X-Men Art

There really was a bit of thought that  went into this  weirdness. I had noticed that Mattel puts out a Barbie for every occasion, including tie-ins with various merchandised characters.  I wondered why the Cabbage Patch kids  didn't do the same.  Several days of photo manipulation later..voila!

My "Method" As it Were....

I'm finishing up the prologue and will be preparing it for publication shortly, but  at the moment I am in search of a colorist ( for reason that will become obvious shortly) so in the meantime I thought I would highlight several panels that are in various  stages of production so that I can show how it is that I do what I do from the  first rough sketches to the finished product.
  Speaking of rough sketches, here is one of young Peyung fighting the original Kung Fu Rabbit, and losing.  I do these really rough, and often change the positions of the limbs several times before I'm over.  I don't normally leave them  this messy, but I couldn't find my eraser.

 

  Once I decide where I want the limbs, I pencil it in with a tad more certainty, and erase the extra lines.

From there I frame things up with a ruler and  sharpie.  I  ink it with a series of  round brushes of various sizes and Black Magic ink. I commit horrible crimes with my eraser once the ink dries.  I will occasionally jot possible dialogue in the borders between frames, and these frames aren't in any particular order other than what would fit on the paper.

  Eventually these will be assembled into the right order, dialogue added, and made ready for publication.

 

  Alas, here is where I run into a wee problem.  I am not a digital colorist,as I have proven on other  projects. I also want a very organic color scheme to the prologue all of which takes place  in and around the ancient rabbit temple.  To get that look, I  broke out my watercolor pencils and  colored some pages then scanned them in. Apparently the scanner function on my copier/printer/scanner was added as an afterthought because even at it's best, it makes my colors look all washed out.  This looks much better in person, and so far, no amount of digital tweaking can  fix the washed-out look.

 

  The search is on for a colorist who can see the picture that's inside my head, and will work for free, or at least for  so cheap that it would appear to be working for free. They also need to be able to  shift gears to a non-organic color scheme once the scene shifts away from the rabbit temple to the outside world. That's a tall order for 'free'.  I intend on giving the eventual colorist full credit, and I would be happy to share  money with the colorist if the money ever arrives, but in the meantime, if you know anybody, let me know, ok?

