Let’s cut to the chase: You love Cassandra Cat, everyone’s favorite alluring, sinister woman of mystery from Slylock Fox. Whether she’s sneaking into a movie theater, starting a media circus on false pretenses, plotting to rob public libraries, getting tied up, or luring Max Mouse to his demise, she does what she does with grace, aplomb, and style that will make your heart go pitter-patter. You want her any way you can get her, and since she’s actually a cartoon character, the only way you can get her is on a t-shirt or other product of some sort. Well, now you can buy just those sorts of items at the Comics Curmudgeon store at CafePress!

“But wait, Josh,” I hear you saying. “Your parodies are all well and good, but you can’t just reproduce a copyrighted character on one of your products. That would violate the intellectual property rights of Slylock Fox creator Bob Weber, Jr.!” That’s absolutely true. That’s why these merch items are sporting a logo designed especially for the purchasing pleasure of Comics Curmudgeon readers by Mr. Weber himself!

Did I just blow your mind? If I didn’t, the logo itself surely will:

Do I need to push this any more? I think not. Buy some Cassandra merch already! You know you want to. As usual, I’ve put up some starter items, including the more popular types of t-shirts and, naturally, underwear, but you can email me if you’d like me to Cassandra-ize something else.

UPDATE: Uh, as noted, there’s a typo in Cassandra’s name on the shirt graphic. Those of you who care about minutia like spelling will want to hold off on those purchases until I get an updated version from Mr. Weber…

UPDATE II: Fixed graphic to come within the hour; I’ll let you all know when it’s fixed.

UPDATE III: OK, as you can see above, the typo has been fixed, both here and in the store. I think that those of you who have already ordered will get the corrected version, because your orders haven’t actually gone to production yet. But if you do get the d-less version, feel free to auction it off on eBay for three times what you paid for it.

This brief story takes place in the mid-1950s. A girl, age 10 or 11, whose mother teaches piano, gets a huge crush on her mother’s beautiful thirteen-year-old student. While waiting for her piano lesson, the older girl entertains her young admirer by drawing wonderful  cartoon “pin-ups” of nude women. To make these mesmerizing sketches of the female form, the teenager employs tools from her “Speedball Artist Set No. 5,”  which comes in a compact 3.5″  x  7″ red, white and blue cardboard box, with lid copy that reads, in part, “Pocket Size for Students and Professional Artists.” Noting all this, our clever younger heroine also falls in love with the lettering and sketching kit. She arranges to get an identical one for her birthday only days later. (Click images to enlarge them.)

The Speedball kit includes a folded 6″ x 4″ four page Principles of Pen Drawing brochure jammed-packed with useful information for the beginner or the professional artist. So one can easily understand why, aside from the array of intriguing pen holders and pen points —not to mention the shapely female form of the small bottle of waterproof black India ink — the young girl finds it all just too, too attractive to resist.

Cover 1 and 4

Pages 2 and 3

For easier reading, I’ve retyped the drawing tips.

Figure A — Here is an unusually interesting sky technique which distinguishes the artist’s work. The drifting lines and absence of harsh cloud outlines gives a true feeling of atmospheric perspective. Hunt 104 and 102 pens were used.

Figure B — Here the artist demonstrates his knowledge of line, freely conceived, bold and open. Study of this example of bold outline can teach us to realize, as each line is crisply drawn, what its precise value in the total finished pen drawing will be. Hunt 102 and 108 pens were used.

Figure C — Cross-Hatching. Note how sparingly cross-hatching is used. In its application texture and tonal values produce the shape and feel of canvas. The highlights and direction and length of the single lines should be carefully studied to get the relaxed portion of the sails. This is a good demonstration of the quality of line, its combination, or contrasting of line values, and directions as serving the additional function of expressing texture and color. Hunt 102, 107, and 108 pens were used.

Figure D — The Structure of Background. The simplified vertical lines with a minimum of cross-hatching which characterizes the background. The mast itself is treated with strong cross-hatching which moves it forward in proper relation to the background. Hunt 102 and 107 pens were used.

Figure E — Modeling and strong highlights dominate this portion of our study. Note the highlighting of the ropes and the curving side of the barkatine, the heavy blacks in the deep shadows at ship’s bottom. Hunt 102 and 108 pens were used.

Figure F — Here we have an effective combination of stipple both light and heavy, with corresponding undefined and decisive lines to give us the feeling of ground around the wharf. Hunt 102, 107, and 108 pens were used. (Copy writer Earl Horter was an illustrator/painter 1881-1940.)

