Newsletter – Page 16 – DarylCagle.com

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Come take a look –it brings back memories!

Tags bar, darts, Duck, Grasshopper, Randall Enos, salt

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My Cartoon Decade With Microsoft

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 31, 2019

Ten years seems to fly by!

I notice that nbcnews.com still has my “decade in review” posted –from back in 2009, with 45 of my cartoons telling the story of the decade from 2000 through 2009 as seen from my old msnbc.com perch.

I’ll do another “decade in review” in three or four months, covering 2010 through 2019. Time flies!

Tags 2000, Daryl Cagle, decade, editorial cartoons, msnbc.com, NBCNews.com, slate.com

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A Day With Jonathan Winters and Carol Burnett

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 31, 2019

This is by my cartoonist buddy Randy Enos!

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

Back when I worked at The Famous Artists Schools, a man came to the school looking for a cartoonist who could draw quick stuff on a large pad of paper, y’know, like a chalk-talk kind of thing. I was recommended to him and I took the job.

It involved me going to New York to participate in the shooting of a pilot for a game show. I’ve forgotten what they called the show. They were going to have celebrity guests on this show and an artist who would draw a few lines on a giant pad and stop mid-stream. If the celebrities couldn’t guess what the artist was drawing, he would add a few more lines until someone could finally guess what the image was.

When I arrived at the room in New York where the pilot was being shot, I was introduced to the two celebrities who were going to participate. They were Jonathan Winters and Carol Burnett. They had a large pad of paper for me to work on and the appropriate crayons or whatever I was to use to draw my images.

I started drawing things like a curved line, then I added a circle to the mix and so on and so forth bouncing around on the big sketch adding little details and trying to keep it mysterious and unpredictable as the two celebrity guests threw out guesses as to what I was drawing. It was lots of fun.

We broke for lunch and they brought some food in. I got a chance to talk to Jonathan and Carol as we ate. They were both very nice and, as I’ve found out through my life when I’ve met people in the humor racket like comedians, comic actors, cartoonists or humor writers, they were serious-minded people. They asked about my life and what I did (which wasn’t much at that point) and they told me stuff about their lives. They both had an interest in drawing. Carol was actually taking The Famous Artists Schools illustration course. Jonathan told me that he had almost pursued a career in art instead of show business. He had an interest in becoming a cartoonist when he was young but finally realized that his talent was limited and that he would probably, as he put it, never be better than just an art department guy so when an acting opportunity came, off he went into acting. Carol was pursuing her art as just a sideline hobby.

I drew some cartoons for them and they drew some for me. Carol drew an ordinary fashion-drawing of a girl in a dress. Jonathan drew a couple of World War 2 soldiers which looked just like Mauldin’s Willie & Joe. They were both pretty good drawings. Winters was obviously a BIG fan of Bill Mauldin.

Unfortunately, down through the decades, I’ve lost both of those drawings so I can’t show them here. I’m very bad at keeping stuff like that. I think the drawings were both so derivative of other artists that I didn’t place much stock in them. Now, I realize that drawings by two famous people like that have a certain unique value.

Anyway, it was a very pleasant day with two charming comedians.

Of course the show we were testing never saw the light of day.

Somewhere those two drawings by Burnett and Winters are hiding away there amidst all those socks I’ve lost. Maybe I’ll find them someday.

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Illustrating the Sea

Why I Started Drawing

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Why I Started Drawing

Tags Bill Mauldin, Carol Burnett, Famous Artists School, game show, Jonathan Winters, television

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Illustrating the Sea

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 27, 2019

By my seafaring, whale-loving, cartoonist buddy Randy Enos!

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

At the opening, Jack Davis’ pirate (which he had done for me, just for the show) sold for $5,000 right away. I cinched the sale by telling the buyer what an icon Davis was and his historic association with Mad Magazine and how he had influenced a whole generation of artists stylistically.

My relationship with Mystic Seaport in Connecticut goes back quite a few years. I started visiting there because in 1941, the last wooden whaleship in the United States went to live there because the millionaire, Colonel Green, who had it in his possession didn’t leave enough money when he died to take care of it. A group of artists got together to save the ship and eventually convinced Mystic to take it just before war broke out with Japan when they bombed Pearl Harbor. It is named the Charles W. Morgan and it was born a hundred years before me in my hometown. My interest in studying whaling history took me to Mystic very frequently to walk the decks of the Morgan. In its 80 years on the sea, there are three men named Enos on the crew lists.

