THE FIRST QUESTION EVERY WRITER MUST ASK...

When I  took my first screenwriting class at Film In The Cities in Saint Paul, this question was ingrained in each and every one of us -- that you may have the coolest, high-concept idea but if you can't answer the above question, your story has no character drive.  The above illustration never made its way to t-shirts but we had cool mugs made!

THIS IS NOT THE JAW OF JONAH HEX

Years and years ago, just after coming off X-FILES  I was approached to write a feature adaptation of the little known comic book JONAH HEX.  The whole thing fell through, twelve years later a feature version did come out written by someone else and it was an unmitigated disaster.  I, however, still have the above sketch I did for the project.  And when I do my own movie about a vengeful, undead cowboy it'll be called, you guessed it, BONE SPUR... 

BABY/ROBOT/BABY

The same doodle, yes... but one that can be viewed two ways -- is it a picture of a baby with a robot tucked uder his arm?  Or a dancing robot with a baby stuck to his foot?  Always like the two of them and this is a great opportunity to include a link to a CARAVAN PALACE video that not only offers a great tune, but a dancing robot... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j95HbhTl60k

NCIS COMIX (SEASON ONE)

I drew this when I was on staff  at the uber-successful CBS series.  It was the first season, but already the characters were set -- and reflected in this quickly-drawn adventure.  Afficianados of the series will recognize Mark Harmon's stoic leader, David McCallum's overly-verbose ME (to such a point that the dead body is reduced to a skeleton -- ha, ha) and the goth lab gal Pauley Perrette with crazy theories.  My favorite is male sidekick, ladies man Tony who gets beaten down just for walking in the door.

Midnight Stroll

 Just another villager running for his life... down some Transylvanian cobble stone avenue... under a full moon.  Wonder what he's running from?..

A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE

 

A panel from 12 o'Clock Somewhere that incorporates your basic ol' "single vanishing point in 1-point perspective."   I just drew the picture -- but for this post, had to look up the official term on Ben Towles art/cartooning blogsite www.benzilla.com/?p=3683 .   Inspired by a Will Eisner SPIRIT panel I saw when I was ten years old, the structure on the left with the big clock face is also from my youth -- it's the Minneapolis courthouse building, one of the coolest buildings in the Twin Cities.

LAIRD VLAMING GOES TO COLLEGE!

That's right!  To Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.  So what better way to commemorate that milestone than by posting a monster painting he did when he was seven years old!  The colors are great but I always loved the teeth. 

 

Congratulations, Laird!



OXY ACETYLINE BOVINE (AKA WELDING COW)

I doodled this in a notebook a decade ago but coincidentally came across it just when Laird started taking a welding workshop.  That inspired me to to color it with Corel painter, I guess.

ANOTHER ROBOT -- IN LIVING COLOR!

I let my son Trevor color this robot sketch any way he wanted.  Funny how a kid doesn't automatically go for traditional "robot colors" -- like chrome or gun-metal grey.  Maybe 'cause they're not robots...

A COUPLE OF DUDE(LE)S

The guy on the above left is of interest in that he is facing RIGHT.  See, as a right-hander, almost everyone I draw faces LEFT -- like the fisherman above, on the right.  Confused...?

 

DEPRESSION KIDS

Three stages of a 12 O'clock somewhere llustration.

Allergic to Hard Labor

Years ago, when I thought I was gonna be an animator, I did this simple sneeze sequence and filled it in with colored pencil, in a sort of Bill Plympton style.  After drawing and coloring a mere ten panels, I realized how labor intensive animation really is... and stuck to writing.

POST EMMY NOMS - SCHNAUZ SCORES WITH BREAKING BAD...WALKING DEAD'S POST MORTEM

A shout-out and a hearty congratulations to my friend TOM SCHNAUZ and his best drama Emmy award nomination for one of the scripts he wrote on BREAKING BAD.  Tom and I were both writers at REAPER back in the day, where in fact the above doodle emanated.  As THE WALKING DEAD had zero Emmy noms, the undead cast members may wanna look for work at The Work Bench....

Holy Cat n' Mouse! Colbert Versus Ratman!!

A couple of panels from the RATMAN comic my son and I did.  Master criminal Dr. Leopold (based not at all  loosely on the likeness and the ego of Stephen Colbert) tells all to the clueless man-rodent.

HAPPY BIRTHDA

Yesterday was the 4th of July, but rather than posting some star-spangled national birthday commemoration, I offer this rough I did for an invite to my kid's October birthday party last year.  Ultimately we went a different direction for the party theme, but I liked the picture.  

NEW GIG: HANNIBAL

Very exciting news -- I'll be starting on the tv series HANNIBAL next week!  The show just wrapped its first (fantastic) season and episodes can be found on NBC.com.  Images from the series can be found there or anywhere online -- so instead I pasted the below drawing -- drawn on a page of my homework back in high school.

Who knew I'd land a job this ancient doodle would fit so perfectly?

DOODLE #368

This one rendered at a moment's downtime whilst doing caricatures at Waverly School's 2013 prom...

DOG v CAT -- GAME OF THRONES SEASON 3 FINALE

Ball Point Alien Dude

Rendered with an old-fashioned Bic, once upon a time...

FRINGE MEETS SNOOPY AT THE WHITE TULIP CLUB

 

There is a method to the above madness.  Working at FRINGE, I was explaining -- via drawings on my office white board-- to David Wilcox how much Charles Schulz' iconic Snoopy character changed from the sixties to the seventies.  Those two represenations are center and left-of-center.  He said that a TRULY 70's Snoopy would have chest chair and platform shoes -- and David added those.  We agreed that Charlie Brown should be serving up lines of cocaine and that was added.  From that point, over the last couple of months of FRINGE season two, the disco grew around them, including an intro in the upper left hand corner with Lucy and Schroeder and the "morning after" panel at the bottom right.

 

For FRINGE fans, already drawn on the board, before the Snoopy's were added, were two concept drawings I'd done for the WHITE TULIP episode -- one of the electrical mesh woven into Peter Weller's forearms and one of the metal discs that he inserted into his flesh to enable him to skip through time.  Respectively, the FRINGE sketches are on the left (the forearm became attached to Linus) and on the right... labeled, WHAM-O.

 

When the series relocated offices from West Hollywood to Santa Monica, the board -- with the drawing intact -- was moved as well, and rehung.

Dog v Cat -- IRON MAN 3 REVIEW

OH, YOU Ts...

I recently received a comment to the blog saying how a couple of my illios would make excellent T-shirts.  To that I say any enterprising young silkscreener out there should go for it -- just plug the blog if you do.  Coincidentally, scrounging deep in my files, I came across these two designs, expressly drawn to be on T-shirts...

WEIRD SCIENCE COFFEE, ANYONE?

In every half hour comedy, characters need an all-important community hang-out so that not everything takes place at home or school.  So too was the case with WEIRD SCIENCE.  Tom Spezialy and Al;an Cross, who adapted the movie into a TV series, created such a place in Java Man!  A play on the prehistoric proto-human remains found in, yes, Java crossed with the nickname for coffee resulted in this logo I came up for the place.  This design was used in the show on everything from mugs to aprons to bowling shirts. 

We're Gonna Need a Bigger Billboard...

Back in college, wanting to live a little dangerously, a friend of mine and I "embellished" billboards with spray paint.  Our first target was the enormous visage of a local political candidate.  Nothing smacking of anarchy -- we crossed his eyes, put a bow tie on him and a word balloon reading, "howdy".   The next one, pictured above, was our masterpiece.  Another street level board, we stared at it until the picture hidden within slowly appeared -- and was then rendered in paint.  This one turned out so well, it's kinda hard to tell what was there before.  Originally, the lady in the surf was screaming with delight, standing beside her equally glee-filled male counterpart.  We covered him up and replaced the guy with the classic JAWS shark's head.  Suddenly the woman was screaming for a different reason.

In half-Banksey fashion, I won't divulge the name of my partner in proto-tagging (in the event she runs for public office some day) but this is what's weird -- after we did the embellishment I returned a few days later to snap a picture -- and it was gone.  Bummer.  Jump ahead five or six years, I was recounting the whole tale to a former frat brother and he said, "I worked at the drugstore right around the corner of that!  It was so funny, I took a picture of it!"  Hence, the photo above. 

Note:  For drama's sake, I re-embellished the picture to restore the teeth and the shark's pink maw.

X-FILES - THE PREHISTORY

I didn't make this up -- these guys are in the opening sequence of the X FILES feature film that came out in the late nineties.  All I did was name them -- and offered the tagline: "Join these intrepid prehistoric alien hunters as they track down amazing new life forms... and kill 'em."

IT'S ALL ABOUT HOW OTHERS PERCEIVE YOU

HOW I SNUCK INTO R-RATED MOVIES

When I was a kid, I managed to see THE GODFATHER, THE FRENCH CONNECTION,  THE EXORCIST and ROSEMARY'S BABY -- all rated R, snd all thanks to MAD Magazine and the brilliant talents of Mort Drucker, Dick DeBartolo and others.  There, by way of eight meticulously drawn pages, I "saw" films restricted to audience members under the age of seventeen (without a legal guardian.) 

Whoa, you say -- I just read a MAD movie spoof and it was a lame-o pale comparison to the movie it was mocking, but that's because things have changed.  Hugely.  Back in the seventies and eighties, MAD movie satires not only presented plot-point by plot-point recountings of the film's story but the panels so perfectly reflected the screen images -- from the actors to the locations to the angles -- that it was like seeing the world's best story board panels.  Satires were eight pages not four, and there was one in every issue -- not every third issue.  What's more, back in those days, the magazine satirized films that appealed to an adult audience (see above list.) -- then again, that was the film-going crowd... there was no teen market to speak of.

Oh, and the above panel is classic Mort Drucker, taken from the 2001: A Space Odyssey satire, or as the magazine affectionately called it: 201: (Minutes) of Space Idiocy.  My good friend Craig McNamara forwarded an article from FILM COMMENT on this very subject:

http://filmcomment.com/article/mad-magazine-movie-parodies

NORMAN REEDUS -- NOT DEAD!

This blogsite has more than a couple pictures of zombies among the posts but despite that, I have to admit I do not watch THE WALKING DEAD.  That doesn't mean I am unaware of the phenomenon it's become or how one of the characters played by Norman Reedus has risen to the top and that the actor has become a really big star.  I drew this of NR during the shooting of the 13 GRAVES pilot.

REASON TO QUIT SMOKING #37

Back when I read ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, well, weekly, it invariably had a cigarette ad on the back of the magazine.  And this one just asked for a redux.  For the life of me, I can't imagine what the ad guys were thinking, having studly Bruce Campbell -esque guy blow a PAPER party favor into the girl's face -- with a LIT CIGARETTE IN HER LIPS.  The only doctoring I did was to add the flames... and making the guy's mouth screaming in agony.  

SPRING IS IN THE AIR