Drew Friedman
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Drew Friedman is a cartoonist who was long known for his "stippling"-like style of caricature, employing thousands of pen-marks to simulate the look of a photograph, although in recent years he has switched to painted caricatures. His work has appeared widely, including in Entertainment Weekly and MAD Magazine. His painstaking attention to detail, and often photorealistic parodies of Hollywood legends is well known.
Although in recent years Friedman has mostly worked doing caricature illustrations for mainstream publications, he began his career in the '80s doing very dark alternative comics stories, sometimes working solo but often with his brother Josh Alan Friedman writing the scripts. These stories took various celebrities and character actors of yesteryear and put them in very seedy, absurd, tragi-comic situations. One memorable story followed Bud Abbott and Lou Costello wandering around the urban jungle late at night, encountering whores, junkies and other lowlifes. Friedman created many strips featuring actor/wrestler Tor Johnson in his well known hulking moron persona from many Ed Wood films. In one strip, Johnson has a dream where he is walking at night and encounters several other Tor Johnsons. ("Me Tor!" "Me Tor too!") He awakens and telephones his friend Bela Lugosi, demanding to know, "Bela, How many Tor?" The brothers also did many stories about talk-show host Joe Franklin, including one strip, The Incredible Shrinking Joe Franklin, that led Franklin to threaten legal action.
These stories were generally meant to be amusing, although they were extremely dark and a few were simply tragic. Drew Friedman's work won high praise from such notable figures as Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who compared him to Goya, and R. Crumb, who wrote, "I wish I had this guy's talent". The Friedman brothers were first published in Raw Magazine and went on to be published in Heavy Metal, Weirdo and other comics anthologies from the '80s into the early '90s. They published two collections, Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead is Purely Coincidental and Warts and All. In a Comics Journal interview, Drew Friedman complained that he and his brother had both failed to earn a living creating work that took so much time and paid so little, and he stated that Josh had given up comics to become a novelist and musician. Since then, Drew Friendman has also dropped out of the alternative comics scene and now works pretty much exclusively as a commercial artist.
He has been recognized for his work with the National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Illustration Award for 2000, with another nomination for 2002, and a nomination for their Magazine Illustration Award for 2000.
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| Contributors to Mad "The Usual Gang of Idiots" |
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| Jerry DeFuccio | Al Feldstein | John Ficarra | Harvey Kurtzman | Nick Meglin |
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| Sergio Aragonés | Dave Berg | John Caldwell | Don Edwing | Al Jaffee | Don Martin | Paul Peter Porges | Antonio Prohías |
| Artists |
| Tom Bunk | Bob Clarke | Paul Coker, Jr. | Jack Davis | Mort Drucker | Will Elder | Drew Friedman | Bernard Krigstein | Peter Kuper | Hermann Mejia | Norman Mingo | Tom Richmond | Jack Rickard | John Severin | Angelo Torres | Rick Tulka | Sam Viviano | Basil Wolverton | Monte Wolverton | Wally Wood | George Woodbridge | Bill Wray |
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| Irving Schild |
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| Mad Magazine | William M. Gaines |
