Randall Enos – DarylCagle.com

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

I was the Green Canary

Tags Dizzy Gillespie, Randall Enos, Randy Enos

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Favorite Cartoons of the Decade

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date December 2, 2019

Here is my selection of my favorite cartoons of the decade. See them on the USA Today site here.

I pitched the idea to Gannett of running collections of favorite cartoons of the decade every day in December, the last month of the decade, with a selection by a different cartoonist each day. We, along with USA Today, selected the CagleCartoonists we would invite to participate and we asked them each to choose their favorite cartoons from the past ten years. I submitted twenty-nine batches of cartoons, selected by each of twenty-nine of our CagleCartoonists. USA Today plans on showcasing their own Gannett employee cartoonists, Thompson, Marlette, Murphy and Archer, through Thursday, with our CagleCartoonists finishing out the month, starting this Friday with Pat Bagley.

USA Today started off their daily, decade slideshows today with their talented cartoonist, Mike Thompson, who also did the work of laying all of these collections out for The USA Today Network sites (that includes the individual Web sites for all of Gannett’s 100+ daily newspapers). Visit USA Today’s Opinion page online to see these every day this month. Click on each cartoon in each slideshow to see a full-screen, high-resolution version of each cartoon, which is very nice.

It is very difficult to select a small batch of cartoons to represent an entire decade!!

Getting twenty-nine CagleCartoonists to each select a decade of favorites was challenging. Obama certainly got shorted as many cartoonists are obsessed with Trump now. A couple of cartoonists selected only Trump-bashing cartoons, which made for a poor representation of the decade –but hey, the fact that the cartoonists chose their own favorites made this project interesting. Some cartoonists, who have been with us for less than ten years, had to dig into their personal archives to cover the whole decade, so some of the cartoons haven’t been seen on Cagle.com. New Yorker/Mad Magazine/graphic-novelist Peter Kuper joined CagleCartoons.com just a couple of months ago and had to dig up his whole collection from his magazine gag cartoon archives. Dave Whamond and Ed Wexler, who joined us more recently, reached into their vaults for some of their early-decade cartoons; Ed selected some from when he was regularly drawing for US News & World Report magazine. Mike Keefe and Bill Schorr came out of their recent retirements to contribute their selections of favorites.

I wouldn’t call these selections the “best” of the decade, they are just the artists’ choices. I also can’t say that they represent the decade well (but what the heck).

Look at our other, great collections of Cartoons Favorites of the Decade, selected by the artists.
Pat Bagley Decade!
Nate Beeler Decade!
Daryl Cagle Decade!
Patrick Chappatte Decade!
John Cole Decade!
John Darkow Decade!
Bill Day Decade!
Sean Delonas Decade!
Bob Englehart Decade!
Randall Enos Decade!
Dave Granlund Decade!
Taylor Jones Decade!
Mike Keefe Decade!
Peter Kuper Decade!
Jeff Koterba Decade!
RJ Matson Decade!
Gary McCoy Decade!
Rick McKee Decade!
Milt Priggee Decade!
Bruce Plante Decade!
Steve Sack Decade!

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

Happy Times in the Morgue

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date October 20, 2019

My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos, writes today about his trips to the library for photo scrap (this is something I also did frequently as a young illustrator in Manhattan, before the internet, running up to the big public library’s big photo-scrap morgue on 42nd Street (the library with the big lion statues in front); my second home in those days.)

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

In my early days as an illustrator, like all the other illustrators, I kept a picture file of various things I might have to draw on an assignment. I’d have pictures of: trucks, cars, tractors, motorcycles, barns, rockets, famous people, etc.. I’d regularly clip up magazines for this purpose. Because I didn’t draw in a realistic manner, I didn’t have to keep the extensive kinds of files that my realist friends did. I could just invent and cartoon most of my material. I could sometimes draw a motorcycle, for instance, in a very fanciful way with strange gears and funny faucets sticking out all over, but, occasionally more realism was required.

I needed pictures of famous people of the day more than anything else because I was doing a lot of caricaturing for N.B.C., The National Lampoon, The Nation, The New York Times, etc.

These files, that all the illustrators kept, were called “morgues”. Some illustrators required so much attention to this collection of source material that they would hire somebody to clip pictures and organize their morgues for them. It could be a full time job.

