Facing Your Ears

I only met the late Mark Cohen once. This was in 1999 at the NCS Reuben Weekend in San Antonio, and before I started doing work for MAD. Mark was a prominent collector of cartoon artwork, and had 9among other things) one of the largest collections of original MAD art on the planet. His collections toured around galleries, and he was a tireless advocate for the cartooning world. I wish I had gotten a chance to get to know him.

One of Mark’s more well-known collections was of self-caricatures of cartoonists, of which he was said to have had close to 1,000. In 1998 he had a show of about 100 of these gems that appeared at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. There was a published catalog of that show, and over at his excellent blog, cartoonist Mike Lynch has shared a number of the self caricatures contained there-in by the likes of Burne Hogarth, Milton Caniff, Gahan Wilson, Al Capp, Robert Crumb and many others. There is a forward by the great Mort Drucker and the cover (above) was done by Charles Schulz. Below are a couple of MAD-centric self-caricatures from the catalog. Be sure and visit Mike’s blog for the rest of the show! These images and the catalog are copyright ¬¨¬©1998 by Mark J. Cohen and the Cartoon Art Museum.

Intro by Mort Drucker- Clicky to Embiggen

Thanks to Mike Lynch and to the mysterious “DD” on the MadMumblings forum for the links.