Time off for some....

If you read today's "Jetpack Jr." at GoComics, then you know "Jetpack" will be on vacation for a month or so--but while he takes it easy on some interstellar beach somewhere in space, I'll be toiling away here at home on another project involving JJ's best pal.

Bella Dilemma comes to life!
Yes, indeedy--I'm working hard on the pitch for an animated TV show built around the babe with the biggest beehive this side of Planet Uterus!( *see my previous post) More to the point--I'm working on an animated teaser/trailer to whet the whistle of potential viewers and TV development execs! Check out this sample:



via GIPHY


 This gif is the result of a character model sheet I was doing for Bella( which means drawing her in the round,for those who don't speak the lingo). I got inspired and took it a little farther than intended--but I couldn't wait to see her move.   This is only a sample test run--the following piece is a slightly more ambitious bit of animation; a "pencil test" for a segment in the middle of the proposed trailer/ show opening:


via GIPHY

 Befitting a geezer of my years, all of this material is old-skool, hand-drawn animation on paper. Exactly the method I learned forty years ago studying animation at PCA (before it was the University of the Arts in Phila.). I'm not entirely a dinosaur, as I work into the project I'm utilizing ToonBoom software to help bring it all together.
If you've read some of my previous posts, you know I've been moving towards animation for over a year now. The gravitational pull has been irresistible-so I stopped fighting.  "The project" at this point is attempting to give the viewer a feel for what the proposed "Bella Dilemma" TV show would be like. The theoretical show opening, or teaser/trailer, will take the viewer through the series scenario in thirty + seconds or so; and if all goes well--excite he or she enough to make them want to tune in.
If it's not as complete a view as a pilot episode can provide; certainly it's as much as I can do on my own within the limits of the time allotted to me to work on it. As this is my first animated project in many years, I felt my best chance for success was to limit the scope of the undertaking--and even at just 30 seconds or so, it's a lot; there's so much to do-aside from just animating the characters!

In the next few weeks I hope to post some images of all that "so much to do" and maybe some more animations, and maybe I'll clue you in to the show scenario; it's quite different from the world of "Jetpack Jr." and the Bella you know there.  
So-- that's why I'm taking some time off "JJ".   
But when this project is done, it's back to the drawing board! 

Not Fade Away

 I'll be 56 in May. I try not to focus on that, but it does rear its (bald) head now and again--in particular when one is traveling along a well known path, and something unexpected happens, something that requires...attention. I thought at this age all the decisions had been made, all the difficulties of youth had been settled and all I had to do was ride it out until retirement--and then sail on off into the sunset with my wife and pets at my side. Isn't that what "old people" are supposed to do?
Instead-at (almost) 56--I've decided to start over again--well, almost. For the last few years I've been drawn more and more into the study of animation, picking up where I'd left off as an undergraduate art student back in 1981. It began with animation history( for a course I began teaching at Adelphi U.)  then design and layout (to adapt into my comics work)--and now, the practice of the medium itself. Over this last weekend I received my idol Richard Williams' great The Animator's Survival Kit, along with Marcie Begleiter's book on storyboarding, From Word to Image--and I've been immersed in both books to the neglect of everything else ever since.
That's not all, prior to that I'd read (and written about) David Levy's From Pitch to Production, and I recently finished Joe Murray's Creating Animated Cartoons with Character-both of which were excellent introductions to the world of TV animation. As a result, I've spent the last month or so, working on a project I never thought I'd do--a pitch bible for a possible animated TV show.
Yup! And I've got to say--while it was one of the most challenging projects I've ever worked on, it was also a blast!  What's the show, you ask? Well-here's a sneak peek:

Whaddya think? I don't want to reveal too much about the idea just yet, but obviously--it's a spin-off from "Plastic Babyheads" & "Jetpack Jr." and starring my most popular character; Bella! Just a word--it's very different from the worlds of my comics; a different scenario and a different Bella too. I'm pretty excited about the results, excited enough that I'm working on a storyboard for a proposed episode, and may even work up some sample animation. And while I don't have any connections in the industry, I've been trying to get it in the right hands. 
"Bella Dilemma"' isn't the only pitch in the works. I have a bunch of different ideas, many spun off of different aspects of my comic strips--and I'm going to try and see them all to some sort of realization--even if it is only a two-page pitch. But TV isn't the only avenue--I'm hopeful that at the very least, I'll be able to make my own shorts and pick up where I left off 35 years ago. It's late in the game, I know, and I frequently ask myself, "what are you doing?" 

The answer is simply, living life.  Our culture places a premium on youth, it's built into the cultural DNA--but such a view shortchanges life post-40, which for many can be half of the experience--and in many ways, the better half. As generation succeeds generation, and one pop culture replaces another in the economic "mainstream",  a tendency to dismiss those no longer tethered to consumerist cycles becomes a prevailing cultural attitude. It has nothing to do with vitality or experience, and everything to do with economics (and technology-as it is tied to the economy).  What I'm trying to say is, we shouldn't be so dismissive of people who don't sit on pins and needles waiting for every next tune or music video, or who haven't kept up with who's on "Jimmy Kimmel". But we "older folks" sometimes allow that thinking into our own conception of self, and it can be self-defeating. It's no minor thing, to work past that little voice in your head that whispers every morning " you're too old, you don't have time, you're irrelevant, you're not a kid anymore. What do you expect to accomplish?" But working past it is what we have to do. What I have to do.
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Having said all that, I've gotten great information and inspiration from the suite of books on animation I've been reading, starting with the aforementioned David Levy's book, "Animation Development: From Pitch to Production".
Prior to Levy's book, I'd read-and thoroughly enjoyed The Noble Approach:Maurice Noble and the Zen of Animation Design ably adapted from Maurice Noble's lectures and notes by protege, Tod Polson. 
Filled with terrific illustrations from
Maurice Noble's work for Chuck Jones
at Warner Brothers and elsewhere, it serves both as retrospective catalogue and a course in layout and design from one of the great masters.  I continue to refer to it for inspiration in both my comic strip work and my designs for pitches like "Bella Dilemma".
Similarly, Joe Murray's book, Creating Animated Cartoons with Character: A Guide to Developing and Producing Your Own Series is chock full of terrific advice from an experienced animation producer, and includes insightful interviews a wide variety of pros such as Steve Hillenburg and Craig McCracken.

Murray lays out a clear path from imagination to pitch to production, and while success of the kind he's detailing may be elusive,  he is both an encouraging mentor and engaging raconteur. This attractive book is also filled with Murray's illustrations, which is a big plus.  

That's all for now! Thanks for reading!

comics in color

I spend a lot of time coloring Jetpack Jr. There was a time when cartoonists didn't worry so much about those things.There are many stages in the production of a comic strip, and prior to the era of webcomics, the cartoonist's involvement often ended with the addition of ink on paper.
But that was never entirely true, and for some of the greatest comics artists, Hal Foster, Roy Crane,  the comic was not complete until the color key was created--or in the case of some like Richard Corben, the comic was painted.
But when  we're discussing comics and cartoonists, whether it’s comic books or comic strips, it’s rare to hear a mention of the role of color on the work.( except, perhaps, in service to some sort of "realism"i.e., in the service to volumetric rendering, as in the work of Alex Ross.) As fans, we often look at those wondrous printed pages by Jack Kirby, particularly those from the late 60’s on, dazzled by Kirby’s graphic power and pop art energy, with nary a word about the role of color in the success of those images.

 Fans often complain about Roy Lichtenstein’s use of Russ Heath’s war comics, as though Heath's line work were the only aspect of the comics panel worth acknowledging. Certainly Lichtenstein was equally interested in the color on newsprint and put as much effort into transposing ben-day dots as lines of india ink. 

 More often than not, our discussions around our favorite comics’ artists eradicate any mention of color from the discussion, as though all comics, and comics art, were in black and white. 

Clearly this is a result of the assembly line approach the comic book companies adopted for speedy production, the industrialized production methods in which newspaper comics developed, and the perfunctory approach often taken to coloring comics throughout a good portion of their history.

But times and technology have changed, and the work of the cartoonist has as well.  Charles Schulz was a one man show for 50 years, writing, drawing, inking and lettering every single strip in the long history of Peanuts; but were he working today—he’d have to add color to that list of duties required of the cartoonist. I think Charles Schulz would have done his darndest to color Peanuts himself, but given the requirements of a daily strip—I’m not so sure even he would’ve been able to keep up the pace. (*Someone else will have to tell me if Schulz laid out the color for his Sunday strips. I’m guessing he did.) 

However, for many web cartoonists, whose strips aren’t under the pressure to appear on a daily basis, the coloring falls to them. And  in this context the coloring becomes as integral an aspect of the work as black lines on paper and text in balloons. But our discussions of comics rarely speak of it, or if they do—it’s as though color is icing on the cake, rather than an integral part of the conception of the strip.
Obviously, the role of technology, and the final destination for a comic, plays an enormous role in the cartoonist’s process. In the 20^th century, strong black lines on Bristol board were necessitated by methods available to the printer. In the 21^st century, print technology is much more sensitive to a range of subtleties, and cartoonists have a wide array of media at their disposal. Digital destinations allow for even broader palette to draw from, and the options are almost overwhelming.
The intricate pen-and-ink work of a Robert Crumb, ideal for black and white on newsprint, has been usurped by digital color in Photoshop.  However, it would be a mistake to say this shift is a rejection of  cross-hatching per se; it's  a technological shift in the production of comics which has opened the floodgates to a plethora of stylistic choices previously unavailable.

For myself, when I began to move from Plastic Babyheads to Jetpack Jr.,  color, and the process by which I color the strip via Photoshop, was an integral part of the transition; it was there from the ground up.  I purposely moved away from the more literal approach to color I’d used in the latter portions of Babyheads, filled with graded transitions in value and hue, to a more stylized approach derived in part from much limited animation from the Fifties( UPA, early Hanna-Barbera); moving from an illustrative style to one more fully steeped in the world of the cartoon.  

Color( as well as texture) has been as much a part of the world I've been building as character design, as the process by which I color in Photoshop has moved my drawing away from line based illustration filled with hatch-marks towards shape-based design. Not only does this move allow for color to speak more clearly --but it is acknowledgment that comics today are, more often than not, meant for a destination in which color is ubiquitous. As a result,  color does a lot of the work previously assigned to line. 

This is not to say that the bulk of narrative heavy-lifting is done by color; obviously in that regard, drawing and text are paramount.
But the right color choices will enhance the emotional and psychological impact of the work; just as the wrong choices can undermine its impact. Everything in a comic is visual--down to the text itself, and all of those choices add up to a totality; the context in which characters exist and their lives unfold. Imagine Peanuts with something other than Charles Schulz's distinctive lettering. The imposition of color onto his daily strips as they are repeated on the web, while innocuous enough, does nothing to serve the highly personalized world Schulz created. It lacks the warmth of his personal choices and imposes a layer of digital coldness that does not exist in the strips in their original form. ( I mean no disrespect to whomever is coloring the work; at best it is a thankless task.)

One of my favorite webcomics these days offers a wonderful example of the impact color can have on a strip. The Mildly Extraordinary Adventures of Leslie Lawrence by Daniel Saunders is an off-beat strip about the life of fireworks factory employee( and much more and less).
The success of Saunders surreal brand of dry humor is dependent upon a world of quiet melancholy; in this case, a world delicately constructed via the sensitive application of apt color choices( as well as an overall general weirdness).

 Thinking then about comics created by a team, my thoughts immediately turn to Mike Mignola's Hellboy(my favorite recurring title) and the powerfully evocative work Dave Stewart has done issue after issue; year after year on these books.  Mood is an integral part of Hellboy's world and Stewart's color, working with Mignola's ( or Duncan Fegredo's) flat blacks, conjures a landscape steeped in Gothic atmosphere, born in the darkest recesses of the mind and spirit.

Stewart's color complements Mignola's deliberate pacing; his low-lit palette and his subtle shifts in tone and hue put pressure on the brakes as we read.
 Color is more than icing on the cake, more than mere filling in the lines; it can be a fundamental aspect of a contemporary cartoonist's voice.