new characters

Blen and Kubercheebie are He Hog's favorite cartoon characters. They also live in his eyelashes. They constantly mutate to adapt the ever changing environmental forces in a pig's coarse eye hairs.

Ranger's Wife part 2

Ranger Smith shows up at Wifey's door with flowers and candy. "Boy, what a suprise this'll be!" He says as he rings the doorbell.

Continued here...

http://funkyhb.blogspot.com/2009/05/romantic-weekend-with-smiths.html

New Ranger Smith Story

PINING AMONG THE PINES
Ranger Smith is sitting in his cabin at his desk pining.
He stares longingly at a picture on his desk and sighs.

"How long have I been out here in this God-forsaken wilderness? Keeping order in the forest. And for what? The bears hate me. The trees drop their mess all over the forest floor. "
Mrs. Smith
We see the picture and it's of a very pretty young lady in her wedding veil. She looks lovingly at Ranger Smith. "Gee, I miss Mary." says Ranger Smith. "How long ago were we married? It must have been 10 years since I've seen her. You know, I think I'll take a break from Jellystone and enjoy that honeymoon we put off."
Just then he gets a call from the park supervisor about a rumor that some park bear is causing trouble and Smith better get to the bottom of it. "Yogi! That's it! I'm tired of getting to the bottom of every bear problem! And it's always Yogi's bottom!


The heck with this, I'm going to go home to Mary and forget about bear bottoms for awhile."

BOO BOO PATHOS

Ranger Smith goes to Yogi's cave and tells Yogi he's had enough of him and his childish antics. Yogi and Boo Boo are in bed. Boo Boo cries when he finds out Ranger Smith is leaving them. "Good riddance to discipline and rules!" shouts Yogi!

Ranger Smith leaves, "Well that's a load off! Now to lead a decent human life with my beautiful wife, Mary!"

more later...

The Meanest Bird Of All

Howie Post's Attributes

Howie Post is by far my favorite Harvey comics cartoonist. He has the most fun style. It's like he is caricaturing the Harvey house style and bringing out all its best elements.

Appeal

"Appeal" is more than just a principle. To me it's the sum of the other fundamental skills. It's controlling your visual skills in a way that makes the result the most enjoyable and exciting to look at.

For me, without appeal a cartoon is not worth watching or reading. It's the appeal that first grabs your attention and draws you in to the story, to see if there is anything else that's worth your time. I know that's very old-fashioned thinking. When I was a kid, it went without saying. You read the comics and read the cartoons first because they were fun to look at. If they were ugly, you wouldn't get far enough in to find out if they had other attributes.

Howie Post has tons of appeal. Real eye candy.

Great Backgrounds

His backgrounds are cartoony, stylish and inventive. Oh... and bold!

Design and Style

He has the strongest graphic style of any of the Harvey cartoonists.

Composition

His compositions are not only totally clear functionally - they go much farther than that; they are designs in themselves.

Cartooniness

His characters are very cartoony. It's rare to see strong style and cartooniness working so seamlessly together.

Poil

Actually all the girls Howie draws are very cute. Poil, Audrey, Wendy, Lucretia and the rest.

Imagination

Howie's stories have some really magical characters and designs.

I'm going to do some posts on each of these aspects of Howie's work.

next

7 great reasons to love Howie Post!
and maybe more...

Next

I copied some Eisenberg drawings to find out how he combines stylization with construction and will share what I discovered...

Eisenberg Subtleties Studies

George Baker's Sad Sack Evolves

I love seeing the progression of a talented cartoonists' style. When I was a kid, I bought all the Harvey Comics' Sad Sack books, just for George Baker's covers. Unfortunately the insides were mostly drawn by a very generic boring artist, but the covers were wildly stylish.

EARLY PERIOD

Baker's early style was not anywhere near as extreme as it became, but you can see the beginnings of his signature approach.

He was very good at drawing scenes from slightly high angles, looking down on his characters.

EARLY HARVEY COMICS

As his cartoons became more and more angular, he still maintained a gruff kind of regular joe feel to his work. He didn't become stylish to prove he was high class. I think his style just evolved naturally, a bit at a time.



Watch how the dog evolves over time...

MIDDLE PERIODBaker was great at feet, whether they were human feet or dog paws. Stylish, but firmly planted on the ground. You can't draw a horizontal line through the left and right foot as you can with most characters today.

Great use of composition and hierarchy!

LATE PERIOD
His late period was extremely harsh stylistically, but I love it. It's so uniquely his own style, and doesn't seem self-conscious at all to me.

