Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- In the last week, Jerry Beck on Cartoon Brew posted a note about the recent editions of the comic strip, Gasoline Alley.

This has long been one of my favorite comic strips. When Dick Moores (original assistant to Chester Gould on Dick Tracy) took over the strip, I thought the artwork, specifically the compositon, kept getting better and better. Very clean and open and sharp.

I remember seeing a book on filmmaking where I first learned how NOT to cross the 180. This cross cutting information was illustrated with a 4 panel strip from Gasoline Alley. How perfect! The strip was always quite cinematic; excellently illustrating good film technique from panel to panel.

Gasoline Alley really started when playboy, Walt Skeezix found a baby on his doorstep Feb. 14, 1921. The boy was named Skeezix, and over the years Skeezix Wallet grew naturally, and an audience grew with him. It was played out like the first soap opera – and it probably was.

The strip was understandably enormously popular.
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In 1941, Whitman publishing followed several other books for “girls and boys” with a novel about Skeezix Wallet and Nina Clock which was written by Frank King. I haven’t yet read the book (even though I’ve had it for a while), but I love owning it.

The pages are printed on newsprint – designed for deterioration, I think. The illustrations by King were done specifically for his book.

The book’s first double page spread

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- I’d like to post a piece by James Stevenson that appeared in his book, Something Marvelous Is About To Happen. It’s a great take on comic strip cartoonists and the relationship they have to their strips. Here it is, The Last Days of Tootie and Fred.

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- I’m a fan of the New Yorker magazine and many of its cartoonists.
Over the years, there have been three who have resonated most sharply with me: Steinberg, Steig and Stevenson. I’ve always felt that these three guys have gone beyond cartoonist to fine artist.

I’ve done films adapted from the work of William Steig and James Stevenson and love both equally.

Stevenson is less abstract than either Steinberg or Steig. He’s as much a journalist as an illustrator and has written excellent pieces for both the New Yorker and the New York Times, as well.

I love his many children’s books, but the two books which were compiled from his odd cartoon/essays are among the treasures I own and cherish most. Something Marvelous Is About To Happen and Uptown Local Downtown Express can only be called gems.
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The page above illustrates “The Case Against Prof. Lamberti,” an attempt to disprove the existence of Prof. Lamberti.
Below is a sample essay, I found in Uptown Local, which shows an animator’s sense of observation in depicting body language. This one seems appropriate today since it’s raining in NYC as I write this.

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- For those of you who haven’t found it yet, may I suggest you go to the Op Ed section of the NYTimes where Maira Kalman has her column, The Principles of Uncertainty. It’s an extended, illustrated observation that is well worth visiting.

- Also in today’s NYTimes is a Op Art piece by Jules Feiffer. Another excellent piece from this great artist.

- As of September 15, a two-part exhibition, presented simultaneousely at The Jewish Museum and The Newark Museum. This is being billed as “the first major museum examination of one of America’s most popular art forms.”

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Hundreds of originals created by some of America’s most influential comics artists will be on display.

The Newark Museum will show comic strips from the first half of the 20th century through the work of such artists as Winsor McCay, Chester Gould and Charles M. Schulz. The museum also has a schedule of guest artists including Jules Feiffer, Patrick McDonnell, Jerry Robinson, Pete Hamill, and Steven Guarnaccia who will talk. For schedule.

The Jewish Museum will display comic books from the 1950s onward including Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, R. Crumb, Chris Ware and more.
The Jewish Museum also has the exhibition Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics with over 70 works from the golden age of comic books focusing on superheroes and super villains such as Superman, Batman and the Joker.

There are two separate books on sale at each museum.

The Jewish Museum 1109 Fifth Avenue (92nd Street), NY, NY
The Newark Museum 49 Washington Street, Newark, NJ

– As I pointed out in the past, I’m a big fan of Cliff Sterrett‘s comic strip, Polly & Her Pals. It’s an exuberant, funny strip that’s packed with a lively graphic design.

