THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Second week of my hiatus, three weeks to go. I must say, it’s going pretty fast.  There’s a small chance that work will turn up from the studio but it’s not very high.

I went to the studio Tuesday night because we have figure drawing every Tuesday there.  I hadn’t gone in years.  I was talking to a friend at work about going.  I wasn’t able to last week because I was taking care of Dante who was sick but now that he’s better I went.  I’m glad I did.  It was fun even though I was really rusty.  I felt that I was really getting something out of it.  Even though it was painful to be so bad at it.  I’m hoping that the more I go the better I’ll get and the more I’ll learn.

BOARDGAMES

I haven’t written about a board game in a while.  Mostly because, as much as I like them, I get to play them as much as I usually do, which is to say, just about never.  That said, I have recently gotten a hold of a really cool game that kinda hits on a lot of things I like in a board game.  Uncle Chestnut’s Table Gype:

Paul Nowak, of Eternal Revolutions created a board game inspired by G.K. Chesterton.

It’s a little bit like Chinese Checkers and a little bit like chess without quite feeling like either one and the pieces are DICE.   I read the rules but I still haven’t played it. The point of the game is to take your pieces and move them into the home row across from you.  Pieces are not captured but you can jump over them.  When a piece is jumped over, it must be re-rolled, resulting in a different face appearing on the die.  Since each face moves a different way, this causes the game to constantly change. It’s definitely one of  those rules that are so obvious and yet new.  Familiar and yet original.  It’s seems like a very cool, very family friendly game.  Just enough thinking without it hurting your head. I played a few solo rounds and I was like, “Woah this is cool.”

As soon as I get to play a few games, I’m definitely going to go deeper into writing my thoughts on it.  I just wanted to make you aware of it for now. Check it out. Uncle Chestnut’s Table Gype.

Table Gype’s Board game geek page

BUY UNCLE CHESTNUT’S TABLE GYPE.

ART

This comic idea started twelve years ago when I felt the itch to make my own comic.  I didn’t really know what I wanted to do so I just started drawing.  I drew a girl a boy and a little dog.  I stared at them a while and started coming up with their relationship to each other.  Little by little things began to change a bit, but I still didn’t know what the story was.  I then just decided, to start writing dialogue.  I wrote for a while but it didn’t go anywhere, so I started over and over and over.  Eventually something started to form.  Then I  went back and started writing along the lines that started forming.  I had hit something and it started to work for me.  I went back to the beginning and plugged in what was working and the comic was born. It was titled: The Seven Impossible Tasks.

I meant this comic to be drawn simply.  In my big head style.  That way I would be able to get it done.  I drew the pages rough so that later I would be able to put a sheet of paper over the roughs and start drawing things better.  I just wanted to get the pages laid out first.  Thing is, as I drew the roughs, I was also experimenting with the look of the characters. Since the pages where roughs, I didn’t feel the need for the characters to look consistent through out.  I was trying to find the style I was going to use in the end.

After I finished the first 22 pages of story, I passed out copies of my roughs to friends and family to get their opinions about whether they thought it was a fun compelling read.  Most of the feedback was positive.  The only thing people said was that it needed an establishing shot at the beginning.  Then, one day, I showed the pages to Richie Chavez (art Director of Dreamwork’s Prince of Egypt movie) . He took one look at the pages and without reading them told me the panel layout was boring.  He thought they needed to be more dynamic. That I need to use the comic medium to it’s best advantage.  This made me rethink all my pages.  He was right. My mistake was to try to fix what I had already done. On hindsight I should have just finished the pages as they were and laid out out the next part of the story in a much better way.

The thing is, by the time Richie had given me his critique, I had already started established the character designs, the background designs and I had started finishing up the pages.  Not only that, but around that time, I had started reading some books on writing.  This had made me rethink some of the structure, or lack there of, of my story.  I started having second thoughts as to how I ought to present the story.  I rewrote the first to pages and compressed them into one. I rewrote the ending to be more compelling and I just generally thought about the comic’s story a lot.  Little by little, the comic started to become a burden and it began to lose it’s fun.

