Happy Happy Joy Joy!

One of the highlights of the Pittsburgh Comicon I attended last weekend was meeting the great Bob Camp. What was even better was the way it happened.

Partway through the show I was walking back to my booth space after a little walk around when I saw that Bob Camp had a booth space right behind where I was located. Bob is best known for his work on the “Ren and Stimpy” show, but has a much longer resume including doing movie and TV parodies for Marvel’s Crazy magazine. I have been a fan of his work for a long time, and made a note of going up to meet him at some point. I’m not the best at that… frankly I feel like I’m “barging in” when I just walk up and introduce myself. Stupid, I know. That’s why Bob and other artists appear at a convention like this. Anyway, I needed to work myself up to that.

Bob never gave me the chance. Some time later I’m doing a drawing for someone and he comes up to me, introduces himself and starts telling me he enjoys my work and that I have his “dream job” doing parodies for MAD. He also gave me this awesome sketch he’d done:

Bob is a cartooning genius and an unbelievable talent, and it was tremendously cool to meet him. To have him tell me, in unsolicited fashion, that he liked my work was surreal. Incidentally, if you ever get a chance to pick up some old copies of Crazy (I have more than a few), he is an excellent caricaturist and parody artist and sells himself very short in that category. His brush work is absolutely beautiful.

BTW, if you look on the left of that picture of me and Bob you’ll see a guy in a black shirt and glasses doing a drawing. That’s Bill Sienkiewicz, another comic book genius I am a huge fan of. He I never got the courage up to talk with. Gotta get over that.