Tuf-n-Stuff

"Little Tuffy and the Tuf Gurlz"
character design concept sketches.
Red pencil on paper.
21.59 cm x 27.94 cm (8.50 inches x 11.00 inches)

I can't say that I have so many ideas that I don't know what I should do with them. I have, however, had minor ideas that I wanted some to just steal, out of curiosity of how they might turn out.

This isn't one of those ideas. Part of the Tuff-Girl mythology is that the seed of Debby's idea of her becoming the adventure hero comes from a cartoon character she created and printed on tee-shirts. My initial plan was for that character to be a little like "The Powerpuff Girls" crossed with "Emily the Strange" - simple and graphic and really just one drawing with slight alterations to the hair, clothes and random raspberries or bandages.


"Little Tuffy and the Tuf Gurlz"
character design concept sketches.
Red pencil and black India Ink on paper.
21.59 cm x 27.94 cm (8.50 inches x 11.00 inches)

As I've progress on my comic book, the notion of placing that cartoon character in a minor feature percolated in the back of my mind. Here is the most developed realization of that idea: Little Tuffy, Monica, Barb, Malibu, Catalina and the Shar Pei dog, Wilson.

Yes, the design is a lot more complex than it began, but that's what happened when I started mixing in the influences of Walt Kelly's "Pogo" and Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes."

Mmmm

The Atlanta Cartoon Network office received an unexpected treat this holiday: hand made caramels. These soft and chewy morsels were a gift from Meredith, our intern of two year's back, and they were good.

Having been exposed to pre-packaged, manufactured candies all my life, I never gave much thought that there must be actual caramel recipes and that it doesn't just ooze out of some "caramel tree" in Canada.

Did I tell you that they were good?

TAGS January 10 & 11, 1994

01/10: Drawing a crowd.

01/11: Prelude to disaster... or something mildly humorous.

What Have I Gotten Myself into This Time?
These two strips, as I recall, were created especially for the first and as of yet only published collection of "TAGS" comics, and were not printed in my newsletter publication "monotony." All TAGS strips that will follow here in "monotonae" have yet to be republished in collected form. This I should do. This I want to do. This I haven't had time to do. Which is too bad, because volume two would have been markedly better in content than volume one, entitled "What Have I Gotten Myself into This Time?"


January 10: Monster engaged in the unusual, curious, but not necessarily complexly interesting act of drawing. Drawing can be a specialized skill and talent, but as an action, it's not all that entertaining to watch happen, because it's conceptually such as simple thing - making marks to look like things.

In the first panel, Craig (bald eagle) makes his first appearance. Panel 2, Tanya (otter) makes her first appearance. Panel 4, Jill (reindeer) joins the group in her first appearance.

Amongst the scratching, drawing sound effects is the word "squibbill" which has been the mark for my self-published greeting cards.


January 11: In the first panel, Shirley (seal) makes her first appearance. I had erroneously reported that Shirley was a doe (blog entry Sept. 2, 2008). The doe/deer is Suzie. Entering in panel three is Brenda (mongoose), also making her first appearance. Five first appearances in two strips, My motives were/are pretty plain, to have the whole TAGS cast actually appear in strips collected in the volume.

Shirley's inquiry in panel one is as artificial a lead in as I've ever heard in a sit-com. The gag of the strip parallels my experience of putting the first collected volume of TAGS strips. In fact, a lot of my projects begin with me not have a very good idea of what I'm in for.

Costume Design:
As previously mentioned, the locale of TAGS is lifted from my situation in my first job working at Disneyland, CA - which was bussing tables in a themed restaurant in an amusement park. So as is done at Disneyland, TAGS characters wear costumes at work. I felt no reason not to simply copy the costume designs from the location where I had worked, The French Market Restaurant in New Orleans Square. In fact, I didn't even question it.

The hosts wore bright cerulean vests with black trimmed pockets over a short sleeve shirt and black bow tie. The outfit was completed with black slacks and black shoes, but most of the TAGS characters are pant-less.

