Oh! I just realized that I didn’t post my Trump Racist Bones cartoon from a couple of weeks ago! Here it is with my favorite, new Trump/Racism cartoons.
This one by John Darkow made me laugh all the way to the corn-field …
Here’s a nifty racist steam-punk cartoon from Pat Bagley …
It continues to amaze me that Randy Enos carves his cartoons into linoleum blocks and prints them on paper with ink. He even does the lettering backwards, with a knife.
These last two gems are from Canadian Dave Whamond …
The best way to deal with Trump and racism is to laugh.
In the late 60’s, most of us red blooded American men were enthralled by a beautiful Swedish girl that appeared in Noxzema medicated shaving cream commercials. As a man with a lathered face started to shave in rhythm with some “stripper” music, the girl’s face appeared in close-up on the right side of the screen. Her sultry gaze looked straight out at us as she intoned, ” Take it off, take it ALL off”.
Her name was Gunilla Knutsen. Here’s the old commercial on YouTube …
A photographer named J. Barry O’Rourke saw some psychedelic art I had done somewhere and called me up. He had a job for Look Magazine and needed my help. He was photographing Gunilla for a feature in the magazine and he needed someone to paint psychedelic designs on her face and body. I said, “Gee, sorry, I’m busy”!
NO, I did not say that. I packed up some acrylic paint and some sable brushes and off I went to his New York studio.
It certainly was the era of psychedelic art. I was doing a lot of it. The artist Peter Max was in the forefront of it all. Max was a master promoter. One day, I looked out of the window in the office of one of my art directors at NBC and gazed across 6th Avenue to see a new building going up. Max had supplied the gigantic hanging tarps that they used to shield the floors under construction. So, all the way around the building, in VERY large letters it said ” Peter Max, Peter Max, Peter Max”.
This is the picture I used to show my father when he said that I should have become an insurance man like him.
So, I arrive at O’Rourke’s studio and there is the Swedish beauty herself in a silver bikini. Barry instructed her to just lie on the floor and I was to work on her there. So, I crouched beside her, squeezed out some color on my palette and started in working around her navel. My circular design developed with curlicues and circles in many different colors. I was inventing it as I went along, I had no sketch or anything, I just let it build any way it wanted to.
Right off the bat, I noticed one thing. Gunilla had incredibly soft and ultra smooth skin. My brush just glided across my “canvas” beautifully. I have never worked on such a remarkable surface. She just lay there with her eyes shut and didn’t move a muscle. When I finished with her stomach area, I proceeded to her face. I confined my design to just the right side of her face. I used Liquitex acrylics because they were bright and colorful, dried quickly, lasted quite a long time and were easy to wash off. I had done a little face painting at that point and I had also painted my entire ’61 Volkswagon Beetle with psychedelic designs when its original bright red color had started to fade. I covered the entire car with spirals and swirls and curlicues from stem to stern. I n later years when the car started to fall apart on me, I gave it to a friend of my son, who was collecting Volkswagon parts for his friends. For years after that, I would be downtown in Westport and see things like a plain blue VW drive by with a wildly painted hood or side door. My old car lived on like that for a long time. The paint remained pretty much as bright as it was when I first painted it.
But, I digress… back to my Gunilla painting chores. After I finished painting her face, I wrapped up my gear and I told Gunilla that it should wash off easily after she finished posing for the spread. She said she’d probably wash off her stomach but she was going to leave the designs on her face because she was going to a party later that evening and she thought it would look pretty good and unusual to go with her face painted.
SO… the woman who was famous for “Take it off”, actually… left it on!
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I’ve been working on putting together cartoons for a CagleCartoons exhibition in St Just le Martel’s lovely cartoon museum on the topic of Trump and Iran. Here’s my cartoon from yesterday …
I got the idea for my cartoon while mulling over this wonderful, new cartoon by Pierre Ballouhey, which makes a point that is rather different …
I’d like to welcome Canadian cartoonist Guy Parsons, who recently joined Cagle.com and PoliticalCartoons.com with this cartoon poking the Trump-hive …
These two cartoons about the Straits of Hormuz by Arend van Dam made me laugh …
Here’s Steve Sack‘s take on the Straits of Hormuz …
And here’s Stephane Peray‘s take on the Straits of Hormuz …
Here’s my last one on Trump and Iran …
Our photo-realistic cartoonist, Bart van Leeuwen drew this Trump and Iran cartoon …
We’ve got a lot of great Trump and Iran cartoons. It will be a great exhibition – starting the last weekend in September and running for a while.