On the Mystic Seaport wharf there is a blacksmith’s shop. That shop was brought there from New Bedford, my home town and was the shop of John D. Driggs. I own two harpoons that he made and I have taken them to Mystic to show the blacksmiths that work there at the shop because they have never seen actual Driggs harpoons. In the whaling days, the blacksmiths signed the harpoon heads along with markings which show the boat the harpoon was assigned to and the ship it was on.

As time went on I ended up doing some posters for events there at the seaport and they also carried giclées of a few of my whaling pictures. Six necktie designs were made from the elements of a border on one of my pictures and they continue to be sold at their shop. One day while I was there they had a new exhibit opening in their nice little art gallery. It was all the same old stuff, sailboats in watercolor, sailboats in oil, sailboats, sailboats and sailboats. I said to the director of the seaport, who I had gotten to know pretty well, “Y’know, I know a bunch of famous illustrators and cartoonists that I bet could make pictures of the sea that would be much more interesting than this stuff!” Then he asked me if I would curate a show of these illustrators and cartoonists for the gallery. I had never done anything like that before. I started to regret I had said anything but he persisted so I said that I’d try to see what kind of response I’d get from my artist friends. So, I started e-mailing everybody I could think of, concentrating on the most famous guys in the business. It pays to have been in the work as long as I had because I knew all the famous guys and they liked me. I got a very enthusiastic response. I asked if they would put as many pictures as they’d like in my show. The only requirement would be that the pictures would be about the sea in some form or other. Mystic paid for shipping and framing. Everything would be for sale and Mystic would take a modest percentage from the sales.

And so, “Illustrating The Sea” was born. Mystic lined up some TV and radio interviews with me to promote the show and they also featured some pictures from the exhibit at their annual booth at the Javit’s Center where I was there to answer questions and plug the event.

The hump I had to get over was that almost all of these artists would be unknown to the average person and the prices on the art would be a little more than they were used to. I had to inform the potential buyers of the reputations and the place each of the artists held as actual historic entities in the world of American illustration and cartooning.

Click on the image to read more about Randy and his whaling art.

Peter deSeve, a renowned New Yorker artist and children’s book illustrator and character designer for numerous famous animated films and a former student of mine (he must have been impressed by me in art school because he went out and married a woman named Randall!), went on NBC’s Today Show with me to plug the exhibit.

I had work from 42 artists in the show. Here are just a few of the names you might know… Bernie Fuchs, Gary Baseman, R. O. Blechman, Lou Brooks, Seymour Chwast, Guy Billout, Jack Davis, Brad Holland, Gary Kelley, Jack Unruh, and Bonnie Timmons. An unlikely group to be illustrating the sea, eh? Well, they did it. Many of them gave me 2, 3 or 4 pictures or more. It was the most unusual show that the Mystic Seaport gallery EVER had!

At the opening, Jack Davis’ pirate (which he had done for me just for the show) sold for $5,000 right away. I cinched the sale by telling the buyer what an icon Davis was and his historic association with Mad Magazine and how he had influenced a whole generation of artists stylistically. A little later the same buyer bought Wendell Minor’s book cover “Revenge of the Whale” for another $5,000. Another $5,000 went for my friend Gene Hoffman’s sculpture “Killer Whale”. I was afraid the high prices that some of the artists put on their work would scare off buyers but then Kinuko Craft’s book jacket painting of “Jane and the Prisoner of Woolhouse” sold for $20,000. I sold two or three pictures and so did many of the other artists so it was a pretty successful show.

The artists that lived in the region came and many stayed over in Mystic courtesy of the Seaport. The next morning, I took everybody on a tour of the Morgan and explained how all the equipment on board functioned and I told of how the whale was processed on the ship in order to extract the valuable whale oil. I was told later by the head of the Seaport that one of their regular ship guides had been standing off to the side listening to me and said, “Who is this guy and how does he know so much about whaling?”