The young girl, sad to say, eventually gives up trying to master hand lettering — she now says that practicing the strokes proved to be just too, too boring. However, she loves the feel of  the crowquill drawing pens from the kit and, with time, becomes skilled at sketching natural scenes in pen and ink. (And, happily for me, she gives up her girly crushes and substitutes boy crushes instead.)

As it happens, two of my favorite cartoonist’s are Roz Chast and William Steig. Here we find them together for — as far as I know — the first time. (And what a team!) I lifted this piece from the “Drawn!,” website (to which you can link from the sidebar on this blog). “Drawn!,”  in turn, picked up the item from The Paris Review blog, where it originally appeared on September 1, 2011. (You’ll find a link to Paris Review by tapping Ms. Chast’s name, below.) If you love these two artists, you’ll enjoy — and learn a bunch of interesting stuff —  from this short essay.

Cats, Dogs, Men, Women, Ninnies & Clowns

September 1, 2011 | by Roz Chast

I first noticed William Steig’s covers and cartoons around 1970, when I was a teenager and would page through my parents’ New Yorker magazines. His drawings didn’t look like the rest of the cartoons in the magazine. They didn’t have gag lines. There were no boardrooms, no cocktail parties with people saying witty things to one another. His men and women looked as if they were out of the Past, although I wasn’t completely clear as to what era of the Past they were from. Sometimes the drawings made me laugh, and sometimes they didn’t, but I always wanted to look at them. I had a sense that these cartoons were made by someone who had had to create his own language, both visual and verbal, with which to express his view of the world.

His subjects? Animals, both real and imaginary. Also cowboys, farmers, knights on horseback, damsels in distress, gigantic ladies and teeny-tiny men, grandmas, clowns of indeterminate gender, average joes, families, old couples, young couples, artists, deep thinkers, fools, loners, lovers, and hoboes, among other things.

Blue Moon

Steig’s drawings seem to flow effortlessly from his mind to his pen and onto the paper. I doubt he ever looked at a blank sheet and thought, “I have nothing worthwhile to say today,” or “I can’t draw a car as well as Joe Shmoe, so why don’t I crawl back into bed and wait for the day to be over.” Steig gave himself permission to be playful and experimental. One of the many wonderful things about looking at his drawings is their message, especially to his fellow artists: Draw what you love and what interests you. Draw it how you want to draw it. When we are children we do this instinctively. But somewhere in our passage from childhood to adulthood, the ability to be truly and fearlessly creative is often lost. To quote Pablo Picasso, Steig’s favorite artist, “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered

William Steig produced more than fifty books, from early collections like Small Fry (1944) to children’s books like Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (1969) and Shrek! (1990), which he wrote and illustrated late in his career. Unlike many artists who find a style early in their lives and then spend the rest of their careers perfecting it, Steig changed his style over the years. His work from the forties and fifties is fairly conventional. In the drawings of his middle years, his style is more angular and geometric. And in his last decades, his line becomes very fluid and playful, and there is an explosion of color, especially in his children’s books.

Steig, who was a follower of Wilhelm Reich, was deeply interested in psychology. Much of his work looks at society from an outsider’s point of view, observing with humor and compassion the compromises we make when we grow up and try to conform to society’s expectations. His earliest collection (and one of my favorites) was About People (1939). Each page contains a drawing representing a different emotional state, with a caption written underneath in his handwriting. Some combinations of drawing and title are fairly obvious, like the man sitting in a chair calmly smoking a cigarette. Behind the chair is a huge octopus with four tentacles wrapped around the man. The caption is simply “Poise.” But some of the drawings are not of people at all. One contains a roughly drawn spiral, and in the center of the spiral is a black blot with a tiny white dot in the middle. The caption is: “Father’s Angry Eye.”

Self-Contempt

These are not your typical cartoons, and especially not typical of cartooning at the time. They’re offbeat. They’re also about something otherwise intangible: actual emotions.

Hostess

Steig’s interest in psychology continued with Persistent Faces (1945), which explores a variety of visual types, like the “Hostess,” who has alarmingly twinkly eyes and teeth, and a worried man’s face, captioned “Straw in the Wind.” The Agony in the Kindergarten (1950), which he dedicated to Reich, is filled with drawings of children and accompanying statements like “I need that kid like I need a hole in the head,” and “Stop asking so many questions.” Perhaps Steig’s most famous cartoon of this period is “Mother loved me but she died,” from The Lonely Ones (1942). These demonstrate Steig’s ear for language, and also demonstrate his ability to look at life through a child’s eyes.

Just a Dream

Steig was an exceptionally gifted colorist, and he used color in a luminous, instinctive, and expressive way. Even when the goings-on are terrifying, as they often are in Rotten Island (1984)—my favorite of all of his children’s books—they’re never depressing. His dark colors are about a gleeful darkness, the darkness children feel when they know their most trusted adult is going to tell them a spooky story. The color isn’t over-fussed or second-guessed or muddified.