The Mask

  This really has nothing to do with the  upcoming  Kung Fu rabbit book, but I thought I'd put it out there since it  concerns the  sequential art form in general, and  two iconoclastic DC characters in particular.
  I have a theory about Superman and Batman.  I'm sure  this theory doesn't originate with me, but this is my own particular take on it.  I think the reason these two  characters have become the  mutual flagship characters of the DC universe are manifold. For one thing, they exist at  different extremes of the  same spectrum and , among comic fans, you are generally either  a Superman guy or a Batman guy. I'm a Batman guy myself. It seems everybody has a preference, but why these two?
  Well, for starters,  Batman has always been, to me, the more  accessible of the two figures.  I could be Batman if I put my mind to it.   To be Superman I would have had to have been born on a  distant doomed world and arrive here with super powers given to me by earth's yellow sun. Frankly, it's too late for that. In fact, by the time I was born it was too late for most of that.  But Batman is different. He has no powers.  In theory, if I were to get an early enough start on things, and inherit a billion dollars ( plus a mansion  with a cave and a penchant for inventing) and dedicate my entire life to exercising and training, I could still be Batman. It's unlikely, but not impossible. It's way more plausible than the Last Son of Krypton.
  Batman  also exists in a dark, gritty underworld full of corrupt  police and  corrupt  officials and  lots  of abandoned warehouses.  There is never a sunny day in Gotham.  In Gotham, the  powerful and the corrupt preside over the decay of a once great city and their descent into depravity is mostly held in check by one man  armed with  gloved fists and his brain.  That seems a lot more realistic than the eternal sun shininess and gleaming skyscrapers of Metropolis.  It seems more believable to me that the heroes would have to labor in the  dark alleys and seedy underbellies rather than  zipping across the city skyline in  red and blue,  waving to their adoring fans before stopping to rescue a kitten.
  Keep in mind that I think it's silly to  try to  'darken' Superman. His inherent nobility and perfect hair have their own appeal and make perfect sense.  Of course he's in a good mood; he's invulnerable!  Meanwhile, Batman is  driving back to the Batcave with a  broken leg he got from falling off a roof.  He'll grit his teeth while Alfred  sets his broken bones and he'll come up with a lame excuse as to why Bruce Wayne has a broken leg.  The Batman will heal, and the work will go on. Life's hard, and  Batman knows this on a level that the Big Blue Boyscout will never understand, because frankly, when you're Superman, life is easy.
  There is also something pretty significant about the two of them; the masks.  Batman wears a mask, and Superman doesn't.  I've always found that odd.  Superman grew up as Clark Kent and obviously doesn't need glasses.  He was  Clark long before he was Superman, and when the character is   accurately portrayed, I think what you have is  this  big  dumb, clumsy farm kid from Kansas who has the power of a god.  When he thinks, he doesn't think like Superman, he thinks like Clark. His  morality isn't from Krypton; it's from Kansas.  If that  space craft had crashed landed anyplace else,  the DC universe would be in real trouble. Superman is a force for good not because he's powerful, but because he was raised by good stock.  Of the two halves of his persona,  the guy in the red and blue tights is the fake; Clark Kent is who he really is.
  Batman is the exact opposite. He really is Batman all the time. The wheels are always turning in  his head. He never rests, he never takes a day off. Bruce Wayne has no hobbies, because Bruce Wayne died in the alley alongside his parents. On that day, Bruce Wayne became the shell, and his real  persona of the  Dark Knight was born.  The money, the parties, the lavish playboy routine, it's all part of a carefully calculated deception  to make people believe in Bruce Wayne.   
  It's interesting to me that Clark, when he decided to put on the persona of Superman, didn't put a disguise on Superman; he put a disguise on Clark.   He hid who he really was so that he could pretend to be somebody that he  isn't.  Why not  wear  glasses and a tie as Superman?  Why wear, in your  fake persona, your real face?
  Batman on the other hand, puts on a mask so that you can see who he really is. Crouching on a rooftop in the pouring rain is true nature, and to do that, he puts on an elaborate disguise.
  I suppose you could make the case that since Superman is the fake half, and Bruce Wayne is the fake half, that both men present their  fake halves to the world with  a maskless face. Both men put a mask over who they really are.  One guy wears a tie and glasses when he's being himself, and the other one wears a cowl.  Maybe they aren't as different as  I thought. That is  sort of brilliant in its own way, don't you think?
 

The Power of Peanuts

 I must admit, that I wouldn't mind a legacy of sorts.  I have always wanted to produce something with my art in whatever medium that people will still be enjoying  decades later. I want to make  classic stuff, timeless stuff. Classics exist in all mediums,  and I am rife with opinions and theories about what constitutes a classic. I submit to you that nobody will be watching South Park 50 years from now, but my kids love  Looney Tunes even though they were  made 60 or 70 years before they were born.  'Calvin and Hobbes' is still a source of delight , while  nobody re-reads 'Doonesbury'. People are still playing Mozart, but nobody will be listening to 'Hollaback Girl' 300 years from now.  Why is that?  What makes some things last, and other things rot?  I have three things, in no particular  order that I think determine a classic.

Quality
  The life of  Charles "Sparky" Schultz of 'Peanuts' fame always fascinated me.  If you read about his life you realize that  he really was  Charlie Brown in a lot of ways. He was a self-effacing loner who married the little red-headed girl. While  a celebrity of sorts, he retained a listed phone number until the day he died.   He never got away from the basics. The basics for him, was the strip itself.  The  strip drove everything else.  Even when he was overseeing a billion dollar empire of merchandising, he would go every day, sit at his  drawing board, and draw.  The strip was the  point, not the  plushies and t-shirts and  Snoopy dolls. 360 or so days  a year, day in and  day out for over 40 years, he sat down at his drawing board and cranked out the most iconic  comic strip of all time.
  If you go through his work, one of the things that really strikes you is the consistency of it.  With Peanuts there really isn't any 'this used to be better'.  Schultz cranked out consistent plodding quality just like the Midwestern work horse that he  was.  While some of us, myself included, work sporadically and  the  quality of our work varies from day to day, Peanuts is pretty much just as good any on any given day as it is on any other given day.  And it's still good, decades after it was produced. Even the TV specials hold this  odd nostalgic place in people's hearts because the heart of  Charles Schultz beats right there in the center of it.  It's good because, well, it's good.

