MAY 2023 BONUS and BIO... (Patreon)

Hello, Dear Patrons!

For $2 up Subscribers, here's Your Bonus for May 2023: A new installment of the storyboards from MARZ NEEDS FELIX, the first FELIX segment I directed! And the film  that resulted! A Patrons' Exclusive!

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MORE AUTO BIO:

One day when I was home alone, seated at the kitchen table. BOZO and the rest were on the tv. I put my all into drawings on two sheets of notebook or typing paper. One was a suburban scene with kids playing and houses going into the distance…the other of kids riding a ferris wheel. I put all the knowhow and love and detail I had into the two scenes. They were close to baroque, at least through my childish eyes. When Mommy arrived, she was overjoyed and astonished. “You drew these??” I had communicated! It drove me forward.

On another occasion, having “mastered” Charlie Brown, I labored on achieving the likeness of Rex Harrison as his face appeared on a Doctor Doolittle coloring book. I wasn’t drawing construction lines; just straight ahead in pen. I sheepishly approached Mommy; “Do you think this looks like him?” She wasn’t being unfriendly when she said “ummmm…It looks like a cartoon version of him.” I decided I was only capable with drawing cartoons, and tried only sporadically to draw realism for almost two generations.

I felt limited trying to draw realism. For a long time, I was anti-fine art. Cartoons can vividly express, but they can also be a copout. I’d encounter a drawing challenge and dodge it with a glib shortcut.  It’s a hard habit to break. Studying only cartoons can be okay, but a lot of shortcuts become second nature.

“Cartoon” was first used to mean a preliminary drawing for a finished work, often one that would be transferred to the surface of what would become the finished work. It might be said, then, that the word was linked to informality. The preliminary, with all its instinctive frankness, remains unobscured to tell  the whole story, graphically and unrefined. Cartoonists of antiquity often used shallow depths that resembled the quaint staging of a puppet show.  A “cartoon”, like a Cubist drawing, used contradicting angles to define the subject; rules of perspective were commonly minimalized; minute details remained fuzzy or even ignored. The consequent, comparative simplicity could be likened to a child’s drawing. The point was the communication of the idea. This frankness broke from any distraction pf literalism and, striking right at the gut, had natural humor. “Cartoon” came to mean satire or comedy. It’s a funny word.

The degree of formality is up to the artist.  Some artists might be called flat and naïve, others are like Renaissance art in their depth, detail and literalism. Most often it’s the happy medium..

The old cartoons drawn for the mainstream markets had to be done with speed. Daily comic strips, monthly film releases or comic books require a facility. Artists found trademark methods needed to communicate their ideas in a timely fashion. To me, that’s when studying cartoons alone might come into question. Learning shortcuts from shortcuts can deviate to the point where a drawing will communicate nothing of its own and becomes a code. The characters become symbols, the pictures diagrams.

As children, we grow up with the mediocrity of the formulas and they become normalized. Plots, props, facial expressions. Most cartoonists never grow up from this stage. Their comics and animation will forever echo the good and bad of what they grew up with. Most often, the mediocre work, because that’s what’s most prevalent. For these artists, HE MAN and REN AND STIMPY and, most often, the generic bastardization of anime is simply the way the art is done. This is why I feel a wide art background can only serve a cartoonist well.

A wide background is not necessarily a commercial plus. Most of us build a market (or whatever it is at this point) by doing what’s become the familiar. But there’s no reason to imitate the familiar when one is operating independently. To be “on model” is unnecessary when you’re working alone. A couple of times I’ve been asked whether I draw my own characters from a model chart. Definitely, positively not. I know instinctively. My personal drawings wrap around the expression, not the form. If it’s “wrong”, so be it, as long as it communicates. Independent artists have the option. Our drawings don’t have to be translated to hundreds of other artists here and overseas. The informal draftsmanship inherent in cartoon drawing is being replaced by formalism. Shortcuts carved in stone.