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The Smallest Cartoon Characters In The World

Here’s my buddy, Randy Enos , writing about more of his comic strips …


Over the span of my career, every now and then, I would suddenly get the urge to create and sell a syndicated comic strip. This would happen every 5 years or so. Nothing much came of it except for the Chicken Gutz strip which was a National Lampoon strip and the two strips for Playboy which I’ve written about recently.

I would really get that urge to dump the illustration work for a nice steady job of doing a syndicated daily comic strip. Here were some of my ideas:

“Mabel & Jones” – I used to see this older couple on the beach every summer in Westport. A little short stocky woman with her tallish, skinny, droopy shouldered constant escort. I don’t think they were married. The woman was always frowning and as they walked along the edge of the surf, down the length of the beach past all the young, tanned, pretty Westport bathers, she would be haranguing him about something or other. They were there all the time. When they weren’t walking, they would be sitting, quietly, sadly on one of the cement benches and before long she would start in on him again. He never said a word but would just gaze off into space looking over the vast expanse of Long Island Sound. He always had a droopy hat on. I decided that I should do a strip featuring them and I named them “Mabel” (I always liked the name Mabel. We had a Mabel’s Diner in Westport) and I picked the nice, very common name of “Jones” for my woebegone hero sufferer. I never sold this idea.

“Specks” featuring the smaller cartoon characters in the world.

“As The Tears Jerk”- This was kind of a soap opera strip. I ran a few in the Lampoon.

“Magnificent Max and the Major”- This strip found publication in “The Electric Company” kids’ magazine.

But, the one strip that I thought was the most creative of my endeavors was:

“Specks-the smallest cartoon characters in the world”- I used it as a space filler below Chicken Gutz in the Lampoon a few times but I also submitted it to all the syndicates. The only one that responded was King Features. The comics editor said, “Wow, this is different for you, Randy. I like it a lot, but, I don’t know, I think newspaper editors would think we were nuts!”

I replied, “Oh, go ahead give it a try… think of it… it would be groundbreaking! Take a chance!”

But, of course… it never happened.

I had a lot of fun doing it though.

“Dux”- At one time, here on the horse farm, we accumulated a whole bunch of ducks. They lived in one of the horse stalls at night and swam on our pond during the day. It started out with two domestic ducks who ended up mating with some mallards and, first thing you know, we had about 15 ducks mixed wild and domestic. So, naturally I decided to do a strip featuring ducks. I named it “Dux”. I never sold this idea either.

Email Randy Enos
 

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

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 Newsletter Syndicate

Chicken Gutz

I loved Chicken Gutz when I was in high school and college –by my buddy, our brilliant cartoonist, Randy Enos. Randy writes about the strip here …

If I’m ever remembered for anything at all, after I pass on to that great slanted drawing board in the sky, it’ll most likely be for Chicken Gutz, the comic strip I created for The National Lampoon in the early 1970’s. Shortly after I started illustrating for them, they instituted their Funny Pages. They asked me and a goodly number of other cartoonists to come up with some strips that would run every month. My contribution was Chicken Gutz. He was a little man who wore a tall black hat upon which stood a bird. The bird was never named and functioned as a spokesman (or spokesbird) commenting on and criticizing  the various goings on that unfolded below him. The little man in the hat was totally unaware of the bird but the bird was certainly aware of the man.

The name Chicken Gutz came from a phrase my high school friends were always saying, “suck chicken guts”. The idea of a bird on someone’s head came from a photo I once saw of a girl in a Greenwich Village club that had a big crow standing on her head. I started doing a little man with a bird on his head. Chicken Gutz first appeared in an animated commercial I had done for an insurance company. Later when I worked at Pablo Ferro Films, I did a painting that was on a piano hinge to cover our rear projection screen. The painting was of a man with a bird on his head confronted by a bird with a man on his head.

My intention with the strip was to create a really different kind of comic strip than was being seen in the venues of the day. I wanted to break some rules. I wanted it to be totally free to pursue any avenues I wished to pursue.