(The guy) double wraps (the steak) in aluminum foil. The guy then takes it and places it on the block where the carburetor is in his car and drives to his game. When he gets there, his steak is perfectly done on both sides and ready to eat.
I eat lunch and sometimes breakfast standing up. I blame it on my father’s influence, He had a habit of doing that. My wife, Leann always says, “Sit down and eat!” I always reply, “I can’t ’cause it’s in the book!” You see, back in 1980, an art director of mine, Judy Reiser wrote a book called “And I Thought I Was Crazy”.
I illustrated it for her. It’s a compilation of the crazy quirks and idiosyncrasies that people have. Along with a lot of other people, my wife and I contributed a few quirks of our own. So, now that my habit of standing while eating has been enshrined in book form, on the printed page, out there for the world to read –and believe; I feel it’s my responsibility to back it up by continuing in my tradition, hence, “I can’t because it’s in the book”. Of course, my wife has heard my reply so many times that she now says, “Will you please sit down and eat … I know … it’s in the book.” Or, she says, “I don’t care if it’s in the book!”
We’ve been married for 63 years and she’s starting to get on my nerves!
… another guy who wears a broad brimmed hat every day and it’s the first thing he puts on in the morning thereby causing him to put all his other clothes on around and over it
Some of the stories in Judy’s book are pretty weird like the guy who goes to a card game every Monday night and doesn’t have time to cook or eat out so he has an arrangement with a deli owner who holds a porterhouse steak for him, which he double wraps in aluminum foil.
… a fellow who always irons his paper money because he can’t stand to have wrinkled bills in his wallet.
The guy then takes it and places it on the block where the carburetor is in his car and drives to his game. When he gets there, his steak is perfectly done on both sides and ready to eat.
Other snippets in the book tell about a fellow who always irons his paper money because he can’t stand to have wrinkled bills in his wallet. And another guy who wears a broad brimmed hat every day and it’s the first thing he puts on in the morning thereby causing him to put all his other clothes on around and over it, There’s a woman who always washes, sets and dries her hair at home before going to the hairdresser so she’ll look her best at all times. A 32 yr. old nurse that has never eaten an olive, tasted beer or oysters or snails. She says she has a “closed palate” –she’s not adventurous about food.
My wife’s contributions to the book were as follows: When eating out with friends, she always has to taste their food selections before even eating any of her own.
She always gets her hip out of whack sitting in a theater seat, so upon rising to leave at the end of a show, she’ll pause in the aisle and bend forward throwing one leg straight out behind her. Then, it’s my turn to say, “Do you know that you came within inches of kicking that guy in the face behind you?” Another of her quirks is that when going up or down steps, she finds herself uncontrollably counting them.
My other quirk, beside the standing while eating thing, is that whenever (I know this sounds made up but it is the honest truth) WHENEVER I eat a Bavarian cream puff, after the first bite, I always say, ” Mmmmmmm Mmmmmmm San Antone!” I have no idea where this comes from. I don’t know why “San Antone”. I have no control over it. I’ve tried many times to not say it, but I can’t not say it. Uncontrollable.
It is physically impossible for me not to say it. Calling Dr. Freud!
When eating out with friends, (my wife) always has to taste their food selections before even eating any of her own.Thank goodness Randy stands to eat.
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In 2000, I got a great contract to draw five cartoons a week for Gannett’s Honolulu Advertiser in Hawaii, the big daily paper in town. The biggest local story at that time was the sinking of a Japanese high school fishing boat. The boat, the Ehime Maru, was struck by a US submarine, the Greeneville who’s captain was Commander Scott Waddle. The submarine was on a mission to entertain celebrities, a common practice for the Navy, where celebrities get to play at steering the sub for PR purposes. On these joyrides, the subs would often do exciting “emergency ballast blows” which made the sub shoot to the surface and leap out of the water – it was on one of these dramatic, celebrity steered, leaping maneuvers that the Greeneville crashed into the Ehime Maru, sinking it immediately.
