Watch the video for the general news update. Scroll below to read some specifics.
We’ve gone through some changes under the hood you’ve probably noticed already. This site will become my general blog/news page as well as a hub for all my creative endeavors. Lil’ Reaper Books will become the store site where I’ll eventually be stocking merch. Towniescomics and Grim & Saddam have their own sites again. I’ll customize them when I have the time for it. Right now I need to focus on drawing comics.
Where’s 2071?
2071 is a special case. It exists in it’s own universe story-wise and I want to have a site where I can add stories that come before or after it in the timeline. I haven’t settled on a new domain that fits the entire series just yet. (And the most obvious domain right now is taken) So for now you can read the archives here. I’ll post the last page of sub-chapter 1.0 on the new site when it goes live.
What’s NoRightsTV?
Lately I’ve been feeling the “productions” in No-Rights Productions has sorely been neglected. The idea was always to start with comics and transition into doing films and other multimedia as well. I consider myself an animator at heart and I have plans for a number of film projects. The only way I’m going to get into posting and editing videos is to actually do it. So you’ll see video blogs, interviews, tutorials, reviews… pretty much anything I can think to add there.
WordPress 3.0 is currently in Release Candidate which means the final version should be dropping soon. Webcomic 3 is also on the way shortly. Once they’re both out I’m going to simplify the site a bit. I don’t plan to spend very long on it as I’d rather have a site that’s functional and updating as opposed to wasting my time playing with bells and whistles. The goal is to make things load fast, look nicer, and to make it all more navigable. I’m mentioning this mostly for the folks who manage their own sites but the casual visitor will probably see the changes as well. I don’t expect it to be drastically different but I’ve been holding onto things from older versions and now I’m just gonna start fresh.
Comic News
I haven’t forgotten about 2071, (Or my other comics for that matter) I’ve just been busy with other projects. I’ve been sorting out some freelance and, if you’ve been following my twitter, working on some digital painting. I have a pretty decent knowledge of Photoshop, I just never spent much time painting with it. I’ve mostly used traditional media and Painter for that.
I still have one more page of Chapter 1.0 to put up, which will serve as a proper cliffhanger. I think I know what the process is going to be like for working on that chapter and I’m pretty excited about it. This comic has always been a bit different and bigger scope than my other work. I’m treating it more and more like production work on a movie as opposed to a simple comic.
I settled on this size so I can use half a sheet of 11×14″ bristol board for the finished inks and regular printer paper for the pencils. Then I can redraw a page as many times as I need to to achieve the proper composition. I sketch with red and blue col-erase animation pencils and like to go over things with mechanical pencil if I have time so they’re easier to see on the lightbox. Also this constant going over evolves the details as I get more confident with the finished drawing. My pencils these days are pretty tight as I want to develop the page as much as possible. Lots of artists keep their sketches loose and save details for inking to keep them spontaneous. I feel more free to change things while penciling as ink feels more permanent, even though I could always touch the inks up digitally later. (I usually have to, anyway)
Penciled Page
The next step is to tape the pencils and some bristol board to my lightbox and go over it all with drawing pens.
Inking
Pens give a colder feel than brushes because their lines are more solid and mechanical. Brushes create more organic lines with varying width. Since the story is set in the future I wanted a fairly streamlined and technical feel. Plus I’m kind of heavy handed and split the tips of brushes pretty easily.
Raw Scan of Inks
At this point I was still trying to white out mistakes before scanning. I usually have to go back in and fix them even after the automated cleanup process so I might as well save corrections for that stage.
Cleanup
Scan After Automated Cleaning Process
I made an action that follows the steps laid out in How to Make Webcomics. I run it to convert everything to straight black or white in bitmap mode and save in .tiff format. Then I go back in and clean lines up.
Page of Inks After Fixing
The changes at this stage are mostly for the print version. When it’s shrunk down and in this jaggy format you don’t see a lot of the things you would once it’s printed. (Save the occasional redrawing of a line or something) I save this and then convert it to grayscale and copy the panels into a template with proper page margins.
Coloring
Initial Flood Fill of Colors
I duplicate the panels onto a multiply layer and remove all the white so only the inks show. Some folks just leave it a normal layer, which is fine. I’ve just had issues with non-black spots getting onto my ink layers in the past and setting it to multiply keeps that from becoming an issue. Flood fill with the paint bucket and pencil in any hard to reach spots on the lower layer.
Layer with Shadows
I then duplicate the colors layer, set it to multiply, create a layer mask and invert it, painting out areas for shadows. Lower this to about 50%.
Layer with Highlights
I duplicate the colors again, set it to screen, create a layer mask and invert it, and start drawing highlights. I keep this layer at 100%.
Layer with Benday Dots
The colorist for Evil, Inc. had an article on Webcomics.com (Before it became subscription based) about making a strip look like a newspaper comic. I came up with a variation on that I liked.
Layer with Aged Paper Texture
Next I add a layer with the aged paper texture. I lower the opacity of the colors layer so some of the splotches bleed through them.
Layer with Lighting Effects
Before I render the intense light of futuristic jet engines I focus on the effects of the falloff color on the rest of the objects in the panel.
Layer with More Lighting Effects
Some things would probably be easier to render if I didn’t draw them in the inking stage (Like shapes for flames, highlights) but I like having them there if I decide to color their lines or just paint over them entirely.
Layer with Even More Lighting Effects
Finally I paint in the white-hot areas of the flames. I like layering the effects to give them a more developed look rather than just dropping a simple effect in. I’ll play around with layer modes, opacity, and layer effects until I find something I like. It’s important to me that the overall page looks balanced. The drawings need to be developed and detailed enough while the rendering needs to be subtle enough to work. It’s very easy to make effects look too “Photoshop-y” and stand out glaringly on a page.
Layer with Panel Border Enhancement
I make a one-pixel stroke around the panels and add a stroke effect to the layer. It frames them better and differentiates the panels from each other. Some people use rules about how wide your borders should be based on your thickest line in a panel. I find a setting that works and leave it.
Layer with Text
After laboring over the art I hate to cover it up with text so I tend to wittle the script down to absolute necessities. Dialogue placement impacts how you read it and I like to think the shape of a sound effect changes how you hear it in your head. It’s also a visual element so I want to compliment the drawings underneath. The fonts add to the aesthetic I’m going for by being simple yet elegant.
Layer with Word Balloons
Keeping with the slightly mechanical and less organic idea I made the word balloons rounded squares rather than oval shapes. (Automated voices use sharp square balloons while voices being broadcast use another closed balloon shape) This harkens back to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and other early 20th century strips as well as conserves space. Copper influenced me to make the panels rounded so making the word balloons match makes sense.
Page with Saturation Layer
This is the last step before flattening, resizing, and adding the URL for the web. I fill a layer with black, set it to saturation, and lower the opacity. This makes the colors a little less pronounced and adds to the aged feel. Movies today tend to desaturate their color palette, too. Compare the original Superman colors to the ones in Superman Returns. I was originally planning on rendering in color and then dropping it down to grey for print but the color version is just too superior.
Art is an interesting thing. There are many different kinds of art and many different opinions on what is or isn’t art. My goal is to find ways to create things and generate a livable income from that work. You’d imagine that would classify me as an artist. However there are plenty of people who wouldn’t call me that. There are plenty of people who make a living off their work but they identify themselves by different titles. I imagine part of it’s to avoid any stigma associated with the term or to specify their trade beyond the generic. Some folks make things like jewelry, furniture, plush dolls, all sorts of things, and consider themselves crafters. Some people like me draw talking animals or funny caricatures of people and call ourselves cartoonists.
The Myth of the Starving Artist
If you open a book on making a living creatively these days you’ll find some opening chapters dispelling the myth of the starving artist. This is the public perception of an artist. Somebody who toils away in obscurity, poverty, struggling to survive while laboring over their masterwork that will only bring them fame and fortune long after their death. Why is this myth so pervasive in our culture? There’s lots of reasons. It’s a romanticized vision based on misconceptions of what a living artist’s life is. Many folks who don’t know anything about the art world and many artists themselves fall for this stereotype. It seeks to make the artist altruistic and above monetary concerns or even concerns about surviving at all. If you’re an artist, all you should be thinking about is rendering some supreme, ultimate truth onto the canvas and nothing else. That’s how it’s done, right? No, that’s not how it’s done. If you paint for yourself and make a living through some other means, that’s fine. But working artists should concern themselves with finding work.
“Van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime!” He was also seriously mentally ill. He was a great painter but I wouldn’t recommend anybody pattern their life after his. In fact I’d argue against patterning your life after anybody, successful or not, because everybody’s life and circumstances are different. Some things can’t be repeated by everybody and it’s best to find your own path to the mountain using others’ as a rough guide. Is it better for the artist to never sell their work and die penniless than to illustrate based on what their clients want? Is “selling out” really that big of a fear? Apparently it is for some people.
Another sub-section of this myth is that artists, being poor and destitute, should accept any offer that comes along from people willing to give them the time of day. Anybody with Photoshop can do what you do, why should I pay you an honest wage or at all? Shouldn’t you be satisfied with the exposure my project gives you? Isn’t seeing your work printed or used in some other means for my profit good enough? There are plenty of people looking for artists to work on speculation. They want the artist to donate their time to something on the promise that, should this thing make money, they’ll get a cut of it down the line. Imagine a plumber only getting paid that way. Picture a heart surgeon haggling with some guy who says he’s used knives before, how hard can it be?
Modern Art
Ok, title of the post, better make this good. Well first I want to address that people use this term wrong. Modern Art was art made roughly between 1860 and the 1970s. Modernism is a movement that some scholars argue is still going on even though we had Postmodernism emerging in the 1980s. When I hear people complaining about the pointlessness they see in art news today, they’re usually referring to contemporary art. Artist using elephant dung?Artist photographing a crucifix in a jar of his own urine? Lets just call it contemporary since it’s going on now. Movements should be named by historians. Ever listened to a bunch of people in bands sitting around trying to classify their sound? We’ll stick with contemporary.
Shock Art
Art can be controversial, that’s fine. However some people seem to only want to make art that’s geared towards offending somebody. These people exist outside of the art community. Look at the success of reality TV and shows like Jackass. Now I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. (Lord knows I can’t look away when an episode of Jackass comes on) But we should look at the intention of a work. We should see what thought went into it, what the artist is trying to say with it, and why it can be seen as upsetting. I love how some people don’t consider editorial cartoons relevant today and yet some are still controversial enough for the cartoonists to get death threats. Cartoons say a religion is violent, people respond by threatening or committing acts of violence, I’d say somebody’s not getting the point. Entire discussions could be had around the opinions behind those cartoons before even mentioning the reaction to them.
Whenever people discuss performance art I like to bring up Chris Burden. He was the guy who had himself crucified to a Volkswagen and had himself shot in the arm by an assistant. It all sounds crazy out of context but if you read up on him, his history, and what he was trying to say, you understand him a little better. This isn’t to say you totally get the meaning and significance behind it or that you magically approve of his work. It just means you can see where he’s coming from and can make a better educated argument for or against his art.
Simple Art
Often people will criticize art for it’s simplicity. Jackson Pollock made art of splatters of paint dripped onto a canvas. Piet Mondrian made straight lines and blocks of color. Mark Rothko made streaks of color. Georgia O’Keeffe made abstractions of flowers. Andy Warhol made pictures of soup cans. Each of these artists has a story. Each of them has a history that explains why they started making art the way they did and why it’s important. A big part of being an artist is being able to explain your own relevance and convincing people to believe in it. If you’ve seen the film Art School Confidential, you’ll recall a scene where a professor is asked, “How long have you been doing the triangles?” and he replies, “I was one of the first…”
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 when 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.
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.
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 Bros. 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 Bros. 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 Bros. 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 Hour 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.
Lately I’m of two minds. I have to be thinking of the site and keeping it updated regularly. I also have to be thinking about the comic itself and the book it’s going to become when it’s printed. If I rushed an update through “just to get it done” and wasn’t happy with it I’d have to deal with seeing that lesser page in the book. Likewise I’d have to deal with seeing it in the archives on the site. The immediacy of a regular update is lost when I show that work down the road and get a “meh” response.
There’s only a few pages left in Chapter 1.0. After that I’m going to try working on the next sub-chapter as a whole before pushing the updates on the site again. I can work in weekly batches until I get 1.1 done. I need to give myself time to thumbnail layouts and spitball character/prop/set designs. It’s very different when you have time to develop and tighten the imagery versus when you have to constantly be putting something out. You all deserve something better than just what I can manage.
5 full color comic pages a week is a nice goal to strive for but it’s also a lot of work. (Plus I’d like to launch other new projects on the site, both by myself and possibly some from other creators in the future.) But I need to get further ahead in production before that can happen. It might even be a good idea to cut back the number of updates so that buffer lasts longer when I do push updates. I’m not bringing all this up to be whiney or to offer an excuse. The reason I’ve got a blog going is to involve more people in the creative process. Figuring out how to manage a production schedule, how to build and maintain a buffer, these are things to deal with and should be shared. I know I like having a buffer and feel better when there’s work loaded ahead of time. How big it needs to be is something I’m still considering.
I’ll blog while I’m working, maybe even bring back the progress meter I had. When I’m coloring and working digitally I’ll try streaming. Of course I tend to work in the mornings EST and that doesn’t seem to be a popular time for webcomics fans to want to tune in. We’ll figure something out. I want to make the act of creating the comics as engaging as the pages themselves.
