Excuse of the Weak

The blog has fallen off lately because I'm really pushing on the latest version of the cartoon pitch. When I'm not busy earning a buck I'm just writing on this thing. I figure, this is the third chance someone's given me, and I better goddamn well kill it this time.

It's Christmas eve morning and I've been working all night. Edie came down with a raging fever yesterday. We're due to have a second kid in the next 48 hours.

IMPORTANT CONSUMER NEWS: Apparently my seething hostility to Whole Foods has finally paid off. I evidently made one too many incoherent sarcastic remarks under my breath while shopping there, because they finally broke down and asked themselves, what can we do to make a believer out of Kevin. Frankly it's a little embarrassing the way they're showing their hand. First they opened a gigantic store a block away, which the wife is delirious over. But still wasn't convinced, and in their desperation to convince me they don't totally suck they pulled out all the stops: the corner of the store closest my house has been converted into a stand-alone beer shop. It even has a separate entrance: I don't even have to go into the main store and get smothered by the overwhelming smugness of it all. They sell you craft beer in re-fillable half gallon jugs, which lends an agreeably white-lightning feel, and by the way, really isn't as much beer as you think it's going to be.

Aflac Duck!

I'm told that this ad is on TV all the time. So I guess it must be okay to post the original boards now. The AD I did these for is one who really rides me and makes me work my butt off, but he always pulls the best work out of me (what a collision of metaphors that was). I always wind up with something I want to show off.































































































In case you're curious, those backgrounds that look like I went and took a picture? Those are usually cobbed together from a drawing and several different photographs, then beat to within an inch of their lives with photoshop filters.

I would be watching out for the commercial, if there was some way to do that without, you know, actually sitting down and watching TV.


**********

I'm in Galveston, TX today (I know I must be in Texas because the baristas at Starbucks are discussing automatic rifles). We took a night flight from JFK to visit my in-laws. On the flight Edie was being a total crab and wouldn't lay down and go to sleep. We gave her a double dose of Benadryl, to no effect. Finally I decided to take the bullet and I just picked her up and walked her up and down the aisle over and over, hoping I could lull her to sleep. A half hour or so later I'm just standing in the crew galley with her and I feel her head start to bob onto my shoulder. Getting there... getting there.... almost.... almost..... and what does she do, she voids the entire contents of her stomach all over my shoulder, everyhting she's wearing and everything I'm wearing. It was runny and chunky and just gushering out of her mouth. Now I'm frantically tearing at her clothes and mine and trying to sop up what's on the deck. The stewardess came back and took in the scene and almost lost it herself. I throw Edie, naked, at her mom and now it's laundry day in the airplane bathroom sink for the next hour. The stewardess lent me a t-shirt to wear for the rest of the flight while mine hung drying from the crew seat.

I don't really have a punchline or a heart-warming finish to this story, it's just that it happened to me, and I need to tell people that.

My Empire of Cute

Awwwww, who's the cutest widdle army of intergalactic space Nazis? You are, yes you are!

This is my latest ebay haul of Star Wars "Galactic Heroes" (in)action figures. Origiinally these were marketed for toddlers, I guess as sort of a gateway drug to hard-core Star Wars collecting. But they must have caught on with collectors, because they no longer go under the Playskool banner and they've ballooned into a staggeringly complete line of their own. Ironically, though they're targeted at little kids they're the only collectables I can't seem to age out of.

I made a decision to quit collecting fanboy crap awhile ago. I just decided that for me it was over. God knows it wasn't related to any kind of societal or peer pressure. I happen to work in an industry where it's not only tolerated but somewhat expected that one adorn one's work station with movie- and comic book-related toys. Apart from that, half of my primary social group these days is two years old, and the other half is contractually bound by the State of New York to continue living with me no matter what kind of garbage I see fit to waste our money on.

It's just that--for me--it stopped being great fun. I realized a long time ago that nothing entertainment-related was again going to give me the kind of transcendant joy I experienced as a young Kevie living the Star Wars experience. I'm not going to piss away what chance my kid has at a college fund by chasing a cycle of diminishing returns, buying more and more sophisticated crap liscensed from less and less entertaining movies, tv shows and comic books. I mean, who the hell is buying photo-realistic 12" maquettes of Black Canary in a sexually suggestive kung-fu pose? Isn't that sort of like putting manniquens in your apartment and pretending it's a cocktail party, except kind of more creepy? I don't know, but I swore off the stuff years ago.

Then my man in Portland, Lee Dawson (the only person I know who can have an apartment full of toys and memorabilia that somehow looks like a happening bachelor lives there), showed me these cute-ass little figures of Luke and Han riding on big-eyed Tauntons and fighting an adorable little Wampa monster, and my newfound maturity folded faster than a phalanx of Democratic senators fighting an appropriations bill. Now any time I'm in Target or K-Mart I'm back to stalking the toy aisle like a pathetic goon, looking to see if a new lot's been released and hoping I look like I might be on the way to a child's birthday party.

These things put me right back in '77 or '78 when that first pre-release of Star Wars toys (if you tell me it's called "Episode IV: A New Hope" I will stop typing on this laptop right now and beat you over the head with it) came in the mail to those few lucky kids who had saved up enough box tops, or gum wrappers, or hair, or whatever it was you needed. There they were in a plain cardboard box (no bubble packs): four completely awesome, barely-articulated bits of plastic that looked nothing like Luke, Leia, Chewie, and Threepio. Decades later people in their forties would be clicking a link to buy 12" figurines from "Prison Break", digitally sculpted from laser scans of the actors' faces and featuring working zippers and hand-sewn prison beanies (I am not making this up), in an attempt to recapture that first high.

I love that these aren't replicas, they're goofy caricatures. But they nonetheless capture all that was wonderful about the glorious production design of those early films, for which my affection is bottomless. Middle age be damned, as long as they keep makin' em, I'll keep buyin' em. (I only turn my nose up to anything prequil-related. Wookie please!) As time goes on they keep getting deeper into the minor players in the first three movies. Every time I check online and see that another series has been released all work comes to a dead stop, and I might as well be tying off my arm right there as I hunt down the latest incredibly cute cantina extras.

And best of all, they're designed for little kids, with safety in mind, with the result that you can't lose the friggin' guns like you always used to!

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Today on the playground Edie started to seriously investigate the sideways tire swing on a chain thing. Even after she got done being pushed on it, there were the hours of fun to be had trying to push it herself without getting knocked over by it. At one point she even asked me to sit on it ( "Da-ee, swing") and did her level best to push me around until that got too taxing ("Da-ee, aw done"). We moved on and when we came back she was somewhat baffled to find a few bigger kids using her swing. "Edie swing?" she asked, hoping I'd make sense of this confounding turn of events. I tried to tell her about sharing and taking turns, and she soon decided I was useless as a consigliere, and really only fit to be an enforcer. To that end she walked around me and started trying to push me toward the group of big kids. "Da-ee, swing." Eventually a little lesson was learned about sharing the park facilities with the other kids, or at any rate that she really needed to look into hiring some better muscle.

I don't know either.

Trying out some ideas for a fashion-y illustration style.

I been busy

My posts ground to a halt a while ago because I've been spending my free time getting a new home page up and running. After five goddamn years I finally got the thing looking halfway respectable. So run, don't walk, over to www.keviemetal.com, and bask in my creative compromise!

So far there's a page of comp art and a couple of pages of animation design, with new stuff being added all the time, uh, being added occasionally, er, I'm sort of thinking about adding something, and I forget what was the question?

HITCHHIKERS GUIDE

Here's something fun to post! If you're a Douglas Adams fan, you might enjoy seeing what the HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY movie would have looked like in an alternate universe.

Back in 2003 I got a call from Christian Charles, whom I'd done some promotional work for on COMEDIAN, the documentary he directed for Jerry Seinfeld (highly recommended btw). A lifelong fan of "Hitchhiker's Guide" (and a Brit who'd geek-gasmed to the original BBC series) he was on a short list of possible directors for the movie, and he wanted some concept art for his presentation. I did the work for free since he would have been in a position to hire me if he got the movie. That didn't happen, but I spent a fun couple of days having the book explained to me (Yeah, I never read it! Fuck off!) and bouncing designs back and forth. He later made good on the favor by hiring me on a McDonalds commercial.


















Christian pictured Hugh Laurie as Arthur (pre-HOUSE).

















The Vogon design. We pictured them as beat-down warehouse drones. The idea for the cut off tusks was to suggest that they were a race of once-majestic creatures who'd neutered themselves. No longer having use for their tusks they harvested them from their own kind. Their workspaces would be decorated with romanticized posters of tusked Vogon warriors on the wild plains of their ancient homeworld. Kind of like the Aztec warriors that decorate the taco place near my apartment.















Marvin the depressed android. Christian put a 70's camera in front of me to demonstrate the old-school, chunky-tech vibe he'd envisioned. I really love this design. But I have to admit the movie Marvin was brilliant.



















Slarty. In the original sketch I had him holding a toilet brush in the other hand. For some reason that was funny enough to me that I fought to keep it. It's not a toilet brush, I explained, it's a super computer that only looks to you like a toilet brush because you can't comprehend it. That sounded pretty Douglas Adams to me. (Christian gave me a withering look.)






























Exterior and interior of the Vogon ship. The concept was straight up Wal-Mart; horrendously ugly, depressing, soulless, lots of wasted space, absolutely nothing cool about it. (Finally something I feel qualified to draw.)
















The desing for Deep Thought: a single eye at the focal point of an immense technological cavern modeled on a logic flow chart (or something)...

















...and another scene where Deep Thought has detatched his core from the rest of the computer. I think the idea was that he had a little workshop in the basement somewhere, where he'd occasionally take a break from computing and watch a little TV.


******

Edie's latest obsession is one of those little toy strollers that a kid can put a doll in. She pushes it around the apartment all day. A few times we let her bring it out on the street and push it down the sidewalk, but decided to stop. There were some mighty tantrums about leaving it behind, I can tell you. But she really does learn if you're firm about enforcing a rule. Now when we're leaving she takes hold of the toy stroller and looks at me imploringly. "Ah Shroyer?" ("Want stroller?") I tell her no and carry her out the door. In a tiny voice, to herself, she says, "bye bye... shroyer." And that's that.

Macbeth

A test page for a proposed adaptation of "Macbeth" that I want to do. This is a scene in Act 1 where Macbeth finds out that he's getting a promotion because another guy has been convicted of treason.

This project is something that's been in my head and my notebooks since about college. Modern dress, super dark, super political. I'm hoping to keep posting these steadily, since a lot of the book is blocked out in my head. I'm thinking of this as more of a comp or mockup than a finished page. I can do these pretty fast in my spare time, so I figure I could get through a good chunk of the book this way and at least have something to show to a publisher.


















*****

Cute Edie story for the day: We're walking past a strip mall in Kingston, and out of nowhere she drags her mom into Ann Taylor Loft, and won't come out. After 10 minutes of browsing I finally carry her out and she throws a total cow. I mean it could just be a random thing. But she didn't demand to go in Barnes & Nobles, or Sports Authority, or Pottery Barn. She's already displayed more than a passing interest in shoes. Now this little 19-month-old absolutely had to shop in Ann Taylor. How can that impulse be there already in someone so young? I'm going to be so screwed later on.

Bend it like Jack Hamm

Another recent job. The client here was operating with limited bugetary resources (i.e. no money), but he provided me with some great photo reference, and I wanted to experiment more with the brush markers. I figured since he was only paying me for pencils I could mess around a bit and he'd still get more than his money's worth.

I just let the pencils be part of the final drawings here. I like the stray sketchy lines because you can see the energy of the drawing as it happened.

Doing comics in the 90's I used to try so hard (and fail miserably) to emulate the super-polished, super-anal ink lines that were popular at the time. As I go on I'm less and less enamored of that "finished" look. Anymore I usually prefer looking at people's sketches rather than their finished work, because the sketches are alive and raw and real. I wonder if that's a function of getting older. Or just getting tired of seeing the same thing over and over. Or just realizing that I'm Not That Guy.

In any case I'm really comfortable with this style and I'm curious if it would translate into comics. God knows I can work faster this way. If I ever get my "Macbeth" book off the ground maybe I'll do it like this. I figure the audience for comics that look like advertising marker comps is roughly as big as the audience for Shakespeare comics, i.e. nothing, so I have nothing to lose.






































































Edie sometimes gets bored in the car seat and starts fussing, and you have to sing some horrible children's song to quiet her down. If she likes the song she asks for an encore ("Ah-gain?"). And another and another. If you try to sing a different song she cuts you off ("Noope") and you have to go back to the one she likes.

Creepily cheerful teen models, unite!

Some recent ad work.

I really wanted to go all out on these frames, for whatever reason, and as an experiment I put aside the trusty old clunky prismacolor markers in favor of colored brush markers. I'm deliriously happy with the results, and with the sheer fun of laying in tones by drawing with the brush pens. It actually saved me a step of tightening up the pencils, because I discovered I could just go in and start sketching with the medium-value marker, essentially tightening up the drawing as I went, and then laying in some black holding lines over the top of that. Each step just flowed into the next. The finals are that rare instance of being both more organic in approach, and more polished in appearance.
































































































It was raining (as Tim Chi Ly would say) fat people for most of the weekend and the 19-month-old peanut kept pleading to go outside (which sounds like this: "oh tide? oh tide?" If you find the big people are ignoring you, get all breathy and hysterical: "OOOHHHH TIIIIIDDE? OOOH-OOH TIIII-IIIDE?!!") Finally I get up, put on her rain parka and boots (that is to say, I put them on her). Edie's a fun kid but she's rather delicate, and I figure she'll discover she doesn't like it in two seconds and we can go back in. I spend the next two hours with a two-foot tall person dragging me by the index finger through every freakin' mud puddle in Ulster County. We'd go through a big puddle and I'd try to make a break for home, only to hear, "nope" and get yanked back.

Cartoon Pitch 2: The Pitchening

A couple of months ago we got our feedback. Only a few contestants were picked to go on to the next stage of development. I and several others were rejected, but given a chance to re-pitch our ideas, incorporating some comments from Tom Warburton (Best Boss in the World) and Heather the Network Lady. In my case the comment was: we like your basic idea, everything after that is a disaster.

One thing that Tom impressed on me was that he expected me to produce some art that took more than five minutes. So I knuckled down and took ten.













These are the same kids as in the earlier post. You may notice that the designs are pretty different, as are their character bios which are a lot better thought out in the new version. Also I was advised to have a definite main character, not the three-way ensemble I was picturing. That turned out to be Milo, the dorky kid, who went from a standard-issue sensitive kid reacting to his environment, to a person with an agenda and his own weird way of looking at the world. That leaves Ezra to play the role of antagonist now, while Milo's innocent/fearful expression has been transferred to Truffle, the little pixie girl.

I also put them in some environments this time around:













Once again Faith came through like a total trouper and helped me write the story ideas, whilst handling baby food and nappies. Basically I throw a bunch of bad ideas at her, she throws a bunch of bad ideas back at me, and hopefully somewhere in there one of us says something I can use. It's great writing with your spouse because you don't have to coordinate schedules. And you can leave her name off the finished product. But if I ever got rich off this and she divorced me she actually would be entitled to half.

Probably won't hear anything for another couple months. If I get shot down I hope I have the intestinal fortitude to keep developing it anyway.

DOGHOUSE...?

I didn't really care when Imus went down, besides coming to the conclusion that Al Sharpton really is a publicity-seeking clown. Now my very own favorite radio show is on the block. The Doghouse with JV and Elvis, my pick to inherit Howard Stern's crown and the guys that get me through my day, has been suspended by CBS radio. The same company that suspended Imus before throwing his ass under the bus. Because they made a prank call to a Chinese takeout place, and asked for Chicken Flied Lice. Which is maybe a little lazy and played out, I freely admit. But I guess it's open season on radio guys now.

This sucks.


UPDATE: They got canned, and the whole station went under a few weeks later. Thus endeth the Free FM "hot-talk format" experiment. JV and Elvis are talking about getting a streaming internet thing going, until the climate of fear has died down in broadcast radio.

On an unrelated topic, I am disastrously drunk in the above picture.

Hot XXX figure drawing action!

Maybe you're like me. You'd like to get to a life drawing class now and then, but you work full time and then some, and you've got responsibilities at home, so you haven't gone to a class in a long time. Well I'm about to let you in on a little secret: You know that "personal computer" thingy that's sitting on your desk that you thought was only good for word processing and doing your taxes? Well it turns out that if you log on to the "internet" (ask a young person), you can actually find lots of photographs of nude figure models. I'm serious, there must be literally hundreds of them! Sometimes they even show up in my "electronical mail", without me having to do anything! All I can figure out is that someone is putting these sites up as some kind of a public service for home-bound illustrators. Perhaps someday when "e-commerce" (again, sorry for the technical jargon) is more developed, someone will figure out some kind of angle to market this stuff. Whoever does that is going to make a fortune!

Barsoom Blues

This is all Leland's fault. (I've been using that as an all-purpose excuse since about 7th grade, so why stop now.)

The other day Leland was geeking out about the upcoming movie based on a series of science fiction books called something like "Jimmy Carter, President of Mars", by William S. Burroughs. When we were kids we were huge fans of those books and used to draw those characters all day. At some point I said something totally self-important like, why am I working for a living when movies like that need production designers to stand around eating craft service and hitting on PA's. After considering that for a second he called me a homo, said that I never could even draw Tars Tarkas right, knocked me down, took my lunch money, and got Lisa Schlavin from 7th grade homeroom on the phone so they could laugh about what a joke my career is. True story.

FYI, Tars Tarkis is not to be confused with Tars An, which is a completely different series of novels by the same author. Tars An is a postmodern story of existential horror, which asks the question: What if a wild man of the jungle had to go around with his whole life being narrated by late-period Phil Collins music, and he hardly ever got to do anything, mostly because Rosie O'Donnel thinks she's funny. Not for the faint of heart.

Comics! We got comics!

My old pal Marie Javins, Editorial Queen of the Universe in exile, gave me a chance to dust off the old HB and pencil a few pages for a startup company she's doing work for. Here's a page of it, along with the original rough, for you to... well, for no reason actually.