Barker's Cartoon Museum

Several years ago, I had wandered into Barker's Animation Gallery and was quite blown away by their collection of animation cels and artwork, and quite frankly, by the pricetags.  It was easy to get lost in this place for a couple hours.  Of course, I somehow thought that their gallery was the actual museum.  It wasn't, and it took me a few years to figure this out.

Two years ago, I separated from my previous employer, as my job, along with several hundred others, were being sent overseas.  Luckily I landed on my feet with a new place to call "job", but before I got started, I took a trip back to Cheshire, CT, to visit the infamous Barker's Cartoon Museum.  It's taken me this long to get around to posting about it.  I'm not sure why it took me so long, but I know what made me think back on it today... I've been reacquainting myself with Disney and Hanna Barberra, so I thought it would be a good fit since this is where my brain is presently at.

The museum is tucked away to the back of the property, and from what I'm told, is NOT the full collection.  If you didn't know any better, you would think you'd have wandered into an incredibly well-stocked flea market.  It seems that the Barkers have been collecting cartoon memorabilia for decades.  You name it, they have it:  toys, action figures, lunch boxes, drinking glasses, Pez containers, puzzles, games.  If they put a cartoon character on it, they had it, at least, if it was an American cartoon, it was probably in there.  Pokemon seemed to be one of the few Asian imports represented.  No Voltron, but you didn't need him to feel entertained here. 

I was especially taken by the age of some of the items in the collection, particularly the tin toys.  Disney was well represented, as were so many others.  Here are some photos... let's let them do some of the talking (I could have taken pictures all day... I took a lot; here are some of the better ones):

If you've seenthe Peanuts book by Chip Kidd I've discussed in this blog, these will look familiar.

Tinykins by Marx.  I'm currently hunting these down.

Just a few character glasses....

When Goin' Gets Tough....

... it means it's time to hit the drawing table.  Somehow, it never fails that my safety valve, my way of blowing off steam, always, always involves a pencil, paper, and time away. 

For some reason, November always seems to be that time of year when take a moment to pause and think about the goings-on of the the period, and assess for myself, just what is really important.

In this most recent period of reflection, I've come to the following conclusions, and none of this is anything new, so forgive me if any of this seems obvious or sounds like I'm hitting "repeat".  What's different now is the clarity in which I'm making these observations.

1) Life is too short, and it's going by too quickly for me to be tabling things that are important to me.

2) I need to draw more.

3) I need to read and write more.

A year ago in November, I apparently hit this same point, or at least, I hit the drawing table after what must have been a challenging few weeks (the "new" job seems to demand a lot a this time of year).  I took a few photos of my "process" without giving too much away.  I put them up on Facebook at the time, so I'm going to collect them here because I think they're worth posting again, especially given the subject of this post.

Some ideas will start as "notebook art".

Some ideas wait until I'm at the table.  Concept art for "Battle Robo III".

Scanned lineart, waiting to be digitally colored.  From "Orionic Wars"

Coloring in progress...  from "Orionic Wars"

Some of my favorite background art is drawn directly on the computer.

It's been a long road back to relative health following that bad shoulder/neck strain that kept me away from the table.  You could say it was a bit like cutting off my left hand.  Believe me, I found enough to do with my time to make up the difference.  But given the recent changes going on in my life (which I won't elaborate on here), it is time (actually past time) to shuffle the deck.  Some decisions have not been easy to make.  In time, though, I think the outcome will be for the better, and the results I hope to share here, I hope will be amazing.

Stay tuned.... 

Animation 101

In keeping with the theme of "priorities" for 2015, I thought it was high time that I got around to one of my back-burner tasks of teaching myself some more basic animation skills.  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far way, I had my sights set on relocating to Vancouver and becoming a 2D animator.  I had just gotten out of school and was working as a mainframe programmer for very little money in a tough environment.  I was beginning to think I had made a career mistake, but then the animation industry suddenly went digital around that time, and I ended up becoming more preoccupied with paying the bills and attending to my own coming-out process.  While I was getting my life together (and off the ground),  I picked up a pair of self-study books on the basics of animation.  The books were written by Preston Blair, a classic Disney animator.  The books are "Cartoon Animation" and "Film Cartoons", which were published by Walter Foster Publishing in 1980 (pictured above).  These books have both since been repackaged and are actually used today in animation schools. 

