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The Garden (of Earthly Delights)

My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos, writes more about his illustrious career …

Email Randy Enos

Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

About 20 or 25 years ago I started working on a large linocut, just for myself, entitled “The Garden (of Earthly Delights)”. I’m still working on it and I’ll probably never finish it. Every few months, I pull it out and do a little more on it. It’s tucked away in a closet in my studio and I tend to forget about it. I guess I’ve lost interest. It started out as a grand idea. My “garden” doesn’t have any flowers, vegetables or weeds in it. It doesn’t have any caterpillars, dung beetles or worms. What it has are dozens and dozens of famous cartoon characters in it. My grand plan was to pay homage to all the old wonderful “delights” of the magical world of cartoons.

It’s a kind of street scene hustle bustle with a building behind with windows. The characters pass each other on the cobblestones going to and fro while Superman and Captain Marvel attempt to save Fritzi Ritz who is falling from the roof of the building.

My picture contains, so far, Dick Tracy, Li’l Abner, Krazy Kat, Superman, Captain Marvel, Secret Agent X9, the Gumps, Barney Google, Tillie the Toiler, Popeye, Olive Oyl, Prince Valiant, Alley Oop, Hagar the Horrible,
Captain America, Jiggs & Maggie, Ella Cinders, Li’l Orphan Annie, the Cap’n and the Kids, Smilin’ Jack, Beetle Bailey, Harold Teen, Skippy, Archie Andrews, Moon Mullins, Nancy, Felix the Cat, Happy Hooligan, Smokey Stover, The Little King, Ferd’nand, Fritzi Ritz, Mutt ‘n’ Jeff, Pogo, The Yellow Kid (with “Is dis da gardin?” lettered on his gown), Walt from Gasoline Alley and a few dozen others that I can’t even remember the names of. But, I have a lot of space left and many many more characters to include. I get worn out just thinking about it.

I’m cutting on an old, very hard piece of linoleum which is dark brown in color. They don’t even sell this stuff any more. It’s like engraving on a hard wood block. It holds the finest detail. I don’t know if I have the patience to continue on in the dense detailed style I set for this piece. The big 24X36 lino block is even starting to crack in places but I think I can work around that hazard. The formidable task of inking and printing it when it is finished presents another challenge. I don’t use a press. I print everything by hand so I’d probably have to ink and print it in sections and then paste ’em together or just keep lifting my paper and freshening the ink as I go along. I’d have to find a nice big sheet of fairly thin and absorbent paper to use. But, as I said before, I’ll most likely abandon this project before I finish it. My wife keeps urging me to go on with it, however, and she often gets her way. More than often.

A while back, meaning a few years ago, I decided to see how the work was proceeding and whether or not things were coming out as planned so I actually inked a few small sections and took some quick prints off of it hoping to encourage myself to continue. I’m showing some of them here in this article along with a couple of shots of the big brown block itself.

To make matters worse, I started another picture in 2011 that still isn’t finished. It seems to be going the way of “The Garden”. It’s named “The Conqueror Worm” after my favorite Poe poem. At least with this one I’ve started printing and pasting up. It got interrupted when I worked on my Mocha Dick book and I have never gotten back to it.

Well, if my “Garden” never fulfills its destiny… at least I got a story out of it.

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Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Happy Times in the Morgue

I was the Green Canary

Born in a Volcano

When I was a Famous Chinese Watercolorist

My Most Unusual Art Job

A Duck Goes Into a Grocery Store

A Day With Jonathan Winters and Carol Burnett

Illustrating the Sea

Why I Started Drawing

The Fastest Illustrator in the World!

Me and the GhostBusters

The Bohemian Bohemian

Take it Off … Take it ALL Off!

I Eat Standing Up

The Funniest Cartoon I’ve Ever Seen

The Beatles had a Few Good Tunes

Andy Warhol Meets King Kong

Jacques and the Cowboy

The Gray Lady (The New York Times)

The BIG Eye

Historic Max’s

The Real Moby Dick

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 NCS

Categories
Blog Newsletter Syndicate

I Yam What I Yam

My buddy, Randy Enos, shares his memories of Popeye below. For me, Popeye was about Tom Hattan who inspired me to draw cartoons since I was about three years old, watching The Popeye Show on channel 5 in Los Angeles. I was delighted to meet and talk to Tom many times in later years through the National Cartoonists Society. Tom passed away only a couple of months ago. He was a gentleman, and he inspired lots of cartoonists like me.  That said, Randy’s Popeye experience is entirely different!

Randy Inking Olive Oyl’s skirt.

It all started with Popeye –my career, that is! My first teacher and guru of cartooning was my boss, the head of the cartoon course of The Famous Artists Schools, Forrest Sagendorf (known to everyone as “Bud”). He, aside from managing the cartoon course, drew the Popeye comic books. His relationship with Popeye started back in the 1930’s when he was a high school kid. Bud’s sister somehow knew Elzie Crisler Segar, Popeye’s creator. She suggested that he should hire her brother as an assistant because he was very interested in drawing. Segar did just that and later on as he got to know Bud , they both realized that he was the corner newsboy that Mr. Segar had bought papers from each morning for a few years.

