Super Mario Bros

I did a big Super Mario Bros pic that went over pretty well on Deviantart and Newgrounds. I'd posted Daisy as a preview pic and that got a nice reaction as well, so I thought I'd post the rest of the individual drawings here on the blog.









I included some characters that people wouldn't necessarily expect, apparently. I thought SMB2 had the best bosses. Also, Toadette is my favorite to race as in Mario Kart Wii. She reminds me of my girlfriend, Lindsay.



Some people told me that Waluigi's legs should've been longer. They're probably right.









I like old Donkey Kong better than the Rare redesign, but I do like the tie and wanted him to stay recognizable to modern Mario fans, so I combined the two.



I think Daisy is generally portrayed as having a little more curve than Peach, but I was a little less subtle about it.

I drew this Wart for another piece, but it looked right for this piece, so I reused it.



Vivian is my favorite Mario character.

I think this is the first time I've ever drawn a proper Bowser. I used to draw Super Mario Bros Super Show lizardy Bowser when I was a kid.

The Ladies rough comic (NSFW-ish)

A year or so ago I caught wind of a comic book "pilot" contest that American manga localizer Tokyopop was running. I thought it was a good chance for me to finally do something with "The Ladies". Before this (and earlier in this blog), it had been simply about a guy who finds himself in a stereotypical herem anime setup (Love Hina, Tenchi Muyo, Happy Lesson, etc) and has fun living the dream while being self-aware. When I sat down to develop it more for this contest, I realized the potential in having our lead Jay eventually grow tired of the formula and start doing the things he always wished that wimpy anime guys would do. I decided that my sample chapter would be that turning point chapter where he starts tampering with the plot.

Unfortunately, the whole Tokyopop thing was revealed to be something of a scam and I never finished making, or even scripting the sample chapter. I found my script pages while moving recently and I liked them better than I'd remembered, so I thought I'd share them here.

So, for a quick setup: Jay Smithsonian is a college student who was rooming with his controlling girlfriend. When they break up and she kicks him out, he finds an ad on the bulletin board searching for a roommate in Elm Blossom Place, a giant boarding house. When he gets there, he discovers it's an all-girl boarding house. After hearing the sad story of Jay’s breakup, the ladies of Elm Blossom decide they feel sorry for him and let him live there anyway. Since Jay is a huge anime geek, he eventually realizes he's living in a harem anime. At first, he plays along like he's being tortured even though he's having the time of his life. He endures the impossible violence and over-the-top unfair situations and, for a while, stays “in-character” and plays along. Despite her disagreeable nature and my-way-or-the-highway attitude, Yomama, the “leader” of the Elm Blossom girls seems to think she’s the love interest and creates lots of clearly-manufactured sexual tension."

Here's a quick shot of the lineup so you know what everyone looks like when they're not drawn super-fast and rough:


And here's my script. I typed in the dialogue so it could actually be read.
















That's all I bothered scripting, so here's the outline for the rest:

-Upon returning home, Yomama finds everyone in their upset states in the living room. She finds Jay in his room, calls him a pervert, and punches him through the roof and into the stratosphere. In mid air, Jay screams back that she uses “pervert” as a verbal crutch.

-Enraged, Yomama runs to the spot Jay will land. While in the air, Jay thinks to himself “This has been the greatest day of my life”.

-As Jay is about to land, Yomama launches him again while screaming “Pervert, pervert, pervert, pervert, pervert!!” Mid air Jay remarks “You’re only proving my point!”

-As Jay lands back at Elm Blossom Place, Yomama hands him to Breena. “He’s got the brain worms. Fix him.”

-The final panel: In Breena’s dungeon/laboratory, Jay is strapped down with a giant device pointed at his head. Breena’s about to hit a button when Jay remarks “This is nothing more than basic electrocution, isn’t it?” Breena replies, “Basic?”



Is really too bad that whole Tokyopop thing was a bust. The Ladies is such a strange idea that it's hard to even find places to pitch it. It'd probably play well on G4. Syfy has the right audience, but there's no science fiction element. Oh well, maybe someday this idea will have a home (even if I have to make one up).

Ralph and Bichael a few years later

Geez, Bichael's hand looks horrible in that pic!

Since I last wrote about Ralph and Bichael in this blog, something interesting happened. I few years ago, I saw an ad on TV for an AtomFilms/Comedy Central animated short contest. Or was it a general short film project? I forget. Either way, I made a super-short Ralph and Bichael cartoon, "Ralphy Panda and the Half-Baked Ditz" and submitted it. It didn't win, but it won something else called the Showdown over at AtomFilms. As a result (most of) the short aired on Atom TV, an Atomfilms showcase that airs late Tuesday nights on Comedy Central! It actually managed to air before MooBeard! Imagine that! My little indie thing I whipped out in a handful of days beats my already-completed commercial studio project to air!

