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The Impossible Dream with Kevin Kallaugher
53 Plays1 year ago
World-renowned editorial cartoonist Kevin Kallaugher dropped by the Apocalypse Duds Depot to talk Ivy Style, pattern matching, coming of age in the 60s and 70s, nature vs. nurture, how he draws a caricature, and much more!
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Transcript
Introduction and Setup
00:00:04
Speaker
We interrupt your regularly scheduled Apocalypse Studs broadcast to bring you an important notice. This episode was recorded in real life, deep in the bowels of Baltimore, Maryland, far from the relative safety of a video chat or a Zoom call. Thusly, there may be audio aberrations and other glitches in this episode, but fear not. You are in no danger, and your brave hosts only expose themselves to minor peril to conduct this interview.
00:00:31
Speaker
We know you will enjoy it.
Meet the Guest: Kevin Kallerer
00:00:33
Speaker
Hi, I'm Connor Fowler. And I'm Matt Smith. Welcome to Apocalypse Studs. Today is a very special show. We are joined by Kevin Kallerer, former Brighton Bears basketball award-winning editorial cartoonist for The Economist and The Baltimore Sun, among many other titles and accolades. Calvin, on this beautiful March day, the first day of spring, it's great to be with you guys.
00:01:01
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, welcome, man. Thanks. Thanks for coming and hanging out with us. And this is also special because Connor and I are actually in this exact same place for the first time ever recording a show. Right, right, right. We're in the same building. So this is pretty funny. So we'll start at the very beginning, I think. And where you came from, where did you grow up?
Growing Up in the 60s and 70s
00:01:26
Speaker
Yes, I grew up in Norwalk, Connecticut, which is
00:01:29
Speaker
in the kind of suburban ring near New York City, about an hour from New York City. And yeah, I grew up, and I'm an older gent. I was born in 1955, so my early formative years were in the 60s and 70s. Nice, nice. Yeah, I imagine
00:01:55
Speaker
I was going to say, I imagine being close to New York in the 60s and 70s and coming of age around that time had to be really fun. It was a really, really, really interesting time. I mean, I suppose all times are interesting, but there's something iconic because I think the shift from my parents' generation to my generation was a much larger lurch than it has been for my generation to your generation. Certainly, certainly.
00:02:24
Speaker
So what did you wear while you were growing up? I mean, I guess we're interested in it all. But if there's a particular thing that's there. Well, I would probably describe my early years that is up till the age of about 13 is being in New England Catholic.
00:02:47
Speaker
um realm and so the you know relatively conservative but it was also at a time and I want to paint this picture for you guys this is a time when there was not a lot of variety available you know there was only one kind of kind of genes there was certain that I was when I was in uh
00:03:10
Speaker
8th grade, 7th grade, and I was playing basketball. There was one shoe, it was a converse. There was no other shoes that you could wear. And so there wasn't, in some ways there was a kind of a uniform that people would wear if they were middle class white Americans. And that's kind of pretty much where I was. So what did you wear growing up?
00:03:30
Speaker
So, so I, you know, growing up in New England Catholic family, a large Catholic family that I that's precisely what my wardrobe was New England Catholic, which meant that it was, you know, pretty conservative button down and we would go.
00:03:48
Speaker
We spent a lot of time playing, of course, so that meant, as kids, it was just jeans, t-shirts, nothing special at all. There was no sense of style or attention to detail.
00:04:03
Speaker
in my early years was also a lot of changes took place in the American clothing landscape.
Fashion Evolution and Influences
00:04:11
Speaker
When I was young, there was one kind of gene that people could wear. And there was branding had only just started for like clothing. My first one that I really remember strongly was the alligator for Lacoste. That would became a giant symbol
00:04:31
Speaker
and a recognizable brand that people kind of saw. And that's besides the typical American stuff that people were just seeing all the time. But also in my school, my grammar school growing up, a Catholic school, we had a uniform we had to wear. We would have a blue blazer, gray pants, white shirt, you know, tie.
00:04:56
Speaker
So a spectacular change, or shall I say, eruption in how I conceived of clothing, took place when I became a freshman in high school, where I was at a, again, there's a Catholic boy school, Jesuit school, called Fairfield Prep, which is like Loyola High School here in Baltimore. But the key thing was is that
00:05:24
Speaker
They used to have a uniform but when I was a freshman everything was changed so that you had to wear a jacket and tie but you didn't have any restrictions about color or style. So I would go into class and then I'd see guys with all different colors on their clothing you know from
00:05:43
Speaker
olives and greens and browns and ties that were wide and narrow, lapels that were giant and small, bell bottoms and straight legs. And so all of this stuff came in and it was a revelation. And you go, wow, this is so cool. And so my freshman year, however, when I arrived, my wardrobe had been chose by my mom and I went with her, was basically echoing where we come from. But the next year,
00:06:10
Speaker
I wanted a say in my wardrobe and so this was the time with opportunity for for playing around so that that was a really interesting time for my perception about clothing. The second thing was you know I mentioned to you that I was playing basketball
00:06:29
Speaker
And the world of basketball, and as we know now, you know, sports and basketball is, you know, leads in fashion making of sorts. And those days it was so is such an infant state.
00:06:43
Speaker
And I saw how in the course of about five years, from I was about 13 to age 18, how the styling of people playing basketball changed as more shirts came out representing schools. Schools started branding and so you could have different types of
00:07:01
Speaker
shirt colors and combinations. Shorts, the sizes of shorts changed. The socks wore. And then most importantly, of course, the shoes went from just one brand about four or five brands. Nike came along and Adidas came along. And people
00:07:19
Speaker
would then pay attention. Guys would pay attention to what other guys are wearing because it meant something. It wasn't just the branding, but it said something about you. The choice that you made of your shoes made a difference about how you regarded yourself and how you wanted other people to see you. Then, as I started playing more and more basketball, I was learning that
00:07:45
Speaker
when you start to play pickup basketball you go down to a playground or you go to a gym and there's 30 people there and you your job is you want to stay and play on the court as long as possible and the teams that win stay on the court so when you try to assemble a team of five players made up of people that you didn't know
00:08:08
Speaker
how would you judge their quality of their play? Part of your decision was by what they were wearing. You could tell, okay, look at that guy's shoes. That's a really nice set of shoes. Is this game up to those shoe level? I mean, you don't get a game. You do not buy a pair of shoes that's way above your playing level, because it'll make you look like an idiot. And then you saw the kind of clothes
00:08:33
Speaker
to make you feel, understood that they had a notion of what the quality players would be like. And so you would constantly assessing people in a way that I had never done before. So it was a great education. That's a very cool origin story about learning and evolving and finally paying attention. Yeah.
00:09:01
Speaker
When and why did you start going by Cal? Well, my last name is Cal, as you know. And when I went to high school, I had an older brother who was three years older than me. So when I was a freshman, he was a senior. And when I got to school,
00:09:21
Speaker
everyone called my brother John Cal, you know, is a short name. And I was little Cal, you know, I was a little Cal. And then I started doing I was doing cartoons as well. So I'd sign them Cal. But then when he graduated, I lost the moniker of little and I owned it ever since he's never tried to
00:09:44
Speaker
fight it back we haven't done an arm wrestling match or anything to see who actually has ownership of it but who's the true cow who's the true cow I'm gonna say this is going ahead a little bit but so your own clothing journey for lack of a better term eyes that term but for lack of a better term you had a little nature and a little nurture right yeah
00:10:11
Speaker
by the hand of capital in a way, you were guided by advertising, the branding was effective, there's like all sorts of perception things at stake. So I just wanted to note that, which is that I wonder if you are aware of the popularity of Ivy style, quote, unquote, days.
00:10:39
Speaker
We know that you went to school in Boston at the Ivy league institution and we were your experiences with Ivy with Ivy league style.
00:10:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's so fascinating to me because I've been out of college for now nearly 50 years, and I've seen Ivy style go up in popularity, go back down, come back up. And it's very interesting why, and trying to figure out what is it that makes people warm to it. So when I was there, remember I was there in the 70s, mid 70s,
00:11:17
Speaker
Yeah, you kind of get the tail end of like the Golden Age. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Oh, boy. You know, that's such a shame because it would have been just, you know, love to have taken full advantage of that. Right. So, you know, so I go there and, you know, but I go to Harvard with not much budget as a, you know, from, you know, personal issues. So the notion of trying to do anything above and beyond what was required to just kind of survive
00:11:48
Speaker
in that environment meant that I couldn't be imaginative. However, I was surrounded by a lot of people with money who were now buying and coming, you know, roommates who could dress really well. And in fact, one of the great things was that my college roommate, his father ran
European Adventures and Fashion
00:12:08
Speaker
a clothing store in Pittsburgh. And whenever he came to visit the, visit, that's he would bring me clothes, you know? You knew that was my size.
00:12:17
Speaker
It was, well, they had three stores. One of them I remember was called High Wide and Handsome. And it was, you know, a size, you know, for plus size guys and so on. And there was a very popular, but as a family run thing. And so when he, you know, was,
00:12:34
Speaker
Moving on, he sold off the business and probably was absorbed by some big chain or something. But it was a great, great family business. And this guy, again, woke me to the notion of more details about clothing and types of collars and quality of cotton in the shirts and things like that. I wouldn't have learned otherwise. And then there was all these finishing clubs at Harvard. And these are clubs that mostly inhabited in those days, at least.
00:13:03
Speaker
by the kind of the white aristocracy of America. And you had to be invited and they had these cocktail party. I mean, I've never been to a cocktail party. And I was 18 going to a cocktail bar surrounded by guys, mostly guys.
00:13:19
Speaker
being served drinks by black folks in, you know, white jackets and stuff. And it just seemed so incredibly uncomfortable. So, you know, of another era, it was just, you know, the whole thing. So I, you know, I kind of shied away from warming toward that style because I found it as generically representing something that I didn't feel like it was a part of.
00:13:45
Speaker
So my attire changed from New England Catholic to college jock basically. And I was you know wearing sweatshirts and you know and I was you know in and out of the gym all the time so I had probably more t-shirts than I had you know
00:14:06
Speaker
other kind of stylish clothes. But that didn't mean that when you were having an opportunity to socialize with members of the opposite sex, you wanted to look your best. So I would try to have some clothes that would be respectable. But a big change, however, that happened to me was immediately after graduating, I literally within a week, I was on an airplane, going to Europe,
00:14:33
Speaker
where I was leading a bicycle tour of American teenagers for five weeks in Ireland and England and Scotland. And then when the tour finished, I stayed. I cycled around England and Ireland and eventually got a job playing semi-pro basketball and lived in England for nine years. And so my experience then changed, my perception of clothes changed dramatically when I was living in a foreign culture.
00:15:02
Speaker
when uh you know unlike today you know this remember before the internet before sorts of uh ways that people perceived americans abroad today it was a lot different back then that um you know i looked like an american people saw me they didn't people hadn't met americans a lot of people didn't you know you know i was like their first american that they met and they were they were
00:15:25
Speaker
they were cool that you felt special you know and I wasn't wearing I was just wearing you know American jeans and you know a Harvard sweatshirt or whatever they just thought this is so cool right you know but then came a point where I had lived there for a long enough I had kids I was married that I didn't want to be American so much I wanted to kind of fit in
00:15:49
Speaker
to whatever was going on in Britain at the time, and my style changed. Or I started getting more Tweed stuff, and I wasn't wearing sneakers anymore. Sweatshirts were definitely out. Everything was kind of shifting and changing. So that was a big kind of moment for me. Yeah.
00:16:18
Speaker
I'm gonna say it's interesting that at the height of wealth is dressing like you're going to the gym. And I mean that has a little bit been aspirational. Like the truly wealthy are not wearing fine tailored clothing. They're wearing joggers that cost $2,000 and whatever sneaker is of the moon.
00:16:43
Speaker
That has been an interesting shift as well. Oh, God. Yeah. To me, when I see it, it's just so crazy. It's just so crazy to me.
Current Style and Cartooning Influence
00:16:52
Speaker
So, Cal, how would you describe your style as an adult? And we would be remiss if we did not mention your love of waistcoats. Yeah, that's right. Well, right now, you know, I am a cartoonist, which means that it's a pretty special
00:17:12
Speaker
I mean, when you tell somebody you're a cartoonist, you can see their eyebrows go up. They've never met a cartoonist before. It's kind of fun. It's definitely special. Even when you go through security at airports, you know, or they're checking your passport and say, okay, what do you do? I'm a cartoonist. These are guys who hear thousands of people go by with all sorts of, when they say cartoonist, their eyes come up and look at you because it's so unusual. But it also means that it gives you permission
00:17:40
Speaker
to be different. And it gives you permission to be playful in people's eyes. Right. And also that kind of plays into my personality anyways. So I've always my style is evolved as being a combination of many of my past elements, that there's a bit of old English in me that I like. There's a bit of the relaxed
00:18:08
Speaker
informality that you get of playing sports and being in that jock world. A degree of formality that I got, you know, working for The Economist is a very established organization. And then I have had a big impact in my life by my wife, who's English, and she is also an artist and
00:18:29
Speaker
her eye. She knows me and so she's always encouraged me to try and experiment with various different things. And then my mom who had a lovely color palette and I have the same kind of color palette which was
00:18:46
Speaker
You're full of energy, and I really like that. So how does that express myself and my looks? Well, I have a collection of waistcoats that I've been building up for about probably a couple of decades, which I love. Most chances. But it all started with socks because for the longest time, men didn't have an opportunity to express themselves with color or imagination or creativity. There was a uniform of what you had to wear.
00:19:16
Speaker
And I always wanted to have crazy socks.
00:19:20
Speaker
And I do a lot of public speaking amount on the circuit. And I remember when I first started, you know, 20 years ago, if I had a crazy pair of socks and the whole audience would notice it and they'd go, wow, that's crazy. Look at those socks. Well now, crazy socks are everywhere, right? It needs nothing special. But I just want to tell folks, there was a time when that wasn't the way it was. So I usually have imaginative socks
00:19:47
Speaker
I've got a great bunch of funky shirts that I really like that I've gotten from a variety of different places. Matching a funky shirt with a waistcoat can be a little tricky at times. I do have some solid shirts that go with tricky waistcoats, and then I have crazy shirts that go with solid waistcoats, that kind of thing. You've got to work that out. Could you describe your waistcoat shirt scarf matching that was going on today?
00:20:17
Speaker
Well, yeah, yeah. So, well, I have a, there's a store in France, in Paris. I was there doing an event and it was February and it was freaking cold. It was frigid. And my wife and I are kind of wandering around the streets and she says to me, wherever the next store we pass, we're going in to get warm. And we turn this corner and it's this tiny shirt shop.
00:20:46
Speaker
Uh, it must have only been about. 10 feet wide, 20 feet deep. You know, it's just like that line, but you know, all these really creative fun shirts and the, and the company is called Katon do C O T O N D O U X. And she, she said, try on some shirts while I get warm. So, well, we walked out of there with three shirts and it's a great place. And ever since then I have.
00:21:14
Speaker
bought. I probably have a dozen of their shirts because you can get them easily in line and I highly recommend people go check them out and they're very reasonable. But I had a particular favorite that I love from them and it's a colorful one and it's all, imagine the spray cans right you know that people do graffiti with spray cans
00:21:37
Speaker
Imagine if you flip it up, so you only see the top of the spray can, but the color of that top of the spray can is apparent. Well, this one is a, is a shirt with, you know, hundreds of spray can tops. Oh, that's cool. And the colors all pop together. So it gives a lot of life. And the amount, I tell you what I have, I have so many times I've worn this shirt. I have been stopped in the streets by guys and gals.
00:22:02
Speaker
Great shirt or you walk in my nice shirt, you know, and that doesn't happen very often that people just walk by saying nice shirt. And in fact, Matt, I know you're from Atlanta, right? I think I was in Atlanta at a convention or something like getting coffee.
00:22:19
Speaker
And this guy walks up to me, starts talking to me about my shirt. He says, that is the best amazing shirt. And so I love that shirt. But as a result, there's only a couple of waistcoats that I have currently that kind of work with it. So I got a nice blue waistcoat. And I don't remember where I got it. Or I think I got it here. But yeah, so that was my choice. Nice. Just a rough estimate. How many waistcoats do you think you have?
00:22:48
Speaker
Well, you know, it's funny. You should ask Matt because I had a call. I did a call. Okay. Great way to call. That's two weeks ago. And I, at that point I had 55. Okay. All right. And now I've got 30. Yeah. Wow. How, where did you put them all? Well, I, well, my daughter was, it said that she wants them. I'm not sure what she plans to do with them, but yeah.
00:23:18
Speaker
No, I've got all sorts. I've got all sorts. That's amazing. Well, so you're a collector too. I wonder about the nature versus nurture thing. I imagine you wanted us to bring that up on the show because you've had some thoughts about it. I have thoughts, but it is a little bit of a cop out. I would just say that nature and nurture sort of equally by for importance as your clothing.
00:23:47
Speaker
Yes, I may think you're exactly right there. I suppose one of the things about the nurture side of it is that I reckon that there's a lot of people in the world who don't have an opportunity, either they're not surrounded by people who can help develop or finely tune people's understanding of what works for them.
00:24:13
Speaker
But I've always been fascinated about cultures all around the world, even in ancient times. People wanted to adorn themselves with attractive, interesting, compelling colors and designs. And as a result, it's kind of innate.
00:24:33
Speaker
But I've always been fascinating about how they've evolved over time, what's made things, as societies change their colors and so on. And then bringing it to today with the internet, how is all these variety of cultures and colors and so on spreading faster because of the internet and penetrating parts, corners of the world that would have never seen or experienced
00:25:02
Speaker
you know, what's available in looks these days. Oh my God. They like the people who I would, I would say that I know these people. I've never met them in real life. You talk very often who I know in all kinds of places in Sweden and in California, you know, all over the country. And we're able to talk to each other about the thing that we care about, which we were not.
00:25:25
Speaker
Do I mean, we all, we all kind of came up in these fashion forums. Right. And now for the most part, people use Instagram. Right. But it has been a hugely uniting force. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And a good one, I think. I mean, that's, it's really fantastic.
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah, I think kind of to your point about, you know, styles and things spreading. Also, like you mentioned how, you know, your mom influenced your taste. Yeah. And so now it's possible that if you don't have that kind of like personal influence, you can find, you know, you can find someone that looks cool and you're like,
00:26:08
Speaker
You know, it's such an interesting time period, I think, for clothing in general. And, you know, I feel like there's, if you want to look a certain way, you can do it. You know, provided you, of course, have the means or whatnot. But, you know, like, also, you know, going thrifting and putting together something that takes inspiration from what you saw. Like, these are things that you didn't have growing up.
00:26:37
Speaker
Yeah, well, and that's the thing is that I lived in a kind of a clothing desert. Right. And it wasn't just the area I lived in. It's just that the times had that. And so today it's just so fantastic, the cornucopia of what's available. Yeah. Perfect description of it. So getting into your arts, when did you realize that, you know, your artistic skills were something that you could, you know, make a living off of?
Early Inspirations and Cartooning Beginnings
00:27:07
Speaker
Well, you know, I used to draw a lot when I was a little kid and I did cartoons for my high school paper, but, and I always kind of wanted to be a cartoonist. As it turns out, the county that I lived in, in suburban, you know, outside of New York, there's a lot of cartoonists that lived there. They all came there after they broke too. They kind of settled into that area. And then a bunch of them got together and started this cartoon museum down in Greenwich, Connecticut at the time. And I went down and volunteered.
00:27:37
Speaker
You know, as a young kid, I was like 14, 15, so I met cartoonists. And so I could suddenly think, oh, yeah, I could do this when most of the people, if you've never had that opportunity, you know, would never dream of it. Right. And so then when I went to university and I was studying art, you know, I started studying all sorts of things.
00:27:59
Speaker
But my final senior thesis was a 13 minute long animated cartoon based on a comic strip that I had in the college paper. And so I started.
00:28:11
Speaker
have dreams that could possibly be true of maybe making my life as a cartoonist. But in those days, I was going to do a comic strip, like Dunesbury. And I had, that was my feeling. Or I did get offered a job at an animation studio right out of college. In those days, of course, none of this computer stuff, my senior thesis was thousands and thousands of hand drawings. That took me forever. But immediately, like I said before, I went overseas immediately.
00:28:42
Speaker
And I also always fascinated with caricature. And I used to do caricatures in the streets in Cambridge. And I was really bad, but I draw all my friends and stuff like that.
00:28:52
Speaker
And, um, but then I started looking for cartooning jobs in London and the basketball team was having financial trouble. And, you know, crazy as it sounds, my first job was with the economist in London, you know, and they were looking for cartoonists when I kind of showed up and it was just a kind of a freak of nature.
00:29:15
Speaker
And by getting my time, you know, getting there, then I could get a work permit as a, you know, and that allowed me to stay. And then, you know, I played three years and I met my wife and cartooning started to show up. And I mean, it was, it was, it's crazy. The whole story is crazy. And I'm lucky. Hell yeah. So cartooning and caricature there maybe is a not
00:29:44
Speaker
fine line between the two. So I was wondering what your process for doing a caricature is. Yeah, so a caricature to me is the capturing of an individual. And I'm going to actually tell you the quote, my favorite quote about caricature is from Annabelle Carracci, who is an Italian Renaissance painter. And he said that a good caricature is more true to life than reality itself.
00:30:13
Speaker
So you try to get to the core, the source, the nub of an individual. And a character is not just of the face. It could be of the whole body, because we know how people carry themselves. That tells a lot about the person. And the same way that clothes tell you about a person, their face does, and all the way they hold themselves. So for me, I've got to get a fix on the individual that I'm drawing, if I can.
00:30:41
Speaker
But if I'm just going to be operating on how I'm going to break down a face, well, you know, the most important feature that we have surprisingly is the shape of our head. I mean, each of our shapes of our head is unique. And it's a reason why you can recognize somebody from a distance or from behind.
00:31:00
Speaker
Right. So you start with that shape. You've got to get those shapes right. And then within the head, there's lots of other smaller shapes. And it's all about the shapes and how they relate to each other. You know, the shapes, the shapes within the forehead, for example, where certain muscles go, the shape of the eyes, the shape of the cheeks and the eyes. So all you put all these things together, these suddenly an image in a special energy that's specific to that and to that individual start to appear.
00:31:32
Speaker
So you're reducing it in a way. Yeah. You distilling it. Um, and then, you know, it's, it's a combination. You're also carving the face because I think I always try to think in 3d, some caricatures work in line and they're thinking about just the surface. I think about it's almost like I'm carving a head in 3d and molding it. You know, sometimes I'm building the head, like adding clay to a, to a, to a, you know, a bus. And other times I'm like shipping away at the,
00:32:02
Speaker
at the model in order to create the different shapes. But I'm doing it in distortion, for sure. In my caricatures at Orway, I like to deal with it as not in utter photographic realism, but in fact, trying to have a little playfulness at the same time. Yeah, one of the things that we like so much about your work outside of the editorial, which is always incredible, is just the color.
00:32:28
Speaker
Um, you know, how do you, how do you select the colors to work with? How do you decide what all, you know, what's going to be more black and white and what's going to make, you know, be a color that pops on a, on a draw. So, uh, you know, color has mood colors, got personality. Um, you guys know this for sure. Right. When you're talking about clothing, the clothing choice. I mean, it, it, it, um.
00:32:54
Speaker
It communicates so much. I mean, this is the thing about our eyes, right? As humans, our eyes are absorbing so much information that we don't even know
00:33:04
Speaker
Right. And trying to back up and trying to break down what our eyes are seeing and why it feels certain ways is one of the great things about dealing with any art. So when people choose certain clothing, sometimes they know that this color goes with that color because they've seen it done a million times.
00:33:25
Speaker
That helps. Well, the same thing with painting is that sometimes you try to become a student of color so that when I see an instance that I want to create, I go, oh, that green with that yellow here would create the mood that I'm looking at. So there's that.
00:33:43
Speaker
I'm also going to bring you back to palette because my mom's palette constantly returns to my artwork where my palette is a more happier palette than some people's and so I find that goes in. That's kind of my happy place to be when I'm making something, you know, creating something. I have a default group of colors that I will work with but I think really
00:34:07
Speaker
What I like to think is that my color is not just coloring in, right? It's not like we're just doing black and white dropping color in. Right. That sometimes is a thing that happens these days, particularly with computers, is that it's easy to drop in color. But it's more nuanced. And that part of that is because I love to do it in watercolor. Because I work in watercolors allows you to have many more varieties of personality in the color. Hey.
00:34:38
Speaker
How do you depict various personality traits in clothing? Well, for me, the clothing in the cartoon can be a prop more than anything else. Although sometimes, you know, people have iconic clothing that they wear deliberately. And because I'm dealing with public figures, they have so many stylists working them. So they get an iconic look and then they don't break from the look as part of their deal.
00:35:06
Speaker
And so, yeah, I capture that, but really, because I'm dealing in ridicule largely, then what happens is that I take that, their chosen look, and then I make fun of it, or I diminish it. You make the sleeves go a little bit too high up their arm, or too far down. In Donald Trump's case, you drop the sleeve so that it's like halfway down his hand, and his fingers are barely appearing underneath, right?
00:35:35
Speaker
And, uh, or, you know, the way that everyone does stuff with this tie.
00:35:39
Speaker
making it so long that it's kind of dragged behind him and things like that. Which is barely caricature, which is barely character, because that is just how he looks. It's crazy. I mean, seriously, who's who's advising him? Of course, he doesn't listen to anybody anyway. Right. You know, but you know, but that is, yeah, you know, I mean, really seriously, he has a unique ability to make a what I'm assuming is probably five or six thousand dollar suit. Yeah. Like it came from Joseph Banks. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, that's that takes talent.
00:36:09
Speaker
It takes a lot of talent, that's right. So, Cal, who are some of your favorites that you have or like to draw? You know, international figures, presidents? Interesting. Well, I'll give you two answers for this. The first answer, I think it's going to be surprising to everybody, is that it's always, always the current president of the United States. And the reason why that is because
00:36:37
Speaker
their faces are changing a lot when they're in office. Oh, because the pressure of the job makes them age exponentially, even even even Joe Biden has got less them, you know, them less face. I mean, I remember seeing pictures of Obama, like, at the beginning of his presidency, presidency, and at the end, and it was shocking. Yeah, like, I'd never really thought about that. But obviously, you had
00:37:05
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, their faces change exponentially, I think. And I tell people it's a combination of gravity and gravitas. Right. So it's, it is, yeah, so I love watching the food. Plus, personally, that I get, I get to know, I get to know their face better than I know my, my, my own face. Because I'm, I look at them for like three or four hours at a time, because when I'm drawing, I have photos of them on my screen in front of me. And
00:37:35
Speaker
And in fact, I don't know about you guys. I mean, I look at them for like three, four hours at a time. I only look at my own face for like one or two hours at a time. I don't know about you guys. Maybe two. So it's one of these things where it's a fantastic journey working with whoever is present. So then as a result, I now have a collection because I've been drawing presents since Ronald Reagan.
00:38:03
Speaker
Um, that amongst that crew, I have a few favorites. Uh, Bill Clinton was one. And, um, he, it's to see his face age tremendously in his time. But he just said this. He looks like a cartoon in, in real life. Exactly. Exactly. He was just like a cartoon. Um, uh, Ronald Reagan was very interesting to draw because he had a very animated face. He was, you know, rubbery. He was a.
00:38:32
Speaker
an actor so he could really put on all sorts of moods and then that you could take you could say take a ball of string and drop his hairdo on top of it and you can make it look like Ronald Reagan as simple as that.
00:38:46
Speaker
And so those are things that, but the, and also by the way, that was in contrast to Margaret Thatcher, who was the prime minister of Great Britain at the time, who had exactly one expression. Yep. You know, it's like a frozen, her face was frozen in time. So that was a robotic dog. Yes, exactly. So, you know, but new guys come along all the time. And, you know, today,
00:39:16
Speaker
I think drawing the Chinese leader Xi has been interesting because at first, you know, people, one of the things when you're doing caricatures and cartoons, you're helping educate your audience as to what these people look like. Right. Because they look at the up photos, they're not paying attention, but the caricature is paying attention. And so if you do a nice, you know, a good, strong caricature of them, people start to see all the parts of their face. So that's really interesting. The Economist is
00:39:45
Speaker
a conservative publication. And I would think that cartoons are at odds with that. And so I was wondering how it's been to make your way at the economists doing. So the economist is kind of, it's conservative-ish.
00:40:07
Speaker
What I mean is it's more liberal in the old tradition of what a liberal is, is that they were basically established because of free trade. Free trade was their big thing, but open government, it surprises people, but the economist endorses legalization of old drugs, for example. But at the same time, they want control of guns. And they have supported for president in the past
00:40:37
Speaker
I think for the past four elections, they've backed the Democrats, you know, for president. But they're certainly, if it was an American spectrum, they'd be more in the middle, but they're definitely a strong pro-capitalist, you know, so in that regard,
00:40:54
Speaker
they could be considered to be conservative. But on social issues, they're on the left, left of center. So it's interesting. It's a kind of idiosyncratic organization. I support them in many things. I was particularly against the Iraq war, the first and second Iraq war. But they were for them. But they have since kind of recanted on the second one. OK. Anyways, for me, I
00:41:24
Speaker
They give me a lot of freedom. They give me an awful lot of freedom. I kind of, I guess, earned it over time. And then I kind of know the areas where I maybe won't tread because it's not doesn't kind of fit into their into their mix. But, you know, I do one cartoon a week for them. That's an editorial cartoon that I do an illustration for them every week. And there's only been over my 45 years with them.
00:41:47
Speaker
one or two instances where I just wouldn't do a cartoon because what was going to be required was not going to fit my perspective. But it may be also about being married. The two of us have been married for 45 years. So over time, I've become more like them. They've become more like me. Right, right. Yeah. So we read a little bit about it. Yeah, it really is. And also, you know, that seems like a pretty good track record of only a couple of things that, you know,
00:42:16
Speaker
have gone against your values. Well, they're not conservative like the Republican party. They're conservative publication from. That's right. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, I think that because the, the, the, the political spectrum in the UK is a lot different than the US world. So Cal, we were reading about an organization that you led that protected political cartoonists internationally, cartoons rights network.
00:42:44
Speaker
Could you tell us a little bit about that and kind of what's your experience with that org was? Well, here in the US, we forget just how lucky we are to have the ability to express our own thoughts in the open. And cartoons particularly are kind of in the front line.
00:43:07
Speaker
of freedom of expression. If you get cartoons in trouble here but abroad it's particularly difficult. And a recent report from a place called Freedom House which judges the amount of
00:43:22
Speaker
freedom of expression and journalism that is around the world. Only about 15% of the world's population live in a place where there's freedom of the press. And it also neatly, I think, overlaps with the amount of places in the world where cartoonists can draw their own head of state, right? You just draw your own head of state. So as a result,
00:43:45
Speaker
in these kind of very ticklish times and intolerant times with demagogues everywhere. Cartoonists have been around the globe routinely jailed, tortured, and murdered for what they do. And so an organization was started, I think about 20 years ago now, by basically an overseas aid worker
00:44:12
Speaker
American who was working in a variety of different countries and found that the cartoonists were coming up to him and looking for help. Cartoonists are their families to try to help them out of trouble that they're having with the governments. So when the guy came back, his name was Bro Russell, he came back, he reached out to me and some other people about trying to set up a forum that could
00:44:36
Speaker
not just raise money to help these people in their own micro issues they have there, but also an advocacy group that could then shine a spotlight on the problems that are going on in other places and maybe get other organizations and other governments to step in and then protect the cartoonists in question and other journalists. And so over time, we've saved cartoonists, smuggled some people out of countries that they're in danger
00:45:05
Speaker
of being targeted. We have done a lot of, we've had cartoonists who've had to, we do an annual award basically that brings attention to certain cartoonists and raises their profile and makes them so that they're hotter for anyone to try to take them on within their own country because they know basically the world is watching. Right.
00:45:35
Speaker
a great honor for me to do this. I've met many of these cartoons from all around the globe. I'm so impressed by the bravery of these individuals. If I was in their shoes, I'm not sure I would do the same thing that they're doing. It's really remarkable because they're the freedom fighters in their own country, putting their lives and their families in danger in order to use cartoons, which are a very potent weapon, particularly in societies where literacy is not very high. The cartoons can go places that the words can't.
00:46:05
Speaker
And it's really something. You were carrying on some of my favorite cartoons that I've seen, like the Old Union cartoons and whatnot.
Cartooning in a Changing World
00:46:17
Speaker
And I feel like you guys are carrying that torch these days. Yeah. And that's what cartoons can do. So I'm very honored to be in this profession. Just out of curiosity, did you guys ramp up things after the Charlie Hebdo incident?
00:46:34
Speaker
or was that just kind of, you know, business as usual for for what you guys do? Well, yes, so the Charlie Hebdo just kind of remind people was that, you know, over five years ago, coming up to six years, maybe, right, ago when
00:46:48
Speaker
You know, some gunman basically broke into Charlie Hebdo, which was this French satirical magazine that had done lots of articles and images critical of Prophet Mohammed. And people took offense and they came in with their automatic weapons and gunned down five cartoonists and some other folks as well.
00:47:10
Speaker
And then it caused a gigantic reaction of people in support of freedom of expression. They had these large marches, they had heads of states going to Paris doing all this stuff. But the sad thing is that all of that enthusiasm as quickly waned as other things came across everyone's bow, including
00:47:33
Speaker
the coronavirus and so on. Right. You know, the thing about cartooning as we've known it throughout history has been intricately the future has been intricately bound to the future of newspapers and newspapers are fading fast. Right. So the cartooning as we've already known it is under threat in ways that we're not used to.
00:47:55
Speaker
I don't think satire is under threat. I think we live in a time of ever increasing and healthy satire appearing everywhere on the internet. But cartoons harder. Now, of course, my cartoons are more widely seen today than ever before, thanks to the web. And I think that I'm one of the lucky ones that can still have that. But if I was starting out now, I think my path to becoming a cartoonist would be much more difficult than it was way back in the days. Right.
00:48:25
Speaker
That's what a lot of people say. When I met Steny Hoyer, that's what he said. It's hard out there. About the covers. You probably have covered the economists more than anybody. Is that right?
00:48:37
Speaker
I probably did 150 covers over the years. I have done less so recently because the style, it's interesting if you're talking about your clothing as a style, but imagery as a style can also come into play. And because of the introductions of computer-generated artwork has changed the way that people perceive graphics. And so they don't use as much illustration on the graphics anymore, but they do a lot of
00:49:06
Speaker
computer-generated artwork. So I've done less of those more recently, but I had a great run there of creating all these covers and some of the, you know, plastics that, you know, really embodied some of the main important things that have gone on in history for several decades. But I do have one fun story of doing a cover that
00:49:31
Speaker
Back in the day, again, this is a while back, it's probably in the 90s now, when we first moved from England to the United States, and they wanted me to do a cover. What they would do is, on Monday, they have a meeting in London, they decide in the cover, they talk to me, and I would then work on it until Tuesday midday, and then a courier come to my house,
00:50:00
Speaker
pick up the artwork and then fly overnight to London to be there by Wednesday, because Wednesday is the press day for the economists. So everything went well for several years, but then one day I got the career key, picked up the artwork and never showed up the next day in London with the artwork. And they were pet, the magazine was petrified because everything was on tight schedules. In those days, they're sending plates via Concord to the far East.
00:50:26
Speaker
And they called me up in a panic and said, what can we do? And so I quickly grabbed a pencil sketch that I've done with the artwork, threw a little bit of ink on it. I then blew it up on a photocopy machine and sent over six pieces of the artwork by fax. And then they then taped it together and then they photographed it and then they spray painted it quickly. And that went on the cover and it was awful, right? It was a real tragedy. So they called me back the next day and said, look,
00:50:56
Speaker
In the future, we cannot take any chances about this happening anymore. So when we want you to do a cover, we want you to find a friend of yours to take the cover over for us so that the media can be delivered. So said that we had so many friends because everybody wanted to go to London for free on the economist dime. But the funny thing was is that as it turns out, very few people can drop
00:51:25
Speaker
everything they're doing at 24 hours notice and go to london for five days surprisingly so we would have a list of about 20 people and go down that list and it was really hard to find people sometimes so anyways that was the day when they did that sort of thing do you know whatever happened to that piece of art like it never showed up anyway it did show up later in the day showed up way too late oh gotcha yeah it but the thing was that really
00:51:52
Speaker
hurt the economists was that they're bullshitting. They're telling economists like, oh, no, it's landed. We've got it here. It's just and they do this for several hours when every minute mattered. You know, right. And if we had we had known, you know, five or six hours earlier that had done something more, you know. Right.
Iconic Cartoons and Market Madness
00:52:09
Speaker
Do you have a favorite cartoon that you've done? I'm sure with the amount that you've done over the years, that's probably a loaded question.
00:52:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, actually, because I doing the math, I've done over 10,000 cartoons are published. But I have, you know, one that has lasted a test of time, and it's been widely reproduced. And so in this way, I, you know, I'm fond of it. It's a cartoon about the stock market. And it's in it's in two
00:52:42
Speaker
It's two stages. So the first stage, there's a guy on the phone that says, I got a stock here that could really excel. A person over here next to him says, excel. And the person after that says, excel, excel, excel, excel, excel, excel, excel, excel. And then the second panel, the second panel starts the same way, saying, sell, sell, sell. A guy over here says, this is madness. I can't take any more. Goodbye. And somebody says goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.
00:53:11
Speaker
And then so it's all about the madness of the stock market. And it's been reproduced over and over again. And it's just been great. For everyone listening, you should certainly check that cartoon out. We'll post it. Yeah, we will post it. It is a great one. Thank you. So I was going to ask about pen and paper versus tablet and iPad. Yes. I do think we talked about that a little bit
00:53:40
Speaker
Do you have pens or pencils that you like better than others? Do you have a paper stock that is your preference? Well, I'll tell you a specific about a pen story because pencils, you know, I like using propelling pencils so I'd have to sharpen them, which I guess they call, what do you call them here? Mechanical pencils. Mechanical pencils, yeah. They call it propelling pencils. Propelling.
