Funny Faces

Milton Caniff, Will Elder and Walt Kelly. In that order.

We hereby plug and recommend a lovely little book entitled A Gallery of Rogues: Cartoonists' Self-Caricatures.  It's a whole buncha pictures of the world's greatest cartoonists drawing themselves, as collected by the late Mark Cohen.  Mark was a much-trusted artists' agent — a description that is too often an oxymoron.  But he was a good guy with a true love of silly pictures and the people who create them.  For his own collection, he amassed self-portraits and they were compiled into this hardcover book, with interesting and informative bio-text by R.C. Harvey.  You can, in fact, order a copy from R.C. Harvey's website and if you ask politely, he may even sign it and draw his own caricature in the front of the book, as he did in mine.  Even if he doesn't, this is the kind of volume that has a very special, labor-o'-love feeling about it, so I hope they sell a lot of copies.

Matter of fact, I'll sell one for them right now: Attention, Gary Grossmann:  Yes, there's a self-portrait of Sergio in this book and, yes, there's a drawing of Groo in that self-portrait.  There.  I just moved one copy…and maybe more if any of you have a little taste, good sense and thirty bucks.  If this thing weren't great, would I be writing a plug for it at 4:30 in the morning?  Of course not.