We had a lovely little catalog printed for the show and here is the last paragraph of my introduction on the first page:

“The men and women represented here do more than just replicate the obvious surface vision of the sea, they plumb its depths to reveal the energy and expression, meaning and story that only an illustrator can.”

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Bob Englehart is a freelance cartoonist and his cartoons are syndicated by Cagle Cartoons.

Tags and Bonnie Timmons, Bernie Fuchs, Brad Holland, Charles W. Morgan, Colonel Green, connecticut, Gary Baseman, Gary Kelley, Gene Hoffman's, Guy Billout, Jack Davis, Jack Unruh, John D. Driggs, Lou Brooks, Mystic Seaport, Peter deSeve, R. O. Blechman, Seymour Chwast

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Be True To Your (Art) School

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 26, 2019

Our CagleCartoonist, Bob Englehart writes more about his cool career. Support Bob on Patreon, See Bob’s Cartoon Archive, E-mail Bob

I visited my alma mater last week in Chicago, the American Academy of Art. Man, has it changed. When I went there from 1964 to 1966, it was a small commercial art school dedicated to the practical side of art (that is, how to make money). It offered a two or three year course and a frame-able certificate upon completion. It was on the corner of Wabash and Adams streets in the Loop. The first year was about teaching fundamentals and the second and third year was about specialties: illustration, oil painting, watercolor, layout, design and so on and was geared to industry demand for artists. It had no cartoon course, so in the middle of my second year when I decided I wanted to become a cartoonist, my fundamentals teacher, Mr. Staake, designed a course for me. He had me drawing greeting cards and anything he could think of that might sharpen my skills as a budding cartoonist. One of my assignments was to draw a political cartoon. I drew it in the style of Bill Mauldin who was my favorite political cartoonist at the time.

The greeting card assignment led to work as a freelance greeting card cartoonist that paid for my first house and my second one, too. The political cartoon became a sample I used to get a job in the art department of The Chicago Herald American. It also inspired me to draw my first political cartoon for the paper shortly after it changed its name to Chicago Today.

The story: a KKK cell was discovered in the Chicago Police Department. The art director of the paper had given me permission to publish an occasional political cartoon on Mondays when the regular political cartoonists, Vaughn Shoemaker and Wayne Stayskal were off. I was walking across the Michigan Avenue Bridge when a gust of wind blew a woman’s skirt and the idea popped in to my brain.

I’m happy to say the academy still delivers a practical education in art. I won’t tell you what the tuition was back in 1964 because it would break your heart. Today, the tuition is comparable to a four-year private college, which is what most art schools are. The academy is now on Michigan Ave. It has student housing and offers nine bachelors of fine arts degrees in traditional areas of art such as painting and drawing but also in 3-D modeling, digital illustration, art direction and more.

A number of famous and successful alumni are making a nice living in comic books, posters, painting, sculpture, design, advertising and graphic arts but the most famous is Kanye West. I talked to Kanye’s teacher and he said Kanye was a talented artist. The teacher told him he could have a fine career as an artist, but Kanye said he had this music thing he wanted to try.

Read Bob’s other posts:

My One-Day Career as a Courtroom Artist

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

The Birth of a Political Cartoonist

Please support us to keep Cagle.com free and keep the endangered editorial cartoons coming! Visit Cagle.com/Heroes!

We need your support!

Tags American Academy of Art, Bob Englehart, Chicago Today, design, illustration, Kanye West, layout, Mauldin, oil painting, The Chicago Herald American, Wabash and Adams streets in the Loop, watercolor

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I’m Emerging From My Hermit Lair to Give a Lecture!

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 21, 2019

It is rare that I come out of hiding to give a talk, but I will do that on Monday September 23rd at Art Center College in Pasadena. I’ll be speaking at Michael Dooley’s comics history class; I’ll show lots of my work and explain how everything I do works. Here’s the announcement – it is open to the public and free.

I met Michael at our local National Cartoonists Society Los Angeles Chapter where I heard about his impressive class at Art Center; the class is titled, “Design History of Comics and Animation”. Michael brings in lots in interesting guest speakers, who he announces on his Facebook page. I’m going to start going to these, they look great.

