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 in varying genres, including Esquire, TV Guide, a Catholic publication called The Critic'', and
Paul Krassner's
The Realist. 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: [L]ook at Charles Rodrigues. Almost nobody is as tasteless as Rodrigues can be. The man would deliver stuff that we would just cringe at. His first piece was the atrocious – and hilarious – "Hire the Handicapped".... In later years, I found out that he's a conservative, fairly religious, Portuguese artist who really thought we were awful people. [laughter] He hated our politics, but he was able to transcend that... so I could never figure out what his attitude was. In a collection of interviews with various cartoonists, Mark Jacobs wrote: He works at night, which is fitting, since some of his best cartoons deal with the dark side of the psyche. A classic black humorist, he rummages around in violence, insanity, perversion, bigotry and scatology, looking for what he needs to create the typical Rodrigues effect: wild laughter with a cringe of repulsion. 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. == Books ==