Gag cartoons
A Truly Monstrous Portfolio
Before I was a professional writer, I was a cartoonist. That is, a gag cartoonist. I used to draw one-panel gag cartoons for a variety of publications. Hey, who knows? I may even start drawing cartoons again. I might even end up doing that soon. Maybe sooner than you think. Am I trying to hint at some upcoming project that hasn’t been announced yet? Maybe. Then again, maybe not. But if the answer IS yes, you’ll hear about it first on this site. Until then, I weary of this game, this charade, where I act all cagey and weird and evade giving direct answers to questions I myself have posed. I mean, what am I doing here? Arguing with myself over hypothetical nonsense? That is not the purpose of this blog post. The purpose of this post is…something to do with cartoons. (I’m pretty sure of it.) Also, today is Halloween, and I’ve drawn quite a few cartoons about monsters. Speaking of which…
The other day, I was going through a batch of my old cartoons, and I thought I’d post some of my personal favorites. Some of these were published, and others were not. Does publishing them on my website now make them “published”? I don’t know. The Internet is a vast untamed wilderness. (Um…yay?) Anyway, let’s get into it, shall we? Yes, we shall:
Okay, so this “Mr. Potato Salad” cartoon was first published in the August 2008 issue of Nickelodeon Magazine. I drew this during a period when I was obsessed – OBSESSED, I tell you! – with Mr. Potato Head, and I drew a whole slew of cartoons involving that little plastic tuber with the interchangeable facial features. Some day, I’ll post them all here. But that day is not today! Moving on…
This “Vampire Nerds” cartoon was published in the October 2006 issue of Nickelodeon Magazine. (That was the Halloween issue. But you probably already realized that.)
And this “Creature of the Blue Bayou” cartoon was published in The Fortean Times, a magazine from the UK which is all about strange phenomena like UFOs and Bigfoot sightings. Notice the “Arie Kaplan” credit typed in really small print along the lower left-hand side of the panel. You’ll ALSO notice that I didn’t specify WHEN this cartoon was published. As in, what year. That’s because it was published a LONG time ago. And of course, to fully understand and appreciate this cartoon, you have to know who Roy Orbison was. (He was a rock star. Google him. It’s okay, I’ll wait.) You also have to know that there was once a really popular Roy Orbison song called “Blue Bayou,” and that this is a cartoon depicting Roy Orbison as the titular “Creature of the Blue Bayou” (a pun on the classic horror film Creature From the Black Lagoon). But you understood that, right? Right? (Right?)
This “Ship In A Bottle/Ask For Directions” cartoon was published in the August 2008 issue of Nickelodeon Magazine. Yup, the same issue that also featured my “Mr. Potato Salad” cartoon. Now, this “Ship In A Bottle” cartoon was published in color when it appeared in Nick Mag. But I can’t seem to find the color version of the files for this cartoon. All I could find is this scan of the black and white line art. So the B&W version will have to do for the time being. Anyway, you’re probably asking yourself, “What’s ‘monstrous’ about this one?” And the answer is, “Not much, really.” But it does seem like the kind of cartoon Rod Serling would draw, if Rod Serling drew cartoons. It’s a bit Twilight Zone-ish. And people watch Twilight Zone episodes on Halloween (sometimes). Is that a stretch? Yes it is. I don’t care. This is my website, after all. If I want to post it here, I get to post it! Get off of my back! Geez! Moving on…
This “Frankenstein/Boy Scout” cartoon is unpublished (well, as of this writing, anyway – again, unless posting it on my site COUNTS as publishing it). Why is it unpublished? I honestly never submitted it to very many places for possible publication. Which honestly, I regret. But hey, maybe I’ll send it around and see if I CAN get it published, because I really like it. And I know that the monster is not actually NAMED “Frankenstein,” he’s just “Frankenstein’s Monster.” But the boy scout can’t say “Frankenstein’s Monster, no!” Why? It’s too wordy. Nobody talks like that. He’d say “Frankenstein, no!” It just flows better, as a line of dialogue.
Okay, I don’t even know where this “Monsterfont” cartoon would even be published. I mean, there’s no real gag or joke here; it’s just a font where each letter is also a monster. I think I submitted this to Nickelodeon Magazine back in the day, but it was rejected. And obviously, I don’t blame them for rejecting it. As I said, there’s no real gag or joke here. But even still, I have a soft spot in my heart for “Monsterfont.” I just like it, okay? I wish it was a real font.
And that’s it! Those are all the monster-themed cartoons I’m sharing today. I’ll probably put up another blog post at some future date where I’ll share some of my other cartoons (both monster-themed and otherwise). But this is it for now. What did you think? Feel free to let me know, either via email or if you see me in person. Or by carrier pigeon! Or message in a bottle maybe? The whole “message in a bottle” thing could make a comeback. You never know!
BTW, if you’re reading this on the day I’m posting it (October 31, 2025), I hope you’re having a Happy Halloween!
Fold Back So That “A” Meets “B”
As you’ve probably heard, legendary cartoonist Al Jaffee passed away on Monday April 10th, 2023, just a few weeks after his 102nd birthday.
Al was a virtuoso artist who left behind an astounding body of work. But as anyone who knew him could tell you, he was also one of the kindest, most gracious people in the comic book industry. And he was a good friend.
In a previous blog post, I talked about Al – his career in general, his work for MAD Magazine in particular, and what he meant to me personally.
But I think it’s also important to mention that, even though he was 102 years old when he passed away, it still felt like he was gone too soon. I think I’d convinced myself that if he made it to 102 years old, there was no reason he couldn’t make it to 103 years old. Or 104. Or 120. I’m not kidding. If anyone could beat the odds, it was Al.
Unfortunately, though, he turned out to be a mere mortal.
Last year, when I called Al on his 101st birthday, he said, “When you live a long time, you outlive a lot of your friends. It’s so nice to hear from one of them that’s still alive.”
I’m sorry, what was that? “It’s so nice to hear from one of them that’s still alive”? That’s a solid joke. There he was at age 101, still making quips. He still had it.
As a cartoonist for MAD, Al showed the world just how hilarious and inventive a cartoon could be. He could draw funny – I mean really funny – which is not an easy thing to do. He had a genuinely unique comedic voice. He inspired generations of cartoonists, comedians, and comedy writers. He gave us the MAD Fold-In, Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, Hawks and Doves (a Vietnam-era comic strip that ran in MAD during the early 1970s), and countless MAD inventions.
And as if that wasn’t enough, he also co-created Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal. (Google it.)
It’s a cliché to say that someone made the world a richer place with their presence. But just because it’s a cliché, that doesn’t make it any less true. And in Al’s case, it certainly was true.
I feel lucky and privileged to have known him.
Let me tell you a story about how Al Jaffee changed my life. One day, when I was a kid – maybe 9 or 10 years old – my parents were visiting some friends who had a son about my age. I don’t remember the son’s name. Let’s just call him “Son X.” My parents’ friends told me to wait for Son X in his room, because he’d be home soon and I should say hello to him. I went up to Son X’s room and I saw these massive long boxes full of comic books. I took the lid off of one long box, and inside there were all of these back issues of MAD Magazine. Looking through one of them, I found a humor piece, written and illustrated by Al Jaffee, called “If Kids Designed Their Own Xmas Toys.” Looking at that humor piece melted my brain.
That’s not hyperbole. (Well, okay, it is. But you know what I mean.) See, I was a kid who was constantly drawing cartoons. And in those days, I was
always thinking about the fact that when you’re a young child, you have no real grasp of concepts like composition, anatomy, perspective, or foreshortening, and so all of your drawings look…uh, well, they look like a kid drew them. I spent a massive amount of time trying to break out of that “draw like a kid” phase and finally draw like an adult. In “If Kids Designed Their Own Xmas Toys,” Al plays with that very premise, that very thing I’d been thinking about. “If Kids Designed…” shows what a doll would look like if it was designed by a 5 year old (stick figure arms and legs, googly eyes, springs for hair, a shapeless, awkward-looking dress). And he shows what a rocket would look like if it were designed by a 9 year old (the rocket looks flat and asymmetrical, the fins jut out at odd angles, the nosecone is crooked). It was like Al had reached into my brain, found out what I was obsessed with, and made a MAD humor piece about it.
But here’s the thing: Al actually built models of these “Xmas toys” that were supposedly designed by kids. Then he took photos of the toys, and those photos appear in “If Kids Designed Their Own Xmas Toys.” He really wanted to sell the idea that actual kids designed these toys!
When I first saw “If Kids Designed…,” it awakened something in me. It was the first time I thought, “Hey, I think I might want to write or draw something for MAD Magazine someday.” After all, I was an aspiring cartoonist and comedy writer. MAD seemed like a humor magazine that was tailor made for me specifically. And it was all because I happened upon an Al Jaffee humor piece that spoke to me on a gut level.
Years later, when I started writing humor pieces for MAD, I tried to write as many of them as possible that required actual models to be built, just like the models I saw in that “If Kids Designed…” article.
And on one particular day, a few years into my career at MAD, I was talking to Al in his studio and getting ready to interview him for my award-winning nonfiction book, From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books. I told him about “If Kids Designed Their Own Xmas Toys,” and what it meant to me. And he said, “Well, I’ve got the models of those ‘toys’ up on the top of that shelf, if you want to see them.” And he pointed to the very top of a bookshelf. There they were: the doll with the googly eyes, the lopsided rocket, all of them. He took the doll down and handed it to me so that I could hold it.
So there I was, holding the doll which made me want to be a MAD writer in the first place. It was quite a moment. (For me, anyway. Probably not for Al.)
My point is, that’s the kind of person Al was: He inspired people. He changed their lives. And most importantly, he let you hold the doll with the googly eyes.
My Favorite Kind of Vampires
Happy Halloween, everyone! As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I used to draw one-panel gag cartoons. Like, professionally. Only for a handful of magazines, and really just at the beginning of my writing career. These days I mostly work as a writer, and I don’t draw that much, unless you count the rough thumbnail sketches I draw for nearly every project I work on. Which definitely counts as drawing. But I don’t often show those sketches to the people I’m working with (although sometimes, I do).
Anyway, since it’s Halloween, I thought I’d post one of the gag cartoons I drew back in the day. It’s called “Vampire Nerds,” and it was originally published in the October 2006 issue of Nickelodeon Magazine. (That was the Halloween issue, as if you couldn’t tell by the cover date.) Check it out:
Obviously, vampire nerds are my favorite kind of bloodsuckers, because I myself am a massive geek. (Which you could probably tell by the fact that I write graphic novels about mythical creatures, children’s book adaptations of famous sci-fi movies, TV scripts about fairy tale characters, and scripts for uber-nerdy video games. But I digress…)
I may begin drawing cartoons again (like, professionally), because I really miss it. If that does indeed happen, I’ll definitely mention it on this blog. So keep checking this space!