a link to the Cosby photo from the Google Images search.
Taylor’s cartoon is better than mine; Taylor wins. But I have the satisfaction of making Cosby go to Hell.
