Author Archives: Mark

“I Shall Become a BAT!”

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The clock is count­ing down to DC Comics’ big reboot, and it’s still got me think­ing back on the orig­i­nals. I thought I should get at least one more post in here, before it hap­pens. Super­man was look­ing a lit­tle lonely.

Like I said in my pre­vi­ous post, I’ve always had an attrac­tion to the ear­ly gold­en age ver­sions of some of these char­ac­ters, despite the occa­sion­al rugged­ness in exe­cu­tion. There was a pri­mal kind of ener­gy there that per­haps got lost a lit­tle bit along the way, as the artists and writ­ers got bet­ter at their craft, and began to for­mu­late the rules for how you were sup­posed to do this sort of thing.

Last time, I copped to hav­ing an affec­tion for the gold­en age Super­man. But if pushed, I’d have to admit that I prob­a­bly liked the gold­en age Bat­man just a lit­tle bit more. Those ear­ly strips just dripped with mood: dark shad­ows, misty nights with almost always an enor­mous full moon, and plen­ty of strange char­ac­ters for the Bat­man to go up against. When I first began to encounter this stuff in those DC 100-Page Super-Spec­tac­u­lars as a kid, I had no prob­lem at all under­stand­ing why kids encoun­ter­ing these sto­ries for the first time on news­stands back in the gold­en age were attract­ed to it. This stuff cap­tured your imagination.

In the same vein as the Super­man poster, here’s one fea­tur­ing Bat­man in that ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry Poster Style. This time out, I did my ver­sion of a clas­sic pose that Kane used a num­ber of times in those ear­ly issues. A very big “Thank You” to Bill Fin­ger, Bob Kane, Jer­ry Robin­son, George Rous­sos, and all the rest of Kane’s “ghosts” over the years who made Bat­man what he was!

“Look! Up in the Sky!”

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If you fol­low comics news at all, you’ve prob­a­bly heard there’s this big reboot that DC Comics is doing in Sep­tem­ber. They’re start­ing all their books over from #1, redesign­ing all the char­ac­ters and redo­ing their ori­gins. You can’t assume now that you know any­thing for sure about who they are, their moti­va­tions or the over­all scenario.

I’m not going to get into com­men­tary on that here (there’s been plen­ty of that already in oth­er places online). But I’ll admit the idea of the retire­ment of the orig­i­nal char­ac­ters has me think­ing back on them a bit wist­ful­ly. Though tech­ni­cal­ly a child of comics’ sil­ver and bronze ages, I’ve always had a fas­ci­na­tion with the gold­en age era too. Despite the fact that work was often a bit crude in com­par­i­son to what came lat­er, there was a cer­tain life and raw ener­gy to those ear­ly incar­na­tions of the characters.

It’s a lot eas­i­er to lay hands on gold­en age comics sto­ries now. Back when I was a kid, most­ly you just got to read about them (in books like Ster­anko’s His­to­ry of Comics, or All in Col­or for a Dime). If you could lay hands on one of DC’s 100-Page Super-Spec­tac­u­lars though, you knew you were in for a rare treat.

Like I say, I’ve long had a soft spot for these ear­ly, pri­mal ver­sions of char­ac­ters like Super­man (the proof is at left; a scan of a fake gold­en age cov­er I did when I was about 12 or 13). And with the DC reboot com­ing, I thought I’d revis­it the orig­i­nal Super­man once again. The new image up top could’ve gone in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent direc­tions, but what I wound up hon­ing in on is a Shus­ter-esque ver­sion, posed more for­mal­ly. It’s been tak­en in the direc­tion of vin­tage poster art from an even ear­li­er era. Because that seemed like a fun idea at the time.

Just my salute to the gold­en age in gen­er­al, and the orig­i­nal Super­man in par­tic­u­lar. Thanks very much, Mr. Siegel and Mr. Shuster!

UPDATE: I recent­ly dis­cov­ered online these neat Super­man pages, drawn by Stew­art Immo­nen some years back. Done in the style of Win­sor McCay’s “Lit­tle Nemo,” they’re not entire­ly unre­lat­ed to what I’m try­ing to do here with this poster. I thought these were real­ly neat, and worth shar­ing. It’s fun­ny how well Super­man works in a style like this!

Missile Mouse

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I men­tioned ear­li­er that from time to time, I intend to do posts of “inspi­ra­tional stuff.” Basi­cal­ly, we’re talk­ing comics I’ve come across that I think are real­ly good, and kind of inspire you to draw. So here’s another.

If you’ve ever checked out the list of artists over in my side­bar, per­haps you’ve looked at the work of Jake Park­er. He’s one of those artists that seem to strad­dle mul­ti­ple media, includ­ing comics and ani­ma­tion. His stuff is very imag­i­na­tive, appeal­ing and a lot of fun to look at.