Even worse, as many of the Japanese high school kids were drowning, screaming for help in the water, the Greeneville and its crew did nothing to help them. It was later explained that this was because the sub had no procedure for saving drowning kids. This was a horror story that seemed to have no end as the Navy was very slow in releasing the embarrassing and damning details, stretching snippets of information out painfully over the course of weeks.
I was new as a daily cartoonist for the Advertiser and the sub disaster made me angry. I drew this cartoon.
The Advertiser killed the cartoon, refusing to run it because, as my editor told me, “Honolulu is a Navy town, Daryl. We’re very careful about criticizing the Navy.” That made me mad – this was the kind of local story that a local cartoonist exists for. I had just started my little syndicate, and I recall that this cartoon was widely reprinted on the mainland, something the Advertiser wasn’t used to seeing with a cartoon they killed, and I think that annoyed them.
So I drew this next cartoon, about no one on the sub attempting to save the drowning students.
The Advertiser killed this cartoon too. Again, it was too critical of the Navy.
So I drew this cartoon about “emergency ballast blows.”
This one was killed too. Anything that mentioned a submarine was going to be killed. This “Navy town” was feeling like a Soviet town. I tried a soft approach with this next cartoon …
Killed, still too critical of the Navy. It was clear that all of my submarine cartoons would be killed. I drew this one about reprimanding Commander Waddle …
No good. I felt like a cartoonist in China. The story was in the headlines for weeks and months, with little more than flowers and teardrops from another cartoonist in the paper, and my cartoons were running only on the mainland.
I was annoyed, so I started drawing submarines in local cartoons, on subjects that had nothing to do with the submarine incident. These cartoons got killed too, just because they included submarines. This cartoon was about a spending disagreement in the legislature about a court decision on Special Education funding, known locally as the Felix Consent Decree.
No, they wouldn’t even print a local submarine cartoon about Special Education funding. At this point, I think my editors were just as annoyed with me as I was with them. I was their new cartoonist who only drew a small percentage of “cartoons we can use.”
Then The Advertiser surprised me by printing one of the cartoons that I kept drawing about the submarine incident – maybe they printed it by accident, who knows, but this calendar cartoon suddenly showed up on the editorial page one day …
My first submarine cartoon was printed, a month after the tragedy!
Then I got a call from my sheepish editor, who clearly was making a call he didn’t want to make. He said, “Daryl, I just got a call from the Admiral in charge of the Navy at Pearl Harbor. He would like to have the original of your cartoon to hang in his office.”
I said, “Which cartoon? You killed all of the submarine cartoons except for that calendar cartoon you printed yesterday.”
“Yes, that’s the one he saw. That’s the one he wants. Can you send us the original of that one?”
I said, “There isn’t really any original of the calendar cartoon. I went to the store and bought a calendar, then I wrote on it in a ball point pen and scanned it, and I added the type, signature and cross-hatching on the computer. It doesn’t exist as a single drawing, like my other cartoons.”
The Ehime Maru.
That was clearly a disturbing response for the editor to hear. I think I ended up sending the editor a signed print or something, and I think I recall the editor proudly saying that the admiral had the print of this calendar page hanging in his office. I mentioned that the admiral might have also liked one of my killed cartoons, but that, again, wasn’t what the editor wanted to hear.
I understand the laments of other cartoonists, like Rob Rogers, who have a large percentage of their cartoons killed after a change in editors. Editors can be control freaks, and cartoonists get under the skin of control freaks. It was all the more frustrating for my editor in Hawaii because he must have known that these were the cartoons that the Advertiser really should have been printing at the time. Needless to say, I didn’t last long at The Honolulu Advertiser, which let me go in less than a year for “cost cutting purposes.” That was an excuse I didn’t believe at the time, because of all the killed cartoons; now I think it is likely true that I was canned for cost-cutting because the whole newspaper went out of business not long after that. Now the combined “Honolulu Star-Advertiser” runs my syndicated cartoons.