A typical extensive file was kept by Al Dorne, my boss at The Famous Artists Schools. When he retired from doing illustrations and eventually moved to Westport to work full time at the schools, he put his morgue in our library there at FAS for all the instructors to be able to use. It was a great resource for us along with the really fine art books that were there and the magazines like Graphis from Switzerland and Gebrauschsgraphik from Germany which turned out to be a giant influence on me and my own work.

At home, I had the World Book encyclopedia and I still use it in my studio along with a world atlas, copies of the old Sears Roebuck catalogs and some books on costume etc..

We were fortunate in Westport to have a little downtown library that was geared up for illustrators. They had nice picture files and when I, or some other illustrator, would just walk in the front door of the library, the woman at the desk would shout over and say, “What do you need?” She’d make a call to the picture files and in 5 minutes, we’d have folders brought up to the desk full of just the pictures we needed. It was a very comfortable, friendly, warm library with great art books. You could settle down cross-legged on the floor in a small, narrow passageway in the stacks where the art books were or sit in a window seat looking out over the Saugatuck River and read books that other communities who were not blessed with a population of cartoonists and illustrators would not even have on their shelves. That part of the old library is now a Starbucks, because, over time, with the growth in population, the library felt they needed a new building and so it came to pass that on a nearby location, a big brand new library was constructed. This time they had a small room off the big entrance area that was designated for the picture morgue; the walls were lined with file drawers that contained hundreds and hundreds of clipped magazine pictures and glossy photos of famous people. Into this collection came the Al Dorne files from FAS along with other files donated by famous illustrators who had retired from the business. When you went into this room, you’d always find a fellow cartoonist or illustrator to gab with. It was a great meeting place for some of the most illustrious illustrators of the day. You could compare notes, talk about the business and give each other tips on whatever we happened to be looking up. One illustrator had a vast (and I mean vast) collection of costumes that he would rent out to other illustrators to use as reference. This guy had everything in his collection. He even had one of Hitler’s actual hats!

The only problem with some of the material in the Dorne file, for instance, was that it was outdated, so, the library employed people to just keep clipping and updating all the files.

But, alas, the days of the computer and its attendant internet came along and enabled us all to stay at home and access all the reference we needed instantly without the burden of having to socialize with other cartoonists and illustrators. Pardon me while I catch this tear rolling down my cheek.

The library shut down for a while and did a major reconstruction resulting in a bigger, very high-ceilinged main room which allowed for local artists to have a personal month-long exhibit of their work. In the middle of this area, a few tables contained the very latest art books. I devoured them regularly. They also put in a little coffee nook near the entrance.

The population of Westport was changing. The illustrators were moving out and going back home to Texas. They didn’t need to be near New York City anymore, nor did they need libraries with picture files. Rich folks in the financial businesses were moving in. Pretty soon there was nary an illustrator left. I, myself, moved to nearby Easton to my own little horse farm to escape the onslaught of the wealthy new residents who didn’t even know that Westport was once known as the illustrators’ town. Eventually Max’s art store had to shut down and the library decided to have an even bigger re-do.

I hadn’t been in to the library for quite a while until recently when I happened to be in the vicinity (at a Save the Planet rally) and had to go to the bathroom. My wife and I walked over to the library. It took us quite a while to locate the entrance. They had completely changed the building around. When inside, I couldn’t believe my eyes. there were some sort of baffles, looked like sails up at the top of the high ceiling. I searched for the bathrooms because where they used to be was now a utility closet. When I finally found them, I discovered that they were approximately where the old picture file room, the morgue used to be. The men’s room was sparse and all-over decorated with a pattern of elongated rectangles in two or three shades of gray that I had seen repeated in the library’s entrance way and pretty much over all the flooring. It was very cold and impersonal. when I went to the sink, it took me quite a while to figure out why there were no faucets or hand dryers but just a horizontal chrome bar where a faucet normally would be. This bar functioned as a dispenser of hot and cold water and a little almost imperceptible symbol on the right side of it told me that it might be a hand dryer if I passed my hand under it. My mind flashed back to the old library on the Post Road where I would usually find a homeless guy washing his delicates and himself in the men’s room. I was thinking that the poor man could never negotiate this ever so clever, robotic, state-of-the-art, chic apparatus. I wondered where the poor fellow hung out now. Certainly not in this rich man’s paradise.

