Which reminds me that I never showed you the poster at left, which I designed for the ACA last fall. It was mainly created for display in MetroNorth stations I’ll never see, but I’ve been told by someone who should know that it can also be seen right now on some wall somewhere in the bowels of New York City’s Grand Central Station.

Unfortunately, since the end products of graphic design gigs like this aren’t at all cartoony and don’t include my signature, no one will know that I had a hand in bringing this poster into being unless I hang around Grand Central Station buttonholing passers-by and muttering "Hey, y’see that poster. I did that poster!" Which I suppose I could do — but probably won’t, since it sounds like a kind of behavior that could easily be mistaken for psychotic.

Life just isn’t fair to us emotionally needy artists who crave affirmation from an uncaring public.

The newsprint interview was conducted by rising writer Glenny Brock for the January 18 issue of the weekly alternative paper she edits in my home town, that paper being aptly named Birmingham Weekly. Any of you who are interested in getting a fresh recounting of my illustrious career history can click the following link to go directly to Glenny’s now-archived piece, which is called "Comix Timing: The big breaks and small wonders of art guy Howard Cruse."

And if you’d like to hear my mellifluous voice in conversation with that of Greg Bass, host of WBHM’s local arts-focused program Tapestry, just head for the Tapestry web page and Greg and I will stream our exchanges right at you. Until next Thursday (that would be February 1) you’ll be able to find the link to my interview by scrolling down Tapestry’s home page until you see my photograph; thereafter my interview will be lurking in Tapestry’s online archives.

Normally, when I’m called upon to draw a cartoon rendition of someone I don’t know, as was the case with Dr. Bridgers once I began working on cover art for his book, I’ll want to see as many images of my subject as possible. I’ll want photos taken from an assortment of angles, under varied lighting conditions. Photos that show the person’s face expressing a whole range of moods.

Contemplating these photographs will help me imagine him or her in three dimensions, and the chances are lessened that I’ll be misled about the subject’s overall personality by one single instance of deceptive lighting or an expression reflective of one day’s atypical attitude.

Finding such a slew of contrasting photos can be easy when you’re drawing a national celebrity who shows up in the pages of People regularly. Unfortunately, Dr. Bridgers didn’t fall into that category and time was too short for me to do extensive digging for photo reference. All I had to go on when I began the project was a small photograph that had appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of UAB Public Health magazine (the same issue for which I had drawn cover art earlier).

So instead of trying to draw the man’s face from scratch, I decided to adapt the photo itself into a form that looked cartoony enough to fit into the cartooned surroundings that had already been approved for my dog-filled book cover art.

Well, mainly approved. There had been one small request for a change.

It was an easy change to accomplish. By shifting of my cast of characters, space was cleared among my "yellow dogs" for Judy and Bill Bridgers’ shaggy and un-yellow Brooke.

I needed to make the face look as if it had been hand-drawn. Look at the progression of details below to see the process I used. First came the raw screened photo captured by my scanner. Next is the same scan after I washed out most of the dots by applying Photoshop’s Gaussian Blur filter. Next I broke the image into small areas of flat color by posterizing it (IMAGE> ADJUSTMENT> POSTERIZE). And that was just the beginning, posterizing-wise!

Below is the drawing as it appeared in the context of my final cover design.

Did you find this backstage look at a cartooning project interesting? Be careful about encouraging me now, ’cause I’ve got a million of ‘em!

Drawing a cover for his book presented challenges, though. The guy would pretty much have to be front and center, since his ruminations were the book’s raison d’être. But how do you draw a cartoon version of a man you never laid eyes on?

I’ll get to that tomorrow, in the second part of this exercise in cartooning shop talk. First I had to figure out what my drawing was going to look like. Dr. Bridgers would be in the middle of — of what?

I took my cue from the book’s title. I mean, a book called Yellow Dog Tales has gotta have dogs on the front, right? Not brown ones or black-and-white spotted ones; yellow ones. But what exactly is a "yellow dog" anyway? And how did that variety of canine get tethered to some people’s political leanings?

A little Googling led me to the Yellow Dog Democrat web site, where all things became clear. Way back in 1928 a Democratic Senator named Tom Heflin committed the unpardonable crime of supporting Republican Herbert Hoover for President. According to legend, party loyalists denounced Heflin’s offense by reaffirming their own party loyalty. "I’d vote for a yellow dog if he ran on the Democratic ticket," they angrily proclaimed, and a super-partisan archetype was born.

