Bizarro is one of the few bright lights in today’s newspaper comics page. Combining a mix of offbeat humor with an occasional smattering of politics and animal activism (Piraro has been a vegan since 2002), the cartoon has won three consecutive Best Cartoon Panel of the Year awards from the National Cartoonists Society. In 2010, Piraro received their highest award, the Reuben Award, for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year.

Piraro regularly gives talks and performs comedy across the country. His one-man stand-up comedy show, The Bizarro Baloney Show, made its debut at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival, where it was voted Best Solo Show.

He spoke with me by phone from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lives with his wife, Ashley Lou Smith.

— Marc Librescu

Marc Librescu: In the introduction to William Steig’s book, Ruminations, Whitney Balliett talked about “the mysterious line that separates cartoonists from artists.” Balliett said, “Cartoonists are sketchers who deal in obsolescence, whereas artists, more heavily equipped, aim at permanence.” As a cartoonist who also creates fine art, do you agree that cartoons are ephemeral?

Dan Piraro: [Laughs.] You’re starting with the softballs and you’ll be getting to the harder questions later, huh?

I don’t think hard about these issues. Charles Schulz, who was a wonderful friend and a pleasure to all cartoonists who were lucky enough to meet him, had a sort of chip on his shoulder about the separation of cartoons and fine art. He felt that cartoons were every bit as important in society and the creative world as fine art and he wanted to see cartoons in the Louvre. Norman Rockwell was another person who was separated by some as an illustrator and others as a fine artist. I don’t know how much that bothered Norman, but there has always been that kind of debate.

Quite honestly, I just don’t care. I think that creative efforts are what they are. You reach down into your soul, pull something out, and you throw it out there. There’s no way to control how it’s accepted or not accepted by individuals or by society as a whole, and it is of no concern to me.

Humor gets dated quite often. If you look back at some of the cartoons from the early 20th century, they just aren’t funny or they don’t ring the same bell or push the same buttons that they did then. But then others do. There’s no way to predict the future. I don’t know what about my cartoons will or won’t be relevant in 50 or 100 years and I won’t be here to care, so I don’t worry about it.

I always thought of cartooning as being a job. I try to make it as much of an art form as I can, but in my own mind, I sort of separate it. I think, well this is a job. It’s not pure creativity. There are a lot of rules that I have to go by. I can’t touch on certain subjects. The cartoons have to make a certain amount of sense and have a certain context. They have to be understandable to most people, and hopefully, amusing to most people. There are just a lot of rules. It’s a product that I’m on deadline for, getting paid for and under contract for.

So I think of it as more of a commercial venture that I try to put as much creativity and soul into as I can, given the guidelines. Whereas with fine arts, I just go for it — straight from the heart. Whatever happens happens. I don’t think about the audience. I don’t think about the time frame. I just enjoy the creative process. Once again, where it ends up in history or in anyone else’s mind is beyond my control, so I don’t worry about that.

Piraro: I don’t know. I’ve wondered about that myself. The further I go down this road, the more I think about getting out of it, only because I’ve been doing it for over 25 years now — a cartoon a day for over 25 years. And it’s getting more and more like a prison sentence in the sense that I can’t escape it. Yeah, I feel very fortunate to be doing it and I enjoy it. It’s so much better than any number of other jobs.

In 21st century United States, you certainly cannot complain if you’re making a living as an artist — period. You just can’t. It’s like complaining that you won $10 million in the lottery instead of a hundred million. So, I like my career, but I’d love to change. I’d love to be able to get away from the 365-day-a-year responsibility because the downside is that I don’t get any vacations unless I work twice as many hours for x amount of time. I don’t get any time off for grieving, illnesses, or injuries. I just have to work through whatever happens. And that becomes an incredible grind after a quarter of a century. I’ve been through any number of funerals and I’ve been through a divorce and a couple of breakups and my dog died and who knows how many bouts of influenza. At that point it becomes really grueling.

So I’d love to get away from it and do fine art. I think about that. I ask myself if I’ll miss the daily contact that I have with my readers. When I send stuff out there, I know that they’re reading it. I don’t watch them read it, or hear from each one of them, or get their opinion on every cartoon, but I know they’re out there. So there’s this kind of connection that I have with my readers. And I wonder if I’ll miss it, and if I’ll occasionally come up with cartoon ideas. If I do, I’ll draw them and put them on my blog. If somebody sees them, then I guess that’s a good thing.

I’m sure there would be a certain amount of withdrawal. And I’ve often thought specifically about Gary Larson. What in the world is he doing with his time? Not that cartooning is the only thing that he can do. But I’m driven by ambition. I wouldn’t be happy sitting in my house for the rest of my life just painting and leaning the paintings up against the wall. I’d want to succeed. I’d want to get them in galleries, start selling them, and build a following. I’d want to get my art out there so it communicates with other people. To me, that’s a big part of the process.