I’ll talk about my varied career, as an illustrator in New York, as a toy inventor, as a political cartoonist, and now running a little syndicate. I’ll cover the world scene for editorial cartoons (internationally our art form is much more highly regarded than it is here). And we’ll have lots of time for questions – Michael wants to talk about the future of editorial cartooning and how the business works. OK.

I guessing the crowd will be small, so if you can make it to Pasadena, don’t hesitate to come and ask lots of questions! Its FREE and open to the public!

Read more old stuff about my career as a cartoonist on DarylCagle.com:

When I was President, PART THREE of three

When I was President, PART TWO of three

When I was President, PART ONE of three

Was I Sunk by Submarines?

Baptists, Gay Marriage, Hawaii, Mazie Hirono, Bert and Ernie

Genies Turned me into a Political Cartoonist

Muppet Mob Scene

CagleCartoonists in France

Amazing

TRUE Color

TRUE Stupid Stuff 2

TRUE Stupid Stuff

TRUE Crazy Stuff 4

TRUE Crazy Stuff 3

TRUE Crazy Stuff 2

TRUE Crazy Stuff

TRUE Devils, Angels and YUCK

TRUE Kids 3

TRUE Kids 2

TRUE Kids

TRUE Health Statistics 3

TRUE Health Statistics 2

TRUE Health Statistics 1

TRUE Women’s Body Images

Garage 7: TV Toons

Garage 6

Garage 5

Daryl’s Garage Encore! (Part 4)

Still More Daryl’s Garage! (Part 3)

More Garage Art (Part 2)

Garage Oldies (Part 1)

29 Year Old Oddity

Daryl in Belgium

Cagle in Bulgaria

CagleCartoonists Meet in France

Cartooning for the Troops in Bahrain

RoachMan

Answering a College Student’s Questions about Cartoons

Punk Rock Opera

Tags Art Center College od Design, class, Daryl Cagle, Design History of Comics and Animation, lecture, Michael Dooley, toy inventing

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Why I Started Drawing

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 19, 2019

Learn why my cartoonist buddy Randy Enos started drawing!

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

It all started with the son of my father’s best friend, Jose. The kid’s name was Jerry and he was about my age. I must have been 8 or 9 when Jerry seriously stole my father’s affection by being very skilled at drawing. Jerry would go to the zoo, come back home and draw all the animals from memory. My father would rave about these drawings.

As I mentioned in another story, I would read the comics every Sunday with my dad and he would pour over the details of the drawing in the strips. He didn’t know much about art but wanted to. So this kid, Jerry, was encroaching on my territory with my father. One day, my father showed me a pencil drawing of an ear of corn that Jerry had made. It was, honestly, pretty damn good, with lots of neat shading and detail. My dad said that Jerry was taking classes at The Swain School of Design, New Bedford’s only art school. He asked if maybe I’d like to take some classes there. I wanted to get some of that admiration from my dad, so I went to the Swain school one summer and it was the most boring, tedious and frustrating experience of my life. The only thing I remember about the teacher was that he had one eye that refused to look in the same direction as the other one, which was a little unnerving. I was forced to hone my pencil to a wedge shape with a sandpaper block and then to draw smooth, even, parallel strokes close together. I filled page after page of these pencil strokes only to be told that they weren’t up to par. We also made strokes that graduated from light to dark –over and over and over again. We would not be allowed to draw anything else until we mastered these exercises. I was failing miserably. I quit.

When I was about 10, I think, I was walking with a fellow classmate, Barbara Camara, down at the bottom of the street where I lived and where her father had a hardware store. All of a sudden, I saw a new little shop that hadn’t been there before. It was just a tiny place next to the hardware store. It was a store front with two windows, one on either side of the doorway. It seemed to be the studio/shop of a commercial artist. A small sign said “Art Lessons”. I went in and met the artist inside seated at a drawing board. He told me the price of lessons. It wasn’t very much. I rushed home and told my dad and he agreed to me taking some lessons there.

