Welcome to my website. I'll be posting commentary along the way on my work and chosen field. Please revisit when you can. Click here for my Portfolios.
INX: Battle Lines
I'm very pleased to announce the publication of INX Battle Lines: Three Decades of Political Art. I've been involved with the syndicated editorial art service INX for many years, art directing it, both solely and jointly, for two decades. The group has long wanted to publish a collection like this, and the current exhibition of 30 years of INX work at Frostburg State University finally provided the impetus to get it done.
The work in this volume is close to my heart –– I admire all the artists, and am pleased to be friends with many of them. They are my peers, and this Op-ed style of political illustration is exactly the kind of work I admire most and have always aspired to produce. This is a terrific sampler of more than 275 examples of the kind of smart, gutsy artwork that seems to be in such short supply in today's market.
Please visit inxart.com for lots more on INX, and visit Now What Books to read more about this volume. You can order it with the Amazon.com widget in the right sidebar or you can order from barnesandnoble.com.
And this seems like a good excuse to share some of my own favorite INX images that spread from the 80s until today, several of which are included in the show. Please check out INX: Battle Lines.
2/22/12
Oscar, the Grouch
As we lurch towards the culmination of the movie awards season, which feels like it has as many televised ceremonies as the Republicans have debates, I wanted to bring to your attention the cinema reviews of the irascible E. Basil St. Blaise. Since 2005, the minimalist critic has been lambasting Hollywood's best efforts in a series of short, but sour notices in the right sidebar of the home page of Now What Media.
Since 2008, the brilliant Randy Jones and I have been providing illustrations for his weekly excoriations on an alternating basis. For me, it's been a pleasant diversion to be caricaturing non-politicians (unless they're humping their latest Oscar bait) who are generally easier on the eyes than our elected officials. I usually do these in pencil, which makes for a looser and warmer feel, I think, and then colorize them in Photoshop using the indispensible Multiply layer.
To see the full run of these, many of which could be rated a pretty hard PG-13, please visit Critic's Corner. And click here for a brief sampler in celebration of the Oscars 2102.
2/10/12
Holiday Jeer
Forgive me for using the season of peace, joy and discounts as a pretext for snarky satire, but that is, after all, my job. Holiday time iconography is irresistable for spoofing because it's so widely recognized and engenders such deep emotions. That so many of the emotions are warm and cuddly makes the subversion of these symbols that much more fun.
At the risk of offending Bill O'Reilly, I'm not invoking the C word to describe this portfolio, but I am aware that it is a little shy on Hannukah or Kwanzaa imagery. Oh well, you can't displease everybody. Whatever solstice-tide rituals you might embrace, I wish you all the best. And please enjoy a little sampler of Holiday Jeer.
12/19/11
End of the World, Ma!
L.K. Peterson and I were looking for an apt topic for a humor book that we could collaborate on, and the notion of sending up the end-of-the-world predictions associated with the running out of the Mayan Calendar in 2012 somehow struck us as very funny. So we "reinterpreted" the long count calendar itself, stuffing it with the glyphs and totems of dubious gods and spirits meant to reflect satirically on our own times. And then we added tons of doomsday gags.
The result is a 96-page lavishly-illustrated datebook entitled 2012 Doomsday Planner. It's currently on sale at Amazon.com –– click on the links in the sidebar to the right –– or at Barnes & Noble.com ––in a Standard Edition or a Deluxe Full-Color Edition.
Please visit 2012doomsdayplanner.com for more on the book and further end times' yuks.
11/22/11
Simply Bazaar
I recently finished a stint of three and a half months on a strip entitled Simply Bazaar that was created for Al Arabiya's English-language website. It was part of a major revamp of the site engineered by Pranay Gupte, a longtime champion of my work. I had happily toiled ten years for him on Kozmology, a strip on international affairs for The Earth Times.
Churning out 80-odd strips at a clip of 6-a-week over a few months renewed my appreciation for the monomaniacs who produce daily strips. The work is nearly all-consuming, but there are definite satisfactions which are unique and deep. I suspected this particular experiment would not last forever, but I would have liked to have had more time to work out the increasingly complex storyline that was emerging as I went along.
I'm also sorry that my accidental hero, who found himself thrust into the hot spots of the Arab Spring (after the Libyan adventure excerpted here, he headed to Damascus to counsel Assad), is not around for the tragi-comic hunt for Qaddafi. Perhaps I can find another venue for his further adventures. Please enjoy this sampler of Simply Bazaar.
09/07/11
One Wedding and a Funeral
The epochal news cycle last weekend that spanned the Royal Wedding and the bin Laden Rub-out had tout le monde pondering Love and Death (and journalistic hyperbole). These two images from the vault came to mind as I tried to ignore the former event, and sat transfixed by the latter. Diana beset by the rapacious news hound was done a few years before her unfortunate demise — one can only wish her offspring a kinder fate.
The Osama drawing was done a few weeks after 9/11, and expressed my conviction that Saudi oil wealth underlaid the bin Laden fortune which 
bankrolled international terror. By extension, our dependence on foreign oil has kept the U.S. embroiled in that part of the world, supporting thuggish regimes that supply our habit, and inspiring fundamentalist lunatics to strike at us because they resent our treading on their soil and mucking about in their internal affairs.