It’s not that way for all artists. Many do it purely for the sake of art. But I really like sharing it and getting stuff out there. People often look at someone who’s already successful and ask, “Why do they bother? Don’t they have enough money? Why are they still working so hard? Why are they still trying to succeed? Why are they complaining about this, that, or the other? They’re famous. They’re rich. They’ve got the awards. What drives them?”

Well, it’s ambition. If I won the lottery tomorrow, I wouldn’t quit working and just sit around and watch TV, travel and scuba dive for the rest of my life. It’s fun, but it isn’t enough. There’s something in me that makes me want to set goals and achieve them.

So, I don’t know what life after cartooning will be like. I’m looking forward to finding out, but I don’t know that I ever will. I may be…

Piraro: Yeah. I may be stuck doing this until I drop just because I need the paycheck.

Piraro: It absolutely does. It beats working in any cubicle in the world, for that matter.

Here is a version of the cartoon published on the cover of today's Le Droit newspaper.

We can recognize from left to right and top to bottom (on a background of red squares): Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Premier Jean Charest, Bashar al Assad, Minister Vic Toews, Dominique Strauss Khan, Lance Armstrong and Gérard Depardieu.

We have, friends, a string of thrilling announcements to make this January, the first of which goes like this: whiz-bang editorial cartoonist/animator Dan Murphy has joined Deep Rogue Ram as a contributor! Dan put together this week’s video, a lovely New Year’s Message from Stephen Harper:

***

***

Curators Kathleen Calderwood, associate professor, and David Cowles, lecturer, invited each participant to choose the illustration they think is their best work to date.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Illustration by Guy Billout

Illustration by Milton Glaser

Illustration by Eddie Guy

Illustration by John Kascht

Illustration byAnita Kunz

Illustration by C.F. Payne

The opening reception for the show is Friday, January 18th from 5:00 to 8:00 PM, and the exhibit runs through March 1st.

The Arts Center Gallery at Nazareth College is located at 4245 East Avenue in Rochester, NY. 

Stephen B. Paine Gallery, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston

Designer/Illustrator: Anita Kunz

Elizabeth Resnick has been an fervent advocate of graphic design as a tool for social and political agitation. She's documented a wide range of material and organized three exhibitions on complementary themes over the past decade. The most recent, "Graphic Advocacy: International Posters for a Digital Age 2001-2012," is set to open tomorrow at the Stephen B. Paine Gallery (click here for online gallery), one of MassArt's premiere display spaces. I recently interviewed Resnick for the exhibition brochure about the work, the response, and how these shows have already and will continue to impact designers and others.

Saturday, January 19th 8PM-2AM

Malmaison 3401 Water St NW Washington DC

Kal (The Economist), Daryl Cagle (MSNBC), Tom Toles (Washington Post), Mike Keefe(Denver Post), Jimmy Margulies (The Record, Time, Newsweek, New York Times, USA Today), Ann Telnaes (The Washington Post), Signe Wilkinson (Philadelphia Daily News ), Christo Komarnitski (Sega, Sturshel), Damien Glez (Le Monde, Courrier international, La Gazette)

Now cartoonist Bill Day is at the center of an emerging plagiarism scandal. (Disclosure: I publicly criticized Day’s work in a letter to the editor of Editor & Publisher magazine during the 1990s, after he won the prestigious Fischetti Award for a cartoon that, to me, seemed like rank hackery.) This will not come as a surprise within the profession. Rumors that Day was a plagiarist have been around pretty much forever. He was especially criticized, over beers, quietly, over what I call the practice of “self plagiarism” – repeatedly repurposing thing the same image over and over and over. Despite a Tumblr blog devoted to Day’s shenanigans, nothing was ever done about it.

It gets worse.

Day is syndicated by Cagle Cartoons, a one-man operation run by cartoonist Daryl Cagle, a powerhouse within the syndication world who has earned millions of dollars by monetizing and aggregating his colleagues’ work since the 1990s. When this latest kerfuffle broke, Day was accused of Photoshopping copyrighted artwork from the website Deviant Art without credit or permission. Daryl apparently took down the offending Bill Day cartoon and asked him to replace it with one that was hand drawn. Pretty sleazy. Having worked as a syndicate executive myself, and having been in the position of having to fire a cartoonist for plagiarism, I know what he should have done instead. He should have fired Bill. But that would’ve been very difficult. Why? As it happens, Cagle recently organized an Indieagogo fundraising campaign for Bill that has raised over $33,000– the purpose is ostensibly to save the cartoonist, his career and prevent the indignity of him losing his home to foreclosure, but it’s hard to avoid the zero sum game aspect of the story as well: this works as a form of subsidy for a syndicate that under pays its cartoonists. (Disclosure number two: $100 of that is mine. And I want it back. I still think it’s important for cartoonists to support each other, especially when they are in financial trouble, but plagiarists aren’t cartoonists. They are thieves.)