This was a whole other world from the Swain school. I went down to the shop once or twice a week and the guy sat me on a stool at a drawing board right next to his and encouraged me to draw anything I wanted. I wish I could remember his name but it escapes me. He gave me India ink and a brush and a pen with which to draw. I told him what interested me and he helped me in that direction. Milton Caniff was making a big impression on me at that time so our efforts were on replicating some facsimile of Caniff’s brushwork. I didn’t know cartoonists used brushes as well as pens until this fellow told me about it. He showed me how to draw half-lock folds. He showed me how to crosshatch. He inspired the hell out of me. He had a friend who often dropped by and they would include me in their “art talk”. I realized, at a certain point, that their main source of work was in drawing the corny little spots you see in the phone book. They were two very small-time commercial artists but they had big hearts and they shared my enthusiasm about drawing and comics etc.. I was finally getting excited about the world of art and illustrating and cartooning. They showed me books and discussed the leading artists of the day.

One memorable sunny day, they said that they were going out to paint watercolors in the outdoors. They asked me if I wanted to go along. Do bears do poo poo in the woods? Of course I wanted to go along and paint with two professional artists, so off we went. We arrived at a farm house. We trudged out into a field and split up, each finding something interesting to paint. So, I’m there with my little watercolor box and my brushes and I settle down to paint the barn I see before me. Halfway into my very enjoyable foray into the plein arts, I became aware of a presence off a way to my left. I turned my head to see a big cow bearing down me! I had never had a large cow bearing down on me before and didn’t quite know what to do about it. She very determinably strode directly at me and was gaining speed all the while. I leaped up and stepped away from my watercolors, brushes and watercolor pad which were on the ground. The cow didn’t seem interested in me but, rather my painting of the barn, because she didn’t come at me anymore, but strode directly at my painting and stopped. She lowered her head to my picture. Then, this giant cow tongue came out of her mouth and slurped across my freshly painted watercolor. Then, she looked at me and walked back from whence she came. My watercolor had this big “splootch” right across the barn.

Afterwards, I enjoyed showing people the watercolor that a cow helped me paint.

And, Oh … remember Jerry back up there in the beginning of this story, the kid who was a drawing genius ? He became a car mechanic and never drew any more.

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Tags art school, commercial art, cow, drawing, half-lock folds, Milton Caniff, New Bedford, Randall Enos, Randy Enos, Swain School of Design, watercolor

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World’s Fastest Illustrator

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 17, 2019

Here’s another piece from my cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos –the fastest illustrator in the world.

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

For many, many years my working hours were from about 10:00 in the morning until 4:00 the next morning, with breaks for breakfast, lunch and dinner. This was in the late 50’s into the late 90’s … then things slowed down a bit.

In the early years, I would often travel to New York to deliver jobs and to pick up work. Sometimes the regular work I would pick up from The New York Times and N.B.C. in particular, were jobs that were “overnight jobs”. I would rush home, do the jobs until 4:00 in the morning, sleep and wake up about 10 or 11 then go on the train to deliver them. I loved working at night. I would play movies that I would rent, while I was working. Sometimes, I would be so intensely working on the job that I wouldn’t even look up to see a single scene, I would just listen to the sound. I rented so many movies (and got additional free ones from the library) that I became a favored customer at several video stores and would get invited to their private office parties. I was renting 2 or 3 movies, EVERY day. I preferred listening to movies rather than music.

I never missed a deadline but had some harrowing moments sometimes in the middle of the night thinking that I wasn’t going to make it. My solution for that was to create a little schedule for myself. I had picked a complicated medium to work in because I’m not the brightest bulb on the tree. I invented this linocut-collage thing which included printing a carved lino block on many different colored papers (Pantone papers) in many different colored inks (water soluble Speedball) and then cutting portions of each print and pasting it all together… a hard to describe complicated procedure which netted me a unique style of my own which was unlike anybody else’s (no other illustrator would be stupid enough to go through a process like this into the wee hours of the morning). SO, here’s the kind of schedule I would quickly write out to assuage my fears of not being able to finish before the morning’s train time.

Only with my more complex and “scary” jobs would I make out a schedule like this. The ones that I thought I’d never be able to do in one night.

9 pm to 10 pm… make a sketch for the illustration.

10 pm to 11 pm… transfer the sketch to my lino block.

11 pm to 2 am… cut the block (or blocks, because I would often have more than one illustration to work on at a time).

2 am to 2:30 am… rest break (watch some of the movie).