I love how solid his backgrounds are, and the feet keep getting better and better.

No matter how stylish and severe, Baker's drawings got he still maintained some basic skills-his great compositions, and dynamic perspectives and angles. He really had a talent for planting his characters' feet solidly on the ground plane.

The dog always show off Baker's talent for mixing high stylistic license with solidly thought out perspective and construction.
His vehicles were fantastic!

Aren't these beautiful? - in a manly, chunky gritty way?

I've struggled in the animation business with all the controls and systems set in place to stop styles and regular characters from evolving naturally. Many producers think it's a sin for characters to ever change and they make huge model sheet binders filled with arbitrary constrictions to clamp down on any individuality or inspiration, or just plain stop the process of slow natural evolution. Studios beat this into their cartoonists, until they finally get to the point where they are afraid to let their natural feelings or personality guide their drawings.

The other extreme is when young cartoonists think they need to express their unique personality through an artificially created personal "style". This usually consists of skipping the steps of learning basic drawing skills in general and going right to copying someone else's already established style superficially or or doing a slight variation of a school of style. This also gets in the way of natural evolution and the ability to express one's self.

More color HB

QUICK DRAW AND FRIENDS IN COLOR

Amir Inked Jinks

Amir Avni inked a sketch I did of Pixie, Dixie and Mr. Jinks, so I colored it for fun.

I think I will do a bunch of color variations, put 'em on my HB site and try to come up with some color theories to discuss.

Hey There It's Yogi Bear by Mel Crawford

There are at least 3 different Golden book adaptations of this Yogi Bear animated feature film.
Here are some pages from the Mel Crawford version.
Mel really has a great combination of design and color.
If only the movie looked this good! (There are actually a couple good things in the movie)

Mike F HB Toy Treats

Here is Yogi Man with realistic human hands.
And realistic proportions.
Yogi helps children learn something important.

Yogi in multicolor suit with blood soaked lips.
Can you name these favorite childhood characters?
I think that's Quick Draw McGiraffe on the right there.

Flintstone Angular

more phone doodles on the new site...

Good Compositions Take Self Control

People who are good at composition have to exercise a lot of self-control.
Instead of starting a picture with small details, they instead have to plan a big visual statement that reads clearly and simply. I've picked a couple simple Eisenberg images to demonstrate this.

The overall image above is broken into 4 basic shapes. Then each major shape is again broken into subdivisions.
Then the next level.
Someone with less control would get all absorbed in the details early on. Maybe he'd start by drawing a bunch of individual leaves and hope they ad up to an overall tree shape. Or he might do a wild pose of the character - with all the limbs sticking out in every direction, and no overall silhouette.
Good layout artists have to have this kind of self-control - to avoid getting lured into the details too early. I wish I had Eisenberg's control. I've always struggled with composition, because I want to get right to the character.

Here's another example. The characters look great, but they fit perfectly into a much simpler framework, which helps them read well.


Ranger, Cindy and Baba Looey act as one form, that in turn fits into the bush shape behind them. They together are well separated from Yogi, who is the focus of the picture. Boo Boo looks up at Yogi and is framed by the bushes behind him. If all the characters were evenly spaced and the same size, the picture would be confusing and wouldn't draw your attention to anything in particular.

The characters and BG also frame the skywriting plane in the BG.
You can see this deft arrangement of shapes in all of Eisenberg's pictures.
Great illustrators like N.C. Wyeth use these exact same principles, only apply them on more complex levels with more complex drawing:




You can still see the big shapes dominating the compositions, and the details being subservient to them through many levels.
...and great use of negative space

http://goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com/search/label/Wyeth

Later...

composition means exercising self-control

HB +

I've been drawing caricatures of HB characters since I was a kid. I'm starting to collect them on a new blog. There are a few there.

http://funkyhb.blogspot.com/

I have tons more in storage somewhere but haven't unearthed them yet. I guess I'll have to do more.

Last Bamm Bamm and the Beauty Of Variations Upon A Style

Here are the last paintings from the Norm McGary book.


I love how old cartoon paintings have so many varieties of styles and approaches.Each painter will take the basic studio style-in this case Hanna Barbera, and do his own own particular variation on it.
These last 3 are Mel Crawford and use a very different approach to design and painting than the Bamm Bamm comic.

Nowadays we only have 2 cartoon illustration painting styles - the video box airbrush style, which is not a style at all, and the faux Mel Crawford Golden book style that started in the last decade and a half.

I'll post more of those Crawford books soon.