My last submarine cartoon was this one, of Commander Waddle. After all of the proceedings about Waddle, he turned out to be a tragic character, genuinely haunted by his responsibility for the horrible event. Waddle was given an honorable discharge and he went on an apology tour in Japan. I feel sorry for the guy. Here he is, like a cowboy at the end of a movie, waddling off into the sunset.
Ever since I was dropped by The Honolulu Advertiser, and after I left The Midweek, I haven’t had a problem with killed cartoons. MSNBC.com and Slate.com never killed a cartoon, even when The Washington Post owned Slate (and I worked for them for a year) the Post didn’t kill any of my cartoons.
Killed cartoons happen when a cartoonist and editor are stuck with each other, they don’t see eye to eye, and both think they are doing the jobs they should do. That may not happen much longer as all of the editorial cartoonists lose their jobs and become freelancers, working through syndication. When editors pick from many syndicated cartoons, some cartoons still don’t get printed, but no cartoons were killed by the editors.
Syndicates still kill cartoons, though. Maybe I’ll write about that later.
My interest in cartooning started when I was a wee small child and on Sunday mornings, my dad and I would lay out the big newspaper comics on the rug in our parlor and go over them carefully with him pointing out some of the finer details of the artwork along with both of us laughing at the antics of the poor Dagwood and Major Hoople and the Toonerville folks. My father and I also greatly enjoyed the political cartoons of Shoemaker and Herblock.
I started looking at, what we in the business call “gag cartoons”, in The Saturday Evening Post which came to my house every week. I was a big fan of Virgil Partch (who I got to meet later in life).
When I worked at The Famous Artists Schools in the 50’s and 60’s, I got to work with a fellow instructor named Frank Ridgeway who was a gag cartoonist for Saturday Evening Post and other magazines and wrote gags for The New Yorker. At lunchtime, Frank would sometimes make roughs for his cartoons. One time I said, “Hasn’t that idea been done before?” He replied, “Of course it has but has it been done this week?”
He showed me some of his tricks in coming up with ideas. One was “gag switching” where you would take a cartoon you found in a magazine and, in essence, take the general idea of the joke and just re-do it using different characters, locale etc.. No honor among thieves.
One day, he showed me another technique. He said for me to get a magazine and he’d show me how he can quickly put an idea together. I got a magazine and was instructed to flip through and at random just pick out three images. I found a picture of a cowboy in a cigarette ad, a picture of a little boy and finally a picture of a store or market. In a few minutes, he had the gag. A kid dressed in a cowboy outfit is talking to a butcher in a market. The kid says, “WHAT… no buffalo meat, and you call yourself a meat market!” This was before we actually had buffalo meat in the markets. Not a great idea, by his own admission, but it quickly demonstrated a method that could be used. I’ve used it a few times myself. Frank sold a comic strip “Mr. Abernathy” while he was working there at the school and he was off to fame and fortune.
When I would go into New York to deliver my illustrations or pick up work, I often rode the train with several New Yorker guys who were going in to their weekly meeting to sell their cartoons. They would NEVER talk about cartoons on the train. Their heads were buried in the New York Times except for Bob Weber who would be doing his roughs because he always waited until the last minute.
In this column, I’ve included some of my favorite cartoons from recent times. My favorite of this bunch is the “tango” cartoon by P.S. Mueller. I find Hillary Price‘s cartoons always funny and likewise with Dan Piraro who seems to never draw an un-funny cartoon (how does he do that?). Both of these guys, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.
I’ve done very few single panel “gag cartoons” in my career but I’ve included a few of them here also. I’ve sold some of them abroad but never in the U.S..
The very very VERY funniest cartoon I’ve ever seen was a long long time ago and I don’t remember who drew it and I don’t remember where I saw it but I often think of it to this day.
Here’s what it was. Two hippos are in the Nile. Only the tip of their snouts and a little bit of their eyes are showing above the water in this very plain, gray, steamy atmosphere. There is nothing around… just grayness… quietness… boredom. One hippo says to the other, “Y’know, I keep thinking today is Thursday!” I crack up every time I think of it… like just now!
Here are Randy’s favorite gag cartoons, along with his reviews …
Ahab and the swatch… My good friend Arne Levin, the New Yorker cartoonist sent this great cartoon to me because of my interest in whaling history and Moby Dick, of course.
