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.

RAT MANIA!

A few years ago Laird and I created this comic book. The hero is a character I created when I was 12 but as crime is always with us, RM remains timeless. With the exception of the Duck and Turtleman Lairdo created all the bad guys, including the dreaded Dr. Liger. [FULL COMIC NOW AVAILABLE FOR FREE DOWNLOAD AT theillustratedsection@gmail.com. Check out all the other digital comics there as well!

KONG ON THE BIG SCREEN

This is a panel from my ongoing comicbook project 12 O'CLOCK SOMEWHERE (or if you wanna be promotionally trendy, 12OCS.) The fact the hero and his confidant are meeting at a movie palace screening of the first incarnation of KING KONG has to do with the fact the story takes place in, that's right, 1933. I sorta like the kid in the front row wearing a beany.

POST SCRIPT

Stephen Cannell, the uber-successful writer, producer and sort of creator of (my favorite) TV series THE ROCKFORD FILES, died a couple of weeks ago right here in Pasadena. When we first moved here I saw him at the local grocery store, buying seafood and I wanted ask, "Hey, is that Rock-fish you're buying?", an allusion to the nickname Issac Hayes gave Jim Rockford on the show. As it turned out, I didn't ask Cannell the question and a good thing too, as rockfish are plentiful off the Pacific coast and he very well may have been buying some. This pictured sequence, for anyone who hasn't seen one of his shows, is a nod to his production company tag that wrapped each one of his shows, wherein he'd rip a finished script page out of his typewriter (it was the 70's and 80's, remember) and tossing it into the air where it became the letter 'C'.

NEW GIG

Anyone who looks through the postings on this site will notice that over the years I've put up more than a few pictures of my favorite monster -- the werewolf. So it was a bit of a coincidence that in June I started working on a new show entitled TEEN WOLF. A TV series about, you got it, a teen who becomes a werewolf.

It's for MTV and will premiere in the spring of 2011 and in the meantime we're coming up with cool stories that follow the trials and tribulations of just how hard it is to be a teenager... and a shape-shifting, claw sprouting, fur-covered monster.

The show was adpated by CRIMINAL MINDS creator Jeff Davis, from the 1980's movie of the same name, starring Michael J. Fox. Beyond the similar premise the TV version won't be as light hearted, has higher stakes and way more scares and definitely has a cool looking werewolf in the featured role.

Keep posted.

Some accumulated doodles.

REAPER WOOF

Every episode of REAPER (both seasons available now on DVD) featured an evil soul returned from Hell, often reincarnated in visually cool and deadly form. Although I was a writer on the show I often did sketches of certain visuals to help point the visual effects guys in the right direction.

Usually they were spot on -- usually. The TV version of this returned soul wound up looking more like an agitated German Shepherd.

BATTERED BEAR!

A model sheet for a lovable teddy bear that always seems to get the violent end of the stick.

So Scrooge sees his own tombstone...

what, he never 

thought he'd die...?

New Sheriff In Town

AURORA CLUB JAZZ!

My brother Jonathan has an online podcast that features the goings-on in the Aurota Club, a virtual nightclub where the master-of-ceremonies, The Fat Man hosts an evening of live jazz. When the Aurora Club put together a 'greatest hits' CD for I-tunes, Jonathan needed album art and. seeing as all band members are anonymous, I did this picture of a shadow-concealed band, one that may - or may not - be the fabled virtual jazz quartet.

This little ditty inspired a whole movie! My cousin Kris Johnson (aka Kristian Idol) adapted it into a fifteen minute film shot in and around the Los Angeles area. (The character "Lance Loophole" was never mentioned by name in the film however.)

The Mummy (tries to) Come To LIFE!

A few sory board panels for a mummy movie I started writing. Long before Steve Sommers (also of Minnesota) wrote and directed not one but two Mummy movies, this (as the panels suggest)were more in the forties "bit of a romp" style than Mr. Sommer's films.

Doodles

Cute little guy.

Get it? get it?

The evolution of a doodle. Started deawing Lucy VanPelt, made her counting money and decided to put her in the gun sights of an off-camera James Bond. Funny, but I hear this was the original plot for the first PEANUTS Christmas special.

Bizarre.

Face it, every boy grows up eventually.

Holy Harriet!

When I drew this it seemed that every facet of the Batman saga was being exploited in every way, shape and form. Comics featuring the Joker, Robin without Batman, Batman in the twenties, Batman in the future... It seemed everyone from Gotham City had a book except Bruce Wayne's aunt.

A storyboard panel I did to promote Monster Rally, wherein a motorcycle cop investigates a car crash... only to make a grisly discovery...

A doodle of a woman I saw on a tv news report

Who doesn't love animals acting like people acting like animals?!

A presenation drawing for the merchandising appeal of MONSTER RALLY, a feature project I still have hopes for.

Tough guy and 'Slaughter That Bird!"

This little guy was designed, more than anything, to appeal to my older son when he was a little kid.

Following the success of the many Muppet movies it was decided that Big Bird should have his own flick and hence the movie"FOLLOW THAT BIRD" hit theaters. Above is a sequence from my version of the film SLAUGHTER THAT BIRD! wherein Ernie quells his appetite and rids the neighborhood of one of its bigger, bumbling residents in one swoop.

New Year's '94 and Mister Senor

I had an idea for a funny anti-hero who, after being left with a skull-like visage (and a metal jaw reminiscent of the Tin Man's) he donned a sombrero and roamed the Mexican desert, answering to the name 'Mister Senor'. While he was at it he should've learned a little Spanish.

Portrait of the Artist as a Headless Man.

At the University of Minnesota I was a member of the ATO fraternity and every Monday evening we actually put on jackets and ties for our 'house meeting'. For some reason I can't explain now, I had campaigned and been elected as 'Worthy Usher', a lofty title for a position that entailed the sole duty of answering the house phone during the meeting and taking messages. Dutifully armed with paper and pen phone calls were few but the doodles I made were plentiful. The sketch above was my point-if-view from my chair, as I awaited the telephone's ring. Note the nifty wingtips.

KONG!

Odd choice to start this site with a drawing I did in a hopital bed at the age of twelve but here it is. After being banged up in a car accicddent (no, I wasn't driving) I spent seven weeks in the hospital (back when health insurance allowed such lengthy stays) where I wiled away my days clicking between the six (SIX!) channels on TV, drawing comics or reading them. Everything rendered during those days isn't worth reprinting here but this visage of the tragic giant ape, copied from a cover of a Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine had a certain pathos that reflected where my head was as a kid in traction during the dog days of summer vacation.