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.

Hey kids, comics!

A comic book page I did last year in an attempt to get accepted for a small press table at the San Diego con. I pretended on my application that this was only one page of a book in progress, which was a total lie. I actually have no idea what is happening in this scene. I scanned some stuff from my sketchbook, photoshopped it together into panels and added some bridging art to round it out. I figured if I was accepted to the con, I'd have to produce a book by the summer! Mercifully, I was not.

THE WINDUP... ANNNNND.....

Earlier this year, the veterans of the CODENAME: KIDS NEXT DOOR crew were invited to submit proposals to Cartoon Network for new show ideas. KND creator Tom Warburton, AKA the Best Boss In The World, has spent the last several months cheerleading us all to take the chance and write something up, and dealing with our stupid questions and half-baked ideas.

Not knowing what else to do I formed a writing partnership with some coworkers which was very fruitful and taught me that what I've been missing my whole life are writing partners. Like all the greatest bands, we developed a lot of riffs and broke up without one song to our credit. With two weeks to go, I showed three concepts I'd been working on to Tom, and watched in horror as they all proved frail and anemic, sputtering and dying right there on the examination table. I was looking across the table at him and all at once I realized he was supposed to be laughing. I had spent dozens of pages writing about an idea I had for a joke, and I should have a hundred jokes.

The next day I was driving a rental car from Houston to Galveston, stuffing my face with BK Veggies and running over the concepts in my head in a blind panic, when I thought of something for one of them that actually made me chuckle to myself. I pulled off the highway and bought a notebook.

The next two weeks went by like some kind of a montage out of a war movie. I dropped all the other ideas, wrote as stream-of-consciousness as I could, pulled in every friend I had with any sort of writing credentials (fortunately no writer can resist critiquing other people's crappy writing), and I rewrote until 5pm the day the pitches were due. I made the wonderful discovery over thanksgiving weekend that my wife and I write really well together, and the five episode descriptions ended up being as much hers as mine. At the 11th hour I sketched a few funny scenes I had in my head and lamely threw tone on them in photoshop.

They got a lot of submissions from our crew. The night of Dec. 1 a bunch of us went out to get drunk and celebrate that the beast was off our backs. I was pleasantly surprised at how imaginitive and offbeat a lot of my colleagues' ideas were. In a perfect world, one or two of us would get a show greenlit and we'd all have jobs for a little while.

My show idea is titled "Backwoods." I'm actually pretty satisfied with it, or at any rate I feel like I didn't punk out. Here's my sketches of the hero kids. We won't hear any feedback for awhile. Fingers crossed!

DEATHLOK

Thanks to the miracle of the internets someone who saw my credit in a Deathlok comic from 1992 sent me a nice cyber fan letter. Whoops, I got confused there for a second, the actual miracle in that sentance is that I have a Deathlok fan. Anyway, I did a little Deathlok sketch for him in return. Probably the first time I ever managed to draw that big neck symmetrically.