Drew Friedman (cartoonist)
Drew Friedman is an American cartoonist who has long been renowned for his "stippling"-like style of caricature, employing thousands of pen-marks to simulate the look of a photograph. In recent years he has switched to painted caricatures. His painstaking attention to detail and photorealistic parodies of Hollywood legends is widely admired.
His work has appeared in such periodicals as Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, Time, The New York Observer, Esquire, Raw, Rolling Stone, and MAD Magazine.
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 sue.
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 Similarity 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 Friedman has also dropped out of the alternative comics scene and now works pretty much exclusively as a commercial artist.
In 2006, Friedman published Old Jewish Comedians (Fantagraphics Books), a collection of black and white caricatures portraying famous Jewish comics of film and TV in their old age. A sequel, More Old Jewish Comedians (Fantagraphics Books), was published in 2008.
Friedman was recognized for his work with the National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Illustration Award for 2000, and was nominated again in 2002. That organization also awarded Friedman their Magazine Illustration Award for 2000.