The slinkies… it took me a while to figure out what was going on with the ski lift. I wasn’t reading it as a ski lift, but THEN, when I figured it out, I haven’t stopped laughing. (Mark Parisi is one of my favorites, too -Daryl)
The cowboys robbing the bank… great cartoon by Piraro. I think this is the best one of his that I’ve ever seen.
The tango… my all-time favorite cartoon of past years. A lot of people don’t agree with me but I think it’s brilliant.
The last supper… Best take-off on the Last Supper that I’ve ever seen and there have been many.
Litter box and cat… Hillary Price put me on the floor laughing with this one. Anyone who has ever had a cat has got to love this.
Crash dummies in car … Dan Piraro again at his best. Anyone who has had children has to love this.
Retractable dog leash… This one rivals the Tango cartoon for best of recent years for me. I love this guy Parisi. Simple, clean and hilarious. (I love Mark Parisi, too. –Daryl)
Seeing-eye dog … A great one by Drew Panckeri!
Dog with walkman apparatus… Another great one by Mark Parisi.
Retractable dog leash… This one rivals the Tango cartoon for best of recent years for me. I love this guy Parisi. Simple, clean and hilarious.
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There is a new anti-semitic cartoon controversy, this time from The Guardian’s cartoonist Steve Bell. Buzzfeed’s media critic Mark Di Stefano first tweeted the cartoon and email that Bell sent to all of The Guardian’s staff journalists.
Bell’s cartoon depicting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was killed, prompting Bell’s mass email. The cartoon depicts British Labour Party deputy secretary, Tom Watson as an “antisemite finder general” calling Netanyahu an “antisemitic trope.”
“Last June, (Bell) emailed all journalists to say he felt “unfairly traduced and censored” after the paper would not run his cartoon of Theresa May meeting Benjamin Netanyahu while Palestinian Razan al-Najjar, who had been shot and killed by an Israeli soldier, burned in the fireplace behind.”
‘He accused Guardian editor Kath Viner of not speaking to him because she “did not really have an argument” for spiking the cartoon.”
“I suspect the real cause is it contravenes some mysterious editorial line that has been drawn around the subject of antisemitism and the infernal subject of antisemitic tropes.”
“In some ways this is even more worrying than the specious charges of antisemitism. Does the Guardian no longer tolerate content that runs counter to its editorial line?”
“In November 2012, (Bell’s) cartoon that depicted Mr Netanyahu as a puppeteer prompted many complaints to the press regulator.”
Here is the complete text of the letter that Bell wrote to The Guardian’s “Head of Features” Kira Cochrane, and forwarded as a mass email to all of The Guardian’s staff journalists:
Dear Kira
After our bizarre telephone conversation yesterday, I feared you might not publish today’s strip, but still cannot understand why the attached should be more liable to legal challenge from Tom Watson than either of the previous two strips that you have already published. You said the ‘lawyers were concerned’, but what about? It’s not antisemitic, nor is it libellous, even though it includes a caricature of Binyamin Netanyahu. If Watson chose to object he would make himself look far sillier than he does in the cartoon.
I suspect that the real problem is that it contravenes some mysterious editorial line that has been drawn around the subject of antisemitism and the infernal subject of ‘antisemitic tropes’. In some ways this is even more worrying for me than specious charges of antisemitism. Does the Guardian no longer tolerate content that counters its editorial line?
Why in today’s paper has the Guardian published a highly partisan and personally insulting (to the leader of the Labour Party) advert on page 20 that uses the Labour Party logo, but is clearly not a Labour Party approved advert? I would have thought that there would be far more reason to expect a legal challenge on that than on my my cartoon. Or is it that you don’t want to offend poor Tom but are quite happy to offend poor Jeremy?
Why on earth did the Guardian publish, then unpublish, a letter in support of Chris Williamson signed by 100 persons identifying themselves as Jewish, including Noam Chomsky? Were they the wrong kind of Jews. The paper’s contortions on this subject do not do it any credit. If there is a reasoned position on this highly contentious issue, then I would dearly love to see it laid out clearly so we all know where we stand. Or are there some subjects that we just can’t touch?