As for the real-world dogs hijacked by the term, I learned from the Internet that an alternative name for a "yellow dog" is "Carolina dog." Here’s what such beasts typically look like.

Come back tomorrow for a further description of how UAB’s much-admired Bill Bridgers was turned into a ‘toon.

In times past a lot of rubber cement and X-Acto knifeplay would have been required to create a graphic like this one, and even so the slightly frayed edges of the hand-trimmed images would remain apparent to anyone chosing to peer closely at the finished assemblage. But everything has been made easier and cleaner with the advent of magic software like Photoshop.

(And I would say that even if Adobe Systems, the makers of Photoshop, hadn’t been dominant among my freelance clients for the last half-year.)

If all goes well and enough page space is available, this graphic will accompany an interview with me that’s set to run in an upcoming issue of Birmingham Weekly, for whom I did that weird Santa Claus cover art I told you about a few blog entries ago.

What occasions that print interview (as well as a radio interview that will be taped on January 18 on WBMG’s arts program Tapestry) is the trip to Birmingham I’ll be making next week. By virtue of having drawn cover art this fall for UAB Public Health magazine, I’m being given the royal treatment at a reception being thrown by the University of Alabama School of Public Health on the 18th.

UAB has even made posters out of my cover art. Signed copies of these will be available for sale at the reception to raise money for the Bill and Judy Bridgers Scholarship Fund.

Nicky and I first crossed paths as fellow participants (albeit from slightly different collegiate generations) in the Birmingham-Southern College Theatre. After years thereafter spent geographically separated and only barely in touch, we’ve recently found ourselves neighbors again here in the Berkshires. She and her husband Jason Brown are both blessed with too many talents to enumerate, but prominent among their present family enterprises is BMA Studios, under whose auspices audio books like their most recent offering, Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, are lovingly produced out of their impressive basement sound studio in Monterey.

When I first met Nicky she was playing a winsome prostitute named Karen in a one-act play called "The Old Man Dies" that I had written while still an undergraduate. Brief aside: My most influential mentor, BSC’s one-time Drama Department chairman Arnold Powell, once remarked in response to a couple of my scripts that student playwrights who have never come close to knowing an actual flesh-and-blood prostitute seem irresistibly driven to populate their plays with them. Point taken.

Anyway, my college days were behind me when Cheryl Thacker (another longtime friend from college, Cheryl has since distinguished herself as a professional lighting designer) chose to direct "The Old Man Dies" as her Director’s Lab student project. Naturally, I returned from New York to see it the result.

My eyes mist up when I recall what a cluster of old friends joined forces to mount that little workshop production in 1969. Of course, since they were my friends and not yours, I won’t demand that your eyes get similarly misty. But take my word for it, if you had known this crowd you’d be misting up right along with me.

Drawing Nicky’s portrait was a perfect way to celebrate her re-emergence as part of my present life. And there’s been an interesting sidebar to our catch-up conversations: I had somehow missed learning previously that Nicky’s grandfather, the formidably named Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, was a founder of DC Comics, under whose Paradox Press imprint my graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby was published. The family lore about Nicky’s granddad reveals a larger-than-life historical personage whose exploits ranged well beyond the comics realm. A fascinating biography of this guy is obviously waiting to be written.

*****

I started this blog entry by referencing two portraits I’ve done lately, so I’ll quickly share the second one with you before I go (see below). Its subject, Will Eisner, will be familiar to any of you who have arrived at this blog because of an interest in comics. Much written about and widely admired, Eisner was a giant of the sequential art medium who was still producing new and exciting works when death finally wrestled him away from his drawing board at the age of 87.

Will was a professional colleague with whom I chatted, talked shop, and occasionally argued (always amicably) at the comics cons and conferences where our paths crossed. When he passed away last year, I contributed the drawing below to an issue of Comic Book Artist magazine that was devoted to Eisner tributes.

That’s the web feature you’ll find elsewhere on this site that chronicles my graphic novel’s four-year journey from initial concept to published form.

Vicente Garcia, Dolmen’s editor, did the translation himself. I’m not able to read a word of it, of course, but I choose to believe that he accomplished his task magnificently, since everything about Dolmen seems to be done classily, as best a non-Spanish-speaker can tell.

I appreciate the spotlight, Vicente.