Symbology
  I  read somewhere years ago in an interview that, according to Schultz, he did the same  12 things over and over again.  That is to say, there were 12  physical items in the Peanuts universe that he used over and over again.  Those items, some of them tied inherently to the characters, were  both the platform and the wellspring of  all Peanuts action.  I don't remember the whole list, but I'll bet if you just stop and think for a second, you can  come up with the list on your own.  Let's see...Snoopy's doghouse,  the kite-eating tree, Linus' blanket,  Schroeder's piano,  Lucy's psychiatrist office, Charlie Brown's football, the pitcher's mound..you see? Occasionally, back in my political cartoon days, I would  steal ( also known as 'paying homage') one of these items   for my own cartoons.  I drew Lucy's psychiatric booth to illustrate a point or  showed Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. These consistently became  the most popular cartoons because  everyone knew what I was trying to say. Everybody knows that  Charlie Brown running towards the football is an exercise in futility or an example of betrayal. The  term  'security blanket' doesn't even show up in the English language until Peanuts!  That's the power of symbology in art, and it's a huge factor in making something timeless and classic.
  I've also heard Matt Groening  say that when he designed the Simpsons, he purposefully  designed them to where their silhouettes would be  instantly recognizable because all iconic carton characters have recognizable silhouettes.  Think about that. Picture Bugs Bunny in your mind.  Now picture Bugs Bunny's silhouette. It's still obvious who he is, isn't it?  Symbology or iconography  is one of those things that  goes beyond linguistic  boundaries into something else. Now I still think the jury is out on whether or not  The Simpsons  will still be enjoyed decades from now, ( I tend to think that it's going to seem a bit dated as the years roll on, because  hipness  has a shelf-life) but at least Groening was thinking ahead.
Intent
 Symbology and iconography  help make something a classic, but the intent of the creator I think, plays a role The only reason anyone would sit down and  watch  'Masters of the Universe'  or 'Thundercats' now is  either because of nostalgia or because they don't know any better.  It's purpose (besides being a 23 minute commercial for the toys) was consumption.  You were supposed to sit down, consume it and then get up, presumably to go to the toy store. The intention was never to make anything of  lasting value. Mission accomplished.  Now that's not bad or  wrong in itself. I mean, even Shakespeare was  , at some level, a guy just trying to pay  the rent, but what is your intent when you create?  You cannot separate the art from the artist, and who you are, and what your scope is will reflect itself in what you produce.
  Now let me  diverge a bit from the point of this and  point out that almost everything  our culture produces as far as entertainment goes is produced for the purpose of consumption. It's made, you eat it, and  pretty soon it's time for another meal.  The song on the radio  gets put out, played until you are sick of it and then replaced with another song.  The movie that is a must-see today will be   pushed down the assembly line of our consciousness and replaced with something else that  you 'must see'.  That mentality has it's own issues, which I won't get into today, except to say that very few classics are being made now because , well, almost nobody is trying.
  If I had my druthers, I'd rather make a little less money (although I promise you I am not allergic to money) and make something that my  great grandkids can still enjoy than to crank out a lot of profitable fluff that nobody will care about  18 months later.  Maybe it's just me.  And  Charles Schultz. And Bill Watterson. And Mozart. And  Chuck Jones. And Shakespeare.
  Actually, that's a pretty good group to aspire to be in, don't you think?

Artistic Development

  One of the many reasons that I decided to  redo KFR at this stage of life is that  the art has frankly, gotten better.  There are a lot  of reasons for the uptick in art quality. One of these reasons is  my short-lived  career as an editorial cartoonist.  For several  years there I  had meet a deadline, which I hated, but helped me. I also had to take  complex ideas and make them  understandable in a cartoon.  Lastly, I  had to really get better at drawing. The  newspaper gave me a platform to  try different techniques  and see the results in print every week as well as people's reactions.  That was invaluable, as it turned out.  Here, I'll show you exactly what I mean.
  Here is a panel from the original webcomic. It was drawn on  Bristol board, inked, scanned, tweaked, and colored on my computer using  Photoshop somewhere around 2007.  The context of the scene ( which probably won't  make it into the Prologue) is that the Easter Bunny is being pursued through the nighttime  forest  by our protagonist.

  I'm pretty sure this is the panel that  caused Tom Lyle to recommend I go outside once in a while and actually look at a tree. I  realized that I  didn't' have the understanding of shading and inking that I needed to have. I went back to the masters, like Jeff Smith and Walt Kelley (whose styles are very similar).  I went outside and looked at trees. I looked at trees at night , which is slightly more difficult since, well, it's dark. A few years later, here is the  'redo' of that same panel in line art.

 

  But wait, there's more. I had also dedicated myself to becoming at least a functional colorist.  Voila!!

  The point of all this isn't any sort of back-patting or compliment-fishing.  I merely want to emphasis that any artist is in a condition of continual growth and development as a practitioner of their art.  Something that was  a clumsy attempt  a few years ago  might be  not quite so clumsy now.  By taking things back to  square one and focusing on the basic of  drawing, and  being in a position where I had to produce caused  the differences you see  here.
  Never stop practicing, never stop drawing.

Kung Fu Rabbit Splash Page

This  (relatively new) panel will be featured as part of the Prologue story.

My Time With Tom

  This story took place sometime  towards the end of the first 'issue' of the KFR webcomic. I was kicking around the idea of attending  art school in order to improve my craft. I was very aware of my shortcomings as an artist, plus I had some GI Bill money I wanted to spend.  The Savannah College of Art and Design was having an open house for prospective students, and though  fully 10 years older than  the  average attendee,  I took the  trip.
  We wandered around the campus and I felt as old as Father Time. I had  gathered up   some of my more  promising projects, including a stack of KFR Bristol boards, and was toting the  whole mess around. Did I mention that I felt  old? I had done  6 years in the military, traveled the world, gotten married and had a couple of kids while most of  the other potential students could still remember who sat where in their  senior English Lit class.  Most of the   professors were doing, honestly, a horrible job at giving me any sort of feeling that I either could do this, or should do this. 
  One of the  professors told me that  I should really go see 'Tom' in the Sequential Art  Department.  We got directions, and by the time we found  the place,  the open house was  closing up.   We caught the very last few minutes of the very last group that Tom was speaking to.
  It turns out that 'Tom' was Tom Lyle.  Yes, that guy.  I had been looking at his art work for years and as the  room emptied out and as he started gathering up his stuff to close up shop, he looked at my folder and  asked "Can I take a look at that?"
  Keep in mind that his shift was over, and that the guy owed me nothing. He's established and accomplished, and I'm an old man with  some vaguely defined ambitions.  But Tom Lyle gave me almost an hour of his time as he went through page after page of my pathetic offerings.  He said nice things, surprisingly nice things. He said that I was light years ahead of most of his students as far as  maturity in my writing and  my apparent willingness to  finish a project.He told me that  the kids that come to him are right out of school and have a super-short attention span. He said "They claim they want a job drawing 8 or 10 hours a day, but they complain when I make them draw for the entire class period." He said that most people can either write, or draw, but the fact that I was doing both was  very rare. He said "If you come to school here, I can help you a lot.  But if you don't, I can only help you a little."
  it wasn't all pats on the back.  He asked me what sort of tools I was using, and when I told him he  chuckled and shook his head. "Ok, here's what you need..." and he gave me a list. He went frame by frame and told me how I could have   presented the ideas better.  He said "For crying out loud, Michael , go outside and  look at what a tree actually looks like before you try to draw one." He talked about  how a movie director  uses different angles to make the scene more interesting as apparently I had fallen into the habit of drawing a plain horizontal shot. In 45 minutes, he literally changed  everything about the way I looked at what I was doing.  I really wish I had taken notes.
  As we left, the last thing he said to me was "Seriously consider coming to school here.  Most of the kids here are  coming here on Daddy's money and they have no intention on doing anything with what I teach them. You've got more potential than 99% of the people I teach, but I can't do anything for you if you're not here."
  As it turned out,  I couldn't justify the time  with a houseful of kids and  one, sometimes two jobs. I would have had to  quit my job and move to Savannah. The comic immediately got better though, and looking back, it's like night and day. I still haven't gone to art school, and I never did  spend that GI money, but that one afternoon with Tom , and the kindness he showed me, saved me, I believe years of trial and error.  He's a nice guy, and if what I  eventually produce is  worth looking at, he has to get  partial credit for that.