I recall being very proud of the research that went into the rigging and crow’s nest on this page. I was young and impatient back then, but I learned a lesson about the pride that comes from getting some nice reference material in order.
Here’s page 3 of Weirdbeard. Hope you’re enjoying these things. And yes, I know that Boma, Zaire wasn’t around in what was thought of as ‘Pirate Days’, but YOU try finding a city that starts with a B in a country that starts with a Z. Tricky. You bend the rules of time and space just to finish the poem.
Here’s page 2 of old WeirdBeard. Again, I’m not a poet. Also, this is when I was really working to learn how I wanted to use a brush properly. Feel free to study it a bit and say, “Wow. Those lines in the wood need to be much, much skinnier.”
I had an excuse to plow through some old comic book pages I drew the other day, and ran across this- I drew it during my first year as a freelancer. December 1991, business got slow over the Christmas holidays and I thought I’d better keep busy. This had been rolling around in my head for quite a while back then, and I took the time to draw several pages. The poetry’s not art, and I’m not entirely sure I’m happy with the cute little story- it hinges on a theme used in an Indiana Jones movie at one point, and that just seems stupid, now. But it was useful as a sample of my work at the time. I took the pages to San Diego Comic Con a year or two later, back when SDCC wasn’t quite the juggernaut it is now. Anyhow, just in case you needed something new to look at in place of Guessing Game pictures (which we’ll come back to) then here you go:
clicking on it might even get you a larger view.
Here is a link for you. It’s to a book full of cartoons and cartoon paintings and funny pictures and everything all based around the comic strip Cul De Sac by Richard Thompson. You see, Richard has Parkinson’s Disease. Yes, the same thing that Michael J. Fox has. So this book compiles a lot of work done by scads o’ cartoonists all so that this book could be made and the proceeds of its sale go to support research into beating Parkinson’s Disease. And of course, I’ve got a page in there (You could bid on it here. That money goes to research too. Very thorough, aren’t they?) so this isn’t some altruistic “rah-rah for cartooning” thing. No, I want you to rush out to buy this book so that you can see what I drew. That’s the whole reason I’m involved. Ego. Nothing to do with battling disease for me.
Anyhow, the cartoons I did have a trebuchet in them. Like a catapult. And it throws ice machines. Get the book.
There were, as I’ve said, a LOT of Max cartoons drawn and printed over a long period of time. The first ones were drawn on huge sheets of bristol paper, to a size that I estimated using measurements of Bloom County comic strips and then carefully studying a photo of Berke Breathed on the back of one of his books. In the photo he was holding up one of his originals- to a group of penguins, if my memory isn’t too distorted.
Anyway, the original Max cartoons were drawn HUGE with pens and brushes dipped in ink. With rulers and lettering guides and everything.
Later, they were done smaller, then finished and colored in the computer. Now, those files are so old that my copy of Illustrator (which is NOT the latest) doesn’t recognize the gradient patterns I used on them. And the files had to be rescued from 3.5 floppies, syquest cartridges and Zip drive cartridges. Now, things are on a backup hard-drive and writable DVDs.
What I’d like to do is go into the attic for you guys and find those huge old pre-computer originals, scan them and color them. I miss Max a bit. And man, some of those old strips were FUNNY.
Here’s a resurrected file found on some poor old CD in a pile, just to keep you busy.
A comment was added earlier today that read simply “Max was my father.” For those of you with a Star Wars fetish, forget all that stuff. This wasn’t some crazy plot twist that turned a thirteen-year-old’s world on it’s head!
Max was the inspiration for a local jewelry wholesaler’s comic strip. When I say “Jewelry Wholesaler”, you need to think of something bigger and more impressive than you are just now. Fargotstein and Sons (I believe that was the official name- forgive me if I’ve misspelled or misremembered) was a massive building that employed many interesting people. In the time before computers, they generated a LOT of paper. One of the kinds of paper was a trade newspaper that doubled as their catalog updates. (Their catalogs were truly something, too)
And one of the features that was in their trade newspaper was a comic strip. I, a young cartoonist who had been supplying them with line art of ring findings and similar stuff, had been asked if I could do the comic strip they wanted. Well, of course they hadn’t thought of me as a cartoonist, they’d thought of me as a technical illustrator or that-kid-that-can-draw or something. I said, “Why yes, I can happily supply you with a comic strip.”
And for years, I did. Max was the name they gave me, and I was told that Max was a Bench Jeweler. I was introduced to Fargotstein’s bench jeweler, who showed me how and where he worked. I was given a few personality cues about Max, and was set to work.
All that was years ago. The real Max, of course, had already gone before I started the cartoon, and since then Fargotstein’s is gone, too.
Imagine how strange it is to suddenly hear “Max was my father.” The Max in my head is entirely a cartoon character, drawn mostly on 22″ bristol paper because there was no computer into which he needed scanning. But of course, there are other people who knew the REAL Max. A real Max who never knew there was a cartoon character based loosely on a brief description of how fantastic and talented a guy he was.
Weird.
I’ve got this framed thing on the wall which looks like a shrine to my own ego. (Not true, of course. This website is the shrine to my own ego.)
Anyhow, this framed thing is, in fact, a teaching aid that grew into the idea for a cartoon art show.
The thing started life as the pile of stuff I showed at the beginning of cartooning classes. It’s the process by which comic strips can be efficiently produced. If you have to produce one for each day of the year, efficiency plays a part in whether you can entertain people properly. If you make your 365 cartoons inefficiently, it’s possible that you’ll start missing more deadlines than I do, and the final product won’t be as funny as comic strips have a reputation for.
It’s pure coincidence that I produce Hubris in the same way I do The Buckets.
The top panel (and I apologize for the color and photo quality. The thing’s behind glass, on the wall, and a lot of it’s in pencil. Plus I was using a crap camera.) is torn out of a sketchbook. It’s got the germ of three or four things that finally made it into strips, and a lot of lines and words that have had no value since. There are also some studies of hands, and a scribble that had been a phone number. Cool, right?
The next panel is a neat sheet that I print out. It’s got the outside dimensions of a Sunday comic printed on it. There are lettering guides printed on the sheet, so I can letter away to my heart’s content. Then erase it all when I realize that I hadn’t spent enough time on the script before I started lettering. It also has marks for quartered panels and for thirds, just in case I need those. They’re printed in blue and red, respectively. On this particular sheet, you can (nearly) see where I worked out the characters, the size of the panels, and all the usual junk.
The following panel is, of course, the final inks, which are done on a nice heavy sheet of paper cut to size and placed on a light table over the penciled page.
The last panel is the way the whole thing printed in the Sunday papers. Fun, huh?
Overlaying the whole photo is a reflection of me holding a camera. Unlike the funny stories that crop up on the internet, I am clothed while I took the photo. In men’s clothing. A whole set of them. Thank you.
Here’s an old article I wrote and some pages to illustrate it from the book ‘Skippy and Percy Crosby’ by Jerry Robinson. It might take some doing to get yourself a copy of the book, but if you ever want a fascinating story about the history of comics, this is a prime one.
©2010-2026 HubrisComics.com Powered by WordPress with ComicPress
