THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Survived another deadline week.  We’ve moved on to yet another crew to help out for a week before moving on to my long term crew. Worked overtime last week so I’m looking forward to my paycheck.  I thinks it’s going to help us out quite a bit.

ART

Here’s my new Superhero Versus Superhero drawing (click on the numbers to see what I’m taking about: 1,2,3,4,5,6).  Well…not exactly superheroes but comic book archetypes never the less:

Betty and Veronica (Archie Comics) Versus Mary Jane Watson and Gwen Stacy (Marvel Comics).  They fight because they’re the same archetype.  Betty and Veronica are rivals for Archie‘s affections while Mary Jane and Gwen Stacy were once rivals for Peter Parker‘s (a.k.a Spider-man) affections. 

This was a really fun drawing to do, but it was a difficult one to come up with.  I learned a lot about how badly I draw. I also learned a lot about how great Dan Decarlo‘s early Archie drawings were.  It was tricky to draw Mary Jane and Gwen Stacy and have them “read” as Mary Jane and Gwen Stacy because they aren’t superheroes and they don’t have a “costumes”.  In the end, I chose the closest thing they have to an iconic look. I doubt anyone but comic book geeks will know who they are  just by looking at the picture.

The thing I learned the most from drawing this, by far, is that I need to do more figure drawing. That and drawing in the Archie style is really, really fun.

ART

The ANIMATION GETDOWN happened this weekend.  The  ANIMATION GETDOWN was an independent animation film festival created by fellow  Cartoonista, Jim Lujan. Both Raul Aguirre and Jim Lujan worked hard to put it all together.  It took place at Geeks, a comic books store in Whittier, California. It was an enormous success. Over a hundred people showed up to watch the indy cartoons that were presented there.

For the full story (or as close as you’re going to get to it) and a lot of pictures from the event (including some with me in them), go to Jim Lujan’s blog (Jan. 17 2010).  Also, if you want to listen to some audio interviews recorded live at the event, listen to the Ghettomation podcast episode #5 (I’m in that too).

Unfortunately while I was there, I felt like a zombie.  I had been working on my comic earlier that day and my head was still on the job (more on that below).  The fact that it all took place in a comic book store, didn’t help either. All I wanted to do was look through the comics for more inspiration.  I also wanted to buy a bunch of them since I saw a lot that I thought looked great.

Still, it was great to be there, even though I was not totally there.

MY WEB COMIC

I’ve been spending a lot of my free time working on my comic.  It’s going to be eleven pages long and I’m enjoying myself immensely.  It’s been a long time since I’ve drawn a comic.  In a way, it’s a very familiar process, on the other hand I’m doing things I’ve never truly done before.  Like putting in word balloons and sound effects. I’m also using 2 ply smooth Bristol paper to draw on, which is also new to me.  Because of this, I’ve had to reinvent my process. There is a few things I really wanted to do that is different than what I usually do.  Usually I plot out a page, then draw a tight rough on another piece of paper, then I get yet another piece of paper and clean it all up.

I will be showing this process perhaps next week.

This time around, I wanted to stream line the process so it all happens on ONE sheet of paper. Trying to figure out if I can do it is the hard part.

When I was growing up, I used to do my own comic strips. Beginning from when I was in 5th grade up until I graduated High School.  I had developed a method on how I approached doing them that worked well for me over all those years.  Later I started doing Simpsons comics and my method changed a bit since I didn’t have to “do it all” the way I had to in a comic strip.  That, and the fact that a comic page is a different “animal” than a comic strip. Now that I’m doing my OWN comic book story, I’ve found that I’ve got to marry what I used to do in my comic strips and what I learned to do when doing comic book pages.

For example, when doing a comic book page, I never truly worried as much about word balloons as I should have. Mainly because they were the last things put onto the page and it was done by someone else. While, when doing the comic strips, the word balloons where almost the most important thing for me.

Working on my personal comic, I tried to approach it in the same way as I did the Simpsons comic pages, only I’ve discovered, as I go along, that the word balloons almost need to come first in a similar way to how I used to do comic strips. Not exactly the same way, but similar.  Especially since I’ve made up my mind to NOT use digital word balloons.  I have chosen to make the word balloons, part of the original art; since they ARE. I’m making a comic book after all. I’m going to attempt to hand letter the words in the balloons, but I have awful writing, so if doesn’t look good, I’ll use digital letters.  That said, I still need to know how big the balloons should be to accommodate the words.  This means writing the dialogue out  so I can see how it will read.  It’s a time consuming part of the process I didn’t anticipate, and I’ve found myself, to my great surprise, enjoying it.

There is much more to think about, besides that and I’ve gotten lost in thought about the process for hours. Which means I become even LESS social than I usually am. I’m so absorbed in this stuff right now. It’s really fun, I can’t wait to finish. I might write about this some more, later.

VIDEO/WRITING

Chris Oatley linked to this on Twitter sometime last week (Follow me on Twitter). I thought it was great tips on writing stories so I thought I’d share it.

You gotta love someone who has to refute relativism in order to teach storytelling.

VIDEO

And now for some random silliness. Here is Hitler’s reactions to some bad news about what Marvel Comics up to. Warning: There is some bad language in this but it’s darn funny.

Hitler really takes his comic seriously:

…and from Hitler to Star Trek as the A-team:

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