I went back out into the library’s main room. I didn’t see anybody sitting reading books but I did see a woman looking at a lap top. I looked around for the checkout counter which used to be manned by several people while a line of people laden with books waited to check them out. There wasn’t any. I did see a very small desk with a sign that read “Patrons’ Desk”. I decided to inquire about where one would find the new latest art books. The woman there didn’t know so she asked another library woman standing nearby. She didn’t know but she asked a man stacking a small shelf from his cart. He said he didn’t know but he showed me a book on his shelf on ceramics. I looked fondly up to where a second floor full of art books used to exist. There was no second floor there anymore. We passed a small desk which was labeled “Podcast Station”. there were microphones and head-sets. Inexplicably, there was a very wide set of stairs leading up and then down into another section of the big main room. On the stairs were a few leather, bean-bag chairs which were unoccupied. It was all very upgrade and ultra-chic like a Sunday spread in The New York Times. The whole area that we were in at that point used to be lined with stacks and stacks of shelved books. I saw very few books anywhere but there were a lot of movie CD’s and big screens with projections of one thing or another. Gone were all the little computer stations that had replaced the old card catalogs. Oh, and the little coffee bar had been replaced by a full-blown cafe eatery. The eatery was full but the rest of the library had very few people in it.

By carefully reading all the signs, and a few wrong turns, we were thankfully able to find our way out of the building but it wasn’t easy, believe me.

They had surgically removed all the heart, goodness, calm, love, spirit, kindness, quiet, charm, warmth, tranquility, peacefulness, generosity, reverence, simplicity, intelligence and meaning of the old library and replaced it all with overly designed superficial techno glitz.

If I wanted to take a longer trip away from my house, I could find myself at the Pequot Library. It’s in a very old charming brown castle-like building. It’s small, the floors creak. There are old card catalogs where you look up the desired book. There is a good-sized room with a big fireplace which is furnished with large logs in the winter so visitors can sit in big comfortable easy chairs and read in front of the fire. it’s a real trip to wander through the old book stacks. I haven’t been there in a long while but, at least I know somewhere where the spirit of the reverence of books is still alive … or, is it?

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Tags connecticut, Randall Enos, Westport Public Library

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

I Was The Green Canary

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date September 29, 2019

This is by my green, canary, cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos!

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

I know exactly where I was standing when I heard that President Roosevelt had died. I was standing on our sun porch. I was also on that same sun porch when Babe Ruth died. When I heard that World War 2 had ended, I was just about to jump into my red cart on the top of the Campbell St. hill and take a fast ride down. People burst from the houses shouting and crying out the news! When President Kennedy was shot, I was standing next to Barney Thompson’s drawing board at The Famous Artists Schools talking to him when someone burst in to tell us the news. One of the other cartoonists said, “Good!” I was working on a Playboy illustration in my studio when I heard that Bobby Kennedy was shot. We tend to remember where we were when these important events took place.

I was sitting on the front steps of Ottello Breda’s house with 2 or 3 friends when we saw the first issue of Mad Comics in 1952. We were stunned. A comic book in black and white that made fun of EVERYTHING!

Ottello was one of my best friends and when we were younger in the primary school years, he was the only other kid I knew that was a member of Captain Midnight’s Secret Squadron and possessed a secret decoder badge (free with several labels from Ovaltine) by which one could get clues as to what was going to happen in the next day’s radio adventure of Captain Midnight who came on at 5:15. “The Shark will cause trouble for Captain Midnight!”

I had millions of comic books like every other kid and we could always be found on somebody’s front porch steps reading, trading and discussing them. My very favorites were, “Captain Marvel Jr.” (I was lucky enough in later years to work with and learn from the artist of that book, Barney (Bud) Thompson), “Little Lulu” and “Hawkman” (I thought he had the coolest costume of all the super heros). Another was “The Boy Commandos”. God, I loved the Boy Commandos. They were 4 kids from the U.S., England , France and Holland who, with the help of their leader a grownup named Captain Rip Carter, fought the Nazis. My favorite kid was the one from the U.S. named “Brooklyn”. He wore a red derby and carried a machine gun. They were all orphans and they were tough. The only thing that always bothered me about them was that the French kid, Andre, was always saying “Oy oy!” It was many years before I realized that what he was saying was the French word “Oui”.

But, of course, there were hundreds of other comics and I devoured them all despite my father’s warnings that they would rot my brain. When I went off to art school, he cleaned out my precious collection. In those days we were all under the scornful eyes of our disapproving parents but we continued on with our sinful pursuit.