Originally, like a number of other strips, the story was about Polly and her dating life and was called Positive Polly . It didn’t take long for Sterrett to move “Maw” and “Paw” into the household, and before long the strip was about them and renamed. Polly and her boyfriends moved into the background.

Sterrett‘s design of Polly & Her Pals had the life of Herriman’s Krazy Kat strip, but it owed more to Picasso than cartoonists of the past. He used cubism, expressionism and surrealism at the strip’s height in the 20′s.

Polly was accompanied by the “top strip,” Dot and Dash, two dogs that went through their own, non-speaking adventures above Polly’s panels. This was eventually replaced by Sweethearts and Wives, another commentary on marriages.

I can’t get enough of it.

Here are four more of the Sunday pages:

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- Thanks to Drawn, I was led to a site that gave me the Evolution of Speech Balloons. This is an off-page from Andy Bleck’s website: Andy’s Comix Website. It’s worth visiting both.

- A site I’d like to draw to your attention is the Comic Art Collective. There, you’ll find the work of a number of comic artists with works for sale. A good way to view some beautiful pieces.

A couple of artists I’d like to single out: Kim Deitch, always brilliant (see the drawing to the right); Peter Bagge, cartoon distortion that makes a point; Tony Millionaire(The Maakies), hilarious work.

You know, all the folk at this site do fine work, and I shouldn’t single any of them out.

My only complaint is that the reproductions aren’t large enough to easily read.

- Digital Media Effx is a site that includes a number of interesting essays on some animation greats: Ward Kimball, Terry Giliam, John Hubley, and Bill Hanna.

- Daniel Thomas MacInnes on his site Conversations on Ghibli, gives a report on the opening of Goro Miyazaki‘s animated feature, Gedo Senki(Tales From The Earthsea). The son of Hayao Miyazaki makes his film debut with this one, and anticipation is high for how the son’s film will compare to the father’s body of work.

Daniel Thomas’ posting leads to a couple of the Japanese reviews. This is an adaptation of Ursula LeGuin’s novels about Earthsea. The book was adapted into a bad live action Sci-Fi series in 2004. Reviewed here.

- I’m looking forward to the retrospective of the works of Bruno Bozzetto coming to the Ottawa Animation Fest, this September. His site is a good way to aquaint yourself with this Animation Master of the medium. Take a look at Freedom, Life, or Neuro to see what simple and effective work can be done with Flash.

- I have to admit that I’ve never understood the allure of zombies, but I have to admit there is one for a lot of people. A number of comic sites have been sprinkling the blogosphere, and there’s some fine art to be found there as well as some interesting approaches to laying out a comic page.

– A friend of mine, who’s worked in my studio for years, Jason McDonald has built a site around a comic that he’s creating and unveiling: one page each week. Like all of Jason’s art, the imagery is imaginative and clever. He’s focussing on the day-to-day routine of a teenage zombie, tedium and all included. It’s the Adams Family wired to feel more at home in the 50′s than the original. Leave It To Beaver, and Beaver is a girl and a zombie.

My Living Dead Girl includes lots more than the strip. There’s a blog, GAK News, giving info about the strip’s development, including lots of art, photo reference com- parisons to the art, and even a store to buy lots of things.

Jason also has another site featuring his non-zombie artwork: jasonmcdonaldesign.com

(By the way, I’m long overdue to post a focus on Jason’s work for my studio. He’s shaped many a film for me with some exciting, humorous and daring Art Direction.)

- Zombies? is a webcomic site by Eric Maziade, and it’s very different from Jason’s strip. It, too, is developing on line as Eric writes the strip, and the site/blog offers writing as well. However, the link list leads you to some other zombie strips.

Eric Maziade also two other sites:
One called In The Maze which seems to have more of a technological bent discussing the technical aspects of hardware and the internet. The site also has a number of good links including other non-zombie webcomics.
The other called Maze’s Lair features a lot of Eric’s artwork.

- Animated films have been stealing from comic strips forever. I mentioned weeks back that the Letterman films took some of its inking style from Herriman’s Krazy Kat.