At first, Bud’s duties around the studio were small chores like sweeping up and keeping things in order but as time went on and Bud started driving, he was enlisted in taking Mrs. Segar shopping etc..

Little by little Bud learned how to draw the various characters of Thimble Theater and he became a full blown art assistant on the strip while still going to high school. Until the day he died, Bud’s only drawing style was the Popeye style. It’s the only experience in drawing that he ever had.

Bud went to school during the day and worked on the strip in the evenings until wee hours of the morning. Soon he was frazzled with exhaustion and lack of sleep. It affected his school work. Since Bud was making good money (more than any of his teachers) he quit school to work full time on Popeye. The sailor man who was to become the star of the strip had only entered “Thimble Theater” a little over a year before Bud came on board so he was in on the creation of a lot of characters who were to be part of the American experience like the Jeep, the Sea Hag, Swee’pea and Wimpy. When Segar was looking for a name for the Jeep, Bud suggested “Eugene” as an inside joke for his former classmates who knew that Eugene was the kid who became a rival for the attentions of Bud’s future wife, Nadia.

Years later when Segar died, his funeral was attended by many famous folks including Krazy Kat’s creator and an idol of Segar’s, George Herriman. Herriman came into the church and chose a pew way in the back, sat silently and left early.

After Segar’s death, the strips continued to flow into King Features in New York. They didn’t know that Segar had an assistant. They summoned Bud to New York and offered him the daily strips with a writer or the new comic books which he could do on his own. He took the books. The strips were handled by a succession of artists and writers after that with even Al Capp (Li’l Abner) taking a stab at the writing. He was fired after he introduced a white slavery theme in the strip.

Bud continued on for many years doing the comic books as well as becoming the comics editor at King. Bud once told me how Percy Crosby (Skippy) used to do his strips downstairs in a bar and was always late with them. Bud would have to send someone down to urge him on and collect the strips. Crosby eventually had mental problems and Bud knew that the end had come when Crosby submitted a week of strips that were all identical.

 I lived next door to Bud in Westport and while I worked at the Famous Artists Schools, he started to give me freelance work helping him with the comic books. We would work, in the summer time at two drawing boards, side by side on his screened in porch. At first I was only assigned the blackening in of Olive Oyl’s skirt. Sounds simple, eh? Not with Bud as task master. Bud had a fetish about really dense blacks. No greys were allowed to enter the premises of those skirts. I had to give them several coats. Bud taught me a lot –like, for instance, if you are cutting a lawn and you make the outward perimeter nice and short, the interior of the bed of grass will appear to the casual eye as being the same length. So, if you make the perimeter of Olive’s dress nice and juicy black, it might give the feeling that the whole skirt is the same.

Later on I graduated to creating minor characters that would enter the stories. In each comic book there would be one page which was a short story written by Bud and illustrated with only one picture. I used to marvel at how he would get up from his board and go up to his bedroom to lay down for 5 or 10 minutes to think up a story. He never failed to come back with a beaut’. He was a real pro.

As we worked, Bud would tell me great stories about his life in California and how Segar would hang out with the movie stars like Gary Cooper who he was in a gun club with. Bud missed California.

He had a few hobbies. He collected Juke boxes and he built doll houses and other miniatures like Popeye’s house which had a mother-in-law room upstairs with no windows or doors. The details in these houses were amazing. Every little object, like the rolled up newspaper on the lawn thrown by the paper boy, was infused with loving detail.

His crowning achievement, however, was his art museum. It had rooms galore, in which hung drawings by every artist that Bud knew or could wrest a drawing from. Nadia worked full time, writing to Fellini, Salvadore Dali, and every artist she could think of. I know Fellini donated a drawing and so did many others. We were all asked to do a small drawing that was only one square inch big. Bud framed each picture with tiny pieces of molding and hung them in his museum. When finished, the museum travelled to many venues. Years after Bud died, I heard that Nadia sold it.

At the elbow of this master cartoonist, I started my own career. He was always so supportive of me and taught me so much. As a result, the character Popeye has always held a special place in my heart and a little ripple of familial recognition wafts through me brain when I see his image. He’s like an old old friend or a family member. Popeye’s special way of speaking with mangled spelling was a boon to a cartoonist like Bud who was a very bad speller and actually lettered the strip with a dictionary on his lap.

When I go to the grocery store, my list has often been concocted with Popeye in mind when I write “Englitch muffings” or “sanrich meat”.

And a dog is always a “dorg”.

And, I always eats me spinach!

Email Randy Enos
 

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

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

Categories
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

Categories
Blog

Robin Williams Memorial Cartoons

Robin Williams was fun, I’m sorry to see him go.  Here’s my quick Robin Williams cartoon that I knocked out this afternoon. We have a growing collection of obit cartoons on Cagle.com.

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