Here are a couple sneak peeks at some of the non-animated portion of the Mystery Work in Progress. Obviously, it’s a comic strip sort of thing. I don’t know where it’s going, but I’m going to keep making it for a while and see what happens.
Soon this little experiment will launch full-steam on its own Web site. Stay tuned!
Between a pile of freelance work and my usual day job, I’ve managed to continue creeping along on the non-animated facet of the Mystery Work In Progress, which I still hope to launch this fall.
I found I was doing much, much more writing than I had time to animate, and that most of the writing seemed to center around the same themes and characters. So now I’ve got all this material, and I need to put it somewhere. It’s a little bit like having to poop… except for the impulse to share it with the public… which in both cases is unhealthy…
A lot of this writing was done at a certain coffee shop (I won’t mention its name, because all you have to do is look out your window and there’s probably one there). Normally, I’d hang at one of the local joints. But this particular location, in a busy shopping district here in Kansas City, has a special feature that I enjoy.
This bizarre fountain, brought back from Italy in 1928 by a major Kansas City land developer, depicts a frog squirting water straight into the crotch of a cherub, who looks absolutely ecstatic about the whole thing. (who wouldn’t?)**
About two feet above this lovely scene is a large window and a comfortable table inside the coffee shop. Beyond that is a fireplace. There is no better place in the world to write cartoons, my friends.
A constant stream of tourists and suburban shoppers passes this fountain, holding their shopping bags and cameras. As I sit there, every minute or two I’m treated to the sight of a family doing a double take, stopping in their tracks, pointing, smiling, joking amongst themselves, and then snapping a picture.
Kids under a certain age don’t find it funny or odd. (why on earth wouldn’t a cherub have a frog squirting him in the junk?) Older kids find it hilarious. Most adults do too. Some of them try to hide it. Once in a while a pack of high-school kids will walk by and struggle to maintain their fragile teenage composure. Few can resist smiling as they pass.
Nothing washes out the wretched stench of cynicism that can come from working in commercial art like spending an hour next to this statue. People are caught off guard, and for a brief moment they stop trying to look cool and just smile and point like first graders. It’s a beautiful thing. Had I known that was all it took to bring out a moment of genuine humanity in people, I’d have been standing there in the buff myself all these years. (though something tells me the reactions would have been different: surprise, yes… giddiness, no)
You can keep your Rodin and your Michelangelo and your Lipchitz and Moore. Give me Rafaello Romanelli’s masterpiece, “Frog Spritzing Cherub In Wee Wee.”
So that’s where I sit and write sometimes. If you’re ever in the neighborhood, come say hi. Better yet– let’s have a secret code so I’ll know it’s you!
If you see a guy sitting at the table by the fountain, watching the people and scribbling in a notebook, come up to him and say this Secret Production Log Pass Phrase:
“Excuse me. I’m looking for Mr. Romanelli.”
If he replies with the Secret Production Log Answer Phrase:
“WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT?! GO AWAY!”
then you’ll know it’s me… or some unsuspecting, foul mouthed stranger…
**I came across one older photo of this fountain which seems to show the frog showering the boy in the stomach, which is slightly less humorous. This may have been the original intent of the artist… maybe someone bent the nozzle down years ago as a joke. But it doesn’t matter now! As you read this, that frog is squirting that cherub right smack in the schlong, and the world is a better place for it.
The 8 or 10 of you who read this production log have no doubt been wondering, “Where has Chris been lately? Has he fallen ill? Joined the Army? Gone to prison? Has he killed again?! Oh, dear. We should have kept a closer eye on him! We blame ourselves!”
It’s a funny thing, life. The last post I made here was about how I burned out on comic strips at the age of 23, and have never looked back.
Well, in putting that post together, I was forced to look back. And with ten years’ distance, I actually kind of liked what I saw.
Long story short, I’ve been experimenting with something new.
I might be announcing this new thing in about a month. It takes a different approach to the same material I’ve already been dealing with in the Mystery Work In Progress. Work on the short will continue too. But the story and its characters have become too big for one short, and have splintered into two projects– one animated, and one NOT ANIMATED! What?! Yes.