One of Jake’s cre­ations, Mis­sile Mouse, has now been fea­tured in two books: The Star Crush­er and Res­cue on Tanki­um 3 (Actu­al­ly, Mis­sile Mouse has appeared in three books, if you want to count Flight Explor­er Vol. 1) . You can buy them here. Mis­sile Mouse is a tough lit­tle char­ac­ter who usu­al­ly has to face down char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions that are much big­ger than him, but he nev­er backs down. He always does what he has to do.

In my opin­ion, one of the best aspects of these books is the way every­thing’s so clear­ly been thought out in great detail. Jake is a “world-builder.” He plain­ly puts a lot of thought into design­ing even the tini­est prop. In the back of Res­cue on Tanki­um 3 is a sec­tion where among oth­er things, he goes into great detail about all of Mis­sile Mouse’s gear, how it’s assem­bled, what prin­ci­ples it works on. The lev­el of back detail and thought put into these books makes for a fun and rich read­ing expe­ri­ence. They’re good all-ages reads, and worth check­ing out.

Since it’s my art­blog, of course I’ve got to put up some art. So up top is my Mis­sile Mouse fan art piece. As usu­al, my ani­ma­tion train­ing seems to have com­pelled me to try to get as close to on-mod­el as I can.  I did some exper­i­ment­ing with the col­or meth­ods, because if I can’t do that here, where can I? It struck me that most­ly we’ve seen Mis­sile Mouse inter­act­ing with beings who are a good deal big­ger than he is (play­ing the “David and Goliath” card very well), so I thought it might be fun to see him inter­act with some­thing much small­er than himself.

Mis­sile Mouse is ™ and © Jake Parker.

UPDATE: If you look in the Com­ments below, you’ll see that Jake has seen this post. He appar­ent­ly liked my draw­ing well enough to post it on his own site here. I’m very flat­tered! Thanks, Jake!

Five Color Comics

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So my local com­ic shop, House of Secrets (Hi Paul, Erik and Amy!) also occa­sion­al­ly pub­lish­es spe­cial projects of their own, under the name Art of Fic­tion. One of them is a title they call Five Col­or Comics. The inter­est­ing thing about it is that they have each pan­el of the sto­ries drawn by a dif­fer­ent artist. Bit of an exer­cise in herd­ing cats for them some­times, I’m sure, but the results are interesting.

I con­tributed to vol­ume one, and they recent­ly pub­lished vol­ume two. Which I was also invit­ed to con­tribute to. You can see my pan­el con­tri­bu­tion here, sans cap­tions. No “Pho­to­shop­pery” going on; it was done the old-school way, direct­ly on paper with pen, ink and col­ored pen­cils. In con­text with the oth­er pan­els, it’s inter­est­ing to see how there still man­ages to be a cer­tain over­all cohe­sive­ness to the sto­ry, despite the fact we all have such dif­fer­ent styles.

Rasputin

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Cour­tesy of Turn­er Clas­sic Movies and my DVR (what a great inven­tion!), I had the chance not long ago to check out a cou­ple of old movies I’d nev­er seen before, both deal­ing with the infa­mous Rasputin. TCM played both films back to back when they aired. First on the agen­da was Rasputin and the Empress from 1932, with Lionel Bar­ry­more play­ing Rasputin (and doing a good and creepy job of it, too!). They fol­lowed that up with Christo­pher Lee play­ing the role in the 1966 Ham­mer Stu­dios film Rasputin: The Mad Monk. Lee, as usu­al, did a great job. He’s always a lot of fun to watch.

I don’t pre­tend to be any kind of an expert on the his­tor­i­cal Rasputin, so I can’t com­ment on the accu­ra­cy of either of these films. But they were fas­ci­nat­ing to watch. And obvi­ous­ly I’m not the only one who finds the char­ac­ter intrigu­ing; look­ing on IMDB, the first time some­one played Rasputin on film was back in 1917, only one year after his death. And he keeps crop­ping up as a char­ac­ter in films, to this day!

With­out try­ing for a like­ness of either Bar­ry­more or Lee (or the real Rasputin), I thought it might be fun to take a shot at a char­ac­ter draw­ing. I only meant to do one draw­ing, but then I was­n’t entire­ly sure about how it was com­ing out, so I kept going, envi­sion­ing dif­fer­ent approach­es. There’s a whole bunch of exper­i­men­ta­tion going on here, with styles, tools, col­or­ing etc. Instead of mak­ing myself crazy try­ing to decide which way to go, I thought I’d just go ahead and run them all up the flag­pole, let the chips fall where they may. And that’s prob­a­bly more than enough Rasputin for any­body in one dose!

I was a one-man meme!

Tunes!

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Okay, I know this is sup­posed to be my portfolio/artblog. But here’s the thing: any­one who knows me knows that I also love music. If you come up to my desk while I’m work­ing at some stu­dio, odds are I’ve got tunes play­ing in the back­ground. My iTunes is loaded with almost 70 GB of music. In addi­tion to my art, it’s anoth­er big part of who I am.

So to that end, I thought I’d add some music links over in the side­bar. These are far from being the only bands and artists I like! They’re only a small hand­ful of musi­cians who would leave a notice­able absence for me if they were removed from my iTunes and CD libraries. If you haven’t heard some of these per­form­ers, do your­self a favor and put some­thing new in your ears! Maybe I’ll add to the list from time to time.

And of course, since this is sup­posed to be an art­blog, I ough­ta post some art to go with this announce­ment, right? The illus­tra­tion up top was part of an assign­ment I did for one of my class­es back when I was attend­ing Art Cen­ter, to illus­trate and design a CD pack­age. I had no Pho­to­shop skills back then, so it’s all pen & ink with water­col­ors. Today, I’d prob­a­bly still draw some­thing like this con­ven­tion­al­ly, but I’d use Pho­to­shop for the color.

Animation Insider

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“Pon­tif­i­ca­tion”

I did an inter­view with the site Ani­ma­tion Insider.com, which they just post­ed. You can check it out here, if you like. The site has inter­views with a num­ber of us who toil in the ani­ma­tion trench­es, if you have any curios­i­ty about what that’s like, what dif­fer­ent kinds of things we all do, or how we got there. We’re a pret­ty var­ied bunch.

And, of course, I got­ta post some art to go with this announce­ment. I had an idea of an image, and thought it might work to do it in Illus­tra­tor as an exper­i­ment. Guess the “no con­tain­ment lines” look of the project I teased in my pre­vi­ous post was still in the back of my mind. And that’s all for this one, before I get accused of liv­ing up to this illustration!

Bloobee blee blah!

Just Another Tease

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So I haven’t post­ed in awhile. The last few weeks have been crazy busy with col­or­ing and let­ter­ing a com­ic book project. I can’t give details or post the pages just yet, but will in a few months, once I get the clear­ance to do so. In the mean­time, the image at right is non-spe­cif­ic enough to work as a tease for what the thing looks like.

Pen­cils for this project were by the love­ly and tal­ent­ed Jim Sten­strum. Jim is best known in comics as a writer, but in ani­ma­tion he’s bet­ter known as a char­ac­ter design­er. I’ve worked with Jim on many projects over the years, and it is always a pleasure.

More Randomness

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Like I said last time, I feel the need to occa­sion­al­ly post some things to at least remind peo­ple of the fact that sto­ry­board revi­sion is one of the jobs I do. Even if all I have to show for it are some ran­dom, scat­tered pan­els that I hap­pened to have kept copies of.

Here’s anoth­er one from a Care Bears board. The over­all sto­ry is for­got­ten now, but in this scene, Cheer Bear (in the fore­ground, speak­ing) was in an awk­ward sit­u­a­tion where she felt she had to fib to Har­mo­ny Bear (in the back­ground). I kind of liked the way Cheer’s facial expres­sion worked out, which is why I hung onto a copy of this panel.

A Random Storyboard Panel

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It’s occurred to me that I have absolute­ly noth­ing on my site to rep­re­sent the fact that one of the jobs I do is sto­ry­board revi­sion. Main­ly it’s because it’s a dif­fi­cult thing to show in a port­fo­lio. At the request of the direc­tor, you’re draw­ing ran­dom scat­tered pan­els here and there through­out anoth­er artist’s fin­ished board. If even that; some­times you might just be redraw­ing a por­tion of a pan­el or fig­ure. Ran­dom pan­els out of con­text don’t real­ly show much in the way of nar­ra­tive skills, which is what board­ing is all about.

Nonethe­less, it seems to me I should still have some things up here to rep­re­sent that side of what I do. And occa­sion­al­ly in doing that job, I’ll gen­er­ate a ran­dom, scat­tered pan­el that I espe­cial­ly like for some rea­son, and have hung onto a copy of it. So I fig­ure maybe I should post some of those here from time to time. Why not? It lets peo­ple know that it’s part of what I do.

So here’s “ran­dom, scat­tered pan­el” #1: from Care Bears, it’s their arch-ene­my Griz­zle. I enjoyed doing a pan­el with a lit­tle atti­tude, and it’s not often that there’s a call to do light­ing effects on a board. Dra­mat­ic up-light­ing is fun!

There will be more ran­dom board pan­el posts in the future, from time to time.