Skin still Mr. Cartoon’s favorite canvas

He was Mark Machado back then, although his friends were already calling him Cartoon. He threw the Mister in front to dress it up a little. These days it annoys him if someone tries to address him as Mark.

“The only ones who call me by my Christian name,” he says, “are my mother and my wife. And my wife only if she’s angry at me.”

As Mr. Cartoon, he drifted into tattooing after trying his hand at numerous other art forms, including graffiti, airbrushing, etching and an ill-fated nine months at a trade school trying to learn sign-painting.

“They gave me the boot,” chuckles the ordinarily laconic Cartoon. “The teacher told me, ‘Man, you’re a great artist, maybe the best in the class. But you’ve got to go. You don’t turn nothin’ in.’”

Things began to look up after he was busted for spraying graffiti on a building and ordered to pay $800 in restitution. He had no idea where the money would come from until he landed a job painting a mural on the wall of a gymnasium.

“They went, ‘How much to do the mural?’ And I went, “Eight hundred dollars, sir.’ And I kind of never looked back.”

Mr. Cartoon goes public
If he hasn’t gone mainstream in the years since, Cartoon has slowly begun to go more public. His main studio is still more or less a secret hideout but he recently opened a more public one. Called Skid Row Tattoos, it is located in a rapidly gentrifying section of the hardscrabble neighborhood, an area Cartoon says he wants to give something back to.

Although his name isn’t on the sign out front, anyone familiar with his work will recognize the place immediately from the beautiful airbrushed lowrider motorcycle on display in the front window. If that isn’t enough, the boutique next door carries Joker brand clothes and Cartoon’s line of Nike shoes.

Back in the day, he used to live at the main studio a mile or so away. He would throw big parties there that helped spread his reputation.

These days he says he leads a slightly more sedate life, with a wife and four kids and a house in the suburbs.

“I’m a white-picket-fence man now,” he says with a laugh as he walks into the main studio.

Moments before, as he was maneuvering his tricked-out pickup truck through downtown traffic, he had reflected on growing older but not losing his connection to the rough-and-tumble side of L.A. that inspired so much of his art. As he spoke, menacing looking clown faces (a Mr. Cartoon trademark) stared up from the vehicle’s floor mats.

“Hopefully you grow up and you have a family and you change,” he mused at one point. “Some guys never change. But the majority of us get older, we start clothing companies, we start design centers, graphic design houses. And we go for broke.”

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