One of my favorite comic book trading friends was Brian. We walked to school each morning together. All we talked about was comic books. We lived in a comic book world of our own so it wasn’t hard for me to convince Brian that The Green Canary was, indeed, a real superhero who walked among us. Over a period of time, I had created this fictional character who, I insisted, really existed in our town of New Bedford. I knew people who had seen him, I told Brian. He was skeptical, of course, so it behooved me to go further in my deception. I started to leave little notes to Brian and myself on the path we took to school. It was my habit to walk across the Common to his house in the morning and then we’d go back a block or two to the Common and walk up to our school which was at the top. I would place the notes off to the side of the path we took and then zip down to Brian’s house to pick him up. As we’d walk along, I would suddenly spy something off near a bush.

“Hey, Brian, looks like a little piece of paper over there with some writing on it!”

Young Randy in knickers.

We’d rush over and read the latest note from The Green Canary. Brian was so caught up in this fantasy world of super heros that he actually was buying my little trickery. I, of course, was starting to actually believe that I was, indeed, a super hero named The Green Canary. Why I came up with that absurd name for a champion of justice, I’ll never know. We always had canaries in the house when I was a kid so that was probably the problem right there. It reached a point that I started to create a costume for myself from handy items in my wardrobe with the help of a towel cape and other stuff.. I also had a black (or was it green?) mask (Lone Ranger style). I had boots. I fashioned some sort of hood for my head, etc.. I was dying to make an appearance to Brian to clinch the deception I had engineered, so one day, the note on the path was an invitation for us to actually SEE the Green Canary. A date was written there along with a time and a place for us to be when the hero would make his appearance. Coincidentally enough, the “viewing” was to be at the corner of Campbell St. and Smith St. where my house was. Brian and I were to be there at 2 in the afternoon and we were to look down the street one block to Pleasant St. where the Canary was to appear.

The day arrived and so did 2 o’clock which found me suitably attired in my patchwork quilt of a costume and waiting for my gullible friend. THERE HE WAS! He peered down at me in disbelief. I struck the best super hero pose I could come up with and waved my hand in a comradely gesture and then… dove off where he couldn’t see me and quickly tore off my costume and ran around a back way to the corner where Brian stood. I apologized for being late and asked if he had indeed seen the Canary. HE HAD! And I had missed the chance of a lifetime.

Well, that was long long ago. It was back when you had to wait an hour after eating a tuna fish sandwich before you could go swimming at the beach.It was a time when all else would vanish and you could get swept up and lost in the intoxicating world of flying heroes and evil, fantastic villains. Goodness and bravery always won. A time when Joe Palooka and Superman took time out of their busy schedule to do combat with Hitler himself. Where a force so evil would sometimes take the combined effort of super heros from different comic books that would come together to make this world a better place. A heady, hypnotizing world where you shut out the real world as you turned the pages of a 10 cent comic book and could just faintly… ever so faintly, hear your mom and pop shouting “You’ll rot your brain”.

SO, if, by any chance, you happen to be out there, Brian, and you just happen somehow to be reading this story, I feel… I guess that I can now finally reveal that I…was………… The Green Canary!

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Tags Barney (Bud) Thompson, Captain Marvel Jr., Captain Rip Carter, Hawkman, Little Lulu, Ottello Breda, Randall Enos, Randy Enos, The Boy Commandos

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Born in a Volcano

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date September 25, 2019

This is by my Azorean, Portuguese cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos!

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

I am of Azorean Portuguese heritage. Both sides of my family came from the same island in the small group of islands called the Azores which lie 800 miles off the coast of Portugal in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. My mother’s side of the family came from one side of the island (which is the largest island of the nine) and my father’s side of the family came from the other side. My father came to this country when he was 10 years old in 1910. My mother was born in New Bedford (a final destination for many Azoreans).

The Azores are the tips of volcanoes that are sticking up in the ocean. My father was born in a little village called Sete Cidades (7 cities) which sits in a green valley in the crater of a volcano which last erupted in the 1700’s. No one knows why they called it 7 cities.

My mother’s mother, my Grandma Sarah or Serafina, was sent for by an American- Portuguese man who fell in love with her photo in the home of his neighbor who was a relative of hers. He paid her way to come to this country so he could marry her. But, he made a deal that if she got here and he decided not to marry her, they would pay him back. She left her job wrapping cigars in the old country and came to America where he married her. She was 13 yrs. old. She had 4 children of which my mother was the youngest. Her husband, my grandfather, died just before I was born, so my Grandma came to live with us. She was illiterate (like our president) until she died at 86. She never learned to read or write. She didn’t even know when her birthday was. She cooked and baby-sat my sister and I so my parents could both work.

