Today, we return with a Pandemonium cartoon for our Monday's Cartoon Blast. This was completed between 2000 and 2001, and while it's difficult to see with the color added, an ink wash was applied with a sable brush for shading. The inking was done with a dip pen and India ink. My oldest son was about the age of the boy character - there might be a touch of non-fiction in this one ...
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People seemed to like the "Wing and a Prayer" comic I posted yesterday, so we'll put up another one for today's Cartoon Blast, appropriately enough for a Sunday. These cartoons were quite a bit more time-consuming since I was drawing 3 separate cartoons. I used a dip pen and India ink on Bristol board - as with the Pandemonium cartoons, the color was added much later.
This is the first cartoon strip I ever worked on. Humor writer Ken Alley had been looking for a cartoonist to collaborate with, and I was just starting in the field. Ken provided stacks of what were in essence old jokes, which I then rewrote/interpreted into a visual strip form. We ended up with a little over 50 of these strips. We actually got some interest from one or two of the major newspaper syndicates, but ultimately it didn't end up getting picked up for syndication. In hindsight, I think that was a good thing as I had a whole lot to learn. At any rate, here's a sample of my and Ken Alley's comic strip, "Wing and a Prayer".
When I sat down to write at the time of this cartoon, I was actually thinking about pirate ships - trying to come up with a cartoon about the sea. So I thought about funny words associated with ships, and 'promenade' popped into my head. I just couldn't seem to figure out anything sea-related, so I began to expand the setting. In the end, it was ancient Egypt and the pyramids, and this "Promenade of the Gods' cartoon from sometime on 2001. Based on the uniform line thickness and hatching method I used for shading, it was drawn with a Radipdograph pen on Bristol board.
This morning's Pandemonium cartoon comes with something of a funny story. Growing up, I played both Pop Warner and high school football. When I started in Pop Warner, I was actually borderline too small and too light to play, which would be difficult to believe seeing me now at 6' and 220 pounds. Prior to each game, there was a mandatory weigh-in. I wanted to play, so our coaches would bring bananas and gallon jugs of water for me to consume immediately prior to stepping on the scales. I would literally jam myself as full as possible. Once the weigh-in was over, it was a sprint to the nearby wooded area to throw up everything I'd just consumed. I should note, the coaches didn't force me to do that - I just wanted to play, and it's what I had to do. This cartoon was created with a little autobiographical perspective, you might say.
When I was a little kid, I was absolutely infatuated with the Apollo lunar space missions and the Saturn 5 rocket - I had a model of it in my bedroom that I'd put together ... badly. Anyway, this cartoon, from around 2001, was drawn using the Rapidograph pen by Koh-I-Nor - you can see a lot of the dense lines or hatching I used for shading.
This Pandemonium cartoon, I believe from around 2001, precedes any developed characters and was inspired by Gary Larson's "The Far Side". As I look at it I see that it must have been redrawn since the original would have been done with a dip pen and India ink to give the lines more variance and fluidity. It appears these were traced over with a Pigma Micron archival ink pen, probably an 08, and I can't recall why I would do that unless the scans were poor. As with all these Pandemonium cartoons, the color was added years later when I guessed my way through Photoshop.
As with all the Pandemonium cartoons, this one was colored well after the fact. The drawing style had already started to change away from the cross-hatching for shading, and I began to add more in the way of backgrounds. The cartoon is dated February of 2002, and I'm pretty sure I used an old-fashioned dip-pen and India ink - probably a Hunt #102 nib or a Globe Bowl #512. I'd love to return to dip pens, but they're a good deal more time consuming - we'll see!
I believe this cartoon dates from right around 2001. My older son Billy was 7 at the time and infatuated with Dinosaurs - in fact, he was quite the little expert, hence the inspiration for this cartoon (And I'm sure he would have been quick to correct me in that the dinosaurs were long gone before man showed up on the scene). I was using hatching to do all the shading (none of my cartoons at the time had color for no better reason than I had no idea how to tackle it) and I was using either a Hunt 102 dip pen nib of the Rapidograph pen I spoke about yesterday. This period of time marked a lot of change in my work as I experimented with different techniques and learned through books and online - if you tune in here, you'll no doubt see the changes over time.
This cartoon, among my very earliest work - probably from around the year 2000 or 2001, was done when I was experimenting with different types of pens. I'd read somewhere on a website dedicated to cartooning, that a popular tool used in drawing was a Rapidograph pen by Koh-I-Noor, which I used for this, and many of my earliest cartoons. It's a great pen, but it requires consistent maintenance, or it'll stop functioning. Below are some pictures of the Radidograph pen I used for this and others among my earliest cartoons. It's a great pen, and I'll probably revisit it for other types of art at some point in the future. These pens, which I believe were originally created for drafting, come in a variety of line thicknesses. You can identify them by the color of the ring near the drawing tip; in this case gray, which denotes a .35 line thickness - a pretty fine point, good for a style which uses cross-hatching, as in the above cartoon. The Rapidograph disassembled as you would to refill the ink - the clear plastic section is the reservoir. The ink capacity is limited, and you only want to use Koh-I-Noor ink both for the proper ink flow, and for the potential of it irreversibly clogging. The pen tip also breaks down further for cleaning.
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