To be fair, Bill Day is not alone. Other cartoonists have been caught plagiarizing. Jeff Stahler of the Columbus Dispatch was a serial plagiarist – I would imagine he probably still is – and although he lost his staff job at a newspaper that wouldn’t give my own work a second look, even though I am an Ohio boy, his syndicate, which also happens to be my syndicate, continues to distribute his work.David Simpson seems to have made quite a career of jumping from one newspaper to another after being fired for plagiarism.

It gets worse than that.


One of America’s most successful and most prominent cartoonists, Jim Borgman, who has won the Pulitzer Prize and virtually every other major award granted to journalists or cartoonists, was forced to admit that he plagiarized, literally lightboxing an image he wanted to appropriate. (Unfortunately, I was ethically and honorbound not to reveal his name. This is because this revelation occurred in an exclusive, secret online forum for editorial cartoonists in which all participants agree not to share anything that is discussed. As of today, however, Matt Bors has outted Borgman via Twitter.)

Bill Schorr, hired by the New York Daily News over yours truly, was also a plagiarist. Serial.




Obviously there are not a lot of negative inducements for the ethically deprived in American editorial cartooning. To the contrary, plagiarists and self plagiarists tend to do quite well, collecting more awards, bigger incomes and getting hired for more prestigious jobs than those of us who think it is our job to come up with something original, thought-provoking and possibly even controversial every day.

I was President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists between 2008 and 2009, after the organization had been around for half a century. I accomplished a lot, not least saving the organization from going under completely during the 2008 fiscal meltdown. But my proudest achievement was to push through the first ever ethical component to the associations bylaws: a rule that allows the Board of Directors to expel any cartoonist they deemed guilty of plagiarism. Unfortunately, subsequent Boards of Directors have been namby-pamby and weak willed about something that ought to be pretty straightforward, so much so that in 2011 they publicly declared that they were kind of sort of considering ethical guidelines. They didn’t mention the fact that they already had a very important one that they were empowered to use as they saw fit.

At this writing, there is not only no consensus within the field that plagiarism should be a fatal offense, one that ends your career as an editorial cartoonist forever, but widespread agreement that self plagiarism – the kind of thing that Bill Day did in the Tumblr blog – is fine. One cartoonist, who has won the Pulitzer Prize twice and hold a tasty sinecure at a national newspaper, is so famous for repurposing thing the same cartoons – in this case, he usually redraws them rather than cutting and pasting them in Photoshop, but the effect is exactly the same – that we have learned to predict the sort of events that will prompt his reuse of the same old metaphoric images.

Daryl Cagle, the cartoonist/syndicator even bragged about it in his blog: “It amuses me to reuse old cartoons; I don’t find much opportunity to do it, but when I do, I chuckle to myself and take an extra hour for lunch.”

It isn’t as though some of us haven’t been trying to draw attention to these terrible practices. Every time the leading journalists who cover newspaper syndication and editorial cartooning have been contacted in the past about plagiarism and self plagiarism, however, there has been little to no interest whatsoever in covering the story. Some of the excuses have absolutely been laughable, like the idea that they were cartoons that had been stolen years earlier, and therefore the story was no longer relevant, or that there is absolutely nothing wrong with self plagiarism because no one really expects original content anymore.

It’s hard to know who to hate more: the cartoonists who put out this kind of hackwork, the old boys network of their colleagues who think it’s perfectly fine, or the editors who hire them and the prize committees who rewards them at the expense of people who do original work. It’s a lot like the Lance Armstrong scandal: if you’re a cycler who doesn’t cheat, you really hate losing to people who do. Right now, there are brilliant editorial cartoonists who are repeatedly being passed over for jobs. Most of them are “alternative editorial cartoonists” like me, Stephanie McMillan, Jen Sorensen, Matt Bors, Tom Tomorrow, Ruben Bolling, and don’t get me started about great cartoonists like Lloyd Dangle who literally were driven out of the profession because they couldn’t make enough money. Bill Day, for example, worked at the Memphis Commercial Appeal from 1998 to 2009. He got a salary, full benefits, probably even healthcare. But the same paper never would have considered someone like me or Tom Tomorrow. Hell, they wouldn’t even run us in syndication. And the thing is, these plagiarists and self plagiarists don’t steal good work or create good stolen product. Most of them are B-listers and C-listers, crummy hacks who didn’t deserve to work even if they had been creating original stuff.

Fortunately, there is hope in the form of some editors. One editor responded to the Bill Day story with comments that probably won’t surprise most readers but would come as a shock to the numerous American editorial cartoonists who really don’t think that plagiarism or self-plagiarism is a big deal: “As an editor who subscribes to Mr. Day’s syndicated work, we had always assumed that we were paying for new content. However, it appears that not only does Mr. Day steal the work of others, but has made a career out of using the same cartoon over and over again. My publisher is currently reevaluating the value of this syndicate and the work they provide to our chain of papers.”

That’s nice to hear. It would also be nice if editors like him and others who have been using cheap, low quality syndicates like Cagle and hiring hacks whose work takes no chances whatsoever and is ridiculously derivative and old-fashioned, would hire those of us who actually take this profession seriously.

This little essay isn’t going to make me any new friends, but I am not the kind of person to sit on my hands and stay silent when there is finally a possibility to get the attention of the media. I love editorial cartooning. It is an incredibly powerful and, when done right, important art form. There isn’t much I can do about the terrible taste and priorities of many of the nation’s editors and website managers, but we artists need to hold ourselves to the highest possible standards.

Daggers Drawn: 35 years of editorial cartoons and covers from The Economist by the award winning artist Kevin KAL Kallaugher
Launched: Jan 14, 2013
Funding ends: Feb 13, 2013

Jack D. Ziegler’s home is located on the edge of the Alvamar Orchards Golf Course in Lawrence, Kansas, where he has lived since relocating from Connecticut nearly three years ago. And while Ziegler does not play golf, he enjoys feeling as though he were living beside a park, especially when the course is empty. This notion recalls the resigned and/or bemused attitude toward life’s slings and arrows one finds throughout his immense body of cartoons, some 19,000 of which, sold or otherwise, fill a couple of file cabinets in his basement.

Born July 13, 1942, Ziegler sold his first gag to The New Yorker in 1973. He started drawing his own cartoons for the magazine soon thereafter, beginning with a panel involving theology, factory conveyor belts, displaced animal attributes, and a joke that takes precisely the right amount of time to detonate in your head. Other signature Ziegler motifs involve diner food, cowboys, bulbous mechanical objects, and pastiche riffs on classical writing and literature. His innovative blend of cartoon and comic-book conventions, often by replacing exterior captions with inset language, has inspired many a younger artist to stray even further from the time-tested grammar of the New Yorker cartoon.

We spoke in Jack’s living room, surrounded by landscape paintings; in his kitchen, while eating excellent local barbecue from Biemer’s; and in his comfortable downstairs studio amid neatly shelved books, a large rotating CD storage solution, original cartoon art, and Ziegler’s collection of replica pistols.

RICHARD GEHR:You were born in New York?

JACK ZIEGLER: Yeah.

Which borough?

In Brooklyn, but I grew up in Queens.

What were your parents’ names?

Kay and Denny. Denny for Denmore. Kathleen was my mother’s real name, so everybody called them Kay and Denny.

What did your parents do for a living?

My mother was a part-time schoolteacher and my father was a salesman for a pigment company, a paint manufacturer in Brooklyn. He was from Brooklyn originally, she was from Queens. One of those interborough marriages.

Those can be difficult.

Oh boy. [Laughter.]

Did you read The New Yorker at home?

No. It was in my friend’s home. [Laughs.] We had Life, Look, Time and The Daily News. My father didn’t like The New York Times. I had the feeling he might’ve been a Republican, but we never talked about that.

Was it [television writer] Brian McConnachie’s parents who bought The New Yorker?

Yeah. I’ve known him since we were six years old, probably. His parents always got The New Yorker. So it was always at his house. His mother was kinda nuts. [Laughs.] She was an ex-showgirl. And his father had a small company in New York that made industrial films. Brian lived about a mile and a half away from me. We used to walk and meet each other halfway. Then we’d wander off somewhere.

Were you big comics fans at that point?

Yeah, we used to buy comic books. We’d get on the subway and sneak into the city. There used to be these used magazine stores all around 42nd St and Eighth Avenue. We’d go to those and get real excited if we’d found something. We were both into EC Comics, and we’d look for old back issues we didn’t have. You’d occasionally find something. Then I’d have to sneak ’em into the house. I’d have a stack against my shirt. They didn’t know I was going into the city, ’cause I was probably ten or eleven or something like that.

McConnachie has said you used to visit the homes of cartoonists like Basil Wolverton and Bernie Krigstein.

Not Basil Wolverton. We used to look for the addresses of comic-book artists in the phone book. Bernie Krigstein lived in Queens off of Queens Boulevard, not far from where we lived, so we visited him one day. And once in the city we went to EC Comics and met a few people there. I remember one visit to Atlas Comics, which became Marvel, eventually. The people there were very nice, very tolerant of these little kids coming in all excited. It was fun. I remember visiting the guy who drew Blackhawk and watching him actually draw a page. It was really quite something. I had totally forgotten about that until right now.

What’s your earliest cartoon memory?

The first cartoon I ever did was something I did for my high school magazine, actually.

Nothing before that?

No, I didn’t do any cartoons at all.

You went to Xavier High School in Chelsea, which specialized in military science. What were your friends like?

They were normal high school kids. It was an all-boys school.

What kind of trouble did you get into?

I didn’t really get into a hell of a lot of trouble that I can recall. I may’ve buried it all. But no trouble, really. It was just a pain in the ass wearing a uniform on the subway into Greenwich Village, if you can imagine. That was in the late fifties, so it was not a pretty sight, I tell ya. There was a dress blue uniform and an OD uniform we’d also use.

What’s an OD uniform?

The Eisenhower jackets: olive drab. That was like a brown tie, brown jacket, brown pants, lighter brown shirt. But the dress blues were a total blue uniform with a white stripe down the leg and gold buttons, the hat with the visor, white shirt, black tie. Spiffy.

I’m sure you got a lot of respect for it, too.

Oh, I did, yes, especially in Greenwich Village. The beatniks really enjoyed seeing us boys come down the street.

Where did you go to college?

I went to Fordham, in the Bronx. I was briefly in the Air Force ROTC there until I just got fed up with it. I didn’t want to do that anymore, so I dropped out.

What did you study at Fordham?

Communication arts was my major. That kind of started around when I got there. It was a new thing.

What was college like for you after such a military-oriented high school?

I actually enjoyed high school more than I did college. But when I was in college, I got a job as a page at CBS, as an usher, and that was more fun than being in class in the Bronx. So I never really hung out that much with my college friends. When class was over, I’d get on the subway and get down to what’s now the Ed Sullivan Theater. It was Studio 50 back then; around the corner was Studio 52, which became Studio 54 the disco. I used to hang out with the other pages, who were far more interesting than the students because they were a bunch of out-of-work writers and actors, and some students.

Was it like 30 Rock?

No, not really. [Laughter.]

Any meetings with remarkable entertainers?

I was there for the Beatles, that was one of our shows that was kind of a big deal. I didn’t actually meet them personally, but I was there –and all the other basically British groups that followed after that.

Did you get into Pop art through album-cover art?

Not really. I always drew from when I was a kid, so I would draw stuff that was somewhat based on posters and whatnot, especially during the psychedelic years. I would try to do the San Francisco stuff occasionally, but I never tried to earn a living out of it or try to be an artist. I was just doing it ’cause it was fun.

How long did you usher for?

For most of college. About three and a half years, maybe.

Sounds like the perfect college job.

It was phenomenal, absolutely great. You had pocket money and met a lot of great people.

What happened after you graduated?

After college, I got a job at D’Arcy Advertising in New York – 430 Park Avenue, if I recall correctly. I was in the mailroom, where you had to start. I did that for a year and then I was about to get drafted. I had to scramble to find a reserve outfit, ’cause it was during Vietnam and I had no great desire to do that. I eventually found a reserve unit that required eighteen months instead of six months.

Did being in the military feel familiar after high school?

Not really. I didn’t like being in the military. It was during Vietnam and nobody really wanted to be in the military; at least nobody I knew did. But this was the best way I knew to not have to do Vietnam. So I did that, and it was great being in Monterey. I had never been to California before. Had a nice time there. Learned Russian. [Laughs.]

How did you spend the Summer of Love?

Well, I was back in New York. I had a job at CBS. I started off at CBS radio. I’m getting a little vague on these dates. I was there at the radio station for the CBS radio network. I was working nights, and then I went to network transmission facilities, which was over in Black Rock, which was a television and network traffic type thing.



You married; what was your wife’s name?

Jean-Anne Rice was her name. Still is her name; she lives on. I met her at a wedding in Chicago. Brian’s wedding, actually. We hit it off, and she came to New York to visit me over Christmas. She was a teacher, and she had a week off, so she came to New York. We spent a week together and then she went back. We got married the following April in Chicago. Had a family, had kids…

Were you happy in New York?

Yeah, it was good; it was fun. I mean, the Net Trans Fax job was just a job. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it, but it was nice. And we decided to go to San Francisco, try that out.

Where did you live in San Francisco?

I had an apartment on Filbert, right off Van Ness, one block over from Union. Then I got a job at KTVU, a TV station in Oakland. I think she worked at I. Magnin or Joseph Magnin; at some point she had a teaching job, too. A couple of months after we moved into Fillmore, we saw this really cute German Shepherd puppy on the street that people were selling for $25 or something. They had a litter and this dog was the runt. So we foolishly got the dog, and it was a no-pets-allowed apartment.

You were a San Francisco hippie. What was your first psychedelic experience like? [Ziegler laughs.]

My first psychedelic experience? I never had a psychedelic experience, actually.

You never dropped acid out there?

I never did, no. Smoked some grass, did some hash. Never did LSD. I’m not sure why.

But you’re a big music fan, right?

We used to go to The Fillmore and the Matrix. I saw the Velvet Underground at the Matrix. They were there for a week and I went three times. The last night I was there, the audience was me and maybe two other people. They did a great set anyway, they were phenomenal.

Any other peak music experiences in San Francisco?

I went to the Fillmore a few times and saw the Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and…I don’t know if we actually saw Quicksilver. There were a couple of concerts in Golden Gate Park. The last apartment we had in San Francisco was on Stanyan Street, right across from the park, so we used to be there quite a bit. That’s when I started doing cartoons and figured I should move back East if I wanted to be serious about this.

I also took six months off to try to write. I completed this novel I thought was good when I was writing it, but turns out it wasn’t.

While I was doing this writing, or trying to be a writer, Brian was in New York and he was also trying to be a writer. He was also doing cartoons on the side, but he can’t really draw. He’s a terrible artist but he has funny ideas, so he started selling stuff to National Lampoon. And he said, “I can’t even draw and I’m selling cartoons. You can actually draw. Maybe this is something you might wanna think about.” So I did. I started kind of fiddling around with it, and then I found that I really enjoy doing it. I mean, I wasn’t particularly good at it, but I found I could do it. So I started doin’ that and then thought maybe this would be a way to make a living without having to sell my soul in some awful job.

Drawing from National Lampoon, 1974.

I was doing a lot of cartoons in San Francisco. I think I sent some stuff out and it all got rejected. Then I thought maybe I should go to New York and actually visit some of the magazines and do an in-person thing. So I went to New York for like a week, and stayed with Brian and his wife. That’s when I decided we should move back there. If I’m ever gonna make this work, it’s not gonna happen in San Francisco. We packed up the bus again, got a U-Haul, and attached the bus to the back. Jean-Anne and I had a kid at that time – the first kid, Jessica. They flew back to Chicago and I drove from San Francisco to Chicago and met them there, spent a weekend, and then drove the rest of the way to New York. Once I got settled in New York, they took a plane and followed. It was just me and Blanche, the dog, in the truck. That was a good trip.

Where did you live in New York?

We actually moved into Brian’s mother’s summerhouse, which was in Mannatuck on the north fork of Long Island. They had a little summer cottage there. Thank God it was insulated, ’cause it was November or maybe December. It was cold, in any case. We stayed there until just before spring, and I was making trips into New York. This would be the end of 1972, beginning of ’73. I was doing cartoons out there and coming into the city, making the rounds with the magazines, dropping off every week at The New Yorker, getting my stuff back the next week and dropping off the next batch, going to the Lampoon– at that point, Brian might’ve been an editor there. We stayed out there until we had to move in the spring, because Brian’s mother, May, was gonna be comin’ out to use her house for the summer, thoughtlessly. [Laughter.] We looked for places on Long Island and Westchester, and we wound up in New Haven, Connecticut. We thought that’d be a good town; it’s a college town and when were living in Mannatuck, it was the only TV station we could actually get. New Haven sounded like fun. We wound up moving there and stayed for like three years. It was while we were in New Haven that I started to sell to The New Yorker. The first thing they bought from me was an idea for Charles Addams to draw.




What was it?

It’s Edgar Allan Poe sitting at a table, trying to think of something to write; and he’s thinking of all these animals saying “Nevermore.” One’s a turtle, I think, and one was – I can’t even remember, maybe a dog or a cat or something – before he hit the obvious. [Laughter.] So that was kind of exciting. But I would’ve much preferred to be able to do it myself.

Do you remember how much you got paid for it?

Maybe only a hundred dollars, maybe a hundred and fifty, I don’t know. But at that point they were buying ideas for Addams and a couple of other people, too. So yeah, that was my first sale there. And you’d always get a rejection slip from The New Yorker. On my rejection slip that week, they said they’d like to buy this as an idea for Addams.

Was that when Lee Lorenz was transitioning into the job?

Lee had started maybe a year before that, and he was really on the lookout for new people. About six months after I sold the Addams idea, they bought one of mine. Instead of a rejection slip, I got an actual piece of paper with The New Yorker letterhead on it, saying, “Would you mind coming back and seeing me?” – signed, Lee Lorenz. Of course if you’ve ever seen Lee’s handwriting, it’s indecipherable. But I went back there and met him, and I was just a nervous wreck ’cause I didn’t know what the hell was goin’ on. I was hopin’ they were gonna buy something. And they did, they bought that one idea, so I had to go home and do a finish on it, and then send it back. Then I think they rejected that one, too. It was the “beasts of the field” drawing. The machinery wasn’t quite right in the conveyor belt.