The last time I worked out of these books, I only got as far as teaching myself character design, and tabled everything related to moving pictures due to time and technological constraints... it's not like I had a stop-motion camera or an animation stand lying around in my one bedroom apartment at the time.  Times of course have since changed... scanners are wonderful tools for bringing in hand-drawn artwork into computers; I've been doing just that  for quite some time now.  So last night, after working part of the weekend (which I'm not a fan of; more about that later), I dusted off the books and gave it a go.  Below are a couple sequences I threw together, just to see if I could do it.  They aren't perfect, but they are a good first step:

I admit there was a certain amount of instant gratification upon viewing the drawings in motion.  I immediately asked myself, why did I not do this sooner??  Well, I am sure I could spend a lot of time second guessing myself for the decisions I've either made or not made, but hell... my drawings are moving!!  So what will come next... not sure, but it's time to draw.

Wayback Machine: The Super Kids League!!

No it's not the Justice League, and it sure as hell isn't Teen Titans Go (good grief, I hate that show!!). It's not even the Legion of the Super Heroes but if you guessed if they inspired it, you'd be pretty close!  Ladies and gentlemen, dusted off for the first time in three decades, is an original drawing of some super teens that I came up with back when I was a teen myself... (drumroll please)... THE SUPER KIDS LEAGUE!!

Here they are, as they looked back in 1980-something... Wonder Kid, Inviso-Kid, Colormatic, Thundercloud, and Wombat, just to name a few... my new favorite is the one at the top, center.... Flame Boy (think "Human Torch") with his hand tea-potting on his hip with just the right amount of Fabulosity.... if that's really a word (I doubt it).

I mean, the work is all very derivative... if DC or Marvel had a hero that did something, I made my own version of it.  I actually designed two sets of heroes back then... Laughing Lad (top row, right) was in both leagues.  Of course, for all the things I loved to create, I never really took these works to the next level... I did actually start a comic for Zippy, the borderline inappropriately named boy speedster.  It was to be a secret origin tale where he (and untold others) gained their powers from a tremendous glowing meteorite that lands in the woods behind his house.  He later meets up with Inviso-Kid and become anti-bullying champions.  That book, along with many others, lay filed away and unfinished.  For years, I berated myself for having so many unfinished pieces of work, but I've since learned their purpose.  They were all skill-developing endeavors.  It was a big problem to start a project, only to find that your expertise and style were now much better than when you started.  It would have been too much to go back and start everything over... so I took them as far as I could at the time and moved on.  In the end, I became a better artist.

It just so happened the other day, that I was cleaning house, and as my mind normally does, it wandered on to something a little more entertaining than vaccuming, and it just so happened that these heroes came bubbling up to the surface of my mind.  Suddenly I was plotting out what could be the makings of my next full comic.  One never knows... this is really a good sign.  I did post recently about balance in my activities... the more these things work their way to the surface, the easier it will be for me to choose what comes next!

Oh... so that people don't think I totally, totally abandoned these kids to time... here is a rework I did a few years ago... luckily I had the good sense to file them all together so that I could find them.  I wanted to know what these heroes would look like if I drew them today.  I avoided all manner of "Hollywood rewriting" and instead just drew them with today's skills - minus the hands... I totally admit I rushed the hands to get the below drawing done.  As they came to life on the paper, the pencil nearly ran away from me with excitement to see these guys again after so many years.  I could almost see them animating themselves on the page.  It may be time to reboot Reflex Comics!!

My First Book??!!!

And so, here it is, my first anthology of sorts, documenting 20 years of cartooning the Hairyer Parts Universe.  What??  Twenty years??  Where could the time have gone??

I won't deny that the dream of being published has always been in mind, but doing the work of actually producing a book, when one sets out to do it, is actually a LOT of work.  I actually can't say it's my first book if you count that I've created a handful of comic books ahead of this publication, and I can say first hand, making those comics were a LOT of concentrated, hard work.  That aside, this really is my first softbound collection, a restrospective of sorts.  I actually started editing it about six years ago, and it got shelved for one reason or another.  It was a momentary, passing thought the other day, that I needed some kind of prize to donate to a Mr. Connecticut Bear basket raffle.  I said to myself, "Why not create a Hairyer Parts basket?"  So you know me, I can't do anything with half effort; I decided that any basket of mine was going to need products, and no product like an actual book.  So I went back to my original project, dusted it off, and looked at the date of the very first drawing.