Sept. 19, 1975, I was hunched over my drawing board in my office at the Journal Herald in Dayton, Ohio, trying to come up with an idea for a political cartoon on a slow news day when Managing Editor Bill Worth charged into my office and said, “Glatt’s been shot. They’re going to arraign him in a few minutes at the Federal Building. Get over there and draw the shooter when they bring him into the courtroom.” Who? Oh, right, Dr. Charles A. Glatt Dayton’s federally appointed desegregation manager.
I was at the paper less than a month, my first full-time job as a political cartoonist. I barely knew where the bathroom was. Everything was new to me, the paper, the newsroom, the city and busing. Dayton was under a court order to desegregate its schools and busing was the federal plan. My family was in the process of moving from Ft. Wayne, Indiana, to Centerville, a suburb south of Dayton. Neither the city of Ft. Wayne, nor Centerville was busing school children. This was all new to America and almost every white person I knew hated it.
“Right,” I said. “Where’s the Federal Building?”
“Next door,” said Worth.
I grabbed my sketchpad and a black Prismacolor pencil and followed the reporters. It took only minutes to get there.
The courtroom was dimly lit and empty except for the press and the judge. The shooting had just happened down the hall in Glatt’s office. The door opened and the murderer entered, flanked by several marshals and a lawyer. My heart was racing. I’ve never seen a murderer in the flesh before. I had only seconds to get his likeness. I’ve never even been in a courtroom before and now – it was “look, see, draw.” I had maybe four seconds from when I saw the defendant in profile to when he turned his back to me to face the judge. His image is stamped on my brain. I captured his likeness in an instant and the next morning, my drawing was on the front page.
The guy turned out to be serial killer, Neal Bradley Long, a filling station attendant. He shot Glatt four times with a handgun and later was found guilty of killing Glatt and four black people in the area over the past few years. The hubbub surrounding busing in Dayton quieted down after that. A new desegregation manager was appointed, busing continued, magnet schools were organized and the community schools were integrated. Long was tried, convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms while white people fled to the suburbs. Dayton ended the busing program 25 years later.
Most of my forty years in the newspaper business were filled with habitual rituals, creative challenges, daily deadlines and plenty of laughs. They tend to run together in a very long timeline, but some days stand out, like Sept. 19, 1975, the first of many more to come.
This column is by the brilliant cartoonist for the Omaha World-Herald, Jeff Koterba –Daryl
As a kid growing up in the 1960s I loved drawing and the idea of space travel. My earliest memory—at age two or three—is of me holding a blue, Bic pen and scribbling away on sheets of paper. I also recall pretending that my drawing instruments were rockets, my hand guiding them through our house, orbiting the furniture
All throughout grade school, I had two goals: I wanted to become an artist and an astronaut. But was I that unusual? Don’t most kids love to draw until they’re told that doing something creative is no way to make a living? Likewise, in the years leading up to the first Moon landing, weren’t lots of kids excited by the space program? After all, coverage of the space program was everywhere.
In those days, the three networks would break into programming to show live coverage of the various rocket launches. My dad would stay home from work and call me in sick to school so we could watch together.
Watching those massive Saturn V rockets roar from the Earth with such grace was, in itself, a work of art, their contrails on the sky like drawings.
At school I was shy, lacking confidence. I loved to draw, and occasionally my sketches of rockets landed on the bulletin board of my grade school classrooms. But mostly, I kept my art to myself, drawings hidden away on sheets of paper tucked into textbooks and under my bed.
I also grew up with stories of my Uncle Ed. A syndicated columnist for Scripps Howard and later, the Washington Post, my uncle covered the early days of the space program and the Kennedy administration.
Sadly, he was killed in a plane crash shortly after I was born so I never got to meet him. Mourned by Kennedy during a televised press conference, my dad kept the memory of his brother’s journalism alive with stories of his globetrotting adventures and his love of space. Including how my uncle once interviewed Wernher von Braun, father of the Saturn V rocket.
I can only imagine what Uncle Ed might have written that fateful day when Neil Armstrong first dipped his boot into the lunar dust.