The hostesses wore dresses in the same blue with short puffy sleeves and high collar to which they affixed their oval name tags. Over the dress they wore an apron that was white with a crisscross of multi-colored stripes.

In the kitchen, hosts and hostesses wore "kitchen whites" (white coat, white pants, white apron) a scarf in restaurant unifying blue and all topped with a white paper hat.

Although all of the costumes for the New Orleans Square restaurants have since been re-designed, Monster and company will forever be swathed in bright cerulean blue.

If I were to further define the TAGS world and actually give a name and by association a theme to the restaurant that Monster and gang work in Happiland, I will have to retro them to the costume designs which I think are a generic 1890's design and not turn of the century New Orleans specific.

Inks and Outs

I am now in, as it turns out, the long, laborious process of inking the twelve pages of the next Unstoppable Tuff-Girl episode. I'm averaging one page a day, or less than one panel an hour. It's a little slower going in these colder winter days and nights, with the drier air seeming to make the India ink evaporate quicker.


UTG #20001, page 3, panel 5
light blue and blue Col-Erase pencil on Bristol board
14.0 x 12.7 cm (5.5" x 5.0")


UTG #20001, page 3, panel 5
India Ink and color pencil on Bristol board
14.0 x 12.7 cm (5.5" x 5.0")

I'm inking the borders and word balloons with a round nib quill pen. I figure that I need to know how large the balloons need be and design them into each panel layout. The balloons drawn into the panels at these stages comes with the additional benefit little areas that I need not draw and ink.

All other art is inked with a round lettering brush and black India ink. For good or bad, I avoid inking lines of the art with a ruler.

Also for good or bad, I hand letter anything that's not dialogue and narrative. I do realize that now days it's more common than not to do all this, the balloons and lettering, utilizing the power of the computer and versatility of the dozens of available typefaces. I can only answer back, "That's not what I'm doing."


UTG #20001, page 5, panel 1
light blue and blue Col-Erase pencil on Bristol board
14.0 x 12.7 cm (5.5" x 5.0")


UTG #20001, page 5, panel 1
India ink and color pencil on Bristol board
14.0 x 12.7 cm (5.5" x 5.0")

The pencil art I drew rather loosely and sans many details, knowing that I would also be inking the pages myself, rather than handing them off in assembly-line manner to another artist. This was mostly a time saving plan, which, in that respect, worked well - at least at the pencil stage. Perhaps the inks are going slower than ideal due to the addition of details like backgrounds and environmental property.

Still, the inking from page to page seems to grow subtly more confident. There is also more dry-brush and rough quality to the later pages due to the ink evaporating quicker and my brush getting stiffer quicker in the dry winter days.


UTG #20001, page 6, panel 4
light blue and blue Col-Erase pencil on Bristol board
13.7 x 12.7 cm (5.4" x 5.0")


UTG #20001, page 6, panel 4
India ink and color pencil on Bristol board
13.7 x 12.7 cm (5.4" x 5.0")

As I go through the pages mostly in series (page two was inked first, then page one, followed by the rest in proper order), I've made running changes in some of the character's designs. Tuff-Girl's mask now has downward points over her cheeks, and she has black go-go boots rather than more rugged motorcycle boots. Rip's henchmen have distinguishing color schemes for their Luchador masks. Eagle One's sleeves were corrected to extend past his wrists in all panels until he rolls them up in the last panel of page six.

The backgrounds, particularly the interiors of the Golden Cactus Casino, are an example of what I describe as nonsense-space. I picked this up poring over and studying Milt Caniff's Terry and the Pirates comic strip where he would always position the camera (the reader's point of view) in different places in the environment from panel to panel. Some times he would simply switch between wide, medium and close up shots. Other times, it would be as if the "camera" would be re-positioned and turned 90-degrees, so that in say four successive panels, he'd show the four different walls in a room. Of course this makes the visual read as interesting as the artist can conceive, but simultaneously, the artist is not restricted to keeping track of property, windows, etc. their relative positions and number. It's a slight of hand that suggests that with the same characters from panel to panel, so too is the location depicted behind them the same, but not necessarily anything architecturally accurate.