The first thing that was different was that I lettered most of the balloons in cursive or what we used to call “long-hand.” I left myself free to smudge the ink, spatter it, blob it, and to generally create a mess. In Chicken Gutz, trees and brooks and rocks could talk, God or the Devil might make an appearance, the characters could talk to the reader and even the very structure (the panel outlines, word balloons etc.) of the strip could be subject to break-downs. Gravity and other laws were always ignored in favor of, hopefully, a laugh. I indulged my interest in the nostalgia of the old radio days and my love of the old early comics. I didn’t want it to look like anyone else’s style and I think I succeeded. The strip could be a nightmare to the copy editor, the long-suffering and wonderful Louise Gikow, who once advised me to just put a comma after every word because it would be easier to remove the unnecessary ones than to put in all the necessary ones. But, she was great because she always understood the purposeful misspellings.

One important feature of the Gutz strip was the use of commentary around the edges of the panels in which I would write notes to friends, fake advertisements, and all sorts of ridiculous space fillers. I couldn’t seem to be able to tolerate empty space in the panels. All this seemed to appeal to my readers who would write to me in an effort to get their names in the strip. One fellow wanted to propose to his girlfriend through the strip –so he did. I lost a wallet in a taxi in New York (again) and I thanked the driver, Nelson Cisneros in the strip when he returned it to me. Another guy named Gene mailed me an old advertisement depicting a 50’s woman opening a refrigerator. He said that he was hoping to get his name in the strip by doing so. I replied (in a border of the strip) that “No, Gene, you don’t get your name in the strip by mailing me a lousy advertisement of a woman opening a refrigerator!” One of my friends “Kathryn from Nantucket” almost became a regular character in the strip because I mentioned her so much. In the strip shown here in the column, you can see my reference to her singing at the “Brotherhood of Thieves” in Nantucket over on the right side of the last panel. Because of this note, an old high school friend of hers reunited with her by showing up one day while she was singing.

I got a lot of fan mail on the strip even years and years after it had ceased publication. I also got presents from fans like a 16” high stained glass replica of Mr. Gutz. I got a little stuffed Chicken Gutz doll, an embroidered Gutz and also a denim shirt with a large Gutz embroidered on the back. I got an actual laboratory slide of chicken guts and some sort of a partial rubber face (medical?) and a big set of colorful Mexican cards that have pictures of animals, humans and objects with the Spanish names. I lined the doorway of my studio with them. My biggest fan was a girl named Snooki that wrote me voluminous tomes. She was very creative sometimes writing in mirror image. I never met Snooki but I was privy to every turn in her life from being a Black Oak Arkansas groupie to finally a married woman with a daughter. Snooki wrote to only three people, Charles Manson, David Bowie and me. She threatened to come to visit me a few times but never did. She phoned me once or twice. I actually heard from her a couple of years ago.

Gutz appeared as a half- page for a while and then a full page (or the other way around. I forget). He appeared only once in color in a Christmas issue.

He also appeared later on in two long features in the same issue of the Fantagraphics “Blab” (issue 18).

He has also appeared in a new magazine called American Bystander.

A while back, I wondered what it would be like to do a daily strip because I have never done one. So, I created a blog where I could resurrect my old tall hatted friend and do a strip a day. I think I did about 45 or so but got derailed by a big children’s book project. You can see my aborted daily strip efforts here: http://chickengutz.blogspot.com/

One experience with the fans sticks in my mind. Bobby London who did a strip for the Lampoon (and also Playboy) called Dirty Duck was staying with Leann and me for a while. I introduced Bobby to Bud Sagendorf who drew Popeye. Many years later after Bud died, Bobby ended up doing Popeye.

One day I got a letter from a Gutz fan and having nothing else to do that day, I suggested to Bobby that we both draw some fantastic pictures for the college kid. We spent all day making the most elaborate drawings and sent them off knowing that it would blow this kid’s mind. I was right –he sent back the most fantastic letter describing his incredulity when he opened our package. He promised to be our slave, wash our cars, etc., forever and ever.

You see, cartooning can sometimes be a whole lot of fun.

“Don’t neglect that right back fender there!”