2:30 am to 3: 30 am… ink the block (or blocks) and print on colored papers.

3:30 am to 5:00 am… dry the prints (in my little studio microwave) and cut them out with X-acto knife and paste up the illustration.

5:00 am to 7:00 am… do any retouching that would be necessary etc.. Put a flap on it and stick it into an envelope.

DONE.

When I could see that there was ample time to go through all my processes, right in front of me, the panic would subside as long as I kept to the schedule.

As I said, a lot of the time I would have more than one illustration to work on at a time. Six seemed to be my magic number. I always seemed to have six jobs on the board to do. As soon as one would be checked off, another had replaced it. Also, when I looked at a magazine or newspaper stand, I could, almost always, count at least six publications that I was in at any given time. In my 63 years, I’ve worked for every American magazine except The New Yorker. I even did an illustration for People and they don’t even carry illustrations. Have you ever seen one in there?

I never did any advertising work (unless you count the very “editorial” nature of my NBC illustrations), but, rather, I was in the low paying but much freer and more interesting world of editorial illustration (books, magazines and newspapers). And the money was all over the place from doing a small spot illustration for the back pages of Time magazine for $1000 to elaborate double-page spreads for The National Lampoon or Progressive magazine for $150 – $200. I never thought about the money (my wife says that’s a major problem with me) and put just as much energy and time into the low paying jobs as I did for the higher paying ones –sometimes more. And, I never turned a job down because, unlike other illustrators, I didn’t care about playing tennis or golf or going on vacations. I only cared about making pictures. On beautiful hot and sunny days, I was only happy if I was in my basement studio with some juicy jobs to work on.

In those days, I used to bill myself as “The World’s Fastest Illustrator”!

Time magazine had the habit of giving out rush jobs and sending a driver out to Westport to pick it up. That could be harrowing. I once got one of those jobs. No time for a sketch to be approved or anything. I worked out what I was going to do with the art director over the phone. Then he would say, “Okay Randy, the driver is setting out now to pick it up!” Then I would quickly draw my illustration onto my block and start cutting away at it, all the time with the vision in my mind’s eye of the driver on the Merritt Parkway heading toward me. Fortunately, it would take him almost an hour.

Okay, here’s the fastest job I ever did. My next door neighbor was the editor of Fairfield County Magazine. She called me from work and said that she had a quick job for me. She had some photos of lawn furniture and wanted me to just draw on them with pen and ink and make the chairs and tables into cartoon characters. She said she’d drop off the photos on the way home that night. Later, she came to my door with an envelope with the photos. I took them and rushed over to my drawing board as she left and quickly drew arms and legs and heads on the photos and went out the door and gave them to her as she was putting her key into her front door. Time elapsed… under a minute!

Some of the fastest illustrations I had to do were for The Wall Street Journal, which I like to call The Wall Street Gerbil. Back in the black and white days before there were any color illustrations in the newspapers (I did the first color illustration for them later on) we used to FAX the originals, Believe it or not!

On the other hand, I had a client who never had a deadline. Let me repeat that… NO DEADLINE… ever. It was the Boy Scout magazine, Boy’s Life.

The art director, Joe Connolly would call me up and ask me if I could do the job and that he would be sending me the text. It would always be one major full-page illustration and three smaller ones for each story. At the end of our conversations, he would say, “And, as always, Randy, there’s no deadline!” Boy’s Life was one of my highest paying clients but the stories had practically no content with which to work. They were void of any substance. I defy any average illustrator to get even one idea for an illustration never mind three! It’s a good thing I wasn’t an average illustrator because I did them for many years. Joe would just hand out and stockpile up the illustrated stories until he needed them for an issue. And he used top illustrators so I was in good company.

On one occasion, I slipped his manuscript under a pile of other stuff because I knew there was no immediate rush and went on to other projects. It stayed there for a WHOLE YEAR!!! Joe called me up and I suddenly remembered the long lost manuscript that I had forgotten about. I stammered, “Oh jeez, Joe, I forgot about the story … I’ll get to it right away!” He said, “No no no, there’s no deadline, I’m just calling you with another job!” You don’t find clients like that very often.