Steig loved pattern. Rugs, sofas, chairs, wallpaper, ladies’ dresses, and men’s shirts were all miniature canvases where he could make up designs—diamonds or flowers or spirals or something that looks like an upside-down banana peel. Even a sky could be patterned with lines or brick-like shapes or decorative cloud puffs.

Carnival

In the preface to his collection Dreams of Glory (1953), Steig writes, “We can laugh at the pretense and pose and foolishness of an irrational ideology and at the same time feel the pity and love—for a living being—that should be ingredients of all humor.” Sometimes I think of the Cartoon World as a big house with a Magazine Panel Cartoon Wing, a Newspaper Daily Strip Wing, a Graphic Novel Wing, an Underground Comics wing, a Superhero Comics wing, an Animation wing, and lots of other wings I don’t know about yet. Steig’s drawings throw open a bunch of windows and let in some fresh air, for which I am deeply grateful. He saw the world of human beings as absurd, hilarious, terrifying, mystifying, and infinitely worth observing.

Roz Chast’s cartoons have been published in magazines such as The New Yorker, Scientific American, and Mother Jones. Her next book is What I Hate: From A to Z. A longer version of this essay will appear in Cats, Dogs, Men, Women, Ninnies, & Clowns: The Lost Art of William Steig.

Over the years I’ve posted several other pages of Bad Mickey doodles, and in one case a very short essay about them. To see them all at once, type “Bad Mickey” in the little sidebar window and press “Search.”

In Which We Read With Awe And We Read With Wonder

By Christina Gay

The “Hip Shots” series of Doodlemeister.com photographs will feature images that were grabbed “on the fly” with little or no regard for framing and focus. The object of the exercise being to create dynamic pictures, not perfect ones. With this ” shoot-from-the-hip” method, the more frames  exposed, the better the chances are that you’ll come up with something interesting—a related series that can be arranged as a three-image post. If you’d like additional tips for using the technique, or to submit your own pictures, drop a question or note in the “Leave a Comment” section, below. Meanwhile, click on these images for a larger view, and click the “Hip Shots” tag above for more examples. Tune in next Friday for another post in the series.

Copyright © 2010 Christina Gay.

“Between 1956 and 1964 I worked at The Famous Artists Schools in the correspondence art school. I worked on the Cartoon Course. We would get a student’s assignment and put overlays on it and point out various “trouble” spots and sometimes re-draw the whole situation and then send a letter to accompany the crit. The letters were standard form letters (after all everybody would make the same “mistakes”) but we would “personalize” the letter by inserting certain words that applied specifically to the student’s particular picture. We had lessons on inking, heads, action etc.. There were 4 or 5 of us doing the lessons and we would bounce the student around between us so he or she would have the advantage of more than one point of view. I was the youngest, being hired at the ripeness of twenty years. The others were pretty much retired guys in their 60′s having had careers in the field. One of them had and continued to draw Popeye, another had worked on the Lone Ranger, another on Katzenjammer Kids, another on Captain Marvel Jr. and Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang and Playboy girlie cartoons etc..

“So . . . the other day I’m surfing the web and I come across a blog called “Doodlemeister”. The fellow that runs it named Jim Sizemore had a post where he, in great detail, described critiques of mine he had received when he was an FAS student. It was a trip down memory lane alright. He complained that I had always given him high grades and flattery when he really wanted tough criticism. He pointed out that my overlay comments were a little more to the point than my letters (form letters). I made a comment on his blog post and invited him, if he wished, to send me an assignment NOW and I would give him a free crit. He was 25 then and is in his 70′s now as I am. I promised him, in addition, that this time I definitely would not give him a good grade. Here then is my crit of his “assignment” because he took me up on it.” (Click images for larger views.)

The one disagreement I have with Mr. Enos’ critique is not visual but verbal—his suggested caption, making it about the mythical memory powers of elephants instead of cross-species relationships. In the writing process I considered the memory angle but quickly rejected it as too much the cliché. I  think the relationship idea is the more original—and funnier—choice.

Mr. Enos ended his blog post with these kind—and much too generous—words: “Y’know, the more I look at it . . . the more I like his cartoon better than mine.”

Copyright © 2010 Jim Sizemore.

