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Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

Tags Abie the Agent, Art Spiegelman, Bobby London, Chris Browne, Drake Hotel, Elwood Smith, Harry Hershfield, Harvey Kurtzman, Hugh Hefner, Jay Lynch, John Held Jr., Little Annie Fanny, Lou Brooks, Michelle Urry, Mort Gerberg, new york, Playboy Magazine, Polly and her Pals.Cliff Sterrett, Reg'ler Rabbit

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Crazy NRA Board Meeting!

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date April 30, 2019

There’s been lots of news about the non-profit National Rifle Association’s recent money troubles – from a $200,000 wardrobe budget for the NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, to a $1,000,000 annual salary for spokesperson Dana Loesch. Infighting forced NRA president Oliver North out of his presidency, after North allegedly blackmailed LaPierre – and there’s an investigation by New York state that might take away the NRA’s tax exempt status, insuring the organization’s demise. So many egos! (I’m guessing that Oliver North is the good guy in the mess, trying to save the NRA from itself.) Here’s my cartoon!

Notice how they are in mirror image positions? When I do something like that I’m bound to get an email from somebody saying “Wayne LaPierre isn’t left handed!” Also, did anyone notice that I only drew the gun and the hand holding it once, and duplicated it another seven times in Photoshop? So lazy. And where’s all the blood?

Here are some of my recent NRA favorites. The first one is by New Zealand cartoonist, Chris Slane, who is one of my favorites!

This one is by our newest CagleCartoons.com syndicate cartoonist, Dave Whamond.

And this one is by my buddy, Bill Schorr.

Here are some gun oldies I drew back in 1995 for my TRUE! cartoon panel. These are really true, at least they were in 1995.

Tags board meeting, convention, gun, National Rifle Association, non-profit, nra, Oliver North, pistol, scandal, shoot, shot, Wayne LaPierre

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Genies Turned Me Into a Political Cartoonist

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date April 28, 2019

Before I was a political cartoonist I was a toy inventor.

Here’s my design for the Genie “Ruby,” from my presentation boards for “Teeny Genies” that were made to look like historic old parchment.

I worked for the Muppets for many years, designing Muppet toys for all the major toy companies, and the same people I worked with were also the people who reviewed new product submissions for the toy companies.

The Muppets were a crash course in the toy industry for me.

For a few years I was knocking out about 20 new toy presentations a year. Most of my concepts were cartoon and character based and I always had a bag full of new inventions to show to toy company executives whenever they came through Los Angeles. I was constantly pitching. Since my skillset is limited to drawing and writing, I used to pitch my ideas to other talented people with different skillsets, often to someone who would make prototypes for me. My garage is full of these old presentations and prototypes.

Here are some of our Genie dolls on blister cards, along with their magical, baby exotic animal pets.

My Magic Genies was one of my favorites; I originally titled it Teenie Genies and partnered with brilliant Muppet artist, Marilee Canaga who made the most beautiful little doll prototypes, with wearable jewels decorating their lovely Genie bottles. More recently Marilee did the latex costume for The Tick on Amazon Prime and she’s been making Marvel superhero costumes for arena shows. Marilee can make anything –and make it look perfect and theatrical!

All of my toy presentations consisted of large presentation boards on foam-core (called “B-Sheets”), prototypes and a VHS video to leave with the toy company. We made the Genies in 1991 and I pitched them to all the major toy companies, who all liked them and kept them for review, sometimes for months. I pitched and re-pitched the Genies for four years.

These are Marilee’s prototype Genie dolls, with their bottles, on black velvet. Sadly, the original prototypes were lost in the bowels of Hasbro.

Marilee made four gorgeous Genie dolls with matching bottles in special black velvet cases where they sparkled like jewels; I broke the dolls up into two sets of two so that I could circulate two presentations at once. It wasn’t unusual for me to re-pitch concepts that were turned down in those days. I would push the limits on re-pitching until I annoyed the toy company executives.

Finally in 1995, Hasbro called me asking me to bring the Genies back to them again, and Hasbro ended up licensing them, changing their name to My Magic Genies to go with Hasbro’s other “My …” toys, like My Little Pony.

Here’s a TV ad for our My Magic Genies that came out in the spring of 1996.

Here is my design for the baby, magical dragon character, “Zyra,” and Hasbro’s rendition. Hasbro added magical “elements” to the genies’ pets, for example, the baby dragon had a fortune telling die in its transparent belly – something I didn’t design. It looked to me like I was seeing what the little dragon ate for dinner.

At Toy Fair in February 1996, Hasbro built a big Arabian tent and hired a bunch of beautiful, young girls dressed like our genies (but a little older, and shapelier, looking more like the I Dream of Jeannie TV genie). Hasbro’s live genies frolicked around like our genies would, charming the crusty old toy buyers.

Writing cartoon gags often involves putting two different concepts together; it is the same thing with toy inventing. Kids feel small and powerless in a world full of bigger people, so boys love toys that let them imagine being strong, and girls feel empowered by magic in toys. Girls also like nurture dolls (baby dolls they care for, Pound Puppies and Cabbage Patch Kids they adopt); and girls like aspiring to beauty as with Barbie dolls, hair-play and wearables. The Genies combine all of that seamlessly. I suppose the ultimate proof-of-concept is the success of Shimmer and Shine twenty four years later.

Hasbro asked me to design baby, magic animal, exotic pets for each of the genies. Although I designed four pets for four genies, oddly, Hasbro only came out with three of the pets. Hasbro added magical “elements” to the pets, for example, the baby dragon had a fortune telling die in its transparent belly – something I didn’t design. It looked to me like I was seeing what the little dragon ate for dinner.

The Sparkling Palace Play Set, styled like a giant bottle, was center-stage in Hasbro’s Toy Fair genie harem tent, but I don’t think it ever came out in stores.

During my four years of pitching the Genies I also pitched them as a show in Hollywood; I often did this with toy pitches and I optioned and did development deals on some of these, but they never turned into shows. I could see that I could spend my whole career pitching shows, and making a reasonable living with development deals, but never actually getting any shows produced. Pitching shows in Hollywood is very frustrating for little creative guys like me. Hasbro pitched the Genies to the Hollywood studios also.

The drawing below is a rough sketch I did for a big painting for Hasbro’s Hollywood TV pitches. I don’t know what happened to the painting, but the sketch survives, showing the four genies and their four magical, baby, exotic animal pets frolicking in the bottle city where the genies live, and having tea on their magic carpet.

The genies had a magic carpet vehicle that was pretty cute. I’ve got a box full of these in the garage. I just looked them up on eBay and they go for something between $89.00 and $300.00 each.

The Teenie Genies/My Magic Genies didn’t amount to much because they never got a TV show, but a doll line with Hasbro is still a big score for a little toy inventor –and a big non-refundable, advance against royalties made me feel secure enough that I could try some different things in my career. I did a newspaper comic, something that notoriously pays poorly, but that cartoonists love to do. In 1995 the genies gave me the financial freedom to draw a panel titled, TRUE! for Tribune Media Services (see lots of TRUE! comics here).

One of the newspapers that ran TRUE! was the Midweek newspaper in Hawaii; they called me up and asked if I would like to be their local, Hawaii editorial cartoonist, and I said, “of-course!” I later moved to being a daily cartoonist for Gannett’s Honolulu Advertiser (they were absorbed by another paper and are now the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, which still runs my cartoons). I started my syndicate and became the cartoonist for Slate.com, then msnbc.com and here I am today, still drawing political cartoons. I wouldn’t be drawing political cartoons if not for the genies.

Every so often I hear from ladies who somehow tracked me down, who tell me how they loved My Magic Genies when they were little girls. That’s nice to hear. And I see the genies sometimes on eBay, sometimes for silly prices.

By the time I rounded out my toy inventing career, the toy industry had changed. When I started in 1986, Toys R Us carried 35,000 SKUs (different products) in their stores. By the time I quit in 1995, Toy R Us carried only 13,000 SKUs. Now Toys R Us is gone completely. I used to license lots of small, unadvertised toys. I hit singles and not home runs, but I could make a fair living hitting singles. I don’t think that is possible anymore. The toy industry is only about big licensed products from big Hollywood properties now, and the days of the small, independent toy inventors are sadly gone.

Whenever I did a new toy presentation, I would make a pitch video where I would show the B-sheets (presentation boards) and the prototypes. I would usually read through the copy on the B-sheets and make the best argument I could for the toy in one, unedited, five minute take, in my living room, in front of a big, clunky, noisy old video camera. I would make about a dozen copies and leave the VHS tapes with toy companies when they wanted to consider the pitch –and even when they didn’t, who knows, they might change their minds and take another look, like Hasbro did.

The old video below shows young, 35 year old me making the pitch for the Teenie Genies in 1991. I cringe to look at myself and this crummy tape now, but at the time I never worried about the tapes being crummy. The VHS video shows the nice, parchment B-sheets and Marilee’s lovely prototypes. The video also contains a Gilligans Island joke, which may have been funny 28 years ago, but probably wasn’t.

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Trump Toilet

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date April 26, 2019

Trump isn’t showing much respect to Congress these days. The president will not comply with any subpoenas from the House committees that are investigating him and the courts can’t do much about it because Trump’s term will be over by the time the courts come to any decisions. My cartoon shows Trump’s attitude about Congress.

This isn’t the first time I’ve drawn Trump on the toilet –here’s an oldie from a couple of years ago when it looked like Trump was spinning out and sinking with some forgettable issue of the moment.

Somehow I think Trump will have more visits to the cartoon toilet before long.

Tags Capital, capitol, congress, Democrats, donald trump, executive privilege, House Judiciary Committee, investigation, Mueller, president, subpoena, toilet

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Art School Days in the Whorehouse

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date April 25, 2019

Here’s a memory about art school, from our storied cartoonist, Randy Enos.

As my second (soon to be my last) year in art school approached, I decided to live with a homogeneous group of art students instead of the un-homogeneous group I had been with in my first year. So, four of us found an apartment on Dartmouth Street above Back Bay Station in Boston. It was not a long walk down Huntington Avenue to our school, The Boston Museum School of Fine Arts.

The furnished apartment consisted of one long room culminating in a big wall window looking down on the street from the second floor. Entering our $75 a month apartment there was a little cooking alcove, consisting of an old stove and tiny refrigerator to the left, and a tiny bathroom with claw-foot tub to the right; there was also a long room with four beds perpendicular to the wall down the right side. There was a small amount of room left for sitting before the grand window which formed the back wall.

The apartment building was above Dave Finn’s Irish Bar which had a garishly large green shamrock in the window. The bar and building were owned and operated by our landlord, Dave Finkelstein. Every night the bawdy sounds of music, drinking, fighting and other general ribaldry wafted up to our grand window and managed to deprive us of any quiet or sleep until the bar shut down around midnight.

Across the street was a charming little art store called Hatfield’s Color Shop and to its left a cigar and cigarette store featuring cigarettes from all around the world. My favorites were the strong pungent ones from Turkey. Every morning on my way to school, I would purchase my breakfast which consisted of one of their fat, five-cent cigars augmented by a 5th Avenue candy bar bought at the drugstore next door. That was the breakfast I munched on every morning, finishing off my fat smelly cigar in drawing class where we would draw from a nude model until noon.

In the entrance-way to our apartment building was a small hotel desk (because, in fact, it was sort of a hotel) manned by a little crippled poet named Bob. Facing Bob and his desk was a small rickety elevator which took us to our room. On our second floor there were a few other tenants (I don’t remember ever seeing any of them). On the third floor were rooms for transients and I think, there was a fourth floor, also for transients. There was one of our fellow art students on the third floor among the transients, named Arthur Foley who was also a jazz drummer. Because I talk a lot Arthur dubbed me “Lip-Jazz”, a nickname that stuck with me that whole second year. The transients were exclusively bar and street hookers and their sailors (there were an awful lot of sailors around at that time).

I didn’t eat or sleep much in those days and I really took a liking to Bob with his poetry and intelligent conversation so I hung around his desk often into the wee hours of the morning. We watched the endless parade of hookers with their drunken sailors file in every night. Sometimes the girls would ditch them only moments later, seeking greener pastures and leaving the abandoned sailor boys alone in the room until, finally, they’d stagger back down to Bob and me and ask if we saw the girl they had come in with. It was usually, ”She said she was just going to get some cigarettes.”

Life was frugal for us in those days. About our only form of relaxation was hiding Jack’s thick glasses from him in the morning and watching him stagger around blind as a bat cursing us and our ancestors. Ronnie was an avid rock climber who actually slept with a beautiful, recently purchased and gleaming “rock-climbing axe.” And there was Steve Chop, our “cook,” who we all mercilessly kidded about wanting to have a career in advertising art.

We shared our interesting apartment with about a million cockroaches who would line the rim of our bathtub and watch us take baths. The flooring of our palace consisted of large black and white tiles. When we would open our door to enter, the whole room seemed to move as the cockroaches dove toward the black squares.

One particular night, I pushed the “starving and drinking” routine a little too far. Around 2 or 3 in the morning, as I stood talking to Bob at the desk, I started to feel slightly woozy. I told him I’d better get to bed. I remember opening the elevator door and entering. The next thing I remember is waking up to loud pounding. A frightened Bob face looked through the little elevator window at me laying on the floor of the elevator. He said I had hit every wall in there before collapsing. Ah, the halcyon days of the art school life.

One morning we looked out of our glorious window down to the street and we saw one of our teachers. He had come on the train into Back Bay Station and was proceeding up the street toward Huntington Avenue to walk to school. We were excited to see him. We banged on the window and shouted out our morning greetings to him. He completely ignored us. He looked straight ahead and kept walking. We knew he had heard us; we weren’t that high up away from the street.

Later we arrived at school and confronted him about it.

He said, “I heard you guys but I’m not going to wave to you up there in that whorehouse above the bar!”

–Randy Enos

Email Randy

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

Tags 5th Avenue candy bar, apartment, art college, art school, Dave Finn's Irish Bar, Hatfield's Color Shop, Randy Enos, sailors, student, The Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, whorehouse

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Muppet Mob Scene

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date April 24, 2019

Randy Enos’ stories inspired me to tell an old story from my own New York cartooning days.

I only draw Muppets occasionally in political cartoons now. I drew this one when it was revealed that the brokers at Goldman Sachs referred to their clients as “Muppets” meaning they were dumb puppets who would do whatever the greedy brokers wanted.

When I was a young cartoon illustrator in New York City my biggest client was Henson Associates, the Muppets, who kept me busy drawing pigs and frogs all the time.

I think it is 1981 and I’m 25 years old in the photo below. The Muppets were hugely popular in 1981 and I had already drawn them so many times that the Muppets all lived in my head; I knew all the names and I didn’t need to look at photos to draw them all.

The Muppets had taken over a large part of the Macy’s Herald Square department store with Muppet licensed merchandise and they did a promotion where I would sit in the middle of the Muppet products and draw Muppets at the request of customers. I hadn’t done anything like this before, but it sounded like it would be fun. They hired me to sit and draw for three hours.

Here I am, looking young in 1981, just starting to draw Muppets at the Herald Square Macy’s before the crowd thickened.

Some people from the Muppets and Macy’s set me up with a table and made an announcement over the PA system to come to the Muppet section of the store to get a free, live drawing from an official Muppet artist –and then they left. The photo shows me just as they left. The calm before the storm.

I asked people to request a Muppet, and asked them what they wanted the Muppet to be doing, and I drew pretty fast. Most of the requests were for Kermit, Piggy, Gonzo and Animal. I signed them with a Muppet signature, like “Kissy, Kissy, Miss Piggy.”

I couldn’t see beyond the edges of my table where people were standing, pressed up against me. What I didn’t know is that the line of people waiting for their free drawing snaked all through the floor at Macy’s, doubling back and forth with hundreds of people waiting for their free drawing. There was no one managing the line –the Muppets and Macy’s people had walked away when I first sat down and they didn’t come back.

I drew this Muppet political cartoon when the Muppets withdrew from a licensing campaign in protest because of Chick-fil-A’s apparent opposition to gay marriage. Good for the Muppets!

After about two and a half hours I yelled out, “I’m only here for another half hour!” The people only pressed in harder. At the three hour mark, I stood up to gather my materials and the people turned surly. Some guys yelled, “I’ve been waiting for my drawing for THREE HOURS!” I learned that my drawings weren’t really free –the people had been paying for them with the time they spent waiting in line and they wanted what they paid for!

Women held up their kids and whined, “Just one more for little Doofus?” The men were angry. They mulled around me, making their demands as I tried to sulk away through an endless mass of people that seemed like a crowd crushed into a subway car at rush hour.

I see how lines like this are supposed to be managed at the San Diego Comic Con, where volunteers keep the line single file, estimate the time remaining and hang a sign on someone that says, “Last in Line.”

At Macy’s I was chum thrown to the sharks!

When I was 25 in 1981, the Muppets were promoting their movie The Great Muppet Caper, and I was doing lots of art projects tied into the movie. Here are a couple memorable ones from my garage.

Tags 1981, Henson Associates, macy's, mcdonalds, milton bradley, muppets, New York City, The Great Muppet Caper

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The Card Trick That Caused A Divorce

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date April 23, 2019

Here’s my buddy, Randy Enos, telling a story from his art school days. See Randy’s editorial cartoon archive here. –Daryl

I learned a trick when I was a kid, from one of my father’s fellow insurance salesmen who used to pull the trick on some of his clients when stopping by to collect their premiums.

Here’s how it worked. He asked if they had a deck of cards. Then, when the deck was presented, he asked them to pick a card from it. When that was done, he would make a phone call.

He’d say, “Hello, Wizard?” And then, “Will you please tell this woman what card she picked?!” He’d hand the client her phone. She would then be shocked when an ominous voice would intone, “the five of diamonds!” Her card!

I’ll reveal how the trick was done toward the end of the story, but first I must note that in 1954, I was off to art school in Boston with a friend from high school who was going to go to the Conservatory of Music which was very close to my school. We thought we’d both rent a double room in the vicinity. When we found a place, we were surprised to find two more of our high school friends there. They were going to the Engineering School right in the same neighborhood. So, there we were; all together. On our first night, a drunk on the street was making a racket so we opened the window and one of my pals shouted, “Shut up!” The drunk looked up at the window and said in Drunkanese, “What’s the name of thish street?” My friend said, “St. Stephens.” The drunk replied, “Who’s that, the patron saint of silence?”

We had an attractive youngish couple as landlords. The woman seemed delighted to have all these young men at her rooming house and she was a bit flirtatious. Eventually, she had an affair with one of the other art students that was living there.

At any rate, one evening, as was our habit, a bunch of us boys decided to go down to the corner cafeteria which was often our nightly hangout. We’d usually stay there drinking coffee until the wee hours of the morning. Mrs. Landlady’s husband worked a night shift at one of his several jobs; she asked if she could come along.

I had never done the trick before (I don’t think I did) so I decided that I would try it on them at the cafeteria. I told them I’d be along soon and I quickly tried to give Ronnie, my roommate, a crash course on the trick. He was to be my voice on the other end of the phone call. Ronnie wasn’t going with us to the hangout. He’d be there near the hall phone so he would be a perfect collaborator. To be the “Wizard”, he would have to know the verbal clues I would be giving him. I wrote them down.

“Hello, Wizard?”= diamonds

“Wizard?” = hearts

“Is this the Wizard?”=spades

“Please put the Wizard on the phone”= clubs

Once the suit was determined, the “Wizard” then starts counting slowly… “ Ace … King … Queen …two … three …” etc. until the card in question is reached, at which point, I, the caller, would interrupt immediately to say, “Please tell this person which card they chose.”

I rehearsed it with him and told him in no uncertain terms that he was not to fall asleep but to stay vigilant and near the phone for the next 30 minutes or so.

So, off I went to the cafeteria to join my victims. Shortly after arriving, I told them that I had brought a deck of cards because I wanted to show them a neat trick. I had someone pick a card and then I made the call to the house from the pay phone without anyone seeing the number I was dialing.

It rang and it rang. And then it rang some more and finally a voice answered. It was not Ronnie! It was our landlord who came home early from work. I was sputtering something and he said, “Who is this?” I told him and he said, “Is my wife down there with you guys?” Then he slammed the phone down and walked the short block to drag her home. We all sheepishly followed, went to our rooms and listened for the next hour to the heated argument a floor below us. Ronnie slept through it all. After a while, a taxi arrived and Mrs. Landlord left carrying luggage. I felt really bad even though Mr. Landlord tried to assure me that it wasn’t my fault that they were going to get a divorce. I couldn’t help feeling that I was, somehow, the catalyst in the whole thing with that stupid trick. A short while later they did get divorced.

I have never done the trick again, and I would warn anyone attempting it to just be careful. Okay?

–Randy Enos

Email Randy

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

Tags art school, boston, card trick, divorce, landlords, Randall Enos

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Barr and the Mueller Report

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date April 22, 2019

I drew this Mueller Report cartoon last week.

This is actually the first time I’ve drawn Attorney General William Barr, and he is a great character to draw. I thought I would share some of my other favorite William Barr cartoons by my buddies.

The burning Hindenberg Baby Trump is a great backdrop for this one by Pat Bagley.

Here are two by the great Ed Wexler! I don’t think Ed likes Barr much.

This one is by John Darkow.

This Easter Barr-Bunny is by RJ Matson.

This charming puppet is by Monte Wolverton.

And Rick McKee.

Tags ATTORNEY GENERAL, donald trump, exonerated, mirror, Mueller Report, obstruction of justice, president, queen, Snow White, William Barr

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Sarah Sanders

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date April 22, 2019

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders got caught up in the Mueller Report last week where she admitted, under oath, to lying to the press. She called the lie a “slip of the tongue” even tough she had repeated the lie a number of times, that “countless” members of the FBI contacting her to say they had lost confidence in FBI Director James Comey who the President fired. Here’s my cartoon.

This is actually the first time I’ve drawn Sarah Sanders. She is great fun to draw, and since she’s on television all the time it would seem that I would draw her often. Maybe I will draw her more –we’ll see if she lasts.

Sanders’ uneven, “smokey” eyes and shapeless form are fun, but her asymmetric mouth isn’t really that big, certainly not big enough for a tongue so huge that she can slip on it. I took a look at how other cartoonists have drawn Sanders.

This one is by Sandy Huffaker. Sandy used to be a regular in the CagleCartoons syndicate and he has retired, but he draws a new one once in a while. I grew up watching Sandy’s work in Time Magazine when I was in school. He should come out of retirement!

This one is by my buddy, Taylor Jones. It’s all about the eyes.

This one by Pat Bagley catches her very simply.

This one is by Steve Sack, who catches her without one big eye.

Here’s one by Adam Zyglis of the Buffalo News.

Here’s one more, from New Yorker cartoonist, Chris Weyant, who draws symmetrical eyes, flops her mouth and adds a few pounds and loses a few pearls, but still captures her.

Tags donald trump, lie, lied, Lies, Mueller Report, press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Sarah Sanders, slip, tongue, tongue tied, trip, truth, White House

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The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date April 19, 2019

Here’s another Randy flashback. See Randy’s editorial cartoon archive here. –Daryl

In the late 60’s and into the early 70’s, I became aware of a series of pretty avant-garde children’s books being published by someone named Harlin Quist. I think I first saw them in Graphis, an international magazine published in Switzerland and also in a similar publication, Gebrauchsgrafik, from Germany. Quist was an American publisher with offices in New York and Paris. I couldn’t believe how beautiful these books were. Many of my favorite artists were doing work for Quist, people like Reynold Ruffins, Murray Tinkelman, Eleanor Schmid, Phillipe Weisbecker, Charlie Slackman, Stan Mack, Edward Gorey, Étienne Delessert, Alain Le Foll, Alan Cober and Heinz Edelman. It was revolutionary! Realism was fading from the illustration field and in its place was a vibrant, refreshing breath of graphic grandeur. I wanted in.

So, I found Quist’s phone number and called him up for an appointment. He told me to come by on Thursday. Thursday found me in front of an ordinary, rather bleak-looking old brownstone with my trusty portfolio in hand. I was surprised to see that his office was in his apartment. I climbed the stairs and knocked on his door. It took a while for the door to be opened a crack. It was dark in the apartment.

I couldn’t see anything but a hand that had opened the door. Then I could make out an eye peering out at me.

“Mr. Quist is not here” said the voice in answer to my, “I have an appointment with Mr. Quist”.

“He’s in Paris” said the voice behind the door. “You can leave your portfolio until next Thursday!”

It was fairly common practice in those days to sometimes leave a portfolio for a week. I was disappointed but I agreed to leave it and a hand emerged snatching it from my grasp. The door shut. I needed that portfolio but I had high hopes that I would soon be joining that stellar group of outstanding illustrators in the Quist pantheon.

A week went by and I again climbed the stairs to the ominous apartment and knocked on the door. Nothing. I knocked again… and again. No response. The whole apartment building was soundless. No one seemed to be around. I didn’t know what to do. I went downstairs to see if I could find a door that said “Super” on it … or something. NOTHING. I went outside and looked for an entrance to a basement where I might find someone to give me assistance. I found a door that looked promising. I opened it and entered going down a few steps into a dark musty basement. It was EXACTLY like being in one of those horror movies. There were passageways, overhead pipes, electrical fuse boxes. It was dank, quiet, dark and eerie. After trying different paths that wound through the vast basement, I started to hear faint music coming from a radio. I followed it to a small room where I surprised an old fellow who was sitting there. I enquired about Mr. Quist.

“He’s gone” the super said.

“But … but” I stammered, “I need my portfolio that is in his apartment”.

“NO” he said, “He doesn’t pay his rent. We kicked him out and everything in that apartment belongs to us.”

I explained that I didn’t even know Harlin Quist. That I had never even met him. That I had just left MY portfolio for him to look at. It belonged to me. I had nothing to do with Mr. Quist. He replied that nothing could be done. Everything in the apartment was confiscated. I guess I started pleading, maybe even sobbing, about how my livelihood required that portfolio and etc. and etc., because he grudgingly relented and I followed him up the stairways to the foreboding apartment which we entered and finally found my portfolio, among others strewn about the place. I showed him my name on it and I left.

Now, I see that Quist has died and that my good friend Étienne, who had done four books (sometimes written by his friend Ionescu) for Quist, has written in a recent interview that Quist and his partner Francois Ruy-Vidal were con men, crooks and charlatans that didn’t pay proper royalties (if they paid anything at all) to their contributors and even though many illustrators were warned by Etienne and others of this fact, the illustrators continued to flock to his door hoping to do one of the beautiful, Harlin Quist award-winning books.

–Randy Enos

Email Randy

Harlin Quist passed away in 2000 at the age of 69. Read Harlin Quist’s obituary in the New York Times. –Daryl

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories: