The Elusive Art of Caricature

This week’s blog features thoughts on cartoonists’ brains, Bizarro holiday decor, and a fascinating bit of pipe-related graffiti.

As we approach the Thanksgiving-to-New-Year holiday avalanche, it’s already February in the studio. I suppose I need to come up with a Cupid gag.

The latest outpouring of cartoon art features ghosts, extraterrestrials, pirates, spiders, frogs, and people soaking in a hot tub. To clarify that awkward sentence, the people soaking in a hot tub are not sharing it with ghosts, extraterrestrials, pirates, spiders, or frogs.

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Looking Ahead & Looking Back

A couple of semi-regular Bizarro characters will reappear in 2025. I’ve done twenty gags about ghosts since taking over the daily cartoon and have developed a fondness for them. Without physical features, they can represent anyone, so they’re universally relatable.

This relic from my pre-Bizarro files is a caricature of action-dude Chuck Norris, created for Entertainment Weekly in 1996. When I was called on for color illustrations, I did small acrylic paintings in those days.

Working regularly for an entertainment-based publication required that I learn to draw (or paint) famous people. I developed decent caricature skills, but achieving a humorous cartoon likeness usually involved multiple preliminary sketches that I tweaked and redrew repeatedly.

I’ve always had to work hard to do a caricature, which has deepened my admiration for people who produce them in quantity at live events with their subjects watching. In that situation, I’d be so self-conscious I could never complete a drawing.

This is an attempted caricature of my colleague Jason Chatfield, done at the annual meeting of the National Cartoonists Society in 2017. Here’s a photo of Jason from around the time of my faux-Hirschfeld sketch:

Jason is one of those artists who can do in-person caricatures and is excellent at it. He recently appeared in a New York Times story about a gathering of Substackers at Zabar’s cafe in New York.

Jason is also a terrific cartoonist, illustrator, and standup comedian, and a genuinely lovely human with seriously great hair. I subscribe to and enjoy his New York Cartoons substack. You might like to check it out, too.

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This Week in Bizarro History

ICYMI

Poor Pinocchio, the boy without a poker face.

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Keep those pipe pics, questions, comments, and t-shirt modeling photos coming in! I’m always open to answering questions in the newsletter, too. Remember, this is for you, and your input makes it better.

Thanks, as always, for your readership and support.

Best wishes from your cartoonist,

Wayno

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© 2024 by Wayno®

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