Our flight was full of Portuguese/Americans who go every year to visit relatives. My wife, Leann and I were the only people on the flight that couldn’t speak Portuguese. They didn’t even translate the in-flight instructions in English because they assumed that everyone knew Portuguese. I spoke it when I was little but lost it later on retaining the ability to understand it when I heard it spoken… but I eventually lost that too because I spent years away from any Portuguese speaking people. I listened to a lot of tapes to bone up on the language before our trip and so much came back to me and I really impressed Leann when we got over there.

My Father’s Village

We stayed on Sao Miguel (St. Michael) which is where my family is from and is the largest of the nine islands. We took a room at a horse farm (Where else? We own a horse farm here in Connecticut) where the new Swedish owners gave lessons and riding excursions to their clients, a lot of whom were German tourists. Back in 2001, it had been owned by Portuguese, who I had talked to on the phone. We saw them, they owned another horse facility at the time we were there.

We visited three of the nine islands in our stay. My father had never told me how beautiful it was there. I’ve been to many countries in Europe and I have never seen anything as beautiful as the Azores. I would urge anyone reading this to NOT go there because the less tourists, the better. That’s one thing I liked about it. I saw practically no tourists except a few from mainland Portugal. The air is pure and sweet smelling, the islands are famous for the flora and their pineapples were the most amazingly sweet and often were included in meals. Even though the Azores is about latitudinally opposite New York, it is tropical in climate and is often spoken of in relation to Hawaii. You can quickly drive up to high points on the volcanic slopes and look out across the vast Atlantic. Breathtaking!

We were on a tiny dot of an island in the middle of the huge Atlantic Ocean, far from home… and yet… I was in a restaurant when a woman, who found out that I was an illustrator came up to me and asked if I knew Murray Tinkelman. Murray used to love that story.

Maria Has Gone into Ribeiras With All Five of the Newborn Lambs”. In this picture there is no Maria or lambs

When I came home, I decided to chronicle my trip with a suite of fairly large linocuts. I called it The Portuguese Prints and I put up a show of them at the Society of Illustrators in New York. I did a couple of things that were different for me with them. I wanted to be as spontaneous as possible and to reflect the feelings I had about the islands and to reflect the very texture of the place. Here’s what I did:

I “drew” my pictures on the blocks of linoleum free-hand with the lino cutter. In other words, I didn’t pencil it on the block first or even make any sketches whatsoever. I just dove in with the cutting gouge. It’s scary to work that way but I wanted a “primitive”, visceral look. As it was, my hand was too smart and they didn’t come out as primitive looking as I had hoped. Another thing I tried was to make several prints of each block.. some light and grayish ranging all the way to really black prints. I used color only a little in a couple of the eventual 11 pieces. I made a collage for the finished pieces, in each case, so that, in every picture, there are different tones of gray and black areas. I also let the block print in a grainy, textural way, in many cases to simulate the feeling I got from the lava rock and sand on the islands. I always print my pieces by hand so they don’t look as slick and “perfect” as they would if I used a press.

I like the peculiar title I used for one of the prints… ” Maria Has Gone into Ribeiras With All Five of the Newborn Lambs”. In this picture there is no Maria or lambs. It’s a code phrase used by Portuguese whalemen crews to confound their rival whalemen. On one of the islands, I saw a film in a little whaling museum which showed how the island, in the old days, would have lookouts perched in high stations who would look through binoculars all day hoping to sight whales. When they did, they would send a message by radio to their crew members who would be scattered about at their various jobs, farmer, barber, shopkeeper etc.. The message told them where the whales were spotted, how many there were and which direction they were heading. They would then rush to their boats before rival teams on the island would beat them to it. If Maria was going to Ribeiros it meant that the whales were heading west because that’s the direction Maria would have to go to get to Ribeiros. The one thing that I’ve never been able to figure out is that how they knew which Maria was meant. Half the women on these islands were named Maria. This picture was done in a comic-strip format.

Dog of Sao Miguel

The “Dog of Sao Miguel” was the first picture I made. I would see these Pit Bull-looking dogs all over this island. I asked what breed of dog they were. The answer was always, “It’s the dog of Sao Miguel”. It seems that each island has its own dog breed. They don’t live in the farmers’ houses. They just guard and tend the black and white spotted cows that are EVERYWHERE in the fields grazing. Their ears and tails are cropped so the cows can’t get a hold of them and they seem to subsist on just a little Portuguese bread that’s tossed to them. They are kept hungry and mean. You can see how ferocious my dog looks in this picture. At the horse farm where we were staying, though, there was a very tame one… probably the only tame one on the island. He was scary-looking though and he would park himself in the middle of the driveway.