Big House Blues Spumco 4 - Hwarf "I'm Covered In Hairballs"

When I was first doing storyboards for TV studios they had a theory that you should keep cutting every 2 0r 3 seconds to a new camera distance or angle. This was to "keep something happening" on the screen. I guess it was because there was nothing happening on the screen in the actual drawings or action.

Stimpy swallows his first wad of hairballs

This is all one long scene- the same one from the last 3 posts or so. I've had scenes in my cartoons that were a minute long, just because I had no reason to cut away from what was happening in a certain shot. I did cut in on Stimpy's face to show a close up of him trying to keep from letting out his hairballs, just because I thought it would build more suspense, but otherwise it's all a continuous animated scene from the same angle.

Ever have tears in your eyes after swallowing some nasty puke?
One more dry heave cycle...
antic...
He's really trying to keep in his hairballs, and Ren is getting nervous....

I made a little cycle of Stimpy's "hwarfing", and timed it 3 different ways for him to puke up 3 different hairballs on Ren.







Nickelodeon saw this scene already animated and colored and asked asked me to add a line of dialogue explaining what all the stuff was on Ren. They didn't want the audience to think it was poo or puke. So I added the line "I'm covered in Hairballs". That's why there is no mouth movement.


http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/Hairballs4JohnPuke.mov

**BTW, TWITTER: Someone is pretending to be me on Twitter. I don't even know what a Twitter or a "tweet is" so don't fall for it.

Weird Kirby and his audience of Athletes, Balding children and Ugly Girls

I think Jack Kirby is my favorite "realistic" artist. Maybe because he's not very realistic.He sure is a stylist. You can tell he's influenced by Milton Caniff, but he added all kinds of weirdness to it.
I really love this late 40s-early 50s stuff. The inking is really unique too.

Here are some "normal people".
These are great stories for kids too.

If you wanna be as good as Kirby, they'll sell you this kit that can make anybody draw.

I love who they advertised to in kiddie comic books back then. I can image an 8 year old wrapped in his new leopard skin car seat covers.
Can you imagine this world class athlete standing on the street corner in his health support girdle reading the latest issue of Casper?

There must have been a lot of balding children in the 50s.
Ugly girls must have read a lot of Kirby comics too. Because cute ones don't really need to be taught how to attract boys, do they?

Big House Blues 3 - Lynne - Stimpy About To Cough Up a Hairball

Here's a scene that was split between Lynne Naylor and me. She did Stimpy's about to puke cycle.
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/Hairballs1Lynne.mov
I drew all of Ren's spaz poses, but honestly don't remember if I did the breakdowns. That might have been Lynne.






Stimpy's cycle intensifies here. I found the perfect stomach bubbling sound effect from one of the guys who used to do the sound editing for the 3 Stooges.


I did Stimpy trying to hold in his puke here.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/Hairballs2JohnRen.mov

How To End A Cartoon

Boy, no one made better endings than the Fleischers. You could never predict them!




Gotta have some good butt slapping.




Hordes Of Betties and Butt Slaps

Next

More Bamm Bamm Paintings

Next

I love the red nose technique of old cartoon paintings

That Wacky Jim Tyer

Did you ever read the Jim Tyer stories? They seem to be much weirder than the regular Terrytoons stories. Or any other comic book stories.

Someone told me he wrote them himself, which would explain things. They are full of non-sequiturs and cartoony jokes.

I wonder which cats are Canadian?
Look! A dead pup!

One cat gets so mad at Mighty Mouse, that he just grows into Ralph Bakshi in one panel, with no explanation. You can't beat that.
This is extremely kid-friendly stuff. No character arcs, no filler, just fun.Read the whole zany story here!
http://comicrazys.com/2009/05/11/mighty-mouse-the-alley-cats-convention-jim-tyer/

Crazy Story

next...

Inker's Reward

Remember this? I asked some folks that I had been training to ink some presentation art for a pitch meeting. Here's one Ryan Guimond inked, so I sent him a Spumco fan club package to thank him.

Stuff like this:
and more:
http://rmguimond.blogspot.com/2009/05/goodies-from-john-k.html

He's Dead You Eediot!

Here's a couple scenes I animated.
This head turn was based on the funny head turns the cats do in Kitty Kornered when Porky first kicks them out into the snow.
I think this might be the first lip synch scene I ever did where I didn't follow pre-drawn mouth charts.

Ren has a side of his personality that shows pity for dumb animals. Here it is for a moment.