Throughout childhood and beyond, I kept sketching rockets and astronauts. I wouldn’t realize it until many years later, but my pens and pencils carried a heavy payload. Those early drawings were an outpouring of my deep desire to follow my heart—whether artist or astronaut—and also in some way, to keep my uncle’s memory alive.
Anything worth doing, anything new and different and daring, begins with a dream, a spark of inspiration. President Kennedy’ famous “We choose to go to the Moon” speech was just the spark needed to send humans to the lunar surface.
At the time, the concept of sending humans to the Moon was beyond the scope of anything anyone had ever done. It seemed to be the biggest challenge ever suggested in the history of the world. The concept was utterly breathtaking.
If not for that speech, it’s difficult to imagine that the U.S. would have landed Apollo 11 on the lunar surface 50 years ago this month.
I’m also convinced that Kennedy’s speech, and NASA’s space program, ignited within me the confidence to purse my dreams. If an idea so daring, so impossible, as landing humans on the Moon could become reality, was it so far-fetched that I, too, could pursue my love of cartoons?
Over time, I would realize that becoming an astronaut wasn’t for me. Becoming a cartoonist, however, was truly what I was meant to do on this earth.
Just as I did that summer fifty years ago, I now continue to gaze into the night sky, the Moon and stars reminding me that I was called to explore blank sheets of paper, the contrails of my pencils and pens making images that I hope engage readers. Maybe even sparking a new way of seeing the world.
Over the years, I have taught at many art schools including Parsons, Syracuse, Hartford, School of Visual Arts, Fashion Institute in New York, Rhode Island School of Design, Philadelphia School of the Arts and others. My longest sustained teaching was at Parsons in New York for 8 years.
The one common thread I noticed among students was that they didn’t know much of anything about our profession which they were supposedly interested in pursuing. They hadn’t looked at much illustration or cartooning and they didn’t know the names of the star practitioners of those fields. I always have found that to be peculiar. I’m sure that students of say, ballet, know the superstars of ballet; or students of music probably know the major musicians in the part of the field they are studying. I’m sure that students of painting or sculpture have their favorite painters or sculptors. But, not students of illustration. Once you get past Norman Rockwell, they don’t know any of the stars unless they have just had a visiting lecture from one of them. When you teach illustration or cartooning, you start at ground zero; there are no reference points, just a blank slate. I once opened a class at Syracuse with, “Good morning, I’m Milton Glaser.” I didn’t raise an eyebrow.
In my 8 years at Parsons, I generally taught two classes a week. It took Murray Tinkelman, the head of illustration at that time, five years to talk me into teaching. I kept saying,” I’ve only been in the business 10 years, how can I know enough to be able to be a teacher?” But, he wore me down and he had created a special course at that time called “Sequential Illustration” which I was to teach along with a “Conceptual Illustration” course. The conceptual course dealt with the “concepts” or ideas part of the process rather than drawing or perspective or design. At that point in time, illustration was a conceptual business rather than in previous times when it was a narrative, story telling process. We were in the era of illustrating abstract ideas for the business magazines like Business Week, Time, Fortune etc., rather than illustrating Indians attacking a wagon train for The Saturday Evening Post. We were illustrating articles on the falling stock market or the rise in childhood diseases or the latest fad in cooking.
The “Sequential Illustration” course was to be taught by three teachers, each teaching for a third of the semester. The course focused on illustration that was realized in multiple images such as in children’s books, animation, comic strips etc. I dealt with book illustration and multiple- picture magazine or newspaper illustrations in my third of the semester. Dick Giordano (Batman etc.) handled the comics part of the program and noted animator, Howard Beckerman handled the animation part. A little later on they created a third course that I was a part of which was just an animation course wherein Howard and I split the year in half. I did the first part dealing with designing and storyboarding and Howard did the last part and took the students through actually animating and filming animation sequences.
Clip from Randy’s illustration for Emergency Medicine magazine.