1995.

<Momentary pause>

I first doodled the face that would become the lead character in my bearishly inspired universe on some unknown day in 1995.... which means it's totally appropriate to label the book as a 20th Anniversary Collection.  The strip that eventually became "Hairyer Parts" first debuted in the Northeast Ursamen's "Bears & Hunters" newsletter two years later in 1997, which means the series remained in development for two years.  There was a lot of trial and error in those early years.  When I stop and look at where I started, as compared to where I am now, I realized that perseverance was the key, all along, to making a good book.

It feels a little unusual to put something like this out, directly for sale, especially when I've spent most of my energies working for charitable means.  I pause to remind myself, that aside from the few cartoon prints that I sold more recently, I've never made any money off of my work.  A large percentage of it has been donated to auctions, raffles, or advertising campaigns, all of which have gone on to make thousands of dollars either for charities or community organizations (and I mean, THOUSANDS).  When you look at it that way, if I end up selling a couple dozen books and making a few bucks off of them, I guess I shouldn't feel so bad about it.  There is this other philosophy that gets into how artists need to think in terms of what they are really worth.... it's something I ought to get better at, so in that spirit:

If you've ever enjoyed my cartoons, please go buy my book here!!  Follow the link to get a preview.  Share and enjoy :-)

Priorities....

Sometimes it takes dramatic events to help you gain a better perspective.  Recently a friend of a friend passed away, at much too young of an age.  Our conversation drifted over to, of all things, never knowing when your time is going to come.  My thoughts went to something that's always been on my mind... that I have so many things that I still want to do.  My friends response was brilliant:  then you set priorities.

I remember being a tender young age of 19, and like most young adults, I wanted the world.  My mother was recently single, I was getting closer to finishing my degree in Computer Science.  I was in the middle of a college co-op, when I got the idea that I wanted to do a summer abroad.  I really felt like this was the one time in my life that I would have the chance to do something as crazy as going to Europe for a summer.  Meanwhile, I was commuting to school with an old beat-up 1976 Buick Skylark, and it was really on it's last leg.  So my mother says to me, as most good mothers would, as I'm blabbing about wanting to go to Europe, "You need that car to get to school and work.  Set your priorities."  So what did I do?  I made BOTH the new car, and the trip abroad, a priority.  I used my full-time co-op pay to qualify for a new car loan, and I continued working after the co-op term was done, and banked as much cash as I could.  I ended up with a new car, a two month stay in Munich, and enough credits from the summer to put me within grasp of a double major in both German and Computer Science. 

But... priorities.  I guess I am no stranger to filling my plate, reorganizing, and then filling it up again.  It's not always a winning strategy.  Case and point, Spookybear of 2013, the Heroes & Villains party.  I very much wanted to remain in retirement from my volunteer life while I sorted out what I wanted to do and when.  Of course, I wasn't going to say no when asked for help.  I basically art-directed the whole thing, which ended up with a larger than-life comic book on the walls of the night club, custom animations, a well-photographed ad campaign, and more.  But in the end, I broke under the strain of the work.  Even now, the recovery of my ongoing neck and shoulder issues continues at a slow pace.  I'm getting there, but not as quickly as I'd like.  So unfortunately, my time at the drawing board has been minimized.

Priorities. 

I started this blog as a way to express a lot about who I am as a creative person, but of course, I am so much more than just a creative person.  I try to make some tie-in's as I write and as I share.  But I suppose a year off from the drawing table meant I also ended up taking a year off from this blog.

So what's really important to me?  The art?  Volunteering?  Building things out of plastic bricks?  Throwing charitable bar parties?  Teaching people tracking and how to tie knots?  Making music??

Well, you know.... all of it is important to me.  Maybe the key word for 2015 will be one that I became more aware of in 2014 thanks to a new job:  BALANCE. 

Below is a cartoon I made of our current Mr. Connecticut Bear, which was raffled off at our Lumberjock party at the beginning of the month.  It's also my first real finished piece of work in many months.  Hopefully it will be one of many more to come in the next year.