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July 27 is the tenth anniversary of the death of gifted cartoonist Richard Thompson. His tragic death at age of 58 was a great loss to the field of illustration as well as a personal loss to the many friends and admirers who loved him dearly. I always enjoyed Richard's sketch of presidential candidate and business executive H. Ross Perot, one of the very first in a line of plutocrats convinced…
“You have to wake up every morning angry.” -- Pat Oliphant Last week I wrote an appreciation of the late great Pat Oliphant (1935-2026) in The Comics Journal . While writing it, I was struck by the fact that Oliphant's long, successful career was the result of a total fluke of time and place. He started out in a small town near Adelaide, Australia where nobody cared about current events. He worked…
The False Gods by George Horace Lorimer was illustrated in 1906 by a young J.C. Leyendecker. It is not mentioned in any of the reference books on Leyendecker. 1906 was an interesting moment for the world's perception of ancient Egypt. 19th century colonial exploration had revealed-- but not solved-- many of the intriguing mysteries of that fabled empire. The discovery of King Tut's tomb, which…
In the early1960s a flurry of coloring books appeared with grown up content. Don't ask me why. Like children's coloring books, they were printed on cheap pulp paper with simple line drawings suitable for coloring in with crayon. Each page might contain a sentence or two of very simple language, like a child's primer. The first major example was The JFK Coloring Book illustrated by Mort Drucker. It…
Lynd Ward's 1929 book, God's Man, came out at the wrong time and place. At a time when full color reproductions on glossy pages in books and magazines were new and wildly popular, God's Man was made exclusively of black and white woodcuts, a medium that predated Durer in the 15th century. In a decade when the country was celebrating prosperity and citizens were wallowing in new luxuries and…
Done with Chat GPT in 2 minutes Freud famously claimed that the human race has suffered three great humiliations: The discovery by Copernicus that earth isn't the center of the universe, "only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness." Astronomy destroyed our illusion of a safe and stable home at the hub of the universe and left us in an unbounded, decentralized universe…
"See what forest has arisen from the rot." -- Susan Barba The Roman Colosseum was designed for the most brutal entertainments. Ancient Romans were thrilled to see victims ripped to shreds by lions and tigers. The more fortunate victims were permitted to fight back ( damnatio ad bestias or "condemnation to beasts"). The less fortunate were left naked and defenseless to be devoured ( obicĕre bestiis…
In 1966, The Cartoonist Cookbook published a drawing and recipe from each of 45 popular comic strip artists. The book reminds us about the snappy draftsmanship on the comics pages in those days. For example, the talented Leonard Starr contributed this drawing of his wife trying to trick him into eating tuna fish, which he'd told her he hated: Stan Drake contributed this sparkly drawing of his…
Harold von Schmidt's illustrations for Death Comes for the Archbishop were greatly admired when they first appeared in 1927. Von Schmidt was ideally suited to illustrate Willa Cather's tale of the southwestern desert. He grew up in that land, roughing it on cattle drives, wrangling horses and riding the buffalo trails. He got to know and love the desert by contemplating vast landscapes of clouds…
I previously posted a series of life drawings by illustrator Daniel Schwartz. In addition to pencil drawings, Schwartz regularly painted from the model with watercolors. Schwartz was a highly respected illustrator, winner of eleven gold medals from the Society of Illustrators, yet every week he went back to study from the model. It seems clear that Schwartz wasn't doing this to learn anatomy. He…