Back in the 1980s and ’90s, when I was trying to become a magazine cartoonist and having only moderate success at venues such as the Saturday Evening Post, TV Guide, and Writer’s Digest, the publication I really wanted to crack was Playboy. Next to the New Yorker, (which rejects just about everybody) Playboy was and is one of the highest paying magazines still in the gag cartooning game. The problem was, I had no idea how to write a sexy caption or draw a sexy woman—especially not a sexy naked woman. But the money was good, so I decided to try anyway and hope that Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s founder and editor, would find my subtle attempts at fleshy humor appealing. After all, I thought, the man’s not just a booty-hound, he’s also an intellectual—all you had to do was read his essays in the magazine to know that. But as it turned out selling him one (or more) of my cartoons was not to be. (Click once or twice on the rejection letter for a larger view.)

Prior to receiving that letter I had been encouraged when the long-time cartoon editor of Playboy, Michelle Urry, “held” some images from three “batches” of ten cartoons that I submitted each month. So I knew that Hefner’s  gatekeeper appreciated my indirect take when it came to the subject of male lust, liked them enough to show them to the boss. But several additional months went by before I heard the final verdict, which you see above. Just for laughs I showed the no-sale notification to a feminist-Marxist friend of mine. She promptly displayed her sharp radical-chic sense of humor by scrawling the note you see in the upper right hand corner of the “damning-with-faint-praise” letter. Her joke alone almost made the failed efforts worthwhile.

Below are three rejected cartoons from one 1997 batch. Now you be the judge—are they Playboy-worthy?

To purchase reprint and/or other rights for these cartoons, buy  framed prints, or have them reproduced on T-shirts, mugs, aprons, etc., visit the CartoonStock website by clicking the sidebar link.

Copyright © 2010 Jim Sizemore.

Once I’ve settled on a visual idea, I place the doodle under a sheet of tracing paper and began to refine the image. My goal in this early stage is to clean up and sharpen the drawing without losing the vitality of the original, something I find difficult to achieve. My drawings tend to tighten up as they go from rough draft to finished art. With few exceptions, I prefer my doodles and rough sketches to the final product. Here I’m also using the side of my blue pencil lead to freely suggest a possible shading scheme for the final drawing. (I use blue pencil because I like the “feel” of it and it’s cleaner than graphite.) I’ve also indicated where my signature will go, along with a note to myself that it needs to be smaller. (It seems  vanity always wants my name to be huge.) Meanwhile, still working in stage two, I’ve also begun to play with a very different idea for the caption. It’s not unusual for one of my cartoon tag lines to change by a word or two, even more—but for the caption to do a complete flip, as in this case, is rare.

Back to the drawing. I begin stage three by sliding my somewhat “refined” sketch under a fresh page of tracing paper and go over the lines, this time in ink, again trying to keep the image as spontaneous-looking as possible. My line work generally fails to express the illusion of volume and shape that I’m after so—to compensate—I add shading with a black Prismacolor pencil and use my earlier blue pencil rough as a guide. After working a bit more to sharpen the new caption, I scan the inked tracing paper image into Photoshop for the final cleanup. My goal is to make the corrections, additions, deletions, size changes, etc., appear to be as “natural,” that is as un-computer-like, as possible. For someone like me, who began in the graphics business using only pencils, ink, T-squares, triangles, etc., having a powerful computer to assist me in the final stages of what is, for the most part still a handicraft as I practice it, seems more than a little strange. But I’ve been happy to embrace this wonderful new tool, albeit in a limited way.

And finally, here’s the finished cartoon as it posted on 12/28/09. You’ll notice that I’ve decided to go with the second, “too old for me” version of the caption, which I’m convinced is the better punchline. But I could be wrong. What do you think—did I make the right choice? Please pass along your opinion in the comment section below, and include your own caption suggestion if you have one. (If it’s better than mine, assume I’ll steal it.)

To read about more hi-jinks with this particular gag cartoon, click on Randall Enos’ blog link, drawger.com/bigfoot in the sidebar and scroll down to the title “My Life on the Slanted Board, Chapter 32, ‘FAS redux’,” which posted on 2/4/10. Mr. Enos was one of my cartooning instructors at the Famous Artists Schools back in the 1960s, in fact he was the very first. Thanks to the Internet, Randy and I have recently reestablished our student-teacher relationship. It was his idea that I send him a “lesson” to critique as he might have in the old days. I agreed and suggested that he be tougher on me grade-wise than he was then. He has some interesting and insightful things to say about my effort, and he’s still very fair, but with my blessing he has also become a stern task-master. (The big lesson I learned from him this time was to be careful what I ask for.)

I’ve tried to keep this post brief, so if you have questions about the process or anything else, please use the comments tag below to ask them. And if you have some more time to play, check to see how many differences you can spot between the last two images. (I count seven, one of them being a bit subtle and easy to miss. I’ll tell you mine if you’ll tell me yours.)

Copyright © 2010 Jim Sizemore.