"Hello? Beasts of the Field? This is Lou, over in Birds of the Air. Anything funny going on at your end?"

I’d love to hear your version of the office intrigue that was going on around your work vis à vis Carmine Peppe.

Yeah, well, he didn’t like my work, apparently. He was the layout guy, back in the days when they really knew how to lay out the magazine; the cartoons were always printed exactly the right size they should be. Carmine was great at that, but he didn’t like my stuff.

Did you ever meet him and find out why?

I never met him. But I sold the “beasts in the field” drawing to Lee in either November or December. And I had always heard that if they bought something from a new person, they would print it pretty quickly. So the weeks went by, and then a couple of months, and I finally said to Lee, “I was wondering if that first drawing is ever going to appear.” And he actually hadn’t realized that it hadn’t appeared. Meanwhile, I’ve started selling fairly regularly to the magazine, and nothing is appearing. So he said, “Let me look into this.” And it turned out that Carmine thought that if they printed my stuff, it would be the end of the magazine; that it would just destroy the future of The New Yorker as we know it. [Laughter.] Which it did, apparently.

How was it resolved?

Eventually, Lee spoke to Carmine and said, “Listen, we have to start printing this stuff” William Shawn spoke to him, too, and insisted they start printing it “because we’re gonna be buying this kinda stuff.” From then on, I started to appear gradually. But he was still holding back a lot of stuff. I was selling a lot of stuff but very little was getting printed. Eventually they started printing my stuff on a more regular basis.

How do you think your work compared to what had been in The New Yorker until then? Were you surprised they were buying it?

I thought my stuff looked OK. I knew how to draw. But I look back on those early drawings and they’re not really anything like what I draw now. Because the more you do it, the more comfortable you get. You kind of fall into your style, you know? I didn’t quite have what has become recognizably mine until much later. I wasn’t actually trying to gear it toward The New Yorker audience – I was just trying to do stuff I would like to see in The New Yorker. But I still don’t know what stuff of mine is funny to other people, because it’s such a subjective thing. So to this day I just do what I think works for me, and I don’t even think about The New Yorker, although I send them everything I do.

So you were starting to make a living?

I started to make a living. It’s like everything started to happen at once. I started selling at The New Yorker, then The Saturday Evening Post started buying my stuff, and then a couple of girly mags in New York started buying my stuff. Saturday Review, Writer’s Digest, a couple of others.

Drawing from The New York Times, November 7, 1976.

Could you describe the scene at National Lampoon while you worked for it?

At that point I was going into New York on Wednesday. I would finish my rounds of magazines and always make sure I’d wind up at the Lampoon at the end of it. I’d go up and hang out with Brian for a while, then a bunch of us would go down to this bar around the corner. It would be a big carousing group at a table, yelling out funny stuff, ideas for the next issue. Nobody wrote anything down. Really funny stuff. Tony Hendra was there, and Sean Kelly. We’d be there for hours. They’d throw all these ideas for the next issue back and forth. And of course none of these ideas would ever appear. They’d all get lost in the booze, I guess.

What sort of work did you do for the Lampoon?

I didn’t sell them that many things, actually. I probably sold them less than ten drawings. I tried a couple of comic strip pages but they didn’t work out. They weren’t very good, actually. They only printed single-panel drawings. I got good advice from Michael O’Donahue about drawing. I was drawing way too realistically really early on in my career. As I look back on those drawings, they were really wrong. They weren’t cartoony enough. They weren’t reduced down to their lowest common denominator or whatever you want to call it. There were wrinkles in the clothing, y’know? People were too tall and there shouldn’t be any tall cartoon people.

Lee Lorenz wrote that your work, “if taken as a whole, constitutes a dead-on if bemused portrait of Middle America.”

That could be. I don’t know.

But you haven’t lived in Middle America until fairly recently.

That’s true. I’ve been here in Lawrence about two and a half years now. I don’t really think about what I do sociologically. I’m just trying to do stuff that amuses me. And I don’t think about rich people or poor people or East Coast people. I’m just trying to find something funny. Which is harder and harder to do.

Because of you, or because of the crazy mixed-up world we live in?

Because of me. I’m less sure of what’s funny anymore. Not that I ever knew. It was always a guess.

Do you have a theory of humor?

I got no theory at all. I just start drawing and see what happens.

What was the difference in editorial styles between Lee Lorenz and Bob Mankoff?

Lee had much more direction. When you’d get an OK from Lee, he would look at the drawing with you. And if he wanted any changes made, he would tell you pretty much what he wanted. I don’t get any direction at all from Bob, although maybe that’s because I’ve been around so long I don’t need it anymore. I assume I know what I’m doing at this point.

Where did your idea of using inset captions rather than standard captions come from?