When we first arrived on Sao Miguel, we got into our rented car and drove out of the airport and immediately to our right was a hill and on the very tip top of the hill stood a horse. Go figure. We had just left our horse farm and the first sight we see in the old country is a horse. And there aren’t a whole lot of horses on the islands. I’ve included this picture here along with some others that I shot just as they hang in a hallway in my home.

So, remember, if you want to plan a trip to an amazingly gorgeous paradise, do not, under any circumstances, consider the Azores… is the advice I always give.

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Tags Azorean Portuguese, Randall Enos, Sete Cidades, volcano

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

A Duck Goes Into A Grocery Store

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date September 3, 2019

This collection of jokes is by my cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos!

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

My favorite thing in the whole world next to making pictures is telling jokes. I have a goodly collection that I’ve amassed over the years. I don’t know where I’ve heard most of them but, one in particular came from a Paul Newman movie. I think I’ve found a few in movies. I’m talking about just the everyday “guy walks into a bar” type of jokes.

A few years back, I decided to try something that I’ve never seen done before and actually illustrate some of these favorites of mine. My emphasis was on the picture making and the words were secondary but served as a catalyst for my cartoon abstractions. I’m including some of these here in my article. They may be a little hard to read in this format but you’ll get the all over picture of how I transformed my favorite jokes into color linocut semi-abstractions.

I’ll write out a couple of my jokes here.

This is my favorite joke of all time. I think it is a Soupy Sales joke:

A duck goes into a grocery store and says, “Do you have any duck food?”

The guy says “No”.

Duck goes in the next day and says, “You got any duck food?”

Guy says, “No”.

Duck goes in the next day and says, “You got any duck food?”

The guy says, “No”.

Duck goes in the next day and says, “You got any duck food?”

The guy says, “Listen, I told you I haven’t got any duck food. If you come in again, I’ll nail your little web feet to the floor!”

Duck goes in the next day and says, “You got any nails?”

Guy says, “No”.

Duck says………… “You got any duck food?”

Here’s my current second favorite joke (I haven’t gotten around to illustrate this one yet but I will):

A guy is walking along Madison Avenue in New York and, in the crowd of people coming toward him he thinks he sees a familiar face. As the face gets closer he recognizes it and says, “Harry… is that you?”

Harry says, “My God, Joe, I haven’t seen you in so long! How are you? I remember seeing you all the time years ago. You were always with another guy. I remember now, if I saw you, I’d see this other guy with you … you guys were inseparable, what was his name?”

“Oh, that was Fred” says Joe. “It’s funny you should mention him because he just died last week”!

“Oh, no, what happened, he was a young healthy guy, right?”

“It was freak accident”.

Harry said, “What happened to him?”

“Well, he came into Grand Central one morning, like he always did to go to his job at the Port Authority and it was a real nice warm day so he decided not to take a cab up as he usually did. Instead he decided to walk, so, he goes up the big stairway and out and up 43rd St. to 8th Avenue and takes a left on the corner and just then a huge cement block comes off the top of a building and hits him on the head and kills him instantly”!

Harry says, “OH MY GOD WHAT A WAY TO GO”!

“I know” says Joe, “I would have gone straight up 42nd St and….”.

Another one I heard the same day I heard that one, goes like this:

A guy is driving home after he’s been shopping and suddenly remembers that his wife made a big point of telling him to buy some salt and he didn’t. Jeez, he realizes that she’s going to kill him but he’s far from the grocery store and doesn’t have time to go back. Just then he sees the lights of a little shop that he’s never seen before. As he gets closer, he realizes it’s a little tiny general store. “Maybe they’ve got salt” he hopes and pulls in. The shop is empty except for the owner, a little old guy.

“You got any salt?” he says.

“SALT… you’re looking for salt? Have I got salt? You see all those boxes along the top shelf over there? That’s all salt, my friend. You see the shelf under it… more boxes… that’s all salt. Look over there, you see those bags all along that wall, that’s salt. Now, follow me!”

He takes the guy down into the basement.

“You see all those barrels all around the room here? SALT!”

My, God, says the guy, “Are you going to be able to sell all this salt?”

The owner says, “No, I can’t sell salt worth a damn… BUT, the guy that sells me salt………. BOY, can he sell SALT!”