Check out the short here:


This short seems to be popular enough whenever I post it anywhere. It's one of my most popular pieces on Deviantart, and on YouTube, it's inspired 7 YouTube poops... that I'm aware of. People keep responding with quotes from it, which is weird, but highly complimentary.



That said, I hear far more from people about Weird Eddie, MooBeard, and Strawberry than I ever hear about the Pandas.
Look at this DA poll: http://tvskyle.deviantart.com/journal/poll/544742/ They're dead last!



(Geez, I'm glad I started painting backgrounds. Look at that mess.)

I don't think I've ever actually pitched this show anywhere. It's hard to know where to do so. I like having it in a slightly-adult place, but not full-on Adult Swim strength stuff. Like early Simpsons. I don't have to, though, it can be a kids' show. I don't know if you're allowed to have chauvinistic characters or let anyone be a skirt-chaser anymore. You could do that as recently as Johnny Bravo, and Yakko and Wakko sure used to do it a lot without offending anyone, but you never see that now.



In fact, it seems like you see no male characters chasing girls (which used to be a cartoon mainstay) and instead effeminate characters! Don't get me wrong, I get a good laugh out of how... flouncey Flapjack can be, but I don't see any blatant displays of heterosexuality anymore. Is it allowed?



Also, I've been nervous that no network's gonna want this thing without a permanent setting. I came up with one called "Treasure Pandas" in which they're escaped zoo animals living in an apartment who go on treasure hunting expeditions for cash. You know, because no one will hire a red panda.

Although, come to think of it, I could do a lot worse than to leave them in that Hogwarts-like school. It's possible that that's the missing element that gets people interested in the short moreso than when I usually talk about these guys.



The third panda's Ralph's cousin Arnie, by the way.

So, thoughts anyone?

Not Much Consensus on Strawberry...

I'll talk about Bronson Jeopardous later. I wanna make a post here, but I wanna talk Strawberry for a sec...



I think I'm about 90% done caring what people say about the strip. There seems to be little to no consensus about what's good or bad about the strip. It was never intended to be a Pixar movie where it's accessible to absolutely everyone, but I didn't anticipate getting opinions across the board that contradict each other so much.

Let me copypasta something I just said to E D Thweatt on a Deviantart poll:

"It's tough finding a balance. It's tough figuring out how weird we can be without losing everyone, but at the same time, I don't want to be explainy. Every reader's coming from a different vantage point when it comes to absurdist humor. It's really become a lost art in this era of political humor and 'it's funny 'cause it's true' or nostalgic humor. I don't have a problem with any of those kinds of comedy, but we're at a point where doing something weird will get a label of "random" or "childish". You don't need an explanation, but apparently others do. It's hard to pick and choose when to care about the audience and when to just do whatever makes John and I laugh."

...And so, I think I'm gonna try the latter, mainly. We'll still try to aim for punch lines more often than when the strip started, but other than that, we're gonna be as weird as we want it to be, we'll make references to whatever we want, and we'll be self-referential when we want, as long as it's what makes us laugh. I have projects where "accessible" works just fine, but Strawberry can't be one of them. The comic doesn't seem to be struggling for readership right now, so I might as well have fun, right?

Anyway, here's some art:



Here's one of John's scripts based on a story session we had:

Darkblade Upgrade

The whole job thing might be looking up a bit. I'll keep you posted on that.

Picking up where I left off, I wanted to make the new MooBeard main character images you see in the previous entry. I really busted my hump on those. I had done a Kee-Kee Koki lineup a few months prior, and I was really proud of it. I didn't want to let up until I could match that quality.

After finishing the Moo Crew, I want on to the other characters. There really weren't that many other characters for me to draw since I want to avoid having a PPG-esque "Villain of the Week" show. I like shows like that when they're done well, but there are too many of them and MooBeard just isn't about heroism. So, I got to the main villain, Dark Blade of Fire...



...and I found myself bored with the direction he was going in. He was presented in the Random short as kind of an arch-villain who isn't quite good at it yet-- sort of in an in-the-middle place between schoolyard bully and actual threat. That's interesting, I suppose, but I had come up with alternate Dark Blade that I was considering pitching as a brand new project called "Darkblade the Wanderer"



The concept of this show was that Darkblade was a very capable, but lazy ninja who was sent by his sensei, Master Omai on a quest for some abstract nonsense. The show would always be about Darkblade, forcibly paired with Ungus the Unpleasant, investigating some possible lead or the other for this abstract knowledge, and of course turn up short. I still want to do this show someday, but I'd really rather do it as a followup to MooBeard.



The thing is, I really like who Darkblade became as I developed this. There were some nifty surface things that I added, like his blacklight saber that I think my friend Aron suggested and a new ability to turn into a squeak-toy duck that my roommate Arica brilliantly came up with. But moreso than that, I liked him better as a jackass hero than I did a villainous figure.



I always have Dave (Gruber) Allen in the back of my mind when I write for Darkblade. That's him on the right with me in the middle and Andy Paley who did the score and theme song for MooBeard on my left. You might know him from his role as Mr Rosso the guidance counselor from Freaks and Geeks or perhaps as the Naked Trucker from the Naked Trucker and T-Bones show on Comedy Central. Anyway, Gruber's a really laid-back, super-nice guy, and also, particularly on stage, has a great wiseassy side. I wanted Darkblade the Wanderer to be more like Gruber, and once I got back to Dark Blade of Fire in MooBeard, it just didn't feel right without the new personality. Or the new less-generic look.



Plus, the more I thought about it, the less MooBeard and Dark Blade had reason to be flat-out villains. After all, what else were they than treasure hunters? It's not like MooBeard had any better reason to want a particular treasure than Dark Blade. The only reason it worked at all in the short is because I set up Dark Blade as a huge, map-stealing jerk. I decided I liked the idea of Darkblade as more of a rival than anything clearly villainous. Plus, he and MooBeard are so evenly matched, that I could present Darkblade as one of the few things that actually cheeses MooBeard off. MooBeard's a guy who can fight using any weapon that comes to mind, but he can't take anything seriously. Darkblade is a master swordsman with ninja abilities, but he's lazy and always tries to find the easy way out of things. Pitting the two against each other as rivals rather than the old, played-out good vs evil is more compelling to me.



Using the newer version of Darkblade seemed to bother a lot of folks on Deviantart. I have to wonder if they either didn't get why I was doing it or simply have an aversion to change. Either way, maybe this journal entry cleared some things up.

Next: Bronson Jeopardous (but first, probably some more Strawberry roughs)

Misconceptions/MooBeard

So, there's something I want to quickly address: Some people are under the misconception that because I once made a short for Nickelodeon, that I'm somehow permenantly employed by them. I'm not. In fact, I work at a hospital. It's not fun. If anyone reading who has the capacity to hire anyone digs my stuff, I'm very available to work for you.



So, anyway I do intend to keep talking about developing stuff here. I've mostly lost my interest in pitching to networks. I want to try two more and then focus my efforts entirely on the internet.

One of those is MooBeard. For those who don't know, I made a MooBeard short at Nickelodeon for Random! Cartoons (thanks to the good folks at Frederator). You can watch it here:



I did a full pitch bible, but didn't get anywhere with it. You can read the whole thing at http://www.moobeard.com So, I'm trying to spiff it up, make things funnier, play with the character dynamics a bit more...



I'll get into some specifics in the next one. I'm sleepy.

Back to Blogging

So I've decided to get back to blogging. Some folks are intimidated by the whole DeviantArt thing, and I want to get more in-depth on stuff than I feel like I can on their journals, so I'm gonna supplement DA and the other stuff I do with some bloggery. The focus here won't be pitching anymore since I'm almost entirely fed up with it now. I have maybe two more pitches I want to try down the road, and I'll post about those as I work on them, but I have lots more to talk about than that.



So, for those who don't know, I've been doing Frog Raccoon Strawberry as a web comic over at http://www.dummcomics.com every weekend. The comment box gets some unusual comments, both positive and hate-filled, but lots of people read it and I'm having fun, so I've got nothing to complain about! The strip is a bit of an experiment as Strawberry's something I wanted to do a lot of strange things with, so it's only natural. I thought it might be cool to post the roughs here so you can see what the drawings look like pre-cleanup.



This is what our "scripts" look like. I say "our" because I do the strip with John Berry, the amazingly talented creator of Evil Josh and Billy. eviljoshandbilly.keentoons.com/ We usually brainstorm the strips together via Skype or Gmail chat and then one of us draws up a script in the form of a rough layout. I did the one above. I'll show you one of John's sometime.









Here are the roughs. I draw these by hand, scan them, and send them over to John. John then cleans them up in flash, and sends them back to me. I take those, paint some backgrounds (usually very quickly) in ArtRage Deluxe 2 and put it all together in Photoshop. If you guys like seeing this stuff, let me know and I'll keep posting this kind of thing.