Charles Rodrigues

Charles Rodrigues died on June 14, 2004 at the age of 77. He was survived by his wife Lorraine and daughters Judith and Ann.

He began contributing to the National Lampoon as of its first issue in April 1970, and continued to do so until 1993. Although his politics differed sharply from those of the Lampoon's staff, the magazine provided a wide outlet for his sense of humor. Art director Michael Gross once said of him:

Two collections of Rodrigues's work were published during his lifetime: Spitting on the Sheriff and Other Diversions (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1966), which consists of cartoons from various men's magazines, and Total Harmonic Distortion (Perfectbound Press, 1988), which reprints his work from Stereo Review. He also drew cartoons for Defending the Undefendable (Fleet Press, 1976), a discourse by libertarian economist Walter Block. In 2013, Fantagraphics Books published Ray and Joe: The Story of a Dead Man and His Friend, and Other Classic Comics, a collection of his pages from National Lampoon. In late 2015, Fantagraphics published a second collection, Gag on This: The Scrofulous Cartoons of Charles Rodrigues, which collects gag cartoons from the Lampoon.

He was also a long-time contributor to Stereo Review, beginning with its first issue in 1958, and created three comic features for the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate: Eggs Benedict, Casey the Cop and the daily panel Charlie.

Rodrigues was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts; his father came from Madeira, Portugal and his mother was a local woman of Portuguese descent. After a stint in the U.S. Navy, he read in Writer's Digest that a magazine entitled Country Gentleman was paying forty dollars for cartoons - then a large sum of money – and determined to become a cartoonist. With support from the G.I. Bill, he went to New York City to attend the Cartoonist and Illustrators School (now the School of Visual Arts). He began peddling his cartoons around 1950, selling at first to low-grade girlie magazines, then to Playboy, to which he would contribute continually for many years. From the 1950s onward he worked for many magazines of many different kinds, including Esquire, TV Guide, a Catholic publication called The Critic, and Paul Krassner's The Realist.

Charles Rodrigues (September 29, 1926 – June 14, 2004) was an American cartoonist perhaps best known as a contributor to National Lampoon.