Patrick Timothy Mullikin

It's an innocent enough looking pen-and-ink drawing: a smiling Pinocchio, his head poking out from a stack of firewood. "I wasn't sure about the smile," says Harry Bliss of his latest creation. "I thought: Would he be smiling? Of course he would. He's a wooden doll." Bliss laughs. A second, closer look at the picture reveals a cabin in the background with smoke curling from the chimney.

Is it funny or sick? Both, if Bliss is successful.

He's submitting this uncaptioned Pinocchio drawing to the New Yorker's weekly cartoon caption contest along with his regular batch of captioned pieces. His cartoon of a doctor consulting a patient whose detached head, torso and trunk sit on the examination table appears in the Nov. 13 issue along the winning caption. The winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Bliss keeps the original artwork. Some he sells; others he trades with fellow cartoonists. His current passion/obsession is collecting original drawings by Charles Addams whose irreverent, often macabre cartoons were a mainstay of the New Yorker in the 1940s. There's a hint of Addams in Bliss.

"Charles Addams' stuff is timeless," he says. "The thing about Addams is that you can picture the life before the cartoon and after the cartoon. You're just stopping by and looking in the window. That's something that I try to do. I want to try to create as much personality with the setting. You just stopped in time to catch the gag."

Bliss, 42, who has lived in South Burlington since 2000, was weaned on art. His mother and father met in art school, and he has two uncles who are artists.

"As kids that (art) was pretty much what we knew. We grew up with markers and everything in the house. In fact being in a house with a dad for an artist (he did graphic design work for Kodak, French's Mustard, Burger King and designed the 1964 fall preview cover for TV Guide) made a lot of my college education a little bit superfluous. I knew how to work with pencils and paint and all that stuff. I was a little bored."

Though he may have been bored, Bliss attended some highly prestigious art schools: The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he studied painting under Arthur De Costa, and Syracuse University, where he earned his master's degree.

"By the time I was a senior, I started getting magazine work at GQ, McCalls, some editorial work at Business Week." Then came the book jackets.

From 1990 to 1995, he says, he worked almost exclusively on designing book covers, mostly mysteries, for St. Martin's Press, Random House and other publishing houses.

"I did so many mysteries I got tired. I would send them to my mom to read and had her give me the synopsis of the book. I'd give her 50 bucks. She's a visual woman, and she really helped me out."

In 1995 Bliss moved from Philadelphia to Nyack, N.Y., to be closer to his 1-year-old son and the mother of his son.

It was in Nyack, Bliss says, that he had his New Yorker epiphany.

"I was sitting in a park looking at a book of Charles Addams while my son was playing in the playground, and I was laughing. I had sort of an epiphany when I just realized that how beautiful the cartoons were and how all my teachers in college had said to me: You should really try the New Yorker, try the New Yorker, try the New Yorker."

He did. He sent some black-and-white cartoon samples to the cartoon editor. Those samples then made it into the hands of the cover editor. "She sent me a letter back. We like these. Why don't you start working on some cover sketches? So I started doing some cover sketches. About a week after I faxed a few things, they bought one. Tina Brown (then editor) said it was a very glam cover." That cover, the first of 17 Bliss covers, ran on Jan 5, 1998, and shows a city couple heading upstairs to their apartment after a night of partying.

"After my third cover, I started submitting cartoons as well." To date, more than 80 Bliss cartoons have appeared in the New Yorker, which has first refusal rights for all his cartoons.

"There was a time when I was only publishing in the New Yorker. That's not the case anymore. The irreverent ones find their way into Seven Days newspaper. The other ones that get rejected end up in syndication (28 newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Detroit Free Press). The ones that are over the top, some of them end up in Playboy."

Bliss says he just completed his first year with the syndicate, Tribune Media Services. "It was a way to get the cartoons out there. I want to make people laugh. I really get a kick out of seeing people laugh. "

Bliss loves to laugh as well. But it takes some coaxing.

"The BBC version of 'The Office.' It was one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen in my life. 'Shawn of the Dead' made me laugh. Danny Shanahan (another New Yorker cartoonist). He's a very funny cartoonist. We like each other's work. The one I had to have, it's got Snow White on the ground, with a bite out of the apple, and there are two dwarfs looking at her, sort of wondering what to do, and one of them says: 'Let's get Junkie, he'll know what to do.' That made me laugh out loud, which is pretty rare."

He says one of his own New Yorker cartoons made him laugh out loud when he finished drawing it.

A man and a woman are driving along a scenic road along the California coastline.

"He's looking in the rearview mirror, and he says: 'Oh, Christ. It's your mother.' Behind this mountain is this huge monster mom peering out. When I finished that it made me laugh out loud. (Apparently so did Jamie Lee Curtis, who bought the original.)

His advice for aspiring New Yorker cartoonists?

"The New Yorker doesn't want you to generate cartoons that are New Yorker cartoons. They want you to just generate good cartoons. They want your personality, your voice. My advice for people who want to cartoon for the New Yorker: Don't try to be a New Yorker cartoonist. Try to work on the craft of cartooning."



Patrick Timothy Mullikin writes regularly for Vermont Sunday Magazine.











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