It depended on the drawing. I just felt there was a better way to do a particular drawing this way than with a standard caption, because it requires less explanation. I was just trying to make it simpler instead of being long-winded. I didn’t start out doing it. I started out doing pretty normal things. But then as I kept doing it, there were ideas I had that just didn’t work in a normal fashion. They had to have a more logical way of presenting themselves. And that’s where that came from. It was just a way to do it that looked right.

Have you licensed much of your work elsewhere? Has there ever been a Ziegler line of toasters?

No. And of course they don’t make toasters like that anymore. My toasters are based on forties and fifties models.

Did your relationship with the magazine change after Shawn left?

Not really. When Shawn got fired…Of course they said they’d never get rid of Shawn – “you stay here for as long as you want!” [Laughs.]

Were you close to Shawn?

No. Nobody’s close with Shawn, except for Lillian Ross. [Laughs.] I didn’t really know Shawn. I met him a few times. I know he liked my work, which is always nice. I got a couple of nice notes from him.

What’s your weekly routine?

I usually get up between 7 and 7:30, go out and get the newspaper. I do some reading before I start work, look at the front page of The New York Times. Then I go downstairs and do ideas for maybe an hour or two. I submit fewer cartoons now than I used to. I submit about eight a week and I used to submit about twelve. I still enjoy doing it. I scan and email it. Then I FedEx the finish if needed. The week is basically Monday to Friday. I draw them up on Fridays and Mondays, and Mondays I get them all finished and scanned and sent off. And the rest of week, Tuesday through Thursday, I’ve been using for writing.

What are the tools of your trade these days? Do you still rely on Uni-Ball Visions?

Yep.

And 20-pound typing paper?

No, I switched to this great 36-pound paper, a linen paper. It’s really, really good paper. I wish I had discovered it years ago. I switched to it because when I started scanning drawings, the ink would sometimes bleed through the old paper. My scanner scans both sides, so I’d send eight drawings in, and it would turn out to be fifteen or sixteen pages long, and that wasn’t a good thing. So I looked for this heavier paper and I’m very happy with it. But it’s very expensive. I mean, for paper. It’s sort of the queen mother of papers. [Laughter.]

Do you keep your roughs?

I number all my rough drawings, and they look very close to what goes in the magazine. When I get an OK, I just put the rough on the lightbox and pretty much just trace it. I also make things fit better.

Do you have any favorite cartoon categories?

I’ve done them all. I find myself drawing cowboys a lot for some reason. I’ve always done a lot of cowboy cartoons. Mostly scenes in bars – or saloons, I should say. Guys on horses having little conversations during the cattle drive, then going back to the bunkhouse to catch a Clint Eastwood marathon.


Special thanks to Kristen Bisson for transcription assistance.

You can now find Canadian cartoonists Aislin, Lind, J.J. McCullough, Melki and Wes everyday on Yahoo!

It would be impossible for any single exhibition to capture the whole noisy riot of styles, techniques and trends that has made up illustration over the past century. My approach was to showcase the work of what I believe to be eight of the best, most important illustrators representing a cross section of today's illustration.

I have argued on this blog that a large percentage of popular illustration today is directed at information-saturated audiences with diminishing attention spans and little taste. Much of the technical skill that previous generations of illustrators earned at a terrible price is now available to any high school student for the price of Photoshop. Many of the periodicals that once made illustration a lucrative profession died long ago. Yet, as the Delaware exhibition demonstrates, there remains a bold, creative core to illustration that is, for me, superior to much of what is taking place in contemporary "fine" art.

For this exhibition I tried to avoid popular illustrators who have prospered today by catering to the lowest common denominator. I was looking instead for the true heirs to the tradition of Howard Pyle, excellent artists who create work of enduring value.

STATE OF THE ART:
ILLUSTRATION 100 YEARS AFTER HOWARD PYLE

February 9, 2013 – June 1, 2013

In the century following Pyle’s 1911 death, American illustration has diversified into a creative empire that includes a wide range of exciting art forms. From animated feature movies and computer images to graphic novels and conceptual art, America’s storytelling artists use the latest technologies and the newest media to tell an ever-richer blend of stories to ever-broader audiences. For this exciting contemporary exhibition, Guest Curator David Apatoff, an illustration author and blogger, has gathered over 60 artworks from eight important illustrators: story illustrator Bernie Fuchs; graphic designer Milton Glaser; MAD caricaturist and comic artist Mort Drucker; The New Yorker cover artist and character designer for animated films, Peter de Sève; editorial artist John Cuneo; painter and book artist Phil Hale; painter and magazine illustrator Sterling Hundley; and Pixar production designer Ralph Eggleston.

Tailed, cover for The New Yorker, January 24, 1994 Peter de Sève (born 1958) Watercolor, colored pencil and ink on paper, 15 x 10 inches Lent by the artist