New Role Model

I'm still trying to make Weems look like a real comic strip. Today's plagiarism victim: Cliff Sterrett.

Click the thumbnail to see:

Posted by Steve H. at 7:59 PM | Permalink  

Cartoon Characters Have to Stay in Shape

I'm trying to re-learn such drawing skills as I once possessed.

I'll tell you how to learn to draw cartoons. It's surprisingly simple.

First, learn to draw. You may think you can't draw. You're probably wrong. Get yourself a copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain or The Natural Way to Draw and spend a couple of weeks doing the exercises, which are very easy. You may amaze yourself. Almost everyone has the ability to draw well. Once you find out how to access it, you'll do things you never would have thought possible.

Second, learn how to use cartooning materials. I learned from a book by a syndicated cartoonist named Ken Muse. It's in a box here somewhere, so I don't feel like digging it out and giving you the title, but I'm sure you can find it on Amazon.

Third, buy books of other people's cartoons and learn to copy them. Then learn to draw their characters in new poses, in their styles. Then learn to draw your own characters imitating poses found in the other cartoonist's work.

By copying other cartoonists, you'll learn how they solved problems every cartoonist faces. How to shade. How much detail to show. How to compose frames so you get all the important stuff into the picture.

Unfortunately, I've forgotten all that stuff.

I've been working on it anew. I got out some of my old books of cartoons, and I am copying the ones I admire. Chic Young. Cliff Sterrett. Walt Kelly. Harold Gray. I'm avoiding the more photorealistic cartoonists, like Hal Foster and Burne Hogarth, because I prefer to do work that is more stylized. I don't want my cartoons to be realistic.

While working on my skills, I resurrected a creepy ability I possess. I had forgotten all about it. If you put a cartoon character in front of me and hand me a pencil, I can draw a near-perfect copy, like a photostat. It gives me the willies, watching it appear on the paper, but I think it's a good thing to practice.

Here comes my latest Weems strip. I did freehand copies of Albert the Alligator from Walt Kelly's Pogo, and then I did copies of the copies, into my comic strip. I tried inking Albert with a brush, but it was impossible, so I went back to a pen. Kelly and his assistant used brushes, but they were way more talented than I am.

Anyhow, here are Weems and Otis (click for popup):

By the way, if you're a cartoon buff, you may have heard of a great strip called Little Joe. It's not entirely clear who produced the strip. Harold Gray (creator of L'il Orphan Annie) had an assistant named Ed Leffingwell, and Little Joe appeared under Leffingwell's name. But it is known that Gray drew the strip for at least part of its run. Anyway, it was beautifully drawn, and it was considered a connoisseur's strip.

You can't find it in print, except for little bits here and there, but somebody put together a CD of old strips. I ordered one, just for the hell of it. If you click this link, you'll go to a site where you can find information on ordering the CD.

Posted by Steve H. at 7:06 PM | Permalink  

The One and Only

I can see I'm going to have to draw more comic strips.

People are coming to my comments and comparing Otis the pig to existing characters. They obviously don't understand Otis.

Let me explain something. Otis is almost 20 years old. He is not based on Brian from The Family Guy, because Brian didn't exist. He is not based on Dogbert. Dogbert didn't exist until 1989.

I can't think of a single character that has a personality like Otis's.

Get a grip, people. Not every funny idea is plagiarized.

Posted by Steve H. at 12:41 PM | Permalink  

Playing Around With New Toys

I have been fooling around with some new paper today. I decided, after testing both Canson and Strathmore Bristol, that there was no discernible difference, except that Canson is brighter. So I did a whole strip on Canson today.

I also bought some engineering vellum. If I recall correctly, this stuff is actually easier to work with than Bristol. Takes more erasures, and you can scrape mistakes off with a knife.

I don't know why cartoonists don't use it. Maybe because it's not very white. But that shouldn't matter, now that it's so easy to lighten an image.

Here, click this huge thumbnail:

I think my inking is improving.

Posted by Steve H. at 8:44 PM | Permalink  

Revolutionary Rat

Today I complained about stupid editors who boost bad comic strips for political reasons. In a comment, a reader steered me to a Pearls Before Swine strip, in which Stephan Pastis (the cartoonist) makes fun of the morons who buy strips for syndicates. Take a look.

I knew Pastis was critical of the industry, but I didn't know he had done a strip on the subject this past weekend.

If you like that one, you should see how he reams out bad old strips that clutter the comics page. He has really savaged Cathy Guisewite, whose strip Cathy ceased being funny a long time ago. I was surprised to see him do that, because Cathy was a good strip back in the Eighties, and it might be good again some day.

He's wasting his time, I think. People want to wake up in the morning and see Dagwood and Blondie and all their old favorites, even if they're about as funny as a cancer relapse. And syndicate editors want to stock what sells.

Posted by Steve H. at 3:18 PM | Permalink  

Now he Needs to Feed

I threw together a new strip for my old cartoon feature, "Mr. Weems," as mentioned in a previous entry. It's the feature I showed to Berke Breathed. Here it is:

I still can't draw as well as I used to.

The idea behind the strip was that Weems had a miserable life, and I tormented him constantly. Otis, on the other hand, sat around doing nothing, and everyone loved him, and he felt like he pretty much deserved it.

I had two strips in development for syndication, and both were eventually killed by my editor. "Mr. Weems" bought it because the editor refused to let me keep Otis, who was the funniest character in the strip. The rationale? The local editors who buy comic strips would not accept a strip with a talking or thinking animal.

I assume he knew what he was talking about, after decades of dealing with idiots at local papers, but without Otis, the strip was awful.

I do miss him. He was completely self-absorbed, he was always upbeat, and he had what I consider to be an ideal existence. I wish I could be Otis the pig for a few months.

I may draw a few more strips.

More

I just realized something. Marvin is Otis. But he was born about eight years after Otis was created.

Maybe he's the Dalai Otis.

Posted by Steve H. at 8:34 PM | Permalink  

Pen Problem

I was fooling around today, doing a few panels of my old comic strip, "Mr. Weems." I thought I'd put them up so you would see the kind of thing I was working on before I quit writing and cartooning back in 1990.

I decided to do half a strip on Canson Professional Bristol board, and the other half on Strathmore 500 Series. I wanted to see which was best, because I can get Canson locally, and it would be nice to avoid the hassle of mail-order.

I sat down and sketched out half a strip, I did the lettering, and then I started inking. I was surprised how hard it was to make a thin line. And the pen was temperamental about being pushed forward and sideways. I figured I was getting old and feeble.

Turns out I was using the wrong pen. I thought I was using a Gillott 170, which is probably the most popular cartooning pen. However, I was actually using a Gillott 290, which is a bear to control.

What a bummer.

But I'm not doing the strip over. You can look at the difference when I put it up. Only the first panel is affected.

Posted by Steve H. at 6:54 PM | Permalink