DREW FRIEDMAN is an award-winning illustrator + cartoonist whose work regularly appears in dozens of major publications. For years he was renowned for his "stippling" style of drawing, employing thousands of tiny pen marks to achieve photographic verisimilitude, but in recent years Friedman has switched to painting. His painstaking attention to detail and humorous parodies of Hollywood and political icons are widely known and admired.

Friedman's work has appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The New Republic, The New York Observer, Esquire, RAW, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, and MAD, among many others.

Friedman, middle son of the celebrated author Bruce Jay Friedman, attended New York's School of Visual Arts from 1978 to 1981, studying under such legendary cartoonists as Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Edward Sorel, Stan Mack, and Arnold Roth. He launched his career in the 1980s illustrating morbid, caustic, alternative comics, often collaborating with his writer-brother Josh Alan Friedman. These stories depicted various B- and Z-list celebrities, such as Tor Johnson, Frank Sinatra, Jr., Wayne Newton, Joey Heatherton, Joe DeRita, Marnin Rosenberg and Joe Franklin, in seedy, absurd, tragicomic situations. Friedman's work won high praise from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who compared him to Goya, and Robert Crumb, who said, "I wish I had THIS guy's talent."

Throughout the 1980s and into the early '90s, Friedman's comics were regularly published in RAW, R. Crumb's WEIRDO, BLAB!, Details, Heavy Metal, High Times, and National Lampoon. Comics by the Friedman brothers were collected in two anthologies, Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead is Purely Coincidental (Fantagraphics) and Warts and All, edited and designed by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly (Penguin).

In collaboration with the cartoonist Mark Newgarden, Friedman has helped to design several products for the Topps company, among them "Toxic High" and "The Barfo Family."

In 1986, Friedman was asked to illustrate a monthly feature, "Private Lives of Public Figures," for the (then) immensely popular NYC humor magazine SPY; these were collected into a book by St. Martin's Press in 1992. He also provided illustrations for Howard Stern's two best-selling books, Private Parts and Miss America. Howard Stern has called Friedman his favorite artist on numerous occasions. Since 1994, Friedman has provided a monthly cover illustration for the New York Observer. A collection of his Observer covers will be published in 2013.

In 2006, Friedman presented Old Jewish Comedians, a celebrated collection of portraits of famous and forgotten Jewish comics of film and TV presented in their golden age, designed by Monte Beauchamp. Steven Heller, in the New York Times Book Review, proclaimed it "a festival of drawing virtuosity and fabulous craggy faces; Friedman might very well be the Vermeer of the Borscht Belt." Jerry Lewis chimed in: "Jesus Christ I love it! Holy Moly what a book!"

The following year, he published a collection of newer work, The Fun Never Stops!, including many comics co-written by his frequent collaborator and wife, K. Bidus. Booklist tabbed it one of the Ten Best Comics Collections of 2007. More Old Jewish Comedians was published in 2008, followed by the final book in the trilogy, Even MORE Old Jewish Comedians in 2011. An anthology, Too Soon: Famous/Infamous Faces, 1995-2010 (Fantagraphics), with a forward by Jimmy Kimmel, was published in 2010, followed in 2011 by Drew Friedman's Sideshow Freaks (Blast Books), which presented 50 color portraits of strange, bizarre circus entertainers from bygone years.

Friedman was recognized for his work with the National Cartoonists Society's Newspaper Illustration Award for 2000, and was nominated again in 2002 and 2007. That organization also awarded Friedman their Magazine Illustration Award for 2000. His work has been included in nine volumes of the American Illustration annual. In 2011, he was invited to be the special guest speaker at the International Society of Caricature Artists' convention in Florida.

Friedman and Bidus live in rural Pennsylvania with their two adorable champion beagles.