That’s another one I have yet to illustrate.

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

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

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

Why I Started Drawing

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 19, 2019

Learn why my cartoonist buddy Randy Enos started drawing!

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

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

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

World’s Fastest Illustrator

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 17, 2019

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

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DONE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

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

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

How to Get Out of a Parking Ticket

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 7, 2019

My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos explains how a cartoonist gets out of a parking ticket.

… a confused cop who is scratching his head and looking up and down and sideways trying to see any evidence of signage.

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

Cartoonists possess a secret weapon whether they know it or not which will be shown in this little short story.

My wife and I and another couple went out to dinner one night. I was driving. We went to a city next door to us called Norwalk Ct.. There’s a nice little district there which has artists’ studios and interesting restaurants. I parked very close to the seafood restaurant we had selected. I carefully looked around for any “no parking” signs and saw none. It looked like a safe place to park… no restrictions in evidence. No signs at all.

After we finished eating and came back out to the car, there was a big, expensive parking ticket affixed to my windshield. I couldn’t believe it. We all looked around again and saw no signs at all in the vicinity of my car. Just then, a policeman walked past. I rushed over to him and asked about the ticket. He seemed puzzled too. He looked around and confessed that he couldn’t figure out why I would get a ticket there. He advised me to go over to the police station which was close by and pick up a form which I could fill out contesting the ticket.

So, off we went to the police dept. where I picked up said form and then we all went home.

I meticulously filled out the form showing where I was parked, how long I was parked there and the absence of any signs. I turned the form over to see if there was anything I needed to fill out on the other side and… there, I discovered an 81/2″ x 11″” blank expanse of white paper. BLANK WHITE PAPER!! I’ve never been able to resist a nice big, blank piece of paper since I was a little kid. My fingers itched. It was awful hard to resist that beautiful, plain white space. I succumbed!

… I drew myself leaping backward aghast and in utter horror at it …

I decided to illustrate my plight. I drew an elaborate cartoon of my car at the curb with a big parking ticket stuck on the windshield. I drew myself leaping backward aghast and in utter horror at it, slapping my hand to my head, sweat drops popping forth. Our male fellow diner is in the background gesticulating wildly at a confused cop who is scratching his head and looking up and down and sideways trying to see any evidence of signage. Meanwhile, our female fellow diner is trying to revive my wife who has fainted in the middle of the street. I put appropriate arrows and labels where needed and turned the sheet back over to put “OVER” down in the lower right corner so they would know to turn it over. I mailed it to the police dept. in the envelope supplied to me and awaited the answer.

… our female fellow diner is trying to revive my wife who has fainted in the middle of the street.

In a few days, I got a letter from the police stating that they were dismissing my ticket. No explanation as to why.

They also said, “Everybody in the station enjoyed your cartoon very much and we have it hanging up on our wall “.

See? … secret weapon.

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Tags cartoon, connecticut, Norwalk, parking ticket, police, Randall Enos, windshield

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

The Bohemian Bohemian

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 2, 2019

My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos remembers his talented mother-in-law.

She would just start in on whatever she was calling about. She was fond of calling me from parties with questions. I’d be in bed and the phone would ring with “What’s the capital of Ecuador?” It’s not that she thought I was particularly smart, but she knew I owned a set of encyclopedias.

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

Her name was Tecla Maria Marguarita Kolodziej. She was born in 1913 of Polish and Bohemian/Gypsy parents. When she was 15 years old, she was sent to live in a Catholic girls’ boarding school. She read everything she could lay her hands on. She was a bit of a loner.

She married Jim Walker (English, Irish, Dutch descent). As a young man, Jim was a champion amateur boxer whose trademark move was to rush out at the bell of round one and fell his opponent with one solitary blow. He never lost a fight… not particularly popular with fight fans who perhaps wanted to see a little more action. During World War 2, he was in the last Texas Cavalry troupe which was formed into a tank destroyer unit while Tecla worked as an airplane designer for North American Aviation. Later on she became an assistant to a medical illustrator. She had her own cadaver.

They had one child, Leann ,who I married in 1956. If they had had any other children, I would have married them too.

After the war, Jim worked for the Texas Pacific Railroad as a dispatcher. Tecla had always wanted to be an artist and when she made her first oil painting (shown here in article) which won the first prize at a Dallas Museum of Fine Arts show, an art teacher at the convent told her that someday she should study with Jerry Farsworth. So, she finally made the journey from Texas to Cape Cod to study with the well known painter/teacher. She appeared with their outdoor painting class that summer on the cover of Life Magazine.

