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The REAL Moby Dick

By my brilliant buddy, Randy Enos  –Daryl


When you were born and raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts, as I was, you grow up in an atmosphere of whaling history. At one time back in the late 1840’s, New Bedford was the richest city in the world. That’s right –not the country but, the world! It all came from a Quaker business, the collection of whale oil. The oil generated by the New Bedford (and earlier the Nantucket) fleets of whaling ships supplied the street lights of the world, the lamps of Italy’s opera houses, buggy whips, canes, perfume enhancers, candles and hundreds and hundreds of other products. The oil from the Sperm whale is the finest machine oil that has ever appeared on this planet.

So, when you’re a kid in New Bedford and you go to the library or you accompany your parent to the bank or you go to a municipal building or go to school, you see all around you, paintings of the whale chase. Whales heeled over snapping whaleboats in their mighty jaws, hapless seamen falling through the air, mighty ships plowing through rampaging seas. Out in front of the New Bedford Public Library is the symbol of New Bedford, a sculpture of a strong whale man in the prow of a whaleboat, with his sharp harpoon in hand, ready to dart it. Now, on the other side of the library, stands a statue of a black harpoon maker named Lewis Temple. There are no existing pictures of Temple so the sculptor used a picture of his son as the model. This man invented a harpoon that revolutionized the whaling industry because it was designed in such a way that once thrust into a whale’s hide it stuck and didn’t pull out which was the problem with the harpoons that preceded it. It’s called the “Temple Toggle.” I own two 1800’s examples of this iron.

Herman Melville
Randy Enos with his “Temple Toggle.”

Another thing you do, while growing up in New Bedford, is you sing whaling songs in glee club. There was no escaping the pull of the whaling adventure. In New Bedford, we have the best whaling museum in the world and I practically lived in it as I grew up walking the deck of the largest model whaleship in the world.

Another factor was that I was born of Portuguese parents –Azorean Portuguese parents to be exact. The Azores are the nine, tiny volcanic islands that sit in the middle of the Atlantic 800 miles off the coast of Portugal. These islands produced the greatest of the world’s whale men. The New Bedford and Nantucket ships always stopped at these islands to pick up food, and boatmen. When they returned from their 3 and 4 year voyages to the Pacific, many of these whale men came to the U.S. instead of returning home. Thus, a huge population in New Bedford were Portuguese, mostly Azorean. As a side note, my father was born in a tiny village nestled in a volcano crater. I visited it once.

I left all this behind when I moved to Connecticut but as I started my illustration and cartooning career, thoughts of the whaling started drifting back to me and I found myself doing my first promotional mailing which was a woodcut whaling scene which I entitled “Fetching Whale Oil.” It was a joke because the word “fetching” hardly was adequate to describe the violent scene in the picture.

As the years went on, I started thinking about my childhood and heritage and I began reading some whaling books. It was startling to me because I found such a connection to it. I was reading books that constantly mentioned New Bedford and mentioned the whalecraft shops that I realized were right in the neighborhood that I had grown up in. In the later days of whaling, the American-Portuguese had, pretty much taken over the business. The captains had Portuguese names that I was familiar with. I started to discover a history that I really never knew existed wherein the whaling industry, playing a big part in the Revolutionary War (that tea-party adventure in Boston was on a whaleship), the Civil War, the Gold Rush and more. History teachers tell me that they too have been unaware of this rich history.

My first real elaborate whaling picture, “New Bedford Boys At Toil”, was made in 1994. I did a border design around the picture which was my habit sometimes in those days (the art directors loved my border designs) and Mystic Seaport in Connecticut later made 6 necktie designs, mainly from that border, utilizing the whale and whale men from the picture which they still sell online and in their store. along with some of my whaling pictures.

In my extensive readings on whaling lore, I discovered a whale named “Mocha Dick.” He was a white whale who rampaged through the Pacific in the 1800’s eating whaleboats and whale men seemingly seeking vengeance on the enemies of his brethren. He was based around Mocha Island off the southern coast of Chile. Mocha is pronounced with a “cha” sound rather than a “ka” sound because it’s Spanish (but try to tell that to the rest of the folks out there who study whaling lore). All the whale men of the era knew of Mocha, including Melville who later used a version of his name for his great Moby Dick.

An art director friend from The Wall Street Journal, Dan Smith asked if I’d like to do a book with him in his newly formed “Strike Three Press.” Dan loves books and he even likes to “make” books –I mean he binds them, hand stitches them etc. He asked me what I would like to do a book about and I quickly said “Mocha Dick”.

Dan went forth and studied up on Mocha Dick and 19thcentury whaling so he could get the “feel” of it for the structure of the book, the typography and so forth.

Dan, with the help of his wife, Virginia Cahill, bound and stitched 32 copies of the book until they ran out of steam (tough job). I had helped them pick out the paper and the cover boards etc. and I executed a suite of 11 linocuts and wrote a brief history of Mocha on each page opposite. We had a wonderful signed and numbered, limited edition of  “The Life and Death of Mocha Dick” the hero white whale of the Pacific.

Later, around  2013, the award winning designer, Rita Marshall was at my house and saw a big picture of Mocha Dick that I had made. Months later she told me that she couldn’t get that picture out of her head and also said that they had a manuscript from a writer named Brian Heinz on Mocha Dick. And, so, another Mocha Dick book was crafted for her company Creative Editions. It’s a rather sophisticated children’s book. Thanks to some great starred revues from places like Kirkus and some mentions on important websites like Brainpickings.org and the Atlantic Magazine’s, we got so many advanced purchases on Amazon that we sold out the first edition two weeks before the book was even released. I was blessed to have a great writer on board that trip around.

The first book, “The Life and Death of Mocha Dick” also sold out it’s 32 copies for $200 each.

It pleases me now that when someone looks up Moby Dick or Mocha Dick on the internet, my name often pops up. I’m so glad I was able to make a connection with this whale and bring his story to more people that didn’t know of him before.

Email Randy Enos

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

The Norman Conquests

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

How to Murder Your Wife

I Yam What I Yam

The Smallest Cartoon Characters in the World

Chicken Gutz

Brought to You in Living Black and White

The Hooker and the Rabbit

Art School Days in the Whorehouse

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Monty Python Comes to Town

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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Blog Syndicate

Cops, Beatings and Cell Phone Videos

It looks like cell phone videos of bad cops is making police all over America shy away from their jobs enough to make the crime rate soar. I’ve had this cartoon in mind for a long time, but for some reason I wasn’t happy with the layout and it took me a long time to draw – too long. I’m still not quite sure about the colors of the thought balloons. Oh well, time to move on, for me and for the police.

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copbeating
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Cartoons

Mitt Newt and Jobs

Mitt Newt and Jobs COLOR © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Speaker, jhomeless, jobs, President, Massachusetts, governor, campaign 2012, income taxes, form 1040, IRS, class warfare, carried interest

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Cartoons

Romney Tax Cloud

Romney Tax Cloud COLOR © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Mitt Romney, President, Massachusetts, governor, campaign 2012, income taxes, form 1040, IRS, class warfare, carried interest

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Cartoons

Romney Tax Returns

Romney Tax Returns COLOR © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Mitt Romney,taxes,tax returns,governor,massachusetts,uncle sam,ladder,republican,presidential campaign

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Blog

More “How to Draw Like Daryl”

People seem to like it when I show my sloppy drawing process, so here it is again with my last three cartoons.

The most recent cartoon has Obama in the pocket of greedy bankers.  I draw with a hard pencil fairly quickly on 11″x17″ paper.  I like a hard pencil because it encourages me not to render and get bogged down in details.  I first thought I would have Obama shaking his fist, and that didn’t work – in fact, my first Obama attempt didn’t look good at all and I drew over it with a sharpie marker (which is quicker than erasing).

Next I did the finished line art, in pencil on a piece of vellum over the rough sketch.  The black and white line art is how most people see the cartoon in the newspaper.  One thing I notice with student cartoonists that that they shy away from using a lot of black.  Heavy blacks stand out on the page and are lots of fun – don’t be afraid of black.

Then I color the image in with Photoshop, with the black lines as a layer over the color layer.  This is for the few newspapers that print color on their op-ed pages and for the web.  I try to keep my colors bright and simple – when I do anything with textures or colors that aren’t clean and bright, I get complaints from editors who say the cartoons look muddy when they are printed.  Newspapers have lousy printing and the cartoons have to work for the worst of them.

I drew the cartoon below when Scott Brown won the senate seat in Massachusetts – an unpleasant day for Obama and the Democrats.  The first decision I had to make was whether to draw Obama or a Dem donkey under the Massachusetts rain cloud – either would be fine, but since Obama’s agenda was taking a hit, and I like to bash Obama, I went with the president.  Here’s the rough sketch.  I printed out a map of Massachusetts that I found on the web and taped it to the paper.

Then I traced it with pencil on vellum, scanned at high contrast so it looks like I drew it in ink.  This is what most people see in the newspaper.

And here is the color version from our site.

This last one, from last week, is bashing the media in Haiti.  I wasn’t happy with the vultures in my rough sketch, and I drew over them in purple Sharpie Marker, quick and dirty.  Nobody is supposed to see this.

Then I trace it nicely on vellum and scan as line for the newspapers.

And I color it in Photoshop …

Categories
Cartoons

Obama and the Massachusetts Election

Obama and the Massachusetts Election COLOR © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Barack Obama, Scott Brown, Massachusetts, rain, senate, election, wet

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Cartoons

Mitt Romney Evolution

Mitt Romney Evolution © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Mitt Romney, president, governor, massachusetts

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Cartoons

Marriage Proposal

Marriage Proposal © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,gay, massachusetts, homosexual, sex, marriage, gay, foundation, crumbled, rights, cry, crying, tears, tissue

Categories
Cartoons

Kerry Christ and Ketchup

Kerry, Christ and Ketchup Color © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,John,Kerry,Teresa,Heinz,President,senator,senate,massachusetts,campaign,ketchup,catsup,Christ,Passion,Mel,Gibson,movie