00:54:02
Speaker
in the UK. So those are great. And then my sketch paper is just like photocopy paper. But then I love painting on certain kinds of beautiful paper. Cuthbert is one of my favorite. But the pen store, I thought you guys would enjoy this. So I'm in the UK. I'm working at the Economist.
00:54:27
Speaker
And the art director there says, I've only been there about a year or two. So I'm a young guy in my early 20s. And he says, what you need to do, you need to go visit Philip Poole at his nibs, which is the name of his store. And it's a shop that sells only 10 nibs. And I said, OK, so we figured out where it was, which is down near Piccadilly Circus.
00:54:54
Speaker
I remember going down there, and the address was Shaftesbury, it might have been Shaftesbury Avenue, but it was like 33.
00:55:02
Speaker
at the where 33 should be, I saw 35 over here and I thought 31 over here and then between it was a door, but no number on it or anything. So I guess that's 33, right? So I go up to the door and I open it up and it was like going into something in Harry Potter world, right? The door kind of squeaked open and inside was this room, dark room with inlaid into the walls, all these floor to ceiling,
00:55:33
Speaker
uh, shelves and doors that had tiny little windows in them, you know, and, and so, and then at the back of it was this, this desk.
00:55:43
Speaker
And nobody is sitting there, but I heard this kind of shuffle in the back room. I went, hello, everybody there? And this little guy comes shuffling out. What do you want? I said, well, I was not here, but you're getting some dibs. So he asked me questions of what kind of drawing do I do and so on. And then he shoved me a little box, a little box, two inches by an inch, packed full of maybe 20 different nibs. He says, try these, see if there's any one that you like, and then come back to Smee.
00:56:11
Speaker
So I did, after, you know, a couple of weeks, I would try them with different ink. And I came back and I kind of settled on one that I liked. And, uh, and he said, great. And he went back and grabbed some more. And it was, um, it was called George Hughes 1319. So that's just a specific name. So I use this, I go visit, uh, Phillip pool every, you know, month or so, get a few more nibs. And I got to know him a little bit. He was a little less grumpy over time.
00:56:37
Speaker
And so fast forward about five or six years, I come to him, I said, Phil, these nibs are just great. Can I get any more? And he says, I don't have any more. I'm sorry. I said, when are you going to get some in? He says, get some in. They haven't been made for over 100 years. So he says, you'll be lucky to see any one of those. I said, oh, no, that's tragic. I'm so sorry. I wish I'd taken more care of them, that kind of thing.
00:57:03
Speaker
So anyways, I kind of found my way with something else, but nothing ever matched that. So before I left England to come to the Baltimore, I went to see him one last time. And he says, give me your dress, blah, blah, blah. And two years later, I get this beautiful letter from him in London. It says, someone in a basement somewhere, somebody stumbled upon this box of 144 of these 1319s. And so he says, I'll buy the whole lot.
00:57:31
Speaker
I still have, I'm still working off of that, and that's been now, oh, 30 years? I've been working with that same box, and I probably- You're taking care of it better than the first girl. I'll tell you, I'm only halfway through, buddy, so I think I can go to 870 or 80. No, 100, I think I can make it 100. All right, all right. Well, to wrap up with our final question, a little existential, as we like to do on occasion.
00:57:58
Speaker
Um, but if a young cow could look into the future and see how now, uh, what do you think that that little dude would say? Oh man, he would be, Oh God. Well, first of all, it would relieve an enormous amount of anxiety. Cause what do you mean? What the fuck is going on? What am I going to do? Will I, and the, you know, the big question is, will I ever be a cartoonist?
00:58:23
Speaker
could I sustain it? I mean, because it's basically an impossible dream to say, I'm going to do this. But I was like, I'm all in. And who knows where this is going to go. But he could see now. And I would love to talk with that young guy and tell him, don't worry, you know, it's gonna work. But you know, work your ass off. It doesn't just come. Right. And but also just tell me you're on the right track, man. You know, you're doing okay.
00:58:50
Speaker
And I think that the young guy would probably think the old guy is pretty cool. I would agree with that. You sound a bad way, man. You did all right. So yeah, I know. They'd be proud. And also, yeah, I think all of these things. I've been lucky guys. I can tell you. Unbelievable.
00:59:13
Speaker
But lucky I've been. Well, I mean, just from, you know, just from hanging out with you today, it couldn't have happened to a better person. So. Right. But couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I'm so happy. Thanks so much, guys. Yeah, man. Thank you for coming on. And, you know, this was this was a really fun conversation. And, you know, we always give our guests a chance to plug whatever they want to plug. So yeah. OK. OK. Well, I'll start by plugging the cocktail and do shirts. They're really good.
00:59:43
Speaker
I'd really highly recommend that. And then, oh, go to my website, CalTunes.com and check out my cartoons there. Follow me on social media, you know, Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and you name it. Yeah. I mean, really support and spread the word because I mean, democracy thrives on satire and I'm there, buddy. Follow me, please.
01:00:08
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. You're the man in the street. You are the man in the street with the satire. Well, uh, yeah, thanks everyone for listening. Um, thank you again, Cal, for coming on. And, uh, I am Matt Smith at Rebels Rogues on Instagram. And I'm Connor Fowler at Connor Fowler with one hand.
01:00:31
Speaker
Uh, if you have questions, comments, concerns, drop us a line, uh, either on Instagram at apocalypse studs or apocalypse studs at gmail.com. And yeah, we're out. Thank you. Thanks a lot. This would be where the outro music would go.