There came a point, after reading a lot of books on story and story structure, that I contemplated rewriting it all from scratch.  Part of the reason for this was that I didn’t really have a solid, locked down idea for the direction the story was going to go.  I had the jist of  where it was going to go, what the arch of the character’s would be but that was all.  It also didn’t help that I was planning to write a long “epic” story. In the end, after a year (or maybe even two) of working on it, I just got burned out.

Looking back on it after all this time, I find that it wasn’t horrible.  It could have been better, yes, but it’s readable. Some dialogue is a bit redundant but I think, if I had stuck to it, I might have been able to get better at writing and I might have been able to do something with this.

So here, for the first time ever, I present to you my failed attempt at my first comic.  None of it has any finished art (except for two of the “deleted scenes”), all of it is rough and the character’s designs change from page to page. Oh, and the character Paul, is suppose to have a Spanish accent so the way things are spelled in his word balloons are weird. Just thought I’d give you a heads up.

Here are the first 6 pages of 21. Let me know hat you think. CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE:

To be continued next week…

FOR PART 2:  CLICK HERE

Below are the “deleted scenes”.  I’ve posted up the original first page, along with the cleaned up dialogue.

The page below is the final art version of the page above:

The page below is the original page 2 that I cut completely after drawing the new page one.  I thought this page was bit redundant and it didn’t really move the story along.

The page below is a partially finished version of the page above:

As you can see in the page above, I still hadn’t made up my mind as to the proportions of the characters that I wanted to have.

Looking back, I’m pretty sure I’ve improved enough now to be able to do an overall better job if I was to try it again.

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THE SIMPSONS NEWS

So the schedule changed and I’ve gone on hiatus a week early. It was  a bit unexpected but it’s okay. I’m still off for the same amount of time. I managed to finish the scenes I was given in the last show I was at.  I plan to go into the studio on Tuesday nights in order to go figure drawing. Unless of course, something comes up like it did this week. See below…

FAMILY

Dante came down with a terrible cold last weekend.  It was bad enough so that he stayed home with me and didn’t go to daycare like we had planned on Monday.  Since we are paying for daycare whether the kids go or not, we thought it would be best to have them continue to go. Besides, they learn a lot there and they have fun with the other kids. It will also give me a chance to work on my personal projects.

Dante was in terrible shape Monday.  I felt so bad for him.  He hardly eat.  He slept most of the day, while I worked on my comic. He got very happy when “Sissa” (his name for his big sister) and Mommy came home.  He ate the most that night at dinner.

On Tuesday, if anything, he seemed worse.  I considered it MY fault. I don’t think he slept as much as he should have the day before, nor did he drink as many fluids as he should have. I remedied that immediately that day. He was up, maybe five hours the whole day and the rest he was in bed.  He also didn’t go five minutes without me putting his orange juice filled sippy cup in his mouth while he was awake.

My efforts bore fruit.  Wednesday he woke up in much better shape.  He had a bit more energy and he didn’t have temperature, the way he had on the other two days.  I’m thinking of keeping him home one more day so he can improve more.  Maybe even just for the rest of the week, just to be safe.

ART

So I thought it would be fun if I was to go back in time and show you my history with drawing comics. Why? Is it because I was such a master artist from the get go? On the contrary, it’s because I was so average. A lot of the time people say, “You’re so talented”. This phrase while, often used as a compliment, actually under minds the years of hard work I’ve put into my craft.  My view of talent is this:

“Talent is only good for making you want to continue doing a thing. It doesn’t make you good at it.”

What makes you good at it is doing it over and over and over.  Practice and hard work make you better at something.  I know of artists who were less “talented” then me who are now much better artists because they worked harder than I did at getting that way. Sometimes, “talent” is a draw back.  If you rely on it too much, you might not improve as fast as you could.

One day, on the way home from school I got an idea for a comic strip. Unfortunately, I don’t remember how old I was when this happened.  It also may have happened at night as I was going to sleep. I was either in 3rd, 4th or 5th grade at the time.  This would make me about, 8, 9, or 10 years old. The strip I came up with was this one:

This was the strip that started it all.  I didn’t stop after that.  I kept all my strips from that time in my life in a scrapbook so I have all of my early strips. It’s interesting to see the development of the jokes and the clarity of the art as well as the development of the designs and the draftsmanship. I will take the time to note now, that while I drew these comics, I also did a lot of non-comic related drawings. The comics where just one of the many things I drew growing up. I bring this up so that you don’t think I only got better at drawing from drawing comics.