I feel very weird and unsure about all this. These past couple of months have been a hell of a bizarre trip, with flashbacks and strange feelings of being young again, even though I can’t stay up past 9:30 anymore. But I’m following my gut, and that’s never failed me before! (oh, wait…)
Stay tuned!
COMICS, PART 2: SYNDICATION
Here’s the rest of my comic making story (continued from PART 1).
It’s not really a funny story, so I injected some random comics into the mix: serious paragraph — light comic — self-pity paragraph — goofy comic — boring paragraph — dumb comic — dire warning — etc…
Enjoy…
As I approached graduation, I got a deal with Universal Press Syndicate to distribute Feet of Clay in grown-up newspapers around the world. This was something I had always wanted to do, but never dreamed I would actually get the chance.
But drawing comics pays less than delivering newspapers, and I had a truckload of student debt. So I needed a regular job too. Luckily, at the same time I scored a position at a very large greeting card corporation as a writer and illustrator. I was just happy to avoid working in advertising.
During the course of one year, I graduated from college, started a syndication deal, moved to a new city, started my job at the very large greeting card corporation, and went through a severely traumatic personal ordeal involving a girl, many tears, a judge, and custody of a sofa. With all this chaos, I managed to carve out for myself the exact opposite set of circumstances one would desire for producing a lighthearted daily comic strip. My personal life was in complete chaos when I started.
Being young, inexperienced, dangerously depressed, and extremely busy with my day job, I was not able to put the energy into the strip it required. I failed to define, or fight for, my own creative vision, and became extremely dissatisfied with the work I was producing. I lost my way, and was listening too much to other peoples’ opinions. My editor (a kind, patient man) tried really hard to help, but there’s nothing anyone can do in these situations. A comic strip can’t be done by collaboration.
My routine was: Wake up and walk to work. Write/draw greeting cards all day. Walk home and take a nap. Wake up again around 9 PM and work on comics until about 3 AM. Repeat.
Every Thursday I would meet my editor for lunch and bring him 7 inked strips from last week, and about 10 or 11 roughs for the next week, from which he would choose 7 for me to ink. (The syndicate often does that with young cartoonists– have them write 12 strips, and maybe 7 of them will be printable).
Since I never did really figure out my strip’s focus, after about a year of this I became as burnt out as I have ever been in my life. I was going to have to quit one job or the other. The strip was only in about 35 papers at this point– not enough income to make a living.
I remember one horrible night just hitting a wall. It might sound overly dramatic, but if you put a gun to my head, I could not draw one more comic. I had nothing more to say. I was done. The next day I arranged with the syndicate to end the strip, and they were very gracious about it. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made, and it felt like a huge failure. Twenty three years old, and already washed up.
But immediately after quitting, I felt great! I felt more free than I’ve ever felt in my life. I started getting enough sleep, exercising every day. I was physically and mentally healthy. For six years I had been endlessly trolling my daily life for comic ideas. At last I had time to spend with my friends and family without being preoccupied. It was an amazing experience, but I was glad it was over.
A few years later, I started messing around with animation. For almost nine years, I have not had one single idea for a comic strip and have never regretted the decision to walk away for a single second. I don’t know why it just turned off like that, but it just did. In retrospect, I was probably too immature to tackle something like this.
So that’s how that went down back in those days, yo. I’m not sure why anyone would care to read all this, but maybe it will be interesting to some young person who’s making comic strips.
For you kids, here are the lessons of a burnt out cartoonist:
1. Practice every day and try to publish somewhere so you have deadline pressure and public scrutiny.
2. Don’t listen to anybody. Especially me. Keep your head down and do your work, so you’ll know what you want. When the time is right, maybe you’ll get a syndication deal, including the standard, boilerplate million dollar signing bonus. Or, try building an audience on the internet. I hear that’s big these days.
3. Until that time comes, try not to work in a job that uses up all your mojo. If you put all your time and effort into trying to please your art directors and half-witted clients, you won’t have anything interesting to write about, or the energy to draw it.
4. With a daily deadline, you will inevitably find yourself in the position of having to say something when you don’t have anything to say. Be prepared for that. Try to think and read and live a lot, so there will always be material you can pull out of your ass during the hard times. (comic strip ideas are stored in the rectum, not the brain)
Good luck, kids!
