Remember this guy? Life seems a little more hollow somehow since he dropped out. Watching his latest gaffs on the news every night gave me reason to go on living...
And her? Who's going to bring that little bit of crazy into my world now that she's gone?
Oh yeah - that's who! At least this guy is still around, although all he seems to do now is look on bemusedly while Mitt and Newt futilely try to out-dick each other.
It's hard now to believe that the torture will ever end, but I've been told that in a few months or weeks - that will no doubt feel like decades - one of these "individuals" will be crowned as the finest that the Republican party has to offer. Then the real fun begins! To the fictional construct that they've already created of our current President - that Saul Alinsky worshiping godless European socialist - they will add further layers of fibs, fabrications, falsifications, invention, artifice, perfidy, pretense, deceit, mendacity, half-truths, prevarications, and lies, lies, lies!
These pieces ran way way back in the January issue of Vanity Fair. Thanks to the magnanimous David Kamp, whose idea I borrowed and whose text I stole from copiously.
It's always a great pleasure reading a piece by Henry Alford in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and - in the good old days - in Spy Magazine. But it's especially fun to illustrate one as I did most recently for the Sunday Styles section of the Times.
The piece - on the aggravation of having your emails go un-answered - is a great one, and can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/3gmftjy
This is a subject I know a little bit about. When my emails get no response I can run the gamut from slightly peevish to enraged. At the same time I too know the guilt and shame of finding an old email rotting in my inbox, forgotten and/or ignored, sometimes for years.
Here's how I imagine I should be rewarded for this despicable behavior:
That's also why I stopped wearing a tie, right around the time I stopped going to sunday school.
I'm indebted to the peerless John Cohoe for the great gig, and a tip of the Hatlo hat to my friend, photographer David Hamsley, who first used the word 'ignore' as an action word, to hilarious effect. I'm glad I finally got a chance to steal that.
I was fortunate enough to have had four pieces selected for inclusion in the Society of Illustrators annual exhibition Illustrators 53.
The piece above, Now Billy can concentrate, won a gold medal.
I got to express my thanks at the awards gala last friday night in New York, but let me say it again here - thank you. It's a huge honor and I'm very grateful.
The editorial and book show will be on display til mid february, and I urge you to see it if you can - it's not often you get to see so much amazing work in one place.
All four illustrations were from my book, In and Out with Dick and Jane, A Loving Parody, written with James Victore, and due out this April first, from Abrams Image.
It's a simple book, which tells a timeless tale of children and their world. A beautiful, sunny joyful world filled with foreclosures, gun culture, school shootings, abuse by priests, serial killer clowns, meth labs, racism, the Times Square bomber, big box stores, credit card debt, sex education, ADHD drugs, poor school nutrition, soccer dads, bestiality, latch key kids, Viagra, obesity, litter, pollution - in other words, a world much like our own.
The book was over 15 years in the making. The illustration above was originally sketched for the Los Angeles Times Magazine around 1994. The sketch was killed. This illustration, titled some kids have hobbies, was sketched for the New York Times Magazine around the time of the early school shootings in the mid 1990's, but before Columbine. James Victore and I had written a few humor pieces together for magazines and were casting about for a more ambitious (lucrative) project. I don't remember exactly, but I'm guessing we looked at the killed sketches hanging on my wall and little lightbulbs appeared over our heads.
We wrote a proposal, did some sketches, and shopped it around. We got a lot of interest, and many many exciting - and yet somehow interminable - meetings with editors and publishers. Meetings that went exactly nowhere. In 1999 we put together a dummy of the book and my agent Holly McGhee took it out to even more interest. Offers were made, offers were rejected. A very large offer was made. The very large offer was quickly withdrawn when the editor in question was informed in no uncertain terms by her boss that she was not allowed to publish this book. The dummy collected dust..... Fast forward to late fall 2010 - dummy gets dusted off, editor David Cashion at Abrams digs dummy, inks contract, James and I furiously brainstorm, and over beers, jiu jitsu, and sessions at the local gun range, we somehow manage to write a book.
As I said, the books will be arriving on our shores April first. Godspeed, little Hong Kong container ship!
As much as I love stumbling around the mall like a zombie desperately searching for gifts, I was happy to put it off to illustrate this hilarious piece by Jim Windolf on vf.com
