What a terrific idea this is. Last year, cartoonist and illustrator John Martz, also known as Robot Johnny, drew a version of his mother’s entire yearbook from 1968.

He took each yearbook image, over 1,000 of them, and distilled the essence of the face down to a few succinct lines, capturing a cartoon likeness for each individual. The resulting project, called Excelsior 1968, debuted last year at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.

Martz has published the project as a book, available from his online store, and posted the images as a Flickr set. (I love the look of the thumbnail display for the set, with hundreds of cartoon portraits arranged in a huge grid, it would make a great poster).

Martz is an illustrator and cartoonist who is currently the chair of the Canadian Chapter of the National Cartoonist Society, and is the editor and driving force behind Drawn!, a superb collaborative illustration and cartooning blog that I’m sure many of you are aware of (see my previous post about Drawn!).

I find it interesting that he chose his mother’s yearbook from the 1960’s as the basis of the project rather then his own, perhaps finding the different character of the photography, hair and clothing styles appealing as subject matter.

In following a comment from Martz’s blog post, I came across a different approach, in which artist John Ralston did pen, colored pencil and watercolor illustrations of a much smaller class, drawing the senior class of Hamline University in 1925.

[Link via Digg]

Whenever the topic of political cartoonists comes up, the question of political bias raises its smirking little head and I get comments about “How could you feature this flaming liberal terrorist sympathizer?” or “How could you showcase such a right wing fascist nut case?”.

I’ll start out by saying that RJ Matson is unabashedly liberal, unabashedly a Bush basher and also unabashedly a Clinton basher. Either he likes Obama, or simply doesn’t find him a very interesting character to skewer.

Of course, any editorial cartoonist worth their salt will go after the people currently in power, they’re the ones stirring things up, after all, and the ones we need to be reminded to keep our eye on.

While politicians who do bad and/or stupid things make life difficult for the rest of us, they’re paydirt for political cartoonists and satirists.

Regardless of whether a particular cartoonist’s political leanings match our own, we should be able to look at them for their drawing style.

Matson, particularly in the past couple of years, has been working in a line and color style that owes more to the simplicity of classic newspaper comics than to the pen and ink crosshatch style usually associated with political cartoons.

In his older cartoons, he employs a style more in keeping with that tradition, but even there he is somewhat eccentric, and you’ll find stylistic references to other cartoonists like William Stout, Ron Cobb, New Yorker cartoonists like Jack Ziegler, even the historic political cartoons of Thomas Nast.

You’ll also references to 50’s EC horror comics, 60’s superhero comics and other pop culture visual landmarks.

It’s his current, open, line and color style that I particularly enjoy. Though he draws the cartoons so they will be effective either in black and white or in color (as you can see in the R.J. Matson archive on Cagle Cartoons), when reproduced in color, they have a nice feeling of direct drawing, and intentional coloring. It’s hard to put my finger on what it is about the style, but it just feels like Matson has utilized just the line work and just the color elements that he needs to nail his subject, with nothing included that doesn’t add to the effectiveness of the image; which is, of course, the essence of good cartooning.

Matson is the editorial cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The New York Observer and Roll Call. In addition to his editorial cartoons, his gag cartoons and comic illustrations have appeared in many other publications, including The New Yorker, The Nation, The Daily News, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and MAD Magazine. He has done cover art for the Capitol Steps comedy group and has illustrated several books.

Matson has been the Secretary of the National Cartoonists Society and is on the Board of Advisors of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York.

His web site includes a selection of his illustrations, as well as an extensive archive of his cartoons. The latter can be viewed by publication, selected “Greatest Hits”, or in total. Greatest hits can give you a quick overview of some of his most popular cartoons, but if you like his work, the “All” choice makes for a nice mixture of national and local cartoons.

Al Jaffee is a cartoonist and comics artist who is best known as a long-time contributor to Mad magazine. Early in his career, Jaffee worked for Timely Comics and then Atlas Comics, which were early forms of the company that became Marvel Comics.

Jaffee joined Mad magazine in in 1955, shortly after editor Harvey Kurtzman transformed it from a comic book to magazine format to dodge the restrictions of the anti-comics backlash that had been stirred up against Mad’s sibling E.C. horror comics.

Jaffee is the longest running contributor to the magazine and may have been in more issues than any other single artist. He also joined Kurtzman on his other humor magazines, Trump and Humbug.

Jaffee is a writer as well as an artist and has created many series and single features for the magazine over the years, including Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, many of which have been published as a series of collections. There have also been collections of some of Jaffee’s other work for the magazine published as Mad’s Vastly Overrated Al Jaffee and Al Jaffee Gets His Just Deserts.

Jaffee always seemed to be part cartoonist, part inventor, and many of his features have been based on weird gadgets, outrageous fake inventions and clever designs for things. Jaffee is most associated with one of his own “inventions”, the “Mad Fold-in”, which is one of the longest-runing features in the magazine, started in 1964 and continuing today. There is also a collection of those: Mad Fold This Book!: A Ridiculous Collection of Fold-Ins.

These were originally a parody of “fold-outs” in Playboy and other men’s magazines, in which an extra, originally folded over page would fold out to allow an extra large photograph to be printed across three pages (bringing to mind Martin Mull’s quip: “Playboy is like National Geographic — lots of nice pictures of beautiful places you’ll never visit.”)

Jafee’s Mad version was, of course, the opposite, a fold-in in which the image became smaller, but in the process changed its meaning by becoming a different image altogether. This requires some cleverness and careful planning, a task to which Jaffee’s inventive mind is adroitly suited. The idea was a hit, and has become, in essence, the toy prize in the Crackerjack box for each issue the magazine. Jaffee has used the idea both for fun and for sometimes biting social commentary that has ruffled more than a few feathers.

Jaffee has won major cartoonists awards from National Cartoonist Society and is one of three nominees for this year’s Ruben Awards.

Much to the delight of Jaffee fans everywhere, he’s still at it today at the age of 87. In 2006, on his 85th Birthday, Steven Colbert invited Jaffee on his show and presented him with a fold-in birthday cake, which had typically complimentary wishes written on the icing that, when the middle section of the cake was removed, became reduced to “Al, you are old.”

The New York Times has just published an article on Jaffee, along with a great interactive feature of Al Jaffee’s Fold-ins, Past and Present, that showcases a dozen or more of his clever pieces, starting from the early 1960’s, in an Flash module that lets you fold them over.

This, of course, neatly sidesteps the dilemma we had as kids of whether to fold in and crease your copy of the back cover, or try to figure out what it was without folding, or hope your friends had already folded theirs.

Heinrich Zille is an artist I was unfamiliar with until I came across this article in the New York Times.

Apparently, I’m not alone, in that he is not well known outside his native Germany. There, however, he is not only well known but celebrated, particularly in his adopted home of Berlin, where he came to be revered as something of a symbol of the spirit of the city at the time he was active, in the late 19th and early 20th Century.

Zille was an illustrator and photographer noted for celebrating common people at a time when their lot was a difficult one, particularly in his portrayals of life in the Berllin Mietskasernen, or tenement barracks, roughshod buildings crammed with desperate peasants who had fled a life of toil and poverty in the farmlands and fallen into deeper poverty in the industrialized city.

On moving to Berlin, Zille became familiar with some of the noted artists of the time, including Max Beckmann, Käthe Kollwitz, August Gaul and Max Liebermann.

Zille became Liebermann’s protege and created a reputation for witty but incisive social commentary in the form of cartoon-like illustrations about the life of the common and poor in turn of the century Berlin. He became known as “Pinselheinrich”, or “Heinrich the Brush”.

He frequented the bars and cellars of the seedier quarters of the city and became a familair figure there, often called “Papa Zille”, taking in that life in all of its rough character and honesty. He would later say “No one would believe all the things I’ve seen.”

He also documented the Berlin he knew as a photographer. Less well know are his forays into erotic drawing.

Berliners are celebrating the 150th anniversary of Zille’s birth this year with events and exhibitions. There is a small museum there devoted to his work.

There are some resources on the web, including a dedicated Heinrich Zille web site, but the best images I’ve found are in the slideshow accompanying the NYT article.

Dani Jones, the illustrator behind the long-running and very informative art blog, DaniDraws.com, has posted a list of 75 artists, including illustrators and cartoonists, that are suggested as “must know”, along with a good shot of 6 or 8 links to resources for each one.

There isn’t much in the way of description, just a quick phrase or sentence, but the artists are arranged by category.

You’ll find many artists here that I’ve featured over time on lines and colors, along with many I haven’t gotten to yet, but are on my list.

Whether it’s a definitive list is, of course, a matter of debate, and part of the fun. Jones invites comments about additions and suggestions for artists that others feel may have been left out.

Definitive or not, it’s a terrific list (and could be a major time sink, of course, so be prepared to spend some time being dazzled by great stuff).

Had I been on the ball, I would have told you about this earlier, as well as probably entering myself for the fun of it.

Every year The New Yorker holds a Eustace Tilley Contest, in which participants get to draw (or paint) their interpretation of the venerable magazine’s upper-crusty top-hatted and monocled iconic character.

The original Eustace Tilley was drawn by cartoonist Rea Irvin for the cover of the magazine’s first issue (above, top left) in 1925, and has reprised his appearance every year since on the anniversary issue. There is a history of Eustace Tilly here.

The New Yorker has a slide show of 17 past Eustace Tilleys (including Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, Charles Burns and Art Spiegelman).

The contest is open to anyone. This year’s contest just ended on January 24th. (I’ll try to tell you ahead of time next year.) The winners will be announced on February 4th.

Of more interest, however, is the Flickr gallery (thumbnails here) of 160 of this years entries, with all of their varied and imaginative takes on the character, his top hat, monocle, profile, stiff-necked pose and presumed disdainful butterfly fascination.

[Link via Kottke via Waxy]

Ronald Searle, the well known English cartoonist and satirist, started drawing cartoons professionally for the Cambridge Daily News at the age of fifteen.

He served in WW II as an architectural draftsman and, while stationed in Singapore, was taken prisoner of war when that city was surrendered to the Japanese. Despite the horrific conditions of forced labor, beatings, near starvation and rampant disease, he continued to draw. He made drawings of life in the forced labor camp while working on the Siam-Burma railway, and hid them under the mattresses of prisoners infected with cholera. He managed to bring some of the drawings home with him after the war, where they were exhibited and subsequently published.

Just before he left for the war, a cartoon panel of his appeared in Lilliput, that was to be the first incarnation of a project for which he would later be renowned, about a girls school called St. Trinian whose students were anything but saintly, stirring up trouble and amusement for years. The St. Trinian’s cartoons became tremendously popular and made his reputation, but Searle eventually got so tired of the project that he had the school blown up with an atomic bomb (though they came back).

He became the regular illustrator for Punch’s theatre column and eventually one of their major staffers. In the meanwhile collections of his cartoons were published in titles like Merry England, Etc., and The Rake’s Progress, as well as the wonderful cartoon travelogue A Paris Sketchbook.

Since then, he produced cartoons and illustrations for numerous publications and many collections were published. A number of his books are currently available on both sides of the Atlantic. There is also a biography by Russell Davies.

Searle went on to do work for Disney and other film studios, producing posters, animation designs and related material. In the early 60’s he moved to France, concentrating more on painting and less on cartoons and illustration, but continues to produce work in all three areas.

Searle has produced a remarkable body of work and achieved a unique status. His subjects are handled with thought provoking whimsey and insightful social commentary that, along with his energetic linework, invites comparison to Saul Steinberg.

Searle’s cartoons can bite through our pretensions as a civilized society, reveal us at our most ridiculous and arrogant and put a smile on your face while doing it.

His lines, at times drawn with a Rembrandt-like calligraphy of thin to thick, waver and wiggle and skitter around his drawings with a frenetic energy that keeps you thinking that they may well fly off the page.

Ronald Searle is one of the all time greats of cartooning. There are several resources around the web, the best of which is a tribute blog, Ronald Searle Tribute, maintained by Matt Jones, a freelance artist working in the animation industry in France. It was Matt’s letter about the blog that reminded me that a post on Searle was long overdue (unfortunately, I seem to have lost his email). This extensive collection of Searle articles and art has been running since May of 2006 and is a terrific resource on all phases of the artist’s work.

William Heath Robinson wanted to be a landscape painter. Even after his study at the Islington Art School and later at the Royal Academy, he came to the realization that he could support himself better by following his brothers Charles and Thomas into the burgeoning field of illustration. (See my post on Charles Robinson.)

The Robinsons were part of the generation of artists that flourished in the Golden Age of illustration, along with artists like Franklin Booth, Maxfield Parrish, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, J.C. Leyendecker and Elizabeth Shippen Green.

Though he created beautiful illustrations for classics like Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, The Red Shoes, and Sleeping Beauty (image above, right), he achieved widest notice for his humorous drawings and cartoons.

Robinson created cartoons of life prior to, during and after the First World War. He drew numerous cartoons depicting the follies of golfers; like the one above, left, in which the protagonist is trying to “play it as it lies” with a contraption of strapped together clubs, demonstrating the kind of visual invention for which Robinson became a household word.

Robinson drew countless “inventions” in which overly complex gadgets and bizarre devices were employed to accomplish otherwise simple tasks. Her in the U.S. this kind of inventive visual absurdity is associated with later drawings by Rube Goldberg, but in the U.K. they were simply called “Heath Robinsons”.

I’ve long been fascinated with the idea of comics and cartoons as a medium for instruction or teaching. Here’s an interesting take on that idea.

Howtoons is a series of how-to projects for kids (or adults going through a second childhood) presented as comic strips or cartoon-like panels. In them we’re introduced to Tucker and Celine, fantasy characters of brother and sister who are tired of watching TV and bored with video games (I did say fantasy characters), and so take to inventing “Tools of Mass Construction”; making playthings and learning projects out of clothespins, soda bottles, duct tape, cardboard and other kid-ready materials.

Their how-to projects are collected as a book, also just called Howtoons, and are presented in a more limited collection online.

The projects are sometimes presented as a comic strip and sometimes as a single panel, often accompanied by downloadable PDF’s that can be printed. Sometimes the printable PDF’s are the project, one of which is that great old standard of a zoetrope, one of the oldest and most basic methods of creating animation.

Other online projects include a soda bottle submarine, a cartoon explanation of the Beaufort Scale (for measuring the force of wind at sea), and a “Rola-Bola” (image above).

The site is rounded out with Library that includes articles on comic book artists like Kirby, Toth, Eisner and Herriman, and links to other related do-it-yourself or how-to sites (like the terrific Exploratorium), as wall as a nicely done set of links to Wikipedia articles about historical and contemporary figures who are Legends of art and invention.

There is also a blog, where the contributors discuss their projects and other how-to and related resources on the web.

One thing the site is lacking is a “Credits” or “About Us” page. The book is credited to Saul Griffith, Joost Bonsen and Nick Dragotta, with the illustration credits going to Dragotta, who has done some work for Marvel Comics. They apparently get a little help from Ryan McKinley and Phil Torrone.

[Link via Neatorama]

I’ve been wanting to write a post on Ron Cobb for some time now.

Cobb is a cartoonist, film production designer and concept artist from Los Angeles, currently living and working in Sydney, Australia.

When I went to write a post on Cobb last year, I was disappointed to find that there wasn’t much material available on the web. Cobb had an official site, but there was little to it but promises of “coming soon”. I was recently pleased to find that, despite continued protestations of the site being “under construction”, there is now sufficient material on his site for me to remind you of (or introduce you to) the work of this terrific and unjustly overlooked artist. In addition, new material has cropped up in a few other places.

Cobb began his career as an in-betweener and eventually breakdown artist for Disney, working on the ground-breaking feature Sleeping Beauty, but was laid off by Disney in 1957. (”In-betweeners” were junior artists who drew the frames in-between the “key” frames drawn by the senior artists; from which we get the term “tweening” as used in modern computer animation.) Cobb drifted between odd jobs for awhile before finding his new niche.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s there was a lively, energetic “alternative media”, consisting largely of small, independent “underground” newspapers, that opposed the deficiencies and corruption they saw the established order and viewed the mainstream media as tool of the corporate and political elite. (These days, of course, that function is largely served by the web.)

Cobb became the premiere editorial cartoonist for that generation’s countercultural voices. From 1965 to 1970 he drew editorial cartoons for the L.A. Free Press and in the early 70’s for The Digger in Melbourne, Australia; and his cartoons were distributed to other alternative papers through the Underground Press Syndicate.

I don’t use the term “political cartoons” when referring to Cobb because his work often transcended poiltics and dealt with larger issues. His caustic cartoons from the 60’s and 70’s exposed our follies, not just as a group or a party or a nation, but often as a species, in a biting, no-holds-barred commentary that few mainstream cartoonists could approach.

And what cartoons they were! His images were drawn with a raw, in-your-face energy and given a visual wallop by his use of intensely detailed crosshatching, contrasted with large open areas of negative space, and often dealt with subject matter that was disturbing and horrific. He pulled no punches when trying to point out to us how blind and short sighted we were; often portraying a stunned looking everyman who finds himself in some dystopian near-future, shocked with the outcome of our foolish species’ predilection for pollution, racism, violence, war and other monumental stupidity.

There were some collections of his cartoons printed, but they are unfortunately out of print. You may be able to find some used, if you can find someone willing to part with their copies. Personally, I treasure my battered copy of Raw Sewage.

Cobb also was in evidence as an illustrator, particularly within that same counter-cultural milieu; for example, did the terrific wrap-around cover for the Jefferson Airplane’s After Bathing at Baxters album (back when 12″x12″ record albums covers were the “big canvas” for illustrators).

Eventually, he moved back into the film industry, which answers the question for all of his cartoon fans of “Where has he been all these years?”

As a production designer and concept artist, Cobb has worked on films like Leviathan, The Last Starfighter, Conan the Barbarian, Dark Star, Back to the Future, Aliens, The Abyss, Total Recall and Firefly.

There is a somewhat scattered selection of work in various categories on his site, arranged by year. The best of the posted material is the selection of cartoons in the 1955-1987 section. Some of them are frighteningly prescient.

Cobb is currently continuing his work in the film industry, but I was surprised and delighted to see that he may return to editorial cartooning by way of his web site in the near future, something I would very much look forward to. I think this insane world could use a good dose of Ron Cobb cartoons about now.