Speaking of thuggish regimes, I've been working on a new comic strip for the English-language website of al Arabiya TV over the past month, and the initial storyline revolves around the public relations woes of mad Muammar Qaddafi. Please take a look at Simply Bazaar.
05/09/11
Number 2 with a Ballot
The noise surrounding the possible candidacy of Donald J. Trump for President reminded me of this Monopoly-themed illustration I did in 2000, the last time the media blew hard for this blowhard. Though he never formally announced then, he might feel emboldened to do so in this election cycle as his hairline and his browline finally agree to unification.
He's just the void filling a void before the campaign proper gets underway. He does, however, offer the requisite punchlines that would make the cartoonist's job a breeze — check out Tom Hachtman's take on a potential Trump Cabinet on inxart.com.
The reluctance of prospective Republicans to toss their hats and $100M markers in the ring reminded me of the many recent runner-ups who have or will soon fade into the recesses of presidential history. Nice guys might finish last, but they're not even in the running with this delusional slew of #2's. Here's to our future Alf Landons and Adlai Stevensons in a gallery of Also-rans.
04/19/11
Going Rogue
The upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa have provided glimmers of hope for more democratic societies in that part of the world, along with the opportunity for political cartoonists to whale on some of the looniest and most despicable despots to still prowl our planet.
Despite the misery these swine spread, they are a devilsend to artists like myself who can tear into them without offending the tender sensibilities of the editor or the reader (unless you're working for the Tehran Times or the Pyongyang Post or The Weekly Standard.) So here's an excess of evil in a selection of drawings from inxart.com , a sampling of international tyrants and tinhorns from the last 25 years or so in a Rogues Gallery.
04/04/11
Higher Op-Ed
Art of the Times by J.C. Suares, a collection of the best of the early years of The New York Times' Op-Ed page, had a profound influence on me. It showcased a sophisticated brand of visual journalism by the likes of Brad Holland, Roland Topor, Tomi Ungerer, Michael-Mathias Precht, etc. that was new to an American audience used to the captioned, labeled and a bit homogenous editorial page cartoon. It inspired me and a generation of political illustrators to pursue a more personal brand of work. That my first professional jobs were for the Times' Letters and Op-Ed pages was a real thrill, though the experience perhaps made me underestimate the rigors of maintaining a free-lance career in less rareified air.
The art director who initially hired me, and later invited me to actually pinch-art direct the page, was the redoubtable Jerelle Kraus. Her many strengths as an AD included a fierce loyalty to her artists, a healthy suspicion of authority (i.e. editors), and a total commitment to the quality of the page. When Jerelle finally published her long-gestating book on the history and misadventures of the Op-Ed page — All the Art That's Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn't) — she was kind enough to include a couple of my pieces, as well as several of my quotes.
Much of the book concerns editorial timidity in the face of the intrinsically controversial nature of this sort of art. My drawing of Winnie Mandela, seen here with her headdress of intertwined serpents, was published, but drew the ire of a prominent African-American pastor who felt the drawing defamed Nelson Mandela's wife — I felt I was merely illustrating an editorial piece that held her accountable for the violent and deadly activities of her circle of bodyguards.
I'd like to say that I hope this excellent book has a similar effect on a new generation of illustrators as Art of the Times had on mine, but part of me is afraid that it might serve instead as a stirring epitaph for a silver age of newspaper art. And I hope I'm wrong about that. Here's more of my
Op-Ed Art.
02/17/11
Dutch Treat
Adulatory notices marking the centennial of Ronald Reagan's birth on February 6 triggered in me some of the same acid reflux-like release of bile that inspired these caricatures of the Gipper back in the day. You need to tap a genuine animus to produce passionately nasty drawings. Many great cartoonists like David Levine, Pat Oliphant and Edward Sorel were moved to produce their finest work in the five-o'clock shadow of Richard M. Nixon's infamy. I saw doddering yet destructive Dutch Reagan as that sort of monstrous muse.
Reaganism was and is less a political philosophy than a brand name for greed, with Reagan its advertising mascot. Virtually all the disasters of Bush the Junior's reign, including the Great Recession, are a direct consequence and unforseen side effect of that brand's full application. Click here to see my nostalgic Reagan Centennial.
02/07/11
The Museum of Martin's Art
In the process of moving my studio from Ridgefield, CT to Jersey City, NJ recently, I had to sort through lots of my older work. Mercifully, much of it was not too painful to revisit, and, in fact, there was some real pleasure in rediscovering a number of semiprecious gems. Beginning with this post, I'll expose some of them again to the light of day (or the artificial glow of your monitor.)
In conjunction with the recent exhibition Graphic Radicals: World War 3 Illustrated at Exit Art Gallery, I dug up the original pages that I contributed to the magazine in 1987. Congratulations to Peter Kuper and Seth Tobocman for keeping the magazine vital for 30 years and for the inspired show that ran through February 5th.
I think my drawings show a bit of the influence of Ralph Steadman, an early fave, and his influences, the German Expressionists of the 20s and 30s like George Grosz and Otto Dix. I was enraged by the press coverage of the Reagan Administration which seemed to get a relatively free pass, while the journos doggedly pursued and peddled the myth of "morning in America." This was the idiot infancy of happy news and the celebcentric news mongering that later came to consume mainstream journalism. Click here to see News Hounds.
01/31/11