Sometimes I would bring into my classes, actual assignments that I had worked on myself so that students had the real thing to deal with concept-wise. One time, I received an assignment from Emergency Medicine magazine just before going to class so I gave them the same assignment with the same time frame I had to do it in. I told them that I would bring in my finished illustration a week later and they were to bring in theirs. One student said, “What if our illustration is better than yours will you take ours to the client instead of yours?” I, of course replied, “Your illustration isn’t going to be better than mine!” So… even though this particular illustration wasn’t paying very much, I spent all week doing an elaborate, detailed picture just to show the students what they should aim for. Another thing that I did was to bring in some of my art directors from time to time. I tried to give the students a real taste of the business.
Randy’s illustration for Emergency Medicine magazine.
This sounds like an exaggeration, but it actually happened. I told the students one day that most of the realist illustrators traced photographs. I made the mistake of mentioning Norman Rockwell in that group. One of my students was so horrified that his idol traced photographs that he went over to the window, climbed out on the ledge and threatened to jump. I calmed him down by explaining that Rockwell was a splendid draftsman who had worked from live models for years before resorting to working from photographs due to the pressures of deadlines. I told him that those pictures could never come out as well if he didn’t know how to draw like a master.
Many of my students went on to stellar careers in illustration such as Victor Juhasz (caricaturist, war correspondent, Rolling Stone illustrator etc.) and Peter de Seve (New Yorker covers, children’s books, character designer for Bug’s Life, Robots, 4 Ice Age films and many others).
I remember one assignment I gave my animation class and that was to design and storyboard an opening for a TV special. I wanted to pick a subject that would be fairly easy for them to research. I picked the Beatles. I figured they’d have no problem finding info, photos and ideas for a project like this. One boy in class said, “You know we don’t know very much about the Beatles, it’s kind of before our time!” Another kid said, “Oh, I know the Beatles, I heard of them; they had a few good tunes!” at which point, I screamed “A FEW GOOD TUNES? A FEW GOOD TUNES?”
A few weeks ago, my son told me that his friend, a guitar teacher, had a student who was shocked to find out that Paul McCartney was in a band BEFORE Wings.
When I would finish my class at Parsons, I often would go across the street and have dinner with a fellow teacher, Burne Hogarth of Tarzan fame. One time, I reminded him of an incident told to me by a friend who had been one of his students way back at the School of Visual Arts before it was called the School of Visual Arts and was called “The Cartoonists and Illustrators School”. One of his students asked him one day why Tarzan was always pointing his finger. Hogarth had this characteristic pose that he would often use of Tarzan with his right arm extended out and his finger pointing. Hogarth answered, “He’s pointing at my critics and saying, can you draw as well?”
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My wife’s contributions to the book were as follows: When eating out with friends, she always has to taste their food selections before even eating any of her own.
One day, he showed me another technique. He said for me to get a magazine and he’d show me how he can quickly put an idea together. I got a magazine and was instructed to flip through and at random just pick out three images. I found a picture of a cowboy in a cigarette ad, a picture of a little boy and finally a picture of a store or market. In a few minutes, he had the gag. A kid dressed in a cowboy outfit is talking to a butcher in a market. The kid says, “WHAT… no buffalo meat, and you call yourself a meat market!” This was before we actually had buffalo meat in the markets. Not a great idea, by his own admission, but it quickly demonstrated a method that could be used. I’ve used it a few times myself. Frank sold a comic strip “Mr. Abernathy” while he was working there at the school and he was off to fame and fortune.
Sept. 19, 1975, I was hunched over my drawing board in my office at the Journal Herald in Dayton, Ohio, trying to come up with an idea for a political cartoon on a slow news day when Managing Editor Bill Worth charged into my office and said, “Glatt’s been shot. They’re going to arraign him in a few minutes at the Federal Building. Get over there and draw the shooter when they bring him into the courtroom.” Who? Oh, right, Dr. Charles A. Glatt Dayton’s federally appointed desegregation manager.
As a kid growing up in the 1960s I loved drawing and the idea of space travel. My earliest memory—at age two or three—is of me holding a blue, Bic pen and scribbling away on sheets of paper. I also recall pretending that my drawing instruments were rockets, my hand guiding them through our house, orbiting the furniture
Over time, I would realize that becoming an astronaut wasn’t for me. Becoming a cartoonist, however, was truly what I was meant to do on this earth.
I’m sure that students of painting or sculpture have their favorite painters or sculptors. But, not students of illustration. Once you get past 