Like you and your friends, me and my friends used to make comic strips back in the nineteen hundreds. That’s just what we did, yo. It was back before I burned out in a tragic blaze of sleep deprivation and mediocrity that led me to seek other forms of self expression, such as animation and drunk. As for all my comic-making friends, well, they just grew up and got over it, yo.
Recently, several nice people (mostly from Singapore) emailed asking about a comic I did for Universal Press Syndicate years ago. I looked back over some of that old work. Most of it is painful to see now, of course.
Anyway, I’ve never put any of that stuff online before, so I thought I’d post a couple things, if only for my own indulgence. If anyone is interested, here is the story of my comic strip making days:
COMICS, PART 1: THE COLLEGE YEARS
Back at the University of Arizona, as an engineering student, I started publishing some comics in our school newspaper, the Arizona Daily Wildcat.
As chance would have it, the Wildcat had an amazing lineup of cartoonists all publishing at the same time. We also had a local weekly paper called the Tucson Comic News, which published full-page Krazy Kat spreads. The friendly competition and exposure to George Herriman made our work better (at least, it did for me). Here are just a few of the people we had in our comics page scene back in my day:
Chad Strawderman – became a drunk, killed a man, moved to Alaska, killed an elk
Jeff Barfoot – became a drunk, moved to Dallas (necessitating additional drinking), briefly served time in El Paso for alleged involvement with a hooker known as “The Argentine Firecracker,” and for attempting to bribe the arresting officer with a roasted chicken
Wes Hargis – always has been a drunk, speaks fluent spanglish, recently injured while beating up a tree with a shovel handle
Joe Forkan – became a drunk, started painting pictures of the world “as Joe sees it”
Adam Rex – finally stopped drinking, wrote some great books, began drinking again, wrote even better books, spent the money on booze
My first two semesters, I started off with a couple of inconsequential comics that led to nothing but public embarrassment (in other words, practice). The first one was called “San Jacques,” and was about some people or something. The second was about squirrels, but I don’t remember the name. During that first year, I learned the two most important lessons in cartooning:
1. Yes, the comics tend to suck in newspapers. But have you ever tried to write a tidy little joke and draw it up… EVERY DAY…FOR YEARS ON END? It’s really fucking hard.
2. It might be possible to do a comic in which a squirrel character serves as a symbol for some aspect of human nature. But it is not possible to make a comic that is literally about actual squirrels. They have nothing to teach us.
Luckily, I was oblivious to how bad I sucked. The best way to learn to make comics is to just keep making them every day, under the looming fear of deadlines and public humiliation. I guess anyone’s first 200 or so comics are probably going to suck (and for most of us, so will the next 1000) so it’s good to get them out of your system. Eventually the thrill of seeing your work in print wears off, and you start trying to actually entertain your audience.
My second year, I took it more seriously. I got a quill pen and bristol board, and invented a cool cross hatching technique. I took a couple art classes. I started a comic called The Masked Galloot (a misspelling of the word galoot that I didn’t catch until 2 semesters into the strip) It was about the daily life of a Don Quixote-esque super hero. That is, he was a pretend, imaginary superhero, who had no powers other than his own delusion. Once in a while he’d try to fight crime, but mostly he just hung around with his friends.
Here is one example of The Masked Galloot. This comic was apparently constructed entirely around the phrase “bastard file,” a hilarious term I had probably heard for the first time that day:
It wasn’t great, but it was my first comic that actually sort of worked. It began to catch on around campus too. Some of my proudest moments in college were the occasions when I would find Masked Galloot graffiti scrawled on a chalkboard or a sidewalk. The next year, I began selling a collection of the strip in the student bookstore, called “Godzilla vs. The Masked Galloot.” A rare collector’s item! (as you can see on the cover, at the time I was going by the ridiculous pen name, “C. S. Harding”)
After three semesters I decided it was time for something new. I started a comic called Feet of Clay. It centered around a monkey named Abbott, who worked in various monkey jobs– science lab, circus, NASA test pilot program… Here is a sample:
During my senior year I even began self-syndicating Feet of Clay in other college newspapers. I think I got it up to about 15-ish papers– hot damn! I also sold a collection of those comics at the student bookstore.
Creatively, Feet of Clay began some characters and themes I’m still trying to figure out today. For example, there was a robot named Herriman, who later evolved into the robot in my first animated short, He’s a Good Monkey, and may even come back in a different form in a future project: (stay tuned for that)
And in looking through the old strips, I found a minor character I had forgotten about– a lab assistant named Dennis. I always drew Dennis with my left hand so he’d look weird. (in retrospect, he looks much better than the other characters– maybe I’m latently left-handed)
Anyway, that’s about what I did in college, yo. Maybe I’ll scan in a few more soon.
Tune in to the next post for… PART 2: SYNDICATION!
Here are some specimens from the ol’ robot entomology collection. Might these have anything to do with the Mystery Work in Progress? They might. But I’m not sure yet. The words that best describe the Mystery Work in Progress are: a) “Mysterious,” and b) “In Progress.”
So last night I put Post-It Notes on my fingers and waved my hand in front of a video camera for a few seconds. Why did I do this? Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. It’s much too high tech for me to explain. It’s all part of my patented Cargo Cult animation process.
This has nothing to do with the cartoon, but I noticed in the background of my weird little green screen experiment, you can see a hilarious NYT Style Magazine spread on my desk. On the left is an article called Starved to Perfection: Why Are We Not Entitled to Take Up Space?, which documents the horrible images many women have of their bodies, and their obsession with looking thinner at all costs. Fair enough.
On the page facing the article is an ad for Tummy Tuck Jeans shrieking:
INSTANT GRATIFICATION!
LOOK ONE SIZE SMALLER!
This is obviously a subject NYT Style and their advertisers take very seriously. And as you can imagine, it really got me thinking… about how fat and disgusting my hand looks in this video! God! It’s so fat and ugly! My finger is, like, bulging out around my ring! God!
I’m putting my hand on a lettuce and cigarette diet until it’s pretty again.
1. I’ve always signed my last name with a cool crossbar that zips, with reckless abandon, straight through the right stem of the “H” and ends somewhere in the space over the “ar” in Harding. (fig. 1)
I think everyone would agree, a crossbar swash stroke is kind of ’80s. Very dated and embarrassing. I needed a fresh look for the twenty-first century. It hit me the other day: eliminate the crossbar altogether! How hip and modern is it to have a capital “H” with no crossbar at all?! (fig. 2) It looks like the Roman numeral II. “IIarding!” Totally illegible! Pow! Look out world! I still have some kinks to work out, but I think it’s clear I’ve been spending my time wisely.
2. The other month, I dreamt that I was scheduled to give a lecture on the subject of Sharks, at some university in St. Petersburg, Russia. I showed up at the campus with some friends and family. They were planning on going to a museum while I gave my talk. I wished I could go with them instead.
About an hour before the lecture I realized I had forgotten everything I ever knew about sharks. (In the dream I had apparently given this talk before) So I sat in the hallway and tried desperately to remember something– anything– to say about sharks. All I could come up with were vague feelings of awe and fear. I remember realizing that I had probably been faking my way through the original lectures. I know nothing about sharks and never have. And I remember thinking that these people were idiots– not only did they fail to call my bluff, but they actually invited me back to speak again!
When it was time for the lecture, I said to the students, “Let’s make this an open discussion, rather than listening to me drone on and on about sharks. I want to hear what you have to say.” And it went pretty well.
I only mention it because somehow, deep down, that dream had something to do with my animation work.
Scene 2 of the Mystery Work in Progress is coming along nicely. (I’m only on scene 2! Dear God, when will it end?!)
Scene 1 was pretty much done when it became apparent a major character redesign was needed. At every step of the process, the characters have asserted their “robotness,” even though I wanted to make them very organic and bendy like the original sketches. They just seem to want to move and act like machines. I think it serves the story well, so I’m letting it happen. And by “letting,” I mean struggling through hours and hours of painful trial and error. But in the past week I’ve stumbled on bodies that are beginning to work, and am nearly done reworking scene 1 and some of scene 2.
In the early stages of animation on a short, it takes a while to get the rhythm of the characters. So there tends to be a lot of “over-acting” which mellows out as I move along. (get lazy)
To the right is a still from scene 2. I didn’t want to spoil anything, so I shrunk it down a little.
