Mon to the Next

 

 Red pencil on card stock.
27.9 cm x 21.6 cm (11.0 inches x 8.5 inches).

 Digital color over scan of India Ink on card stock.
4200 x 4200 pixels.




Because a simple e-mail announcing a new e-mail address isn’t sufficient, I designed a couple of Rolodex style cards decorated with this self caricature.

Encircling me, are a number of my characters from past and present, chosen mostly because they would be reasonably shorter than I am.

(Clockwise from the 1 o’clock position) Un-named angel and devil conscience characters once doodled on my grade school notes. Their function are in the “good versus bad” tradition seen in cartoons.  Their design are about as simple as I could make them, decades prior to “The Powerpuff Girls”.

Un-named flying penguin developed for a fable I had in my head in college.

Monster as the corporate mascot for Monster Enterprises is a beast who acts as much as my cartoon alter ego as Mickey did for Walt. He is a mash of bear, gorilla, Hagar the Horrible and Muppet. This is the fourth distinct character design of Monster. The others were used in three different comic strip series: 1) “B.M.O.C.” strip written in college; 2) “Backstage” and “StageLights” satirical comics based on the goings on in Disneyland’s restaurant department; 3) “TAGS” the offshoot of “Backstage” written for a wider audience.

A shue, the pet of Lurna, Moon girl. Lurna was a throwaway invention done eight years ago when I was bored one afternoon. Part of the idea included naming things that sound like common yet unrelated English words.

Odysseus, Jupiter squirrel, pet to Homer. Andromeda was my one story idea most inspired by Anime sources. It involved girls in space, mistaken identities, war, capitalist lizards, pirates and a hapless reluctant explorer Homer and his pet, one of a population of squirrels transplanted on one of Jupiter’s terra-formed moons to evolve into domesticated fur balls the size of house cats.

Wichita, Tuff-Girl’s canine companion.

A bird-winged fairy is a minor conception that arose in high school as a result of thinking butterfly-winged fairies to be totally implausible and ridiculous. The tiny winged horse was added thinking it to be about as reasonable an idea as a tiny winged girl.

TAGS April 18 & 19, 1994

04/18: Heidi's choice.

04/19: Ach! Tsavbort!

April 18: Heidi (Gopher, 5th appearance) and Rudy (pig, 4) discuss one of modern life’s most important issues - ice cream flavors. The stork clerk is a nod to another crittericature I had done for one of my Disney restaurant co-worker. He not a re-occurring character.

Mmmm. Ice-cream.



April 19: On the flip side, Monster offers his take to Bingo (snake, 2) on the decision making process. Here the actual problem is inconsequential.

Some times non sequitur humor works, and some times like this it doesn’t. Don’t worry, I’ll try some thing different in the next strip. That’s one of the advantages of the daily strip.

Ever since writing this, I’ve considered developing a back