Drew Friedman (cartoonist)

Drew Friedman
Born	1958 New York, NY
Known for	Cartooning, painting, illustration
Spouse(s)	Kathy Bidus

Drew Friedman (born 1958) is an American cartoonist and illustrator who first gained renown for his humorous artwork and "stippling"-like style of caricature, employing thousands of pen-marks to simulate the look of a photograph. In the mid-1990s, he switched to painting. His painstaking attention to detail and photorealistic parodies of Hollywood legends is widely admired.

Friedman's work has appeared in such periodicals as Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Observer, Esquire, RAW, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and Mad. His works have been anthologized in seven collections, and he has illustrated a number of books, including Howard Stern's Private Parts and Miss America.

Since the 1990s Friedman has provided caricature illustrations for mainstream publications. However, he first attracted public attention in the 1980s producing morbid alternative comics stories, sometimes working solo, sometimes with his brother Josh Alan Friedman scripting the panels. These stories portrayed celebrities and character actors of yesteryear in seedy, absurd, tragi-comic situations. One memorable story followed Bud Abbott and Lou Costello wandering the urban jungle at night, encountering whores, junkies and other lowlifes. Friedman created strips featuring actor/wrestler Tor Johnson in his iconic hulking moron persona from Ed Wood, Jr. films. The brothers also wrote stories about talk-show host Joe Franklin, including one strip, written by Drew, for Heavy Metal, "The Incredible Shrinking Joe Franklin", that prompted Franklin to sue the artist for $40 million. The suit was later dismissed. These stories were generally meant to be amusing, although they were extremely dark and a few were tragic. 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".

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