80 comics (I counted them) and about two to three years later, when I was 12 or 13ish, my style had gone through nice jump:

Like many artists, I was under the impression that style was everything. I know now that style gets you noticed, but good draftsmanship comes first.  It’s like being a writer who knows his grammar, and writing principles.  He can communicate his ideas much better than a writer who has a unique writing style and good ideas but can’t spell, can’t write clear sentences, or good paragraphs. How is anyone going to understand what he writes?

My parents gave me ink and a crow quill that year, so I began to experiment with my first “grown up” art supplies.  Somehow the tools didn’t magically make my stuff look any more professional:

My comic was originally called, Johny and his Gang but then I realized that the Bazooka Joe comics where called Bazooka Joe and his Gang. Not only that, but Bazooka Joe wore a hat and so did my character Johny. I thought I was going to make a living off of my comic (I was in Junior High and delusional) so I changed the name of the comic to Johnny B. Goode.

I drew a dozen or so of the Johnny comics after that and kinda retired the character.  Still in Junior High (about 13 years old) I started some new comic ideas.  This was one of them:

The drawing above was colored in marker.  I had found my dad’s markers and started using them to color my drawings. The comic didn’t go anywhere. I think I only did two comics strips with both those characters. I drew a lot during this time but I don’t think I drew very many comics.

As a freshman in High school (about 14 years old),  I got the itch to do more strips, which I thankfully dated. I took the sidekick character from the strip above, because I liked writing him,  and made him the lead of my new comic strip:

And so my Paul comics began. This would be the character I would draw comic strips of for the rest of High school (sorta).  I got rid of the markers (which I couldn’t control) and replaced them with colored pencils.

I still used a quill to ink the drawings. I did a LOT of experimenting too.

By my sophomore year (about 16 years old),  I had graduated to using a brush to ink my strips.

I drew about thirty to forty strips  with my character Paul in total.  Somewhere along the way I just kinda ran out of juice. I was trying to develop my  drawing in other ways. I had a good art class that opened my eyes to other things. Not only that but once I hit senior year, I was studying animation and that took all my creative energy.  Below is one of the last comics I drew in my senior year (I was 18). It was a remake of a strip I drew when I was a 15 years old, which is why it has two dates:

I began work on The Simpsons the year I drew the strip above.

Since my life had changed so much, I didn’t really have time for creating comics. My skills were not up to the level I needed them to be in order to keep my job at the studio and I had to get my skills up fast (for more on THAT story, I wrote about it on another post HERE).

Five years later, in 1998 I attempted to draw my own comic for the first time in a long time.  This time instead of just a comic strip I was going to attempt a comic book story.  By this time I had a few Simpson Comics under my belt and I just wanted to try my hand at doing my own.  I drew a  21 page rough of my story, fully intending to do another pass to flesh out the character designs and the drawings. I just wanted to run it by some people to see if it was “working”.  I decided to use my character Paul from my comic strips only redesigned and all “grown up”:

I didn’t finish it. For the full story at to why, as well as a chance to read what I DID do, wait till next week.  I’ll put up the rough pages of that comic, with more legible digital lettering.

The year is now 2010. Twelve years after my last attempt, here’s another preview of the comic I’m working on right now. Coming to this blog soon in full color:

The irony is that The Black Terror Kid looks a lot like that original version of Paul  I did when I was 13. I’ve come a long way and yet I’m still drawing the same stuff in the same way. I don’t know whether I should laugh or cry.

VIDEOS

Two weeks ago, I about how much the Macross version of Robotech influence me. This last couple of days I’ve actually been watching Robotech the New Generation on Hulu. The main reason is that I never really saw it when it first came out.  I watched the first episode and I was hooked.  It really holds up after all these years.  It has some really bad dialogue and narration but nothing so bad that it ruins the drama of the series.  How can you not like a show where the character ride around on motorcycle that becomes Iron Man style mecha armor.  That’s just darn COOL!  It also feels very much like a western at times. Highly recommend it.

BLOG

Just became aware of this Catholic Blog written by Catholic convert Andy Beeler. It’s a great read, I highly recommend it:

The Catholic Comedy

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Writing this blog is almost a part time job for me. Tips are most welcome.