More On John K's Simpsons Intro

As I mentioned yesterday, this week's Simpsons featured a couch gag guest-animated by none other than animation legend John Kricfalusi himself. Today, Cartoon Brew posted an exclusive interview with John about the creation of the piece, along with a good number of sketches and production animatics.


http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tv/exclusive-john-k-talks-about-his-simpsons-opening.html

For me, it was great to see The Simpsons (the height of cartoon writing) paired with John K (the king of the visual side) join forces. Check out the Youtube video here starting at 0:49 (for some reason Homer's speech has been omitted, hopefully they will fix this soon).

John K. Does The Simpsons!

Today is my birthday, and when I got around to watching The Simpsons on DVR, I got one of the best presents imaginable: a couch gag created by John Kricfalusi himself!

This is about the greatest thing on The Simpsons in 15 years, if not ever. Judging by the style and animation, I guess this was a one-man job. John's style is all over this: the characters look absolutely insane, and there is so much going on it's just about impossible to catch it all- I kept rewinding it and must have watched it 20 times in a row. Homer hasn't been this funny in years. Great job, John! 


Hopefully a video will be online tomorrow; I'll link to it then.


http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2011/10/surprise.html

Draw Me a Picture and Maybe I'll Pay You Someday

This is a really interesting entry on SR Bissette's blog, consisting of a response to some requests he has received (at least every other month, he says, and I believe him) by people who  casually ask him to draw their graphic novel.


Here's a sample of the early part of the entry- he gets way more detailed:

Long answer: I am literally asked what you’ve asked me WEEKLY, seeking either me to engage or for me to steer some other cartoonist or CCS student (as if they’ve nothing better to do, like, oh, their own work plus the education they’ve paid for) to a similar task, and have been since about 2006.

What nobody (or precious few) seem to realize:

(1) It takes years to do a good graphic novel; Maus took over a decade to complete, as did From Hell; Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby was one of the faster ones at 5+ years, and all required multiple funding sources, grants, and/or multiple publishers to complete. It’s a bear.

Yes, many lesser graphic novels are done in months; most of those show it.

(2) Cartoonists have their own projects they’d dearly love to afford to do, many of those lengthy works.

We rarely get to them due to the eternal question: How do I eat/pay rent/mortgage while dedicating my life to this venture?

(3) Now, taking on adapted and/or collaborative graphic novels, sans a publisher footing the financing, complicates it all multifold. I now have to introduce letter sections into the outline answer:

(a) Who owns it? Co-ownership is sticky: if you are the source author (as in this case), you’re not going to want to give up ownership/proprietary rights; but if I’m not in for 50%, why pick up the pencil?

If we co-own, what’s the split of ownership (just ownership, mind you—we’ll get to payment and royalty sharing shortly)?

I've actually seen this sort of thing all over the place, mostly on Craigslist searches for freelance work. It will usually be somehting along the lines of "I am writing a children's book and need illustrations for 10-12 pages. If I sell to a publisher we can work out a payment deal." So, in other words, he wants a bunch of fully rendered, professional drawings to help him sell his crappy book, for free. This is nothing compared to the time and skill required for a complete graphic novel of any quality, but it reflects the same disregard for professionals in our community. As if creating the art is its own reward and we are just waiting around for the opportunity to have something to draw.


Beyond that, he goes into detail about the kinds of issues that need to be considered before entering into a writer-artist partnership: royalties, ownership, page rate, etc. He doesn't take sides, and defends the writer's rights as well, but explains in great detail, that it is just not as simple as saying "I have an idea- draw it for me?"


Very educational for someone in my position who is looking to get more compelling freelance work, but needs to understand the complexities behind it.

Something to Post

Has it really been a year since my last post? Oops. Well, I got busy... becoming a dad mostly.

Anyway, I have something to post, so I guess I'm back. This is part of a larger project I am working on for Christmas. Kind of liked the way it was coming out so I thought I'd share!

Roger Rabbit 2 CGI Test

The rumors have been going around recently that Roger Rabbit 2, the sequel one of my favorite movies of all time, is getting closer to actually moving ahead. At this point, the original is 22 years old- and Robert Zemeckis is threatening to use his awful-looking mo-cap technology to render the humans. Personally, I don't care how realistic it looks- it takes away from a lot of the charm of the original, which was about 1940's ink-and-paint interacting in the real flesh-and-blood world. It captured my 7-year-old imagination like no other film I have ever seen, and I don't think digital characters could ever have the same effect.

That being said, this here is a CGI test done in 1998, which just leaked on Cartoon Brew. 

It actually doesn't look as bad as I would have thought. Very fluid and rubbery, especially for 1998. Still, for my money, if you're gonna do it, do it right.

Again, not bad, but it doesn't really hold up on still frames. Give the work to those veterans of hand-drawn!

Now THAT'S How You Sell A Comic Book

The idea of a comic book cover is that it has to be eye-catching, dynamic, something that draws you in and makes you want to read what's inside, right? Well, in that case, this may be the greatest comic book cover I've ever seen:

How could you possibly resist?

I thought this was an old EC comic at first, but on closer inspection it appears to be from Comic Media. They were probably trying to ride some of William Gaines' wave, but apparently didn't last long.

"Ghostly Tales of Spine-Chilling Horror!" I couldn't have come up with a better tagline if I tried.

I love the old comic titles, by the way. They really lay it on thick in terms of telling you what you're getting. "Horrific", "Weird Terror." EC had "Weird Science", "Weird Fantasy", and "Weird Science Fantasy." Marvel had things like "Tales of Suspense" and "Tales To Astonish", among others. What are some other good ones from the old days? 

Definitely Dinosaurs- A Toy That Time Forgot

Keeping with the theme from yesterday of funny nostalgia...

Definitely Dinosaurs were a line of dinosaur action figures from the 80s, and my brothers and I, being kids, boys, and living in the 80s, had some of them. They were just ordinary dinosaur figures...

Nothing special, but pretty cool, right? One of the funny things about them is that they each came with a little caveman figure. Was this the work of some creationist nut trying to push his wacky theories on us impressionable kids? Probably not, I like to think it was more of a Flintstones-inspired thing. Dinosaurs are fun, cavemen are fun, put 'em together and sir, you've got yourself a fun little toy!

To me and my brothers, though, the funny part was this guy:

Who designed this thing, and whose idea was it to make a caveman with a shaved head and a mustache? Why would a caveman have a look like this? Guess it was an 80's thing.

I love this guy.