Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- 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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(Click on any image to enlarge.)

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In conjunction with the editor at CTW, I came up with the corny idea of the shoebox theater (outdated even back then in the pre-computer days), but I thought it was retro-funny.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.)

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