The Mystery Work in Progress is still in progress and still a mystery. It’s going very slowly, but I like it a lot so far. I’m currently making animatics, while simultaneously trying to nail down the exact look. I’ve been working on and off on this project, at night, in my basement, for about 2 years now, with huge breaks for other work and life-living. It’s hard to keep the momentum sometimes. But I have the music nearly done, and listening to that over and over helps put me in the mood.

In the mean time I’ve scanned in lots of random pages from sketchbooks that I’m going to post here regularly, just for the hell of it. Some of these are more than 5 years old, but they’re just laying around, so…

Here is Random Sketchbook Assortment #1:

This is pretty old. I think the dinosaur was drawn when a corporation I know made a really stupid decision regarding the employment of a person I know. The person is doing just fine now. The corporation may be going extinct.

These were sketches for halloween masks(?) I think I also made Shrinky Dinks out of them.

The hands in this sketch are for another short I’ve been wanting to do. Maybe in a couple years…

Here are some sketches and storyboards for an insurance ad or something. I ripped parts of the stage from these drawings and put them in the Robot Family Christmas thing.

In honor of the holidays, here’s teenage robot Penny Clark from Robot Family soiling and corrupting one of the sweetest moments in the history of televesion animation: Linus’ recital of the Christmas story in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special.

Click here to watch!

Have a great holiday, everyone!

A couple years ago, I was at the office supply store when these Avery Matte White High Visibility Labels caught my eye:

You can imagine a pale, skinny, Edward Norton-looking graphic designer, sitting in a cubicle under florescent lighting, dreaming of punching his boss in the throat. But instead of founding a liposuction-fueled soap company, or a quasi-terrorist underground boxing league, this little culture jammer stuck it to the man by mixing a little mayhem into his package design assignment that the management wouldn’t likely notice right away.

Or actually, I like to think it happened like this…
It was all a big misunderstanding. Some employee of Avery, or their hired design house, got bored and sent out a humorous prank memo to the other designers:

Ha, ha, ha. Paper Street. Everyone in the studio had a good laugh and went about their day, continuing to design packaging with sample labels addressed to “Jane Jones.” Everyone, that is, except that one weird guy who sits in near the door and keeps track of how many donuts you took from the break room. You know that guy? He doesn’t get jokes. He takes everything literally and follows orders without question.

So off he went, dutifully obeying the memo and updating the design he was working on that morning. Two months later, to his surprise, the poor bastard gets canned for sabotaging Avery Dennison’s sterling reputation as a leader in paper solutions. (By God, they would not have their respectable company associated with the awful goings-on at Tyler’s place down on Paper Street!)

Today that graphic designer is bitter and unemployed, holed up in a basement somewhere, silently planning the destruction of Western Civilization. Tyler Durden, indeed.

That’s how I like to think it happened…

I came back a couple weeks later and these labels were gone. Did anyone else happen to notice this little exercise in design anarchy? I know this isn’t something I dreamed or hallucinated on a crack binge, because I have the photos.

Don’t you have a cartoon you’re supposed to be working on? Oh, wait. That’s me. Get back to work!

—- UPDATE! —-

Had I bothered to google this, I would have noticed that everyone in the world has already heard of it. It’s even in the Fight Club trivia at IMDB.

If you do a google search, you’ll find many, many mentions of this little prank. One person even speculated that the character was named after the paper labels. But the author of the original 1996 novel, Chuck Palahniuk, said the name came from a couple people he knew. And the Paper Street address has all kinds of wacky speculated meanings, including linking the two main characters to Puff the Magic Dragon and Jackie Paper.

Anyway, it’s likely the Avery labels came later. And obviously my prank memo hypothesis is still the most plausible explanation.

Seriously, now. Get the hell back to work.

I’m new at this blogging! Thanks in part to links from Cartoon Brew and The Disney Blog, there was some great feedback on the licensing rant from the other day. If it made anyone angry or hurt anyone’s feelings, do not worry! I wield as much influence in the animation industry as my dog wields in the United Nations. I’m just a fan thinking out loud, so don’t wet your pants. Go watch some cartoons.

Here are a few good points people brought up:

1. Stop saying Chris Harding is calling all licensing evil
There’s always a tension between art and commerce. In some cases it can run amok and made a mess out of good things. Still, I say there’s no way to argue that a diaper with a character’s face on it is a dignified presentation of that character. All we can argue about is whether it matters. Maybe it doesn’t.
As Amid Amidi at Cartoon Brew pointed out, “it’s something of a necessary evil, so the best thing is to just make sure it’s done well.” Right on. See how he said in one good sentence what I couldn’t say in 3 pages of raving? Now that’s blogging!

2. Easy for me to say!
The truth is I don’t know how I would react if someone wanted to back the money truck up to my house in exchange for the questionable use of my work. I can say that I have turned down licensing deals in the past, miniscule though they were, because they would have diminished the work. But lord knows I have also done some really awful things for money, whoring out my limited skills to make garbage. But that’s a whole different crime. Anyway, I grant that it’s easier for me to shoot my mouth off because I do not have a large peronal stake in this licensing game, other than a love of animation.

3. Disney Princesses
Three people pointed out that pulling six characters from six distinct worlds and lumping them together as the “Disney Princesses” is such a complete violation of their original context that the “illusion of life” is already ruined no matter what trinket you slap them on. Good point.

4. There is hope
We should give credit where it’s due and note that licensing weasels have so far resisted turning most characters into toilet paper, and sometimes piñatas. There are limits.

5. The strong survive
Some characters and studios manage to survive massive licensing campaigns. Peanuts, Pixar, The Simpsons, and Star Wars (thanks for the link, Jacob) come to mind. Others seem to collapse under the weight into expressionless black holes. Why?

Dr. Seuss’ work has been injured, perhaps because the movies are so much louder and more media-prominent than his books. He was reportedly uneasy about the Chuck Jones version of the Grinch. I imagine he’s curled up in the fetal position, weeping in his grave these days.

6. Things that should go without saying
It should go without saying that marketing people are not all weasels. A lot of people work really hard to make money for everyone involved in a creative business. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go without saying, because the ones who are weasels have made so much crap and so much noise that they’ve given the whole thing a bad reputation. Stop referring to characters and stories as “properties” if you want audiences to believe in them!

It should also go without saying that animation is a rich medium, capable of almost anything; that it’s not only for children; that it could be a vital, diverse art form. But that doesn’t go without saying either, maybe because few of us fans and artists get pissy enough about all the lost potential.

But to be fair to the business guys I was ripping the other day, most artists should not be in charge of their own checkbooks, let alone entire animation studios. If people like me ran the show, there would not be an animation industry at all. It would go out of business within 48 frames.

7. Licensing can be a force for good!
Sometimes licensing does a hell of a lot to support artists– like a band selling t-shirts while they tour. The Homestar Runner crew and Don Hertzfeldt, for example, make their living by selling merch on their websites. The merch makes the art possible, not the other way around.

Bigger studios also pretty much make their living the exact same way. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. Maybe it’s just a matter of quality, and artists having some control over their work.

8. Bill Watterson hates all mankind
Here is a quote from one email response:
“Watterston[sic] railed against pirated Tee shirts and that was his own fault. He knew the
demand and he witheld[sic] it from the public. That’s flipping the bird at one’s fans. Not nice. The people who rail the most against licensing are those who’ve failed at it…”

I know this is a common sentiment, but think about it. A man works his ass off for ten years, holds himself to impossibly high standards of quality, and produces one of the greatest comic strips in history. People offer him tens of millions of dollars to put his characters on t-shirts and boxer shorts, because they want a piece of the action. He resists incredible pressure from collectors and his syndicate (who went along with his wishes, to their great credit) and turns down these deals.

What would motivate a man, not just to turn down 8 figures, but to fight tooth and nail for ten years to turn it down? It was his way of saying “F You” to the fans? Are you joking? Sit down for one minute and really try to imagine why a man with these opportunities would choose to resist them. What did he value more than vast wealth?

Forty years from now, Bill Watterson will still be rich from his publishing royalties, Jim Davis will still be obscenely rich from his licensing royalties, and people will still be reading and laughing at Calvin & Hobbes in its original context while they sit on their Garfield Brand toilet seat covers and clean themselves up with Disney Princess shit paper.

The preceding was an old Jedi mind trick, known as being deliberately provocative. Obviously, not everyone is in a position to take a purist stance like that. Nor would everyone necessarily want to. It should be up to the artist.

A few years ago, John Densmore, drummer from The Doors, wrote an article about the difficulty in resisting lucrative licensing deals, and tried to explain his reasons for doing so:

“People lost their virginity to this music, got high for the first time to this music,” Densmore said. “I’ve had people say kids died in Vietnam listening to this music, other people say they know someone who didn’t commit suicide because of this music…. On stage, when we played these songs, they felt mysterious and magic. That’s not for rent.”

We don’t tend to think of cartoons this way. But maybe we could in some cases. Sure we gotta make a living, but there might also be rare occasions when we can afford to be choosy– even unreasonable– about what we do with our work.

9. Shut up already
I should shut up and go do something constructive.

10. Confession
I stole a phrase in the original rant (”to rot and stink in the nostrils of posterity”) from Ben Franklin.

Read the original rant here.

Animate: verb “to give life to… to give vigor and zest to… to make or design in such a way as to create apparently spontaneous lifelike movement…”

What’s so hard about animation? All you gotta do is sit down and make 20 million drawings that work together to create the illusion of life. Easy. Ha, ha. Ok, it’s really hard. You have to be God, one 24th of a second at a time. But the real difficulty doesn’t begin until you try to mix money into the picture. Because not even God can control marketing weasels.

A while back Bill Watterson described an exhausting battle with his syndicate over character licensing. I did a strip for the same syndicate (sadly, not a successful one) and I know the people there. They’re good people. But it’s still dangerous for the creator. What’s so bad about making a little merch? Nothing. I’m as big a whore as the next guy. Money from licensing deals is what supports the studios and allows people to spend time making these things in the first place.

But here’s one of many things I imagine ol’ Bill was fighting: If you don’t maintain tight control over your creations, the marketing weasels lose all sense of perspective, become self-destructive, pee in their own water dish, and take your work down with them. And monitoring them is a full-time job that can really eat into your creative time.

Here’s how it works: You spend all your energy and passion, and it almost kills you, but somehow you manage to breathe a tiny bit of life into a character… your baby. Then some genius comes along and– cha-ching– sells the rights to print that character’s face on a napkin. That people wipe their food on. On your character’s face. That you worked so hard to breathe life into. Chocolate cake and filth all over their face. How disrespectful. It shows contempt for the very idea of a character, because they only exist where we put them. It only makes sense if your goal is to just cash out, leaving behind the husks of other peoples’ once lively creations to rot and stink in the nostrils of posterity.

(These photos might be poor examples. Some of these particular characters were created by committees specifically to have their faces on napkins… but you get the point. The animators that worked on them surely saw them as alive in some way. They had to.)

There’s a great chapter in the book, Dr. Seuss: American Icon, that describes his licensing troubles. Not to mention the abominations that have been made in his name since he died. They have a Cat in the Hat book with pictures of Mike Myers, instead of the original illustrations! I can’t even type that without throwing up in the back of my mouth. Those characters have now been polluted and corrupted. And in the long run, it’s not even good marketing, because they shittied the very product they were trying to milk. Kids aren’t going to have fond memories of that crap, so no one is going to buy it in the future. Way to go. Is shittied a word?

Mickey Mouse is a logo. The Looney Tunes characters are mummified. They’re not in real films or books anymore. They don’t take risks, say controversial things, feel joy, fear, pride, envy… They decorate sweatshirts, grinning and staring, numb and stiff, careful not to offend. It’s a wax museum for cartoon characters.

Doesn’t it seem like there is an inherent contradiction between the very definition of animation– giving life, vigor and zest– and plastering a character’s mug on disposable and absorbant sanitary products?

How about diapers?! We get the kids started at a young age. By the time they get older and have money to spend, they’ll already have fond associations with our characters!

Hey, that’s Winnie the Pooh! I remember him! I used to shit on his face!

Obviously, most of you marketing folks are not weasels (you know who you are). And the problem isn’t napkins and diapers. These examples are just symbolic. There’s nothing wrong with a souvenir. Maybe it’s just a matter of balance.

The very least we should expect as fans and artists is that the licensing stop recklessly undermining the art. This is well-worn territory. The cart is before the horse when merchandise becomes the one and only goal, films and books are only made to sell products, and people who don’t care about stories are in charge of stories. They don’t see the characters as alive– it’s not their job, nor should it be. Their job is to see “napkin opportunities” and “potential diaper impression franchises.” Not to be overly dramatic about it, but it’s ruining everything.

UPDATE: Since there was some great feedback on this rant, a follow-up has been posted here!

I was messing with some backgrounds for the new short. Here are some early ideas:

I like the idea of sort of finding small things that resemble bigger things. Maybe it can make the environments look more like they just exist, rather than having been drawn by anyone… The pictures you get at the end of a roll of film have that weird film-end thing. I don’t know what causes it, but if you zoom in really close, it can look like a horizon, or a sky.

Then you mess with the color and combine them with other things, like torn paper, concrete, and ink-soaked blotter paper…

…And you start to get things that look like weird, distant landscapes. I’ve got a long way to go to figure out how this all fits together, but these have potential I think:

Please remember that all proceeds from the shop go to the Chris Harding Animal Concern Foundation™ for helping the poor, pathetic animals that Chris Harding makes up in his head.

Peacoctopus:

Rhinostrich:

Roundsnake:

Hippopossumus:

Girant:

I’m adding some new designs to the new shop. One of the Learn Self Defense designs required dumping an entire bottle of Dr. Ph. Martin’s Black Star India Ink on my desk.

This lovely image is going on a poster and some shirts. I hope someone orders one so I can afford to replace my inky desk.

I’m working on a new cartoon. God help us all.

I thought of this idea a couple years ago, and it has evolved a lot during the writing process. I can’t really describe it, but it has something to do with making a living. (That is, the subject of the short is making a living– I doubt any actual living will be made by me from the short).

As I go I’ll post bits and pieces here, and at the Mystery Work In Progress page. Years from now, reading this log will be like going on an archeological excavation through sedimentary layers of creative detritus. (fitting, as this project is unfolding on a geological time scale)

Here are some of the very first thumbnail sketches made for this project. Crude! Crass! I like it already.

CLUES:

What’s the cartoon called?

The title will go unannounced until we’re sure this thing is really going to work out. Stay tuned.

What’s the story about?

Making a living.

When will it be finished?

Sometime in 2007 is our best guess.

May contain one or more of the following:

- satellites
- private moments
- burning at the stake
- birds, dead and alive (also, owls & wild dogs)
- fluorescent lighting
- farmers “doing it”
- the water
- fear, boredom, transcendence, hypocrisy

As usual, almost all sketches are done on lined notebook paper, using Chris Harding’s drawing tool of choice: the Sanford Uni-Ball Onyx Micro rollerball pen. A glorious instrument.