When Tecla died in 1993 of cancer (Jim had already passed on), we put her very first oil painting, a self portrait, in the newspaper instead of a photo.

While there on the Cape, she made some friends who invited her to visit them in Westport Connecticut. There she found a community of artists, illustrators, cartoonists, actors and writers. She fell in love with Westport and told Jim all about it. He quit his job, packed up a few belongings, left his car parked on the street in Dallas and took the train with his little daughter across the country to start a new life.

They had decided that since there were so many artists in Westport plus the fact that Jim had been successfully framing Tecla’s paintings, that a Walker Frame Shop might be in the offing. And so it came to be and for many years, it was the only frame shop in town and a fixture on downtown’s Main Street.

By the time I came into the picture, Leann’s parents knew all the famous illustrators, writers and cartoonists in town. Jim used to tell me about his friendship with Orphan Annie’s creator, Harold Gray.

Aside from being a framer and restorer (Tecla was very knowledgeable about old master techniques), she was an outstanding cook who would never let anybody in the kitchen while she was creating her culinary delights. We even got some off-beat appetizers like chocolate covered ants and fried grasshoppers. I couldn’t resist getting her dander up sometimes by proclaiming that, “Food is just fuel!” Regardless, she loved me and I, her. She introduced me to my favorite childhood illustrator, the little known, Martin Burniston who was one of her best friends and she had kick-started my career by hooking me up with Popeye’s Bud Sagendorf, another of her close friends, who hired me into the Famous Artists Cartoon Course thus starting me on the road to cartoonery.

Tecla did lots of self portraits, portraits of friends and portraits of me. I’ve included one of myself here that was painted without my knowledge as she sat on the floor outside my garret studio while I was trying to create a comic strip. At this point in our life we all lived together in a big house. Later we had our own houses but only about a hundred yards apart on the same street. Our kids, on the way home from school, would go through her back yard into her back door, past the big bowl of candy and out the front door and down the street a little ways to our house.

Tecla knew that I kept long hours at the drawing board in those days and often in the middle of the day, I’d get a call. When I answered the phone, all I would hear was one word “STRETCH”! So, now I keep a photo of her in my studio with a word balloon saying “stretch”.

She would never say “hello” when you answered her calls. She would just start in on whatever she was calling about. She was fond of calling me from parties with questions. I’d be in bed and the phone would ring with “What’s the capital of Ecuador?” It’s not that she thought I was particularly smart, but she knew I owned a set of encyclopedias.

When Tecla died in 1993 of cancer (Jim had already passed on), we put her very first oil painting, a self portrait (shown in this article), in the newspaper instead of a photo.

Tecla only painted for herself with only a very occasional commission like the painting of Simone Bolivar’s mistress Manuella Saenz for a book cover… and the fake Gainsborough she did. She had an opera singer friend who owned a Gainsborough and had fallen into hard times… she had to sell it. She loved it so much and had gotten so used to living with it that she had Tecla paint an exact copy of it for her. Tecla spent weeks and weeks on the woman’s screened- in porch, meticulously imitating the painting to perfection. She had to paint it at the woman’s house because, of course, she couldn’t let anything that valuable off her premises until the sale.

Tecla only painted for herself with only a very occasional commission like the painting of Simone Bolivar’s mistress Manuella Saenz for a book cover …

Hardly any of the customers who brought their homely little watercolors into Tecla’s frame shop knew of her extraordinary talent in painting. She never entered shows or exhibited anywhere. She was very modest and didn’t discuss her own work with anyone outside of the family.

After she died, we decided that the citizens of Westport should see her work (she would have hated this). Leann and I put up a show of a ton of paintings, drawings, sketches and sculpture in the hallways and corridors of the town hall. The show was up for months and months and hundreds of locals stood agog with their jaws dropped open while they looked at these paintings by a woman they thought they knew.

The one story about Tecla that sticks in the mind was the time that we (Leann and I, our two sons and their girlfriends) were all skinny-dipping in a small river one evening. A police car pulled up near our vehicles up on the road at the top of the river bank. A young cop, large flashlight in hand, descended the bank coming toward us. No one was supposed to swim here… we knew that. He pointed his lamp at Tecla who was emerging from the water stark naked. He said, “Y’know you all have to take off!”

“TAKE OFF WHAT?” Tecla raised her hands in a shrug.

He just laughed and got back in his car and drove off.

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Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories: