Categories
Blog Newsletter Syndicate

Me and My Axe

We’ll take a break from the pandemic for my brilliant cartoonist buddy Randy Enos who shares another story about his early days as a cartoonist illustrator. (I must say, Randy’s experience sounds remarkably like my own experience as  a cartoonist illustrator in Manhattan 15 years later.)

Email Randy Enos

Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl


In 1955, I shared a room in Boston with a friend of mine from high school who was attending the New England Conservatory of Music which was practically across the street. He was a classical trumpet player who talked like a jazz musician. He woke up late one morning and ran around our small room screaming, “Where’s my axe? Where’s my axe?” He had forgotten where he had put his trumpet case and he was late for school.

Years later when I became an illustrator, I discovered that some illustrators called their portfolios axes. I liked that so I adopted the term. I, and my axe, made the rounds on the New York streets for many years visiting art directors every single Thursday. As I mentioned in a previous story, I took my annual 3 week vacation from the Famous Artists Schools by taking off every Thursday until my vacation had been used up. To prepare for these visits to the Big Apple, I would go through all the magazines on a newsstand and take down the phone numbers of the art directors. At Grand Central Station there was a huge bank of phones in the center of the main floor where now stands a big international magazine store. I’d settle myself down in one of the phone booths and proceed to call one art director after another telling them that I was just in for the day and could I drop by for just a few minutes with a portfolio. In those days, all the art directors set aside Thursdays for looking at portfolios. So, I’d lug my axe up and down Madison Ave., Fifth Ave., Lexington Ave., and all the streets in-between.

I had a lot of guts in those days and would blithely walk into Time magazine, Fortune, Business Week, The New York Times, a newcomer with barely any published work except a few little awful spots I had done for The Famous Artists Magazine. The bulk of my samples were crazy and very off-beat creations I had drawn using an ink bottle stopper or pen and ink or a combination of both. I thought that if I were to make a success at this illustration business, I would have to have an eye-catching original style. Well, for the most part, my early work only found its way into the girly magazines like Escapade where I discovered young daring ADs who would take a chance on a crazy style like mine. The focus of these magazines was, of course, photos of sexy girls and they were willing to experiment with avant garde  illustrations for which they paid very little. Because of the low pay, illustrators were given lots of freedom and often worked without having to submit roughs first. Attached to this article are examples of some of these early samples of mine. In the early 1960’s, when I lucked into my first Playboy jobs and could show tear sheets from that prestigious publication, I found doors opening in much classier markets. In Playboy, I did my very first linocut which was to set my style for good.

On Thursdays, as I mentioned, The ADs were seeing lots of artists so the visits were brief. You’d walk in, open your axe and he or she would riffle through the samples, usually stone-faced making no comments and that would be that. You’d leave a photostat or print of some kind and a business card (mine were hand-made).

As I went on in my first few years, I stuck to “high-end” publications because I realized that working in what some called a “sophisticated” style I wouldn’t have a chance with magazines that had a more common appeal. My markets eventually became publications like Time, Life, Fortune, Forbes, airline magazines, lots of food magazines and political and social satire magazines like The Nation, The Progressive, Avant Garde, Monocle, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone and the National Lampoon. I also did work for Sports Illustrated, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Washington Post and lots of other newspapers all over the country.

And, speaking of the phone bank at Grand Central, my wife did her share of usage there when she started doing theatrical work in New York. She would go into the city and immediately hit the phones. One day I had to get a job into my old friend Mike Gross who was then working at Exxon. I was busy with other jobs so I asked my wife to take it in for me and IMMEDIATELY deliver it to Mike across the street from the train station. I said, “Do not stop at the phones… he needs this right away.” Of course, being a dutiful wife, she got off the train and went IMMEDIATELY to the phone banks. At that moment, across 42nd St., a bomb went off in a small office at the base of the Exxon building. Everyone was evacuated. Mike went into panic mode because he knew that Leann would have been right there at that spot at that time. He found a phone on the street and called his wife, Glennis, and told her to call my home and discreetly inquire about Leann. I think Mike found Leann, at that moment, casually sauntering into the melee of police, ambulances and whatnot.

Back to my axe. At first, I’d go into the city and lug it around to potential clients all day with no success. I got used to it. Leann got used to it. After a while, she wouldn’t even ask if I got anything. It was a given that I hadn’t. 

One day, I walked into Harper’s Magazine to see the editor. They didn’t have an art director per se. I actually recognized his name and face because I had seen him on television being interviewed. I opened up my axe and, as always, he flipped through the pages very rapidly and closed it. I gathered up my sample book and thanked him politely and headed for the door. He said, “Where are you going? I have a job for you!” I couldn’t believe my ears. He reached into a desk drawer and produced a manuscript and handed it to me. I HAD RECEIVED MY FIRST MAJOR MAGAZINE JOB! I wasn’t used to this. It wasn’t part of my ritual. It was a major shock to my system. I was nervous on the train going home clutching my axe for good luck.


I worked like the devil on that little black and white job. He hadn’t asked for rough sketches. I was so unsure of my concepts for it that I did 4 or 5 finished solutions just to cover myself. I remember the illustration. It ended up being a pen and ink drawing of a guy lying in the crater of a volcano puffing on a pipe and emitting a trail of smoke. I’ve looked high and low for that sample and, alas, I just can’t find it.


We need your support for Cagle.com (and DarylCagle.com)! Notice that we run no advertising! We depend entirely upon the generosity of our readers to sustain the site. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!


Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

The Ugliest Woman in the World

Baseball Soup

The Lady with the Mustache

The Rest is History

Randall Enos Decade!

Never Put Words in Your Pictures

Explosion In A Blue Jeans Factory

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Happy Times in the Morgue

I was the Green Canary

Born in a Volcano

When I was a Famous Chinese Watercolorist

My Most Unusual Art Job

A Duck Goes Into a Grocery Store

A Day With Jonathan Winters and Carol Burnett

Illustrating the Sea

Why I Started Drawing

The Fastest Illustrator in the World!

Me and the GhostBusters

The Bohemian Bohemian

Take it Off … Take it ALL Off!

I Eat Standing Up

The Funniest Cartoon I’ve Ever Seen

The Beatles had a Few Good Tunes

Andy Warhol Meets King Kong

Jacques and the Cowboy

The Gray Lady (The New York Times)

The BIG Eye

Historic Max’s

The Real Moby Dick

The Norman Conquests

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

How to Murder Your Wife

I Yam What I Yam

The Smallest Cartoon Characters in the World

Chicken Gutz

Brought to You in Living Black and White

The Hooker and the Rabbit

Art School Days in the Whorehouse

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Monty Python Comes to Town

Riding the Rails

The Pyramid of Success

The Day I Chased the Bus

The Other Ol’ Blue Eyes

8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt

Rembrandt of the Skies

The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part One”

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part Two”

Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School

Randy Remembers Tomi Ungerer

Randy’s Overnight Parade

The Bullpen

Famous Artists Schools

Dik Browne: Hot Golfer

Randy and the National Lampoon

Randy’s Only Great Idea

A Brief Visit to Outer Space

Enos, Love and Westport

Randy Remembers the NCS

Categories
Blog Newsletter Syndicate

The Beatles Had A Few Good Tunes

This column is by my brilliant buddy, Randy Enos about his years teaching illustration.

Email Randy Enos Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl


Over the years, I have taught at many art schools including Parsons, Syracuse, Hartford, School of Visual Arts, Fashion Institute in New York, Rhode Island School of Design, Philadelphia School of the Arts and others. My longest sustained teaching was at Parsons in New York for 8 years.

The one common thread I noticed among students was that they didn’t know much of anything about our profession which they were supposedly interested in pursuing. They hadn’t looked at much illustration or cartooning and they didn’t know the names of the star practitioners of those fields. I always have found that to be peculiar. I’m sure that students of say, ballet, know the superstars of ballet; or students of music probably know the major musicians in the part of the field they are studying. I’m sure that students of painting or sculpture have their favorite painters or sculptors. But, not students of illustration. Once you get past Norman Rockwell, they don’t know any of the stars unless they have just had a visiting lecture from one of them. When you teach illustration or cartooning, you start at ground zero; there are no reference points, just a blank slate. I once opened a class at Syracuse with, “Good morning, I’m Milton Glaser.” I didn’t raise an eyebrow.

In my 8 years at Parsons, I generally taught two classes a week. It took Murray Tinkelman, the head of illustration at that time, five years to talk me into teaching. I kept saying,” I’ve only been in the business 10 years, how can I know enough to be able to be a teacher?” But, he wore me down and he had created a special course at that time called “Sequential Illustration” which I was to teach along with a “Conceptual Illustration” course. The conceptual course dealt with the “concepts” or ideas part of the process rather than drawing or perspective or design. At that point in time, illustration was a conceptual business rather than in previous times when it was a narrative, story telling process. We were in the era of illustrating abstract ideas for the business magazines like Business Week, Time, Fortune etc., rather than illustrating Indians attacking a wagon train for The Saturday Evening Post. We were illustrating articles on the falling stock market or the rise in childhood diseases or the latest fad in cooking.

The “Sequential Illustration” course was to be taught by three teachers, each teaching for a third of the semester. The course focused on illustration that was realized in multiple images such as in children’s books, animation, comic strips etc. I dealt with book illustration and multiple- picture magazine or newspaper illustrations in my third of the semester. Dick Giordano (Batman etc.) handled the comics part of the program and noted animator, Howard Beckerman handled the animation part. A little later on they created a third course that I was a part of which was just an animation course wherein Howard and I split the year in half. I did the first part dealing with designing and storyboarding and Howard did the last part and took the students through actually animating and filming animation sequences.

Clip from Randy’s illustration for Emergency Medicine magazine.

Sometimes I would bring into my classes, actual assignments that I had worked on myself so that students had the real thing to deal with concept-wise. One time, I received an assignment from Emergency Medicine magazine just before going to class so I gave them the same assignment with the same time frame I had to do it in. I told them that I would bring in my finished illustration a week later and they were to bring in theirs. One student said, “What if our illustration is better than yours will you take ours to the client instead of yours?” I, of course replied, “Your illustration isn’t going to be better than mine!” So… even though this particular illustration wasn’t paying very much, I spent all week doing an elaborate, detailed picture just to show the students what they should aim for. Another thing that I did was to bring in some of my art directors from time to time. I tried to give the students a real taste of the business.

Randy’s illustration for Emergency Medicine magazine.

This sounds like an exaggeration, but it actually happened. I told the students one day that most of the realist illustrators traced photographs. I made the mistake of mentioning Norman Rockwell in that group. One of my students was so horrified that his idol traced photographs that he went over to the window, climbed out on the ledge and threatened to jump. I calmed him down by explaining that Rockwell was a splendid draftsman who had worked from live models for years before resorting to working from photographs due to the pressures of deadlines. I told him that those pictures could never come out as well if he didn’t know how to draw like a master.

Many of my students went on to stellar careers in illustration such as Victor Juhasz (caricaturist, war correspondent, Rolling Stone illustrator etc.) and Peter de Seve (New Yorker covers, children’s books, character designer for Bug’s Life, Robots, 4 Ice Age films and many others).

I remember one assignment I gave my animation class and that was to design and storyboard an opening for a TV special. I wanted to pick a subject that would be fairly easy for them to research. I picked the Beatles. I figured they’d have no problem finding info, photos and ideas for a project like this. One boy in class said, “You know we don’t know very much about the Beatles, it’s kind of before our time!” Another kid said, “Oh, I know the Beatles, I heard of them; they had a few good tunes!” at which point, I screamed “A FEW GOOD TUNES? A FEW GOOD TUNES?”

A few weeks ago, my son told me that his friend, a guitar teacher, had a student who was shocked to find out that Paul McCartney was in a band BEFORE Wings.

When I would finish my class at Parsons, I often would go across the street and have dinner with a fellow teacher, Burne Hogarth of Tarzan fame. One time, I reminded him of an incident told to me by a friend who had been one of his students way back at the School of Visual Arts before it was called the School of Visual Arts and was called “The Cartoonists and Illustrators School”. One of his students asked him one day why Tarzan was always pointing his finger. Hogarth had this characteristic pose that he would often use of Tarzan with his right arm extended out and his finger pointing. Hogarth answered, “He’s pointing at my critics and saying, can you draw as well?”

I’ll end on this note … A FEW GOOD TUNES???

Email Randy Enos   Visit Randy’s archive


We need your support for Cagle.com! Notice that we run no advertising. We depend entirely upon the generosity of our readers to sustain the site. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Andy Warhol Meets King Kong

Jacques and the Cowboy

The Gray Lady (The New York Times)

The BIG Eye

Historic Max’s

The Real Moby Dick

The Norman Conquests

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

How to Murder Your Wife

I Yam What I Yam

The Smallest Cartoon Characters in the World

Chicken Gutz

Brought to You in Living Black and White

The Hooker and the Rabbit

Art School Days in the Whorehouse

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Monty Python Comes to Town

Riding the Rails

The Pyramid of Success

The Day I Chased the Bus

The Other Ol’ Blue Eyes

8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt

Rembrandt of the Skies

The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part One”

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part Two”

Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School

Randy Remembers Tomi Ungerer

Randy’s Overnight Parade

The Bullpen

Famous Artists Schools

Dik Browne: Hot Golfer

Randy and the National Lampoon

Randy’s Only Great Idea

A Brief Visit to Outer Space

Enos, Love and Westport

Randy Remembers the NCS