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.


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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.