Drew Friedman (born 1958) is an American cartoonist and illustrator who has long been renowned for his humorous artwork and "stippling"-like style of caricature, employing thousands of pen-marks to simulate the look of a photograph. In recent years he has switched to painting. His painstaking attention to detail and photorealistic parodies of Hollywood legends is widely admired.
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 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 magazine, The Incredible Shrinking Joe Franklin, that prompted Franklin to sue for $40 million dollars. The suit was later dismissed.
These stories were generally meant to be amusing, although they were extremely dark and a few were 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. Working with and without his brother, Drew Friedman's comics went on to be published in Heavy Metal, Weirdo, High Times, National Lampoon, 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 journalist and musician.
Friedman illustrated a monthly feature, "Private Lives of Public Figures," for (the now-defunct) SPY magazine, beginning in 1986; these were compiled in a book published by St. Martin's Press in 1992. He also provided illustrations for Howard Stern's two best-selling books, Private Parts and Miss America. Friedman served as comics editor for the National Lampoon in 1991, introducing the works of (among others) Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware to a wider audience. Since 1994 he has provided regular front-page illustrations for the New York Observer.
In 2006, Friedman published Old Jewish Comedians (Fantagraphics Books), a collection of portraits of famous and forgotten Jewish comics of film and TV in their old age, about which Steven Heller, in the New York Times Book Review wrote: "A festival of drawing virtuosity and fabulous craggy faces...Friedman might very well be the Vermeer of the Borscht Belt.". A sequel, More Old Jewish Comedians (Fantagraphics Books), was published in 2008. A collection of newer work, "The Fun Never Stops!" was published by Fantagraphics in 2007, containing many comics co-written by his frequent collaborator and wife, K.Bidus. Booklist has listed it as One of the Ten Best Comics Collections of 2007.
Friedman was recognized for his work with the National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Illustration Award for 2000, and was nominated again in 2002 and 2007. That organization also awarded Friedman their Magazine Illustration Award for 2000.