I set the scene up so that you expect Ren to softly tell Stimpy in kind terms what "dead" means.
But then the real Ren takes over. His other side hates ignoramuses.
I used flashing abstract backgrounds and the sound of furious bees to heighten the effect of the shock of the idea of death.
This last scene is animated by Dave Feiss. Very stylish, especially for the time.







http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/JohnDead.mov

Dead!

next...

Dennis Sunday Pages

I've probably posted this Sunday page before in a post on another topic with other people's art, but it's worth its own post.

I love these early Dennis The Menace Sunday pages. They are masterpieces of design and layout.
Ist of all the whole page is layed out well, each panel fits and contrasts well with all the other panels.1st of all Ketham has a very "modern" style. In other words, it's graphic, has some angles; it's not made of generic 40s spheres and pears. But that knowledge and foundation is behind his variations on it.

He started out as an animator and designed this character for some navy cartoons in the 40s.You can see him starting to break away from the purely generic Preston Blair style here. It's half pears and spheres style, and half "modern" style.

here's the generic 40s design style to compare to

Have you ever seen the Clampett cartoon starring Ketcham's Hook character! Wow! It gives you a sense of how Clampett would have handled more stylized animation, had he stayed on at Warners into the 50s.

Ketcham doesn't think in terms of designing each little piece. Instead, he crafts the whole composition as a design, and then goes and fills it in with details that conform to rather than detract from the overall graphic statement. His use of negative shapes is phenomenal. Each neg space is a design in itself.

I like how that desk is in silhouette while the characters are full color. There is so much information in the shapes that make up the desk, that there's no question what it is - and note how small the details are in comparison with the overall shape of the desk. Small details don't break up a large image. Big details compete with the objects they are part of. This should be taught in every cartoon school today!

Even the curling lamp neck makes a really beautiful negative shape that then in turn relates to all the other shapes, both positive and negative around it.
His poses are always strong, definite and customized to the story and the characters.
Pure silhouettes were a standard technique in old comic strips. Ketcham was an expert. I noticed that the lines of action of the adult characters in silhouette are less extreme than the lines of action in the younger characters. Makes perfect sense to me
Someone told me that Ketcham didn't do all the Sunday pages himself, but whoever did was following his style very closely.

To me, this kind of work is real design - it's not just abstract stylized shapes for the sake of them.

Everything is tightly controlled and thought out, has a purpose and reads very clearly. There is no wonkiness about it.

Check out Ger's site for lots of great Ketcham art.

http://allthingsger.blogspot.com/search/label/Hank%20Ketcham

More Lewd Betty Advances

My, what's Bimbo so happy about?
It's Betty's figure 8 ass-dance!



In the clip, watch Bimbo throb to the beat here.
Boop's lip synch is pretty damn erotic too.
Especially when she says "Wanna be a member?"





Bimbo's Initiation Ass Dance

Eroticism for tomorrow

Sword In The Stone Thrill

Discovered by Kali

Yogi Sundays

This was one of my favorite strips when I was a kid because it was drawn so well and it's so appealing. Most of these are Eisenberg, but a couple panels confuse me.
Like these kids look like Gene Hazelton kids, but Yogi and BooBoo are totally Eisenberg.
These are definitely Harvey... I love this style. Ed Benedict mid-century modern, mixed with construction and composition, organic angles (as opposed to straight lines and hard corners).
I wish someone would collect all these into a nice book, but I doubt it will happen, because it's not a comic that originated as a strip. It might be considered too low class by publishers.
I don't know though, it's so well drawn and fun that I think these pages should be hanging in a museum....or in my house!

Go look at the full strips here:http://allthingsger.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-loose-ends-my-computer-is-still-at.html

Here's an odd page. It looks like it was drawn by the 1961 main Yogi Bear Show layout guy - Tony Rivera - but inked by someone much better:

Pebbles and Bamm Bamm paintings

Part of the purpose of this blog is to eventually be an encyclopedia of cartoony cartoons and techniques.
Little by little I'm amassing as much fun stuff as I can in the hopes that it will be useful to other folks who like cartooniness.
Some of the posts take a long time to put together. I think I will put some up like this, that just show really fun art. I'll always put a label or more to go with it, so you can click them to see if I have already said anything about the subject.
For example, this would be in the category of "character painting", which I've already talked about.
To me, really nice paintings like this speak for themselves, but you can click the label to read theories about it.

These paintings are by Norm McGary.
And drawn by Hawley Pratt.

More paintings to come...

Next

Timing/melody 2

there is 3 seconds of music - right up to where Bugs crashes into the wall


then it switches to dialogue only
but even the dialogue is totally rhythmic as it almost always is in Bob's cartoons.









Where did Bugs' head go?