Email Randy Enos
 

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

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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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

Email Randy

 

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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Randy and the National Lampoon

Here’s another memory from our cartoonist Randy Enos …

New Magazine in Town

One day in the 70’s, I was trudging along Madison Avenue, doing my rounds, lugging my big black portfolio, when I bumped into the cartoonist Stan Mack. After I helped him to his feet, he told me about a new magazine that had come to town from Harvard, The National Lampoon.

Stan said, “Get over there and show ’em your stuff, everybody’s working for them!” So, I went down the street to 59th and went up to the offices they shared with Weight Watchers to meet the art director Michael Gross. After looking through my portfolio, he gave me an assignment and for the next 15 years, I worked for the humor magazine (long after the founders Henry Beard and Doug Kenney and even Mike Gross had left).

I became very close friends with Mike and his family until his wife and finally, he, died just a few years ago. I worked with him through his stints at Esquire, Mobil Oil, his own design firm, an avant garde, sophisticated porno site and his Hollywood career, producing films like Ghost Busters.

Shortly after I had joined the Lampoon family, I was asked to contribute a comic strip to their new Funny Pages. My strip Chicken Gutz went on for many years. Occasionally I would throw in additional comic strips like my As The Tears Jerk which was a kind of soap opera strip and Specks-the smallest cartoon characters in the world which was a tiny strip consisting of tiny spots which talked to each other.

The work I did illustration-wise for the magazine was different than my regular lino-cut stuff I did for Time, The New York Times, N.B.C., Playboy, etc. in that I didn’t use my own style. Because of the nature of the material, I was required to assume other styles in parody. So, I did Picasso, Robert Crumb, Heinz Edelman (Yellow Submarine), Rube Goldberg etc..

I worked a lot on features written by Michael O’Donoghue, Sean Kelly, Doug Kenney and others. BUT… along with this, I was sometimes asked to pose in photo shoot parodies. One such shoot occurred on a day on which I had delivered a job to them and was on my out the door. I was getting very sick with the flu or something and I wanted to rush home. Mike Gross stopped me and pleaded with me to do this photo shoot. He said, “I know what a ham you are and you’re perfect for this. So … I did it. It was the poster for The National Lampoon Show which Ivan Reitman was producing. It starred Belushi and Radner and others (before Saturday Night Live).

The poster (below) consisted of a large title at the top and then four panels showing a back view of me in a trench coat trying to get a pretty model to laugh.

Panel one: I’m giving myself a hotfoot.

Panel two: I’m tipping my top hat. There’s a rubber chicken draped across my noggin.

Panel three: I’m slamming an ice cream cone into my head (remember, I’m getting very sick at this point). We went through a huge box of ice cream cones (Hagen Dazs, no less) for take after take after take. All through my futile antics, the model is just bored… UNTIL in …

Panel four: I open my trench coat and she dies laughing. These posters were all over New York. Everywhere I went I saw the poster and the creative work done by grafitti thugs who portrayed graphically what the model was looking at.

At that time, my wife was doing a lot of acting in New York and one day she was stepping off a subway train with one of the actors that was in the play with her at the time. He had never met me. As they stepped off, guess what was right in front of them.

Without missing a beat, my wife said, “Oh, by the way, this is my husband.”

–Randy Enos

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Randy Remembers the NCS

My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos, will be writing some short remembrances here in the blog; he has had a long career with many stories that he needs to tell. Randy has had a fantastic career, drawing for all the top publications; he was a regular in the old National Lampoon with his Chicken Gutz comic. Randy was working with all the top cartoonists and illustrators in the New York scene since the year I was born (1956). Randy draws his editorial cartoons with a knife, cutting into linoleum block, backwards. Check out his archive.

 

An Evening at the Society

In the late 50’s into the early 60’s, I often attended the meetings of The National Cartoonists Society as a guest of my friend and co-worker Pete Wells (once a Katzenjammer Kids cartoonist). The meetings were held in New York at the old Lamb’s Club which was really a club for actors, playwrights and the like. I would often see some very familiar faces of old timey actors there because they all enjoyed honorary membership in the Society as exchange for loaning us their home for our meetings.

