It's always exciting to get another semester of cartooning classes underway. Every class has its own flavor, its own dynamic. This Saturday, it began yet again.
I'm trying a couple of new approaches with the two classes. I managed to snag a number of Spongebob Squarepants how to draw books off of ebay for very cheap. I told the younger kids that we are going to become Spongebob experts. Our first class began with printouts of background for the animated show, as well as some material from the Spongebob animator's bible. Each kid had to copy a background. For me, this is working backwards. However, I'm hoping this will force the kids to think in terms of placing their characters in a context later on. We shall see. For homework, of course, I gave them each one of the books and told them to go crazy.
For the second class, I discovered a stack of Disney Treasure Planet books at the Ocean State Job Lot. These are beautiful table books jam packed with production stills and preliminary drawings from the movie. Regularly retailing for twenty dollars, I bought fifteen of them for a dollar fifty cents a piece. I'm using this as sort of a writing prompt with the students. We're doing comic books and I want them to think in terms of creating entire universes. Like the younger kids, we began with backgrounds, in this case, how to draw pirate ships. Once they started on the backgrounds, I showed them how to add characters and got out the vast array of how to draw books I've been buying off of ebay over the past few months. I tell you, those books are a godsend. The kids get very enthusiastic when they find a book with the type of character they like.
For homework, the older kids got pre-made thumbnail paper, so they could rough out the layout for their comic books. I figure if half of them actually do the homework, it's a pretty good percentage.
Rod and I went to see our son, Ted's, stand up comedy gig at Funny Bone comedy club at Buckland Hills. We couldn't find the place and called Ted. "It's between the JC Penney's and Barnes and Noble". When we walked in, there were two lovely young women arriving at the same time. Lo and behold, this turned out to be Ted's roommate and her good friend. Of course, this roommate of Ted's at one point referred to him as "honey", so I have my suspicians about this relationship.
The comedians were uniformly really good. This was Ted's first time at Funny Bone. It's a chain and it's very picky about who gets gigs there. It turns out that they were having a contest, sending the winner to perform at that dream of every comedian, the Improv in L.A. Ted came in third, which was pretty darn good since he's the only comedian who didn't have a pile of homies voting for him. Just us four. And the place was packed.
It's really fun having a kid who is a stand-up. Even though we've suffered through some very, very bad open mike nights, it's always a great night out, full of laughs, not to mention libations.
He's going to be back at Funny Bone next Tuesday. So if there are people out there who, say, need a new pair of Dockers at The GAP, come to Buckland Hills and make an entire night of it by coming to the club.
Today I took my good friend and soccer teammate, Sue, dancing. I've been talking up this class at the gym called Body Jam which I've been taking on and off for about the last month and a half. I said, Sue, I've got a free seven day trial membership, why don't you come and learn the latest dance moves while working off hundreds and hundreds of calories.
I love body jam. I wanted to share the experience with someone.
The teacher is a super buff woman with a penchant for combat themed clothing. She's part drill sargeant. We are all scared of her. When the music begins, it's loud. I mean, really loud. I think it's part of mind control technique. She doesn't say we're all sissies, but we can see it in her eyes. We all start hopping from side to side, just like she's doing. We wiggle our hips. We thrust out our chests.
Sue looks at me with that "WHAT THE HECK AM I DOING HERE?" expression.
"Don't you love this?" I say.
Whoa...swing those hips wider, here comes the cha cha...mambo, freakazoids...that's right...two three...mambo...now walk it to the right...five six...jump...higher...turn...
Then when we're making like those Wild and Crazy guys use to do on Saturday night live...you young whippersnappers won't remember, but Dan Akroyd and Steve Martin would swing their shoulders and rock back and forth. It's my favorite move. I look over at Sue, and she's leaping through the air. Not that she's the only one. At any given time, out of the twenty or so women in the class, maybe three actually do anything remotely close to the instructor.
Soon the tempo picks up. Someone leaps. Someone mambos. Someone does a jumping jack. It doesn't matter. The music's loud and we're having fun. And when, for a fleeting moment or two, I actually remember the combination of moves, the feeling of accomplishment is nothing less than sublime, but by that time, the music ends and I'm standing with my arms raised with my back to the rest of the class.
I think Sue in fact liked coming along to Body Jam class. In the end, for a couple of fifty year olds like us, simply surviving the class, much like surviving a soccer game, is in itself a badge of honor. Moreover, by shaking our butts and doing Beyonce moves, we asserted ourselves as not being cultural relics. No, for one sixty minute span on a Monday morning, we were hiphop stars.
In the next couple of days, the Goth Scouts strip is going to taken over by a pair of mercenaries. Mercenaries are kind of obsession of mine. The current Blackwater fiasco in Iraq has been followed by yours truly quite closely. Here's a sketch of a private military contractor from my notebook. That's their modern, updated name...private military contractor or PFC.
Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. In honor of this occasion, I'm uploading a preliminary sketch of pirate Ethel from a story idea I'm working out. I'm not going to be keeping this version of Ethel. When I sketched in Goth Scout Lola, I realized Ethel didn't quite compliment the Goths in a very pleasing visual arrangement. Back to the old drawing board, as they say.