I used to do a lot of work for McGraw-Hill magazines. Some of it was tedious, mundane sort of things. One massive job I had, involved me putting down lots of Prestype lettering. God, what a nightmare! The lettering would crack or pull off or go down crooked and I struggled for hours and hours doing that tedious rush job. I stayed up without sleep for TWO nights and was going on to my third night (the job was due the next morning) when I just pooped out. I couldn’t go on any longer… I needed to sleep. I just gave up at one point and said, “I can’t do it, I’ve got to sleep” and promptly passed out. I awoke in the morning and went into panic mode. It was minutes before train time. I rushed into my studio to find the job sitting there… completely finished!! My wife had been watching what I had been doing and while I slept, she finished the job beautifully.

I knew there was a reason I married her beside the fact that she was a cutie-pie!

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Tags Boy's Life, Fairfield County Magazine, illustration, Joe Connelly, McGraw-Hill magazines, Randall Enos, The New York Times, the wall street journal

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

Me and the Ghostbusters

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 14, 2019

My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos writes about the Ghostbusters –Randy was one of the regular contributors to The National Lampoon.

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

Toward the last gasps of The National Lampoon, there began a migration of Lampoon editors, publishers and associates of the Lampoon empire to Hollywood. Doug Kenney, one of the founders went out there and unfortunately died in Hawaii. People like John Belushi, who had been involved in Lampoon stuff in New York went to Hollywood along with Matty Simmons the Lampoon publisher and Ivan Reitman and made Animal House. It seemed like lots of Lampoon people suddenly got the Hollywood movie bug. My close friend and art director Michael Gross moved his family to Hollywood and became a producer for Ivan Reitman’s films. One of their most notable being Ghostbusters.

Through all of Michael’s endeavors, the Lampoon, his subsequent foray into his own design firm, some art directing for Esquire, art directing for Mobil Oil and a brief experiment with an artistic porno site, I was always there to supply him with my art work. So it was with Ghostbusters. He called on me, from California to do a fake Atlantic Magazine cover for the movie. At that point in my career, I had yet to do an actual Atlantic cover.

In the film, after the boys get their Ghostbuster business established, they get quite famous and a brief sequence in the film is a montage, of sorts showing headlines in various newspapers, cover of Life magazine and a cover of the Atlantic Magazine all popping and panning across the screen accompanied by the famous “Who ya gonna call?” theme song. I was to show caricatures of the three “busters” in their uniforms and Proton Packs chasing a ghost.

In a stupendous display of over-kill, four fairly large cardboard boxes arrived at my house. One box contained dozens and dozens of pictures of Bill Murray, and another, pictures of Dan Aykroyd and another of Harold Ramis, the three main stars. I had shots of them close-up, at every angle and full figure –in their costumes and out of them. The fourth box was loaded with pictures of them posed together in various action shots. A caricaturists’ dream of reference material!

I set to work and created a sketch for approval and then when I got the okay, I did the finished art in linocut. Michael slapped an Atlantic logo on it and some type and made it look exactly like an Atlantic cover. We had done many fake jobs like this for the Lampoon, of course, so we knew how to do this stuff. Then, to my surprise, the fake cover had to go to The Atlantic for approval which it secured and into the movie it went. It only appears for a few seconds. It zips onto the screen… holds and then zips off. It was a kick to see it on the big screen.

I let Ivan Reitman have the original which I saw framed and hanging in his office when I visited Michael later on at the studios in Hollywood. I also got to see some of the models of the ghost creatures and an actual Proton Pack which was a bit of a disappointment in the flesh being that it was basically cardboard with duct tape wrapped around stuff. Michael also showed me the head of the moose he created for The Lampoon’s Vacation movie where Chevy Chase has to punch the moose character in the nose. The head was a hard plaster but the nose was soft.

Michael often came to New York to shoot parts of films and my wife Leann and I would always go into the city and watch the action. He even gave Leann an “extra” part in Legal Eagles. He also came in for the premier of Animal House where they had a party at the Village Gate afterwards and Belushi and Aykroyd performed a song as “The Blues Brothers” –AND, I got to meet one of my heroes, Ralph Nader, of all people.

But, after all that exciting stuff, the very best thing about the whole experience was that I now get to say, “My very first Atlantic cover was not an Atlantic cover”.

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe