No-Rights Productions

I started this blog to share things. Behind the scenes stuff, advice, and sometimes just to work out my own problems so maybe somebody else can gleam something useful from it. Today I’d like to talk about standing still. Specifically the feeling of standing still. What do I mean by that? I mean there are times when we regularly take stock of ourselves and our achievements. Sometimes we find we’re not going anywhere or even going backwards in our efforts. I’m a believer in being proactive about our lives. If there’s something we want to do and we aren’t we can change our own fate.

That’s not to say we’re going to climb the mountain over night. We must take each day and each task one at a time. We must make decisions on what is or isn’t what we want for ourselves and strive for what we desire. Sometimes we become bogged down by other things – distractions, outside circumstances or influences, the occasional lie we tell ourselves that we need to overcome in order to make something of ourselves. The truth is we need to make something of ourselves in order to make something of ourselves. The hero doesn’t just become celebrated but has to earn it first. I’ve mentioned this before in my posts Being Happy, Be Careful With Your Dreams, and Cultivating Inspiration. We need to be aware of our lives, take responsibility for them, and work on being happy with them.

Sometimes there are days when I don’t feel like doing anything. I’ll be depressed, stressed out about something or somebody, or just drained in some way or another. Every now and again you need to rest and recharge. You also have to look at your life and the things that aggravate you and decide how to deal with them. This person frustrates me, they’re asking too much of me, they’re not considering my feelings, whatever the problem is. Figure it out and deal with it. And sometimes the problem isn’t somebody else, it’s you. Yes, you can stand in your own way sometimes and you need to account for it.

Remember the scene in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure where our heroes discuss when they’re going to be famous? One believes they’re not going to make it until they get Eddie Van Halen on guitar. The other believes they need to have a good music video. Eventually they realize the problem is maybe they need to actually learn how to play. This may be a fictionalization but conversations like this happen all the time in real life. I can’t start my epic masterpiece until I have a Wacom Cintiq to draw it on. Nobody’s coming to my site because all the successful webcomics are elitist frauds who make up fake followers on Twitter and lie about their traffic. (There are actually people who believe these things.)

Merlin Mann gave a talk recently where he asked folks to consider what was really important in their lives. You might say your family, your career, your kids, whatever. But if you tracked their time based on what they’re actually doing with their day, you’d think the most important thing to them would be Facebook. There’s a lot going on in this talk so I suggest you watch it yourself and see what insight you can pull from it.

He makes a good point when he stresses how our e-mail alerts call us to come check what new thing has come in, making us put down whatever it is we’re creating at the moment. Should anything have that power? Should a mechanic put down their tools when anybody walks into the shop and decides to talk to them? Should a person become reliant on that inbox to tell them what person they have to be that day, what duties they have to perform, and whether they’re going to have a good day or a bad one? I admit to using e-mail alerts to let me know when I have something new. (And I also complain when I’m sent yet another useless “This week!” newsletter for some site or service I don’t regularly use much less care about.) I also use Twitteriffic to keep up with tweets from people I’m following and I keep signed into my IM clients in case anybody wants to talk to me. Should I do that? Or should I totally disappear from the internet until all my work is done and play catch up at the end of the day?

This is why people use applications like Rescue Time to track what they actually do with their day, Concentrate and Isolator to stay focused, and Freedom to intentionally disconnect themselves from the internet for a specific period of time. I’m not too crazy about these “save me from myself” applications. I get that they serve a purpose but it’s not particularly empowering to me to decide you’re so reliant on these other apps that you have to use another one to drag yourself away from them. This is where keeping regular hours and a schedule or routine is important. I like getting up early, working on things, then calling it a day when it’s time to rest. Of course, webcartoonists often do the cartooning thing after their 9-5 day job and if you watch Twitter you can see the night owls going to bed just shy of when I try to come into the studio. You do what you have to for the things that are important to you. Sometimes that means staying up all night to get that page finished or you’ll never get it done. Other times it means calling it a night and going to bed because you know you’ll only ruin things if you try to work without enough sleep. Managing your own time can be hard but it’s an important thing to stay on top of. There are days where I can’t even get to drawing because there’s some website issue I have to resolve, or I need to do some writing, or some other crisis needs my attention.

This goes back to the whole standing still concept. If I spend my days writing blogs as opposed to drawing comics am I going forward or standing still? I could take a nod from Kevin Smith and turn those blogs into a book or something, sure, but I don’t want them to be a regular focus of the site. Like I said, some days I just can’t get to the drawing table. Or even if I do I won’t always finish a page a day. That’s a pretty tall order when you think about it. So what I need to do is work on a great big batch of pages at once. I worked on a more bite-sized batch when I made the Prologue and it felt good to have a bunch done at once. I really like working that way, too. The only problem is how quiet the site gets while I build up that buffer. But I’ll be posting things I learn as I work in making probably the biggest batch of comics I’ve worked on all together at one time ever before. There are habits I had when working on the Prologue that improved the way my pages came out and there were some that slowed it down. I’m curious what things I’ll pick up this time around.

It seems every generation goes through that phase where they complain about the present and long for the past. I’m not trying to do that. The present’s not always awesome but it’s where I live and the future’s where I’m headed. But stuff does change and sometimes it’s a good idea to bring something back when you remember it used to be awesome. I’m talking about Saturday mornings and cartoons.

I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s back when you could see cartoons on nearly every channel on Saturday morning. It was tradition. Much like the Sunday funnies in the newspapers, Saturday morning was a time when programming was specially dedicated to the concept. I woke up this Saturday, checked the channels, and you know what I saw? Nickelodeon was fawning over their teen starlet iCarly, Cartoon Network was showing some anime I didn’t understand, (but at least it was animated) and some other channel was showing CGI talking vehicles. That was it. No Saturday morning block on the network stations. No reruns of older cartoons anywhere. Either it was anime or pre-kinder programming. What happened? A wikipedia article claims mandates for educational/informative shows eventually killed Saturday morning, along with advocacy groups and competition from other forms of entertainment. Supposedly with the rise of Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and other channels that played children’s programming regularly, there was little reason to focus Saturday morning for it. That’s like saying MTV exists, why do we need to show music videos? Take a look at this block of programming from the 1980s and this block from the 1990s. Compare that to today where you have so much reality TV drivel, so much “tween” nonsense, so much lifeless pre-kindergarten crap.

Shows I Remember

Bugs Bunny

Call it whatever you want. The Bugs Bunny/Tweety Show, The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, whatever. Back before Cartoon Network exclusively became the place to see these cartoons (and before they drowned them out with their own programming) they’d rerun on older stations all the time.

Beetlejuice

Based loosely around the Tim Burton movie, Beetlejuice and Lydia ran around through the Neitherworld having crazy adventures.

The Real Ghostbusters

Do I have to explain this one? It was based on probably the biggest franchise of the ’80s and still holds up incredibly well today.

Darkwing Duck

I know plenty of you folks grew up on Ducktales, Rescue Rangers, and Tailspin, but this show was probably my favorite of the bunch of duck-themed shows that filled TV at the time.

Count Duckula

Another duck show, only this one’s British and about a vegetarian vampire. It was often paired up with Danger Mouse, which was just fine with me.

Rocko’s Modern Life

This was Nickelodeon brought us Ren & Stimpy, Doug, and Rugrats. How can you not enjoy a show with an opening theme by the b52s?

Sonic the Hedgehog SatAM

This show ran around the same time as The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog but  took a totally different approach to the concept. The SatAM was to better differentiate the two. And since Saturday morning is gone much like this series, it seems only fitting. I remember it launching around the same time as Cro, a show about a frozen mammoth who regaled you with stories of his caveboy friend.

Decent Shows Today

There’s still some good animation being done now but it’s usually squished to weird hours in favor of live action programming.

The Fairly OddParents

A highly stylized show about a kid who has fairy godparents. If you ever get the chance to watch one of their longer animated movies, especially the crossovers with Jimmy Neutron, do yourself a favor and watch.

The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy

Two kids who won the Grim Reaper in a limbo contest and now he has to be their friend forever. This is one of those shows that’s for kids on the outside and grown ups on the inside. It’s been around for awhile but that doesn’t mean it won’t disappear tomorrow. When I saw the creator and voice actors at San Diego Comic Con in 2006 they all seemed to accept that it was always under the guillotine of being canceled.

The Venture Bros.

Part of the Adult Swim block on Cartoon Network. Basically they asked the question of what Johnny Quest would be like when he grew up. It’s a brilliant show but it’s only planned to run 4 seasons and they’re going to be starting the last one soon.

Archer

Much like The Venture Bros., this show is targeted towards grown ups. It stars H. Jon Benjamin as the title character, Sterling Archer –  a secret agent for ISIS, international spy agency. It also stars Aisha Tyler (who I saw do standup recently and can’t recommend seeing highly enough) as the sexy Lana Kane and a whole bunch of other funny people in very entertaining roles. If you haven’t checked it out yet you should.

Final Thoughts

Saturday morning cartoons have changed a great deal since I was a kid. But then again, I’ve changed, too. Now I can find cartoons online or on adult blocks late at night. People like me who grew up on Saturday morning cartoons most likely aren’t even up that early on weekends anymore anyway so perhaps I shouldn’t complain. I just miss the amount of cartoons and the environment it generated. Back then, so many stations would be putting cartoons on the air, by some sort of mathematical law, at least some of it had to be good. And folks who knew what they were doing at the time brought us what some people have called a second renaissance or second golden age of animation. With shows like Animaniacs, Pinky and The Brain, Taz-Mania, and Tiny Toon Adventures bringing a revival of good cartoons. Will we ever see shows like that again? Possibly. Right now Hollywood has been on a retro kick bringing back old properties. TV networks have all been about the reboot as they brought us the new Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, Lunatics Unleashed, and Baby Looney Tunes. (Seriously, Baby Looney Tunes? Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies and The Flintstones Kids was over long before they decided to cash in on designs of the characters used to sell baby products.)

There was the short-lived Duck Dodgers series awhile back and recently it was announced that Warner Bros. would be making a new The Looney Tunes Show. However the promo art for the series has already gotten some pretty harsh scrutiny. I’ll reserve judgement until I actually see it. The problem with doing cartoons today, especially with pre-existing properties like these, is satisfying both the younger audience who are the ones supposed to be tuning in and the older audience who are watching out of memories of shows from their childhood. It’s a hard line to walk. Either cartoons are for the kiddies and not to be taken seriously or they have to be raunchy and explicitly adult. There aren’t too many shows that can please both anymore. It’s a rare thing when that actually happens.

Little Nemo in Slumberland was a newspaper comic strip by Winsor McCay that started in 1905. The story would usually involve some bizarre and fantastic dream by the title character, Nemo, and usually end with him waking up in bed in the last panel. McCay is considered a pioneer in both the newspaper comic and animation genres. McCay animated several films over his lifetime, achieving an amazing level of realistic movement that would be unmatched by most studios for years to come. His early films used rice paper where backgrounds were traced either by him or an assistant. He developed the system of keyframing and using cycles for repetitive motion.

The 1911 film shows McCay entertaining several of his friends, drawing some of his characters in pen, then promising to make 4,000 drawings in a month to show them moving. We then get a scene of people delivering all the barrels of ink and boxes of paper to his studio. The artist is hard at work drawing and testing a shot when a nosey guest causes piles of drawings to topple over. McCay shows off some of his drawings and the film continues a month later where we see him showing off the finished piece to his friends. Parts of the film are hand-colored to make them match their newspaper counterparts.

This was in the early days of animation when these sorts of shorts would be shown to vaudeville audiences. In films like Gertie the Dinosaur McCay would do tricks of interaction such as telling the character to do things or appearing to pet her. Little Nemo is very technically advanced for it’s time. There’s a level of draftsmanship to the art and quality to the animation that many similar contemporary films never achieved. There’s something to admire about an artist making their own films, especially today when most people tend to think of animation as some huge studio production.

In order to understand Bosko you have to understand his time. He was a product of the early sound era in film. His pilot cartoon, Bosko The Talk-Ink Kid, was the first to sync speech. (Steamboat Willie synced audio but no dialogue.) This was an interesting time for animation as things were new and studios were just being founded. Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising had worked with Disney before setting out on their own. They eventually signed a contract with Leon Schlesinger to produce cartoons for the Warner Brothers. Bosko’s design is common for his time. He’s a simple character comprised of mostly black with a white face, similar to Felix the Cat or Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. He sings, dances, and in his early appearances speaks in a stereotypical blackface minstrel voice. Eventually Harman and Ising had a falling out with Schlesinger and moved to MGM, taking Bosko with them. Though you could possibly argue he was supposed to be more of an ink blot or some kind of bug in the Warner cartoons, at MGM he was redesigned into an obvious black boy character.

The whole concept of Warner Brothers cartoons is fascinating even when only seen on a business level. You had animators who sold their cartoons to somebody who sold them to a bigger studio. This bigger studio in turn showed these shorts in their own theaters before their own films and used them to advertise songs the studio owned in their catalogue. Today commercial tie-ins can seem blatantly obvious at times. But think back to the early days of animated cinema or, heck, even back to early television. Frugal spending resulted in airing older films and limited animation which later became a style of it’s own –  a time when one sponsor could own an entire program.

I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s when these types of cartoons were still being shown regularly on TV. I remember when Nickelodeon relaunched their cartoon block to focus on the more popular Warner Brothers characters and cartoons, even using the tagline, “No Bosko. Sorry, Bosko.” It made me kind of sad, actually. Yes the Bosko cartoons are pretty pointless and bland. Yes they’re basically animators jiggling their keys in front of early audiences to make them oo and ah. Yes the designs are often ugly and offensive. But to see them gone to make room for the Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales or Bunny and Claude cartoons of the 1960s was depressing. I find it much more surreal to watch zanny films of a bygone era that show the heavy influence of long forgotten vaudeville acts, personally.

Bosko The Talk-Ink Kid is similar to the Max Fleischer Out of the Inkwell films, with Ising drawing Bosko, the drawing coming to life, and then some nonsense to show off Harman and Ising’s ability to animate silliness to sound. I find this sort of novelty charming in other cartoons when it’s used well. (WB’s own You Oughta Be In Pictures a decade later and the pilot of Tiny Toon Adventures later still being good examples) Here it’s brief and defaults to Bosko getting very annoying very quickly before he’s sucked back into the pen. I could see some indie animator today drawing their own characters fighting with them so it’s probably still a decent sales pitch.

Sinkin’ In The Bathtub is the first ever Looney Tune. We see Bosko courting his girl Honey and riding down the hills in a bathtub. Because you see, they were both taking a bath when they first appeared on screen. Because what better way to introduce your characters to an audience than to show them totally naked? And bathtubs are funny. Why are you asking questions? Do you not see us jiggling our keys? Don’t ask questions of our shenanigans. I think the highlight of the whole thing is Bosko sliding down a mountainside with a series of rocks directly in front of him resulting in a continuous run of crotch-shots. Because nothing makes a hit in the junk funnier than repeating it vigorously.

Cartoons like these should be preserved and shown for historical purposes and so that they might encourage future spoofs like the Fairly OddParent’s “The Good Old Days!” episode. Though thin on story they at least have a lot going on onscreen. (Compare that to the subsequent Buddy cartoons that followed after Harman and Ising took Bosko to MGM.) Without them there would be no “That’s all, folks!” so they deserve some place in history.

2071 started out here on the home page as a text story. I decided at some point to work on it as a comic project. The story evolved considerably over a short time. The characters came pretty quickly, then the story, then a whole lot more as their world opened up. I started thinking of ways their society differed from ours – both in their future and in their history. I also started thinking about bits and pieces of things I’d always been fascinated with. I love early 20th century newspaper comics, scifi/adventure serials, anything archival. Something about peering into a piece of film from another age is like having a time machine. And when you watch speculative fiction where people from the past try to guess at the future, it adds a weird layer to that.

Thumbnailing

I decided to start with a prologue to set up the story and to introduce the main characters, both to the readers and to myself. In the past I rarely scripted any of my comics ahead of time. I might’ve outlined a few story arcs but dialogue and actual panels got worked out as they came to my drawing table. It just felt redundant to me since I was the one working on it on every stage. Since the Prologue had to function over-all I thumbnailed it on 24 Comics Day.

Thumbnails for the Prologue to 2071

I’d learned before when animating a scene to lay it out and break things down into manageable tasks. Here I gave myself page layouts to work with every day so I didn’t go crazy having to come up with them. Instead I could focus on filling up the page with interesting art. I still changed a few designs on a couple of pages where some shots didn’t work, but it was a load off my mind to have it done beforehand. I found if I had to straighten something out in the story while I was working on the page art I would have trouble switching gears mentally.

One problem I ran into with these thumbnails is they’re way too small. I did that intentionally to keep myself from detailing them and wasting time. (You can see the first page where I still tried to go over it with a mechanical pencil before I convinced myself it wasn’t worth it) However being able to read them later was a real issue. I’m sure in my work stride that day they made perfect sense. But the further away from that day I got the harder it became to make sense of my lines. Sub-chapter 1.1 is going to rely on a different thumbnailing system, I’m just not sure how it’s going to work yet.

Thumbnailing ideas

When I set about telling a larger story than what I was used to doing, I looked to the flickr gallery of Bryan Lee O’Malley who does Scott Pilgrim. Over the years he’s shared scripts, thumbnails, pencils, inks, and various scraps from working on his books. Originally I was trying something like a looser version of thumbnailing as he did here. I agree a multi-value thumbnail like this would be a bit too involved for something nobody would ever see aside from a “behind the scenes” kind of thing. Thumbnails need to be clear enough to get the point across but they also have to be simple enough to not eat time away that would better be spent working on the actual pages. Something closer to this technique might work if I can keep myself from detailing too much. Maybe if I limit myself to working in pen or marker, which would keep me from doing too many passes. (I hear Cathy Guisewite only draws in pen)

Scripting

As I fleshed out the differences between the world of 2071 and our own I would dump them into a text file. There’s an assortment of different text editors that offer branched and threaded file structures. For bulk brain dumping I liked Journler on my Mac (Which has since ceased development) while I’m also a fan of Keynote on the PC. (Which has also ceased development by the original creator. It’s since been picked up under the name Keynote NF) Eventually I wanted a system that made smaller chunks easier to manage. Lately I’ve been using JustNotes for it’s simple menu bar interface. I know folks like Merlin Mann are big fans of Notational Velocity, which is equally pretty awesome. I just like being able to click an icon, drop in an idea, and click out.

I took classes on mass media in college so I’ve had some experience with scripts. My own are pretty slim as I don’t see much need for exhaustive descriptions or formatting for syntax sake. Here’s an example of a script for Sub-chapter 1.0

Page 3

Panel 1

Rocket rollerskating waitress approaches the Blitz

WAITRESS: What can I get ya, hon?

MAX: I’ll have one jumbo cajun crawfish burger, seasoned steak fries, and the large chocolate supernova milkshake.

Panel 2

WAITRESS: Coming right up. And for you, sugar?

VIRGIL: I’ll have the Nigirizushi #3 and a small iced tea, please.

WAITRESS: Sure thing, darlin’.

Panel 3

Max watches the waitress rocket away as Virgil continues typing

Panel 4

MAX: Our last meal on the planet and you order Nigirizushi #3!

VIRGIL: I like Nigirizushi #3.

MAX: That’s beside the point!

Panel 5

MAX: We should be going all out! You should’ve ordered a steak or something BIG! There’s no Buckaroo Bayou Ted’s out in space, you know!

VIRGIL: Not true. They just opened one up on Lunar Colony.

Panel 6

WAITRESS: He’s right – been open ’bout 2 weeks now.

MAX: No foolin’? Lunar Colony, eh? *sips his drink*

The final version came out a bit different due to space restrictions but is pretty faithful to the script. I also like to write at least a week’s worth at a time. I like to do the same with pencils and inks as well, though coloring and rendering needs to be done on a page by page basis because steps get missed if I try to work on more than one at a time. Plus it’s a mental block to have a bunch of half-finished pages waiting to be colored/shaded/lettered. Penciling and inking a batch at a time is it’s own process. Working out all the layers per page is another.