Ethel, by the way, runs a private security firm called "Rent-a-Pirate."
My daughter asked me what the heck Talk like a Pirate Day was. I said it's an online thing. She said then you're not talking like a pirate, you're just sending emails. I guess in today's day and age, pirates probably speak Thai or Chinese or something and there's no way I could talk like those pirates. No, it's all, argh, me hearty and yo ho ho (for which no doubt you'd get censured by the Rutger's Women's basketball team) and the usual pirate talk you find mainly in comic books. The bottom line is that being a pirate is really a very cool state of mind.
The local public TV station was interviewing folks at Duncaster for a program about World War 2 reminisces. Since my father-in-law is now a big star at the home for writing his autobiograpy, naturally he was interviewed. Rod's mother called us to let us know, first that he was being interviewed, and second, that the program is really boring and we should skip it.
It's all a very odd coincidence that when I called my mother today, that she spontaneously brought up one of her own reminisces. It all happened when we started chatting about Daniel, my eldest daughter's German beau. Back in April, Lydia, Daniel and I flew down to Florida to visit my mom. Mom is as big as Jabba the hut and spends her days not doing much of anything, which is sad because she's really very fully of life and perky. She brought out some Zarah Leander CD's and started playing them. Daniel was flabbergasted. We all sat around listening, sometimes my mother would sing, sometimes Daniel would sing (My mother has a sumptuous voice and Daniel sings professionally in the opera).
My mother asked if I had a moment. I said sure. She said the evening listening to Zara Leander reminded her of 1941, for whatever reason. I think she was about twelve then. The Germans had run over Kharhov, in the Ukraine, where she lived with her mother and her then eight year old sister. Her father was off fighting the war. There was a knock on the door in the middle of the night which woke everyone up. Soldiers were at the door. My mom called them something, Kundhund. I wish I knew German. Anyhow, no one knew why they were there, but they took note of my grandmother's knitting machine.
A few days later, an older German soldier stopped by and dropped off a lot of yarn, requesting that my grandmother knit sweaters for him and for his children. This she did, but he never showed up to get the sweaters. As the winter wore on and starvation took hold of the city, the sweaters she knitted meant food on the table.
Come springtime, and the end of famine, there appeared a trio of young German soldiers at the door. This time, instead of taking note of the sewing maching, they noticed the piano. One sat down and started playing. The others all sang. My mom, her mother, her sister, and this one little girl that took residence in their house over the winter, stood and listened, not quite knowing what to make of it all.
And that's where my mother ended her story. She said she didn't know why Daniel's visit reminded her of that, but it did. And since the visit, she's become reacquainted with the German language, which she speaks like a native. She's been recalling German words.
She was supposed to come and visit us this week, on account of Lydia being here for a few days, but she cancelled. She's afraid the trip might take a toll on her health.
This is the original gag which I transformed into yesterday's Goth Scouts cartoon. It was a running gag about a bunch of aliens invading the school who are mistaken for foreign exchange students.
The next couple of weeks are going to be tough to get pet projects into my schedule. In order to keep the Goth Scouts daily, this meant going into emergency mode. First, I needed to get a bunch of them done ahead of time. To do this, there had to be one panel goth scout cartoons (so much easier to draw). Second, I needed to write a bunch of gags very quickly.
Fortunately, Mr. Dribble came to the rescue. While I was writing Bobb Zombie gags, I remembered that about ten years ago, I did a small booklet of Galacto the brain eater cartoons for my students in the career center, and then a whole lot of Mr. Dribble cartoons for possible syndication. Jeez, did I have to rifle through some old crud to get to that material. It was worth it. All the brain cartoons currently running are from the Galacto booklet. You'll have to wait a bit for the worked over Mr. Dribble material.
Rereading the Mr. Dribble cartoon, I really liked them. The drawing is quite primitive, but the writing is very good. I think I tried three different batches with the syndicates. At one point, I changed the name of the strip. The storyline revolves around a slacker named George and the principal of the school he attends. Weird stuff happens at the school. A recent hiree turns out to be a vampire. The lady who runs the career center is a gypsy, and the first manifestation of the Goth Scouts' troop leader, Madame Gothskaya. The school has a program for mainstreaming the living dead.
I think I may include the Mr. Dribble cartoons in the next Goth Scout book collection. Rereading the strips also made me think about what the heck the syndicates might have been looking for. Get Fuzzy became syndicated around the time I was submitting Mr. Dribble. Maybe if I had just added a cat to the cast of main characters. George the slacker and a cat instead of a principal. Hmmm...hindsigt is all 20/20...
This is a pretty good sketch I made of my youngest daughter, Julia, while she was watching TV. She moved out just recently, which sent a shock through the system...we are really empty nesters now. Yowsa.
So I can really concentrate on drawing. I've changed up the style of the Goth Scouts yet again. What the heck, I have nothing better to do now that the kids are out of the house. If I can't futz around with the real children, I can futz around with the ones I made up.
Yes, folks, we now have a character named Bobb Zombie in the ever growing Pantheon of secondary characters in the Goth Scout strip. The running gag over how to pronounce the name is directly ripped off from one of my all time favorite movies where one of the characters keeps calling his friend "Bob" and Bob always angrily answers back "Babette! I am now Babette!"
We cartoonists like to pretend we're completely original.
Here's the original zombie finder merit badge which ran on the Humorous Maximus website back in April.
It was nice to know that there are actually readers out there. I got a shout out from a bunch of people complaining that the Goth Scout blog had disappeared. Fortunately, it was simply a temporary situation. Thank you everyone for caring.
Here's another sketch from my notebook. I've drawn a few of these psychotic characters.
This is a picture of me with my soccer team at the occasion of my fellow defender's fifitieth birthday. That's Sue, in the yellow t-shirt. I'm turning fifty next year. I'm in the pale blue.
Our team rep isn't in the picture. She's the most awesome, most organized, most adult person I know, from a well established West Hartford family known for service and dependibility. Team reps are the heart of every team. They handle the league paperwork, go to league meetings, keep track of the equipment, manage the first aid station, and deal with any personal problems which might crop up. Everytime our team rep threatens to quit, it's a panic situation. Usually, it's the personal problems which put our team reps over the edge. Women love to bitch and complain. It's just a fact of life.
So to keep our present, truly awesome, team rep happy, I proposed that I could be the virtual rep. I could take control of the email and deal with the personal stuff while she could handle the rest. Being a cartoonist, I know my limitations. I lose paperwork, I forget meetings, organization is a foreign concept, and I wouldn't depend on me, let alone other people depend on me. But email I can do. Of course, our team rep still threatens to quit, but I think maybe being a rep is a little less lonely with a looney watching your back with a loaded computer.
Most every first Wednesday of the month, I trek up up to Boston so I can have lunch with some Boston area cartoonists. We have a regular core group that consists of our fearless leader, Bob Burnett, NCS New Englahd chaptah poohbah, Mark Parisi, Pulitzer prize winner Clay Bennett, Dave London, Frank Bernard and myself. Clay's wife and my good friend, Cindy Procious, used to be a regular, but then she took up horse back riding and started a lucrative portait painting business. We don't see her very much any more.
So this is how yesterday went. First, the traditional hazing of the new waitress. Our regular waitress has an Irish brogue so naturally the first thing to get picked on was the American accent. It was downhill after that. I think the waitress all pick straws and the one with the smallest straw gets our table. Or maybe they do it the way the Canadian cartoonists pick the president of the Association of Canadian Editorial Cartoonists. Last one to arrive to the meeting (or in the waitress' case, the resaurant) gets the job.
After that, we went into our traditional shop talk. This time, it was about Photoshop and the various ways of handling CMYK in channels in order to produce the blackest blacks. After a while, that started to sound a little like rocket science, so the subject changed to Phillipino prisoners re-enacting Michael Jackson's famous Thriller video. One thing you learn in the cartooning biz, is that nothing but nothing is more funny or bizarre than reality.
During all this, I was drawing my traditional cartoon on the paper table cloth. It's an Irish pub, so I like to keep an Irish theme. This time I drew a fey Superman dancing as "Lord of the Superdance". I was undoubtedly influenced by having watched the latest Superman movie on HBO the other night. Could they have picked a bigger wussy looking guy to play the man of steel? Jeez.
The funniest moment at the lunch was when Clay stepped out the huge picture window to smoke his cigarette, moving maybe three yards from his seat to outside. We kept a lively banter going, with Clay doing much of the talking from outside. Those restaurant guys love us, really.
It's getting really pricey to have lunch with these guys. Besides the usual twenty bucks for lunch, I got socked with a two dollar increase in parking fees, for a whopping $22 bucks. Ouch. But it's worth it. The Boston bunch are great. Sometimes we get surprises. My good friend John Klossner from Maine showed up yesterday, for example. We also were graced by a young whippersnapper named Brian. Makes me feel old when I see these young guys the same age as one of my kids at these things. Sigh.
Well, the Goth Scouts are back to looking like their old selves. Enough experiment. I like drawing them using loose pencils and much photoshop paint.
I'm enjoying the story arcs. I think when I put together the next collected Goth Scouts volume, they might work a little like a comic book. Doing the strip this way really rekindled my love of the comic book form, which had been dwindling for the past few years. It's also helped that I've been reading some good comic book classics like Tintin and Astroboy.
Here's a sketch of a psycho guy I drew in my notebook. I don't really know why I'm posting him. Because I think he's pretty cool, probably.
Elena Steier is a cartoonist whose work has appeared nationally on ESPN Monday Night Football and Nickelodeon Magazine. In addition, she has had syndicated strips, editorial cartoons and freelance illustrations appearing in various and sundry publications. Elena's self-published book, The Vampire Bed and Breakfast continues to be sporadically published while her Goth Scouts comic strip appears online daily except weekends on the Humorous Maximus website. Elena is currently happily middle-aged with grown children and a husband with whom she has shared a life for more than thirty years.
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