Just a heads up, Bill Watterson’s The Complete Calvin and Hobbes is available for pre-order at Amazon!
Author: andertoons
Ed Emberly and a Trip Down Memory Lane
I was checking out Drawn! the other day (and feeling like a complete artistic fraud as a result BTW) and I ran across this great little blurb on Ed Emberly and it prompted a trip down memory lane.
I remember getting the book pictured above through the school book order and drawing frogs and dragons until the cows came home. (I grew up in Iowa, so that’s a lot of drawing!)
I also used to have this great plastic light up desk that came with all of these sheets with Spider-Man in different poses for you to trace. I, of course, traced all the cool Spider-man stuff and passed it off as my own to friends at school, and then I traced the Sunday comics until the cows… Never mind.
Anyway, another great learning experience was a cartooning class taught by the local newspaper’s cartoonist. (Remember those?!) It was at the Bettendorf Public Library and technically an adult course, but my Mom, looking to feed a cartoon hungry young lad, got them to allow me in after much paperwork and a letter from my school’s art teacher. It was seven or eight weeks long and I wasn’t very good, but it really got the ball rolling.
I think the other big cartooning strike of lightning came my freshman year in high school. I was in art class doing one of our first projects for the year and the teacher noticed my cartoony take on it and recommended I try to cartoon for the school paper. I drew editorial cartoons for The Lance on national issues for four years earning strange looks from my fellow students, but raves from the teachers and other adults. I’m not kidding myself that this was great work, but it was certainly better than average and, while not planting the cartoon seed, it certainly watered and fertilized it.
I’d love to say at this point that I went to art school in college and studied design and the old masters and all of that, but I took another route and majored in jazz trombone performance. A choice I certainly don’t regret as my trombone playing took me around the world and earned me countless friends and a nice living when I was young, but it did slow down my cartooning aspirations.
Back to Emberly, I can’t believe it, but he’s still going strong today with his own website and lots of fun stuff for kids to do! I only hope in a few years that my son will enjoy his stuff half as much as I did.
This is long overdue, but thanks, Ed! Thanks a lot!
Beware the Ides of R. Crumb
Check out some good stuff on R. Crumb and his new R. Crumb Handbook at Newsweek online.
Here’s an excerpt:
For the past four decades, since his first successes in the countercultural underground “comix” of the 1960s, Crumb has made strange and hilarious art out of his own neuroses. Insecure and paranoid, obsessed with sex in general and women with big behinds in particular, mad for music recorded before World War II, Crumb has never been afraid to draw and write about his own foibles and fantasies. What’s noteworthy about his efforts is that he manages to draw his viewers in, he makes us keep turning pages. He shocks us, but he makes us laugh. He repels us, but he makes us realize that we’re just as much a part of this sleazy, baggy-pants world he’s drawing as he is. And if he reads this, he’ll probably throw up.
I’m gonna be honest here, I don’t know a lot about Crumb and his work. I’m also reading a lot of Comic Art lately and I’m finding myself overwhelmed with how much I don’t know about a lot of artists.
Cartoons have such a wide range of content and form that I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever have the time to know as much as I’d like/need.
(BTW… Beware today…)
“Hackles” – Week 4
So we’ve come to this… The end of yet another rejected strip.
Well, looking back, it was a big improvement over Smart Alex. But, to be fair, if I were the syndicate I woulda passed on this one too.
Oh well. Here’s hoping my next strip is as big a leap forward for me.
Here’s the last of them…
(Click on each strip to see the large versions.)
Goodnight sweet strips…
A Day In The Life…
I’ve been wanting to do a blog for a while where I chronicle what my typical day is like as a stay-at-home dad/cartoonist. The caveat being I didn’t want to plan it.
I didn’t want to decide what I was going to wear, or what I was going to do, or what day might be the most interesting. That just seemed like cheating. So, I shelved it for a while and figured I’d get to it sometime down the road.
Well, yesterday was the day. It hit me early in the morning after the day had begun and I just sort of went with it.
So, here’s a pretty typical day:
5:00 Alarm goes off. Curse daylight, roll out of bed, and put on my sweats.
5:10 Check email and website/blog stats.
5:20 Walk the dog, drink coffee.
5:45 Shower/breakfast/CNN Headline News/more coffee. (I have an idea for a business cartoon involving a souffle in the shower, but the more I think about it the worse it sounds. I scrap it.)
6:30 Wake up Henry. Get a load of diapers washing. (My wife and I use cloth diapers, so I wash a load just about every other day. It’s not as bad as it sounds. You’d be amazed at what you can get used to.)
6:50 My wife heads to work and I feed the boy.
7:05 This is where I officially had the idea to document my entire day. Track down the camera. (I had to sort of backtrack for the first few hours, but it’s pretty right on.)
7:20 Clean up Henry, take the first picture, and get down to play-time.
8:15 Vacuum the house. I try to get my head in cartoon writing mode, but nothing comes.
8:30 Run to the bank to deposit some cartoon checks. Drop by Krispy Kreme and pick up donuts for my father-in-law. (He’s coming over to watch Henry so I can go to the dentist.)
8:58 I sold a cartoon! An industrial sweeper/scrubber company purchases this cartoon for an upcoming presentation.
9:00 More play-time.
9:15 My father-in-law arrives and we both marvel at Henry.
9:35 The dentist. The hygienist asks why I’m taking pictures of myself. I try to explain, but I don’t think she understands.
10:37 Off to Subway to pick up sandwiches for my father-in-law and myself. (I almost always get seafood with lettuce, onion and pickles for those of you playing at home.)
11:00 Chit-chat with father-in-law. Continued marveling at Henry.
11:30 Lunch.
12:00 My father-in-law heads out and Henry and I head outside to, as my Mom puts it, “blow some stink off.”
12:30 Back inside for play-time and stories.
12:55 Henry goes down for his nap and my cartooning day officially begins. I waste some time checking my email and surfing.
1:15 Actually get down to work. I usually write first because that part is the most difficult for me. I’ve gotten a lot better over the years, but there’s still no real method. I sit and think about stuff and try to let my brain run free.
1:35 Everything I’ve written is crap sp far. Here are some examples:
Businessman to other – “I’d love to show you my business model, but the glue isn’t dry yet.”
Worker at auto dent removal place to customer – “Sorry, we don’t do pocketbooks.”
Old man to another – “You know what I miss? Nostalgia.”
Grocery clerk to kangaroo – “Paper or pouch?”
I get up and start to walk around to try and jumpstart my brain.
1:50 I get my first decent idea.
Female snail on couch next to salt shaker remarks under breath to another female snail seated across from her – “I’ll change him.”
1:52 Another decent one.
Owl on couch to psychiatrist – “Anymore I just don’t give a hoot.”
I just need one more idea, but the last one always comes slow. (I try to write as many cartoons as I plan to draw for the day. Today I’ll be doing three.)
2:05 Got it.
Ostrich in emergency room to ostrich with head stuck inside hourglass – “I told you that thing was trouble.”
2:10 Pick out three older gags, get Ed Wood going on the DVD, and sit down and start to sketch my cartoons for the day.
2:25 Sketches went relatively quickly today. I start inking.
2:55 The time I save on sketches I more than made up for in inking. Two cartoons got drawn three times each to get them right. I start shading the final inks.
3:10 Shading is all done and I take a second to check my email.
3:20 Scan in the cartoons, make changes and add captions in Photoshop.
3:30 The mail comes and I resist the urge to jump up and get it.
3:45 All three cartoons are finished and I allow myself to get the mail. (I’m a mail junkie!) There’s nothing good today.
4:00 Get Henry up from his nap and give him a snack.
4:20 Margie comes home and plays with Henry. I get some housework done; the sink in the kitchen gets a good scrubbing.
5:15 Dinner. (Beef stroganoff, Jell-O and some crescent rolls with apple butter. Yum-yum!)
5:55 Upload pictures and get them ready for the blog.
6:40 Dessert!
6:45 Play-time with Henry and Margie
7:15 Margie reads Henry his bedtime stories and I begin blogging in earnest.
9:00 The blog is finished and I’m done for the day.
9:15 Now for some reading and some well-deserved sleep.