On this one night, I was employed drinking at the bar, half listening to the two guys standing next to me discussing their work, but mostly I was paying attention to the antics of the Smokey Stover cartoonist, Bill Holman, who was gleefully glad-handing every one who approached and chortling like a little kid when they were “shocked” by the buzzer he had concealed in his right hand.

One of the two next to me was the great DC comics artist Jerry Robinson. I don’t remember who the other guy was. As I listened to them, I became aware of a small man with a large head who had approached and was in rapt attention to the speakers, darting his enormous noggin back and forth between them as though watching a tennis match. Every now and then he would attempt to interject something to no avail. He would say, “Hey… hey, fellas”. This went on for a time and then, through utter frustration, he finally exploded, “Hey, you guys. You never talk to me!” It was then that I recognized one of the founders of the Society, Otto Soglow, former political cartoonist who was now famous for “The Little King”.

“You realistic guys never want to talk to me” he went on, “I draw realistic too… I do. I draw realistic . I can’t help it… that’s the way people look to me!”

Well the evening went on to include a near fist fight between a very drunk Walt Kelly and the evening’s guest speaker, my favorite radio guy Jean Shepherd (A Christmas Story) who was dressed in a gamy tux with holes in his socks.

It was just another typical evening at the Cartoonists Society.

–Randall Enos

PS from Randy:
Daryl, In case you’re wondering what the fight between Shepherd and Kelly was all about, here’s what transpired:

Shepherd’s talk that evening was about freedom and bucking the system and speaking out. He was admonishing a lot of the cartoonists for being very tame and not pushing the boundaries etc.. At that time in his career he was without a sponsor. There were brief periods when he did have a sponsor but he was so irreverent to them that it never worked out very well. He was fired at one point and then re-instated when his listening audience rose up and demanded his return. so, I tell you this because Kelly’s point was that Shepherd could play Mr. High & Mighty because he didn’t have sponsors to deal with and answer to while the cartoonists worked for papers that had editors and ads to contend with and didn’t have that freedom. Kelly was very drunk at that point in the evening and started shouting from the floor, openly arguing nastily with Shepherd. It got so fierce that I honestly thought they were going to come to blows but finally Kelly staggered off and left the building.

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Obama Knot and The National Lampoon

Here’s my new cartoon – Obama tied in a knot.  As I was watching the inauguration it seemed to me that Obama won’t be moving too quickly to make all the changes he urged in his speech – therefore, he’s tied up in a knot.  Not too deep, but fun to draw.  Here is the rough pencil sketch …

ObamaKnotSketch600 Obama Knot and The National Lampoon cartoons

I had to erase and think a bit to figure out how to tie the president into a knot. I was a lousy boy scout.  Here he is in line art, the way most people will see the cartoon in the newspapers.

ObamaKnot600BW Obama Knot and The National Lampoon cartoons

… and here he is in color.

Obama600WideColor Obama Knot and The National Lampoon cartoons

And here is the cartoon the very next day in my local newspaper (The Santa Barbara News-Press).

NewsPressKnot600wide Obama Knot and The National Lampoon cartoons

3634918376 16c64e4bc8 o Obama Knot and The National Lampoon cartoonsMy previous cartoon was based on a famous old National Lampoon cover. I loved the old National Lampoon – this great one is from 1973, when I was a junior in high school. One of my favorite parts of the National Lampoon was the Chicken Guts comics by Randall Enos – who I now syndicate as an editorial cartoonist!

Unfortunately, I don’t think this cartoon will get reprinted much, because it is name-calling-Republican-bashing, because it requires some popular cultural knowledge, and because it is in a vertical format, which doesn’t fit the standard hole that editors leave open for the editorial cartoon.  Oh well – I’m the boss here at Cagle Cartoons, so I can draw what I want, even if nobody else wants it.

125654 600 Obama Knot and The National Lampoon cartoons

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National Buffoons

National Buffoons © Daryl Cagle,CagleCartoons.com,Republicans,gun,pistol,handgun,debt ceiling,deficit spending,dog,shoot,kill,National Lampoon,magazine,Debt Ceiling