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- This strip (only a partial strip is posted) was used on Raggedy Ann & Andy as a guide for Ann, Andy & the Camel to slide down the banister into the King’s palace. Other strips from McCay’s Little Nemo were used as well.

John Kimball animated this sequence, and I did many of the inbetweens (I also got to dole out a lot of them).
Between this and the seq- uence where 72 camels animated concentrically into the distance, six months of the film moved very slowly for me. I was doing a lot more supervision and pro- duction work concurrently, but kept coming back to this Kimball animation.

- Nancy Beiman, on her blog The Demon Duck of Doom, posts some material about Winsor McCay and Little Nemo. It’s a good read, and Nancy has an equally good blog.

- Time to recap:
Last week I’d posted some Letterman comic strips I’d done for the Electric Company Magazine way back in 1973. My server went down, and a couple of my July posts were lost. I’ve decided to put these back up, adding two more strips to the batch.

Between the second and third seasons of Letterman, I was kept on staff with the Hubley Studio to draw a comic version of the animated pieces we’d been doing. The strips had to accompany the airing of the shows within each monthly issue of the magazine. John Hubley gave me complete latitude to do what I wanted with the strip. (This was how he worked with his animation as well. If he trusted you, he let you go. He worked with animators exactly as he worked with the actors doing the improvised Voice Overs.)

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I pretty much had to bounce my scripts off the shows’ scripts, but I was asked to make it interactive, if possible. Teaching kids was everything, and each show had its instructional guide lines.

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In conjunction with the editor at CTW, I came up with the corny idea of the shoebox theater (outdated even back then in the pre-computer days), but I thought it was retro-funny. I also started the strips with all the dialogue in balloons, but slowly removed the words from the balloons as the strips progressed. The idea was to get the kids to fill in the appropriate dialogue – or any words they wanted. It was also designed to be a coloring book.

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The only time John Hubley looked in on me, was to comment on the line work I did on the strip. For the animated shows, we originally took the linear style from Krazy Kat – including the simple cross-hatching that Herriman used. When it came time for the strip, the lines had to get a bit bolder (cheap printing; make it a coloring book). John had seen some drawings I did in which I manipulated the ink line by copying over every line, and he was curious to see what it would look like with Letterman. I played with that a bit trying to maintain the original feel and get it to be fun. Looking back on it makes me cringe a bit, but it was a long time ago.

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I think I did six strips, two pages each. It enabled me to keep working on some pet projects going on at the studio, pay my salary, and give me a small bit of autonomy. A good deal for everyone involved.

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(To see this episode animated, go to this link.)

– We’ve had an enormous number of problems with our server, Shield Host. It’s been more than annoying. The site has had enormous problems over the past six months, losing a number of postings and a lot of work. It’s still not operating properly, so I’m not sure if we’ll go down again.

I apologize for those of you that haven’t had access to the site this past weekend. With any luck we’ll be operating normally now.

- For those who are looking for some imaginative art sites to view stunning images, take a look at the Fantastic In Art & Fiction site from the Cornell library. There’s a large range of pictures of devils, and monsters, and angels, and freaks. It’s a nice way to spend a few minutes if you’re searching for some medieval inspiration.

- Another site with some interesting imagery is designed for the person who loves comics or Roy Lichtenstein, or just would like to see where Roy Lichtenstein ripped-off those comic images, go to the Lichtenstein Project. There you’ll see side-by-side pairings of the artist’s paintings and the comic artists’ strip images. Decide which you like best.

David Barsalou, who put this site together, also has complete reference material for each of the strip artists at his flickr place.

- A Scanner Darkly opened to mixed reviews. Most animators seem dead-set against this rotoscoped-type animation. However, it still is animation (just as we call “motion-capture” animation), and a lot of work went into it. Since I’m a big fan of Richard Linklater, I’ll gladly take his brand of “animation” rather than none. There are a number of articles about the making of. One interesting one is at the NYTimes on-line site; it’s a narrated slide show with a lot of models displayed. Worth the three-minute tour.

- I also still like Manohla Dargis’ review best of all those I’ve read. Her last paragraph covers anything anyone has to say about this movie.