MORE 12 O'CSW

Another sketch from the ongoing opus 12 O'CLOCK SOMEWHERE. I inked it in and then "colored" it with my Corel Painter program. Once I figured out how to use the gradation setting, it turned out pretty cool.

SALLY FORTH, YOU TEASE!

A little background is required on this one. back in the eighties a local Minneapolis attorney started a comic strip featuring a working mom as its main character. Relevent and tapping into the decade's zeitgeist it was entitled SALLY FORTH (get it?). Problem was the artwork was not that great. Now anyone who's ever tried to launch a comic strip is told, it's not the art but the ideas and writing that makes a strip sell. And true, the strip was popular enough but it was always needed an artistic upgrade. It could only help.

So when my best buddy Steve Burbidge's mom, who was friends with Greg Howard who created and drew the strip, informed me he was looking for a "wrist" to do the drawing as he continued to do the writing I jumped at the chance. An established comic strip? Produced right there in the Twin Cities?! I quickly did a bunch of samples, re-drawing panels of his strips and met with the guy... only to learn he WAS NOT, in fact, looking for a "wrist". He was very, very nice and while his art was admittedly sub-par, he figured he'd never get better if he stopped. Ironically enough a half decade later Howard turned the drawing chores over to an editorial artist at the Minneaplois Star Tribune... who employed his own cartooning skills in bodily proportions and movement... but retained the originator's balloon-ish, dot-eyed heads. As years passed I wondered if I had been full of myself, thinking I was a better cartoonist than the creator of a successful strip. Then I came across this in my files...

TEEN WOLF TO PREMIERE

Sunday, June 5th is the official premiere date.
Immediately following the MTV Movie Awards.
Set your TiVos now (if that's possible. Otherwise just indelibly stamp the date in your brain). The show's gonna be great. Scary, sexy, funny and did I say scary? And funny?
And while I am not allowed to reproduce official images from the show this is a production sketch I did for one of the episodes I wrote.

DICK CLARK LIVE, FROM THE AMAZON!

As anyone who draws will tell you the beauty of doodling is that a drawing can veer off in a hundred thousand different directions. A businessman with briefcase is suddenly in the beak of a pterodactyl lifting him from his bus stop. An air conditioner can suddenly sprout legs and chase a man on a unicycle, wearing hockey gloves.

This drawing began as some smiling guy in a suit but, as anyone who draws will also tell you, from the neck down suits are BORING to draw so I adjusted accordingly as you can see. Then I realized he sorta looked like the American Bandstand host and the idea was complete. In came the pirhanas and the dropped microphone, etc. I had some press type lying around and I added the title to avoid confusion. The thing I always loved about pictures like this is how the subject continues to smile even though what he endured must have been beyond painful. But hey, Dick Clark was nothing if not a pro, under any circumstance.

The Long Migration of a Robot Wolf

Back in High School I wrote a fifteen page script (in pencil) called SPARX AMPERAGE, intended to be shot on Super-8 like all our previous motion picture endeavors. In college I rewrote the script as a feature length script and incorporated, among other things, security guards in the form of robot wolves. THEN, after we moved to California and I was looking to make a buck any way I could, I drew sample storyboard panels from feature scripts I'd written. The robot wolves in SPARX seemed like an obvious subject. Never got a job storyboarding for the movies but the drawing turned out well.