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/43Tortoise/doityToitlesml.mov

Timing Story To Melody

I don't know any other director who could pack more action into a small space than Clampett did.
Here's a small part of an amazing little sequence from an amazing cartoon.
Clampett not only packs in a ton of action, he makes it all completely clear to the audience. You're not confused by it at all, even at the lightening pace.
How does he do it? It's partly the clarity of the great animators and partly Bob's great direction - which is musically structured.
There are assorted ways to time a cartoon:

1) Straight Ahead - one action at a time, with no thought to an underlying structure, not even to a tempo.

2) Timing to a tempo - Friz, Tex, Bill Hanna, Chuck all timed to musical tempos - without always knowing ahead of time, what the music would sound like. Friz and Bill timed their cartoons on musical bar sheets.

Having all your actions built around rhythmic tempos automatically makes the timing feel good. It is an automatic structure that you can build comedy, suspense and whatever moods you want around.

The musician though, is somewhat hampered with this system because although the beats can add up to a sensible tempo, you can't always fit pure melodies to the actions. This makes the musicians tend to write music that isn't melodic. Background music that is more like sound effects that mirror the actions in the cartoons. You can't hum it.

Scott Bradley's MGM cartoons really illustrate this method. Listen to a Tom and Jerry cartoon, then try to hum the music afterwards.


3) Timing and writing the story to pre-scored music- The Fleischers did this a lot and were great at it. All classic animation directors would do it when a certain cartoon or sequence was built around a song or classical music. Fantasia. Rabbit Of Seville. Magical Maestro, etc.

This system can severely limit the creative choices you have to write your story around, because you have to fit it to the song. This is probably the hardest way to time a cartoon and takes the most skill, but if the director is good at it, I find it it the most rewarding.

Carl Stalling did both types of rhythmic scoring -pre and post, depending on the directors and the cartoons he was working with - some melodic, some just echoing the visual actions - think of the Road Runner for an extreme example of the music echoing the actions.
Clampett seemed to favor this 3rd most difficult timing method, but then maybe it wasn't difficult to him. He must have been very comfortable with it since he used it so much.
He told me his method of timing a cartoon went something like this:

The speed, beauty and clarity in this bit of repainting the stripe on the road just kills me.

Once he had a storyboard for a cartoon, he would take it into Carl Stalling's room and act it out for him. Stalling would suggest melodies on the piano for each sequence and the 2 of them would work out the whole track on bar sheets. As Stalling wrote the score, Bob would write his cartoon actions on top of the score. After the whole cartoon was scored, he would transfer the timing from the bar sheets to exposure sheets to give to the animators.

Clampett liked songs and melodies rather than sound effects style music, so this method worked well for him. Stalling could pull from the huge Warner Bros. publishing library and sometimes they just wrote simple new songs for the cartoons.
The structure of Clampett's cartoons is more like music than it is like straight narrative.
His cartoons are highly emotional and they pull you along in the characters' crazy adventures.
This is a very short scene from a longer sequence, but you can see (and hear) how much action, emotion and fun he crams into his cartoons, partly by using strong melodies to time the action to.



If you watch this clip you can see the overall structure of the actions moving to the melody, but then also, certain key moments are punctuated with strong visual accents and musical stings that fit right into the song.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/43Tortoise/tortoisepaintsml.mov

I'll put up another clip from the sequence next.

Special Timing

Next...

Yogi Mouse

also found by Mike...

Skipping Chicken - Solid Ivory

Here's a funny skipping action.
Here's the pattern:

Left foot one beat Right foot one beat float one beat
Right Foot one beat Left Foot one beat Float one beat
Repeat to the music
If it looks like there are a couple of jerks in there, it's probably from the transfer from 30x/sec to 24x/sec and it dropped the odd frame and repeated another.


In the middle of the musical sequence he floats for a couple beats, then starts the cycle again.






I like how the chicken has bloomers on under her feathers at the beginning of the scene, but somehow slipped them off during the skip, so she could give you a little peek at where eggs come from.




You can still frame through it here:

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/lantz/47SolidIvory/grabandSkip.mov

Next - funny chicken animation

Mike Fontanelli's Toy Box Plus George Shirts

Hey here are some nice toys from the king of happy things, Mr. Mike Fontanelli.
I think these toys are all from Italy and they have a specific flavor.


What a beautiful nose seam!


On another note, look how manly Nico is in his George Liquor T-Shirt. And who is that sexy girl whose chest is covered with George's wrath?

Hey- wanna look cool YO? Buy this shirt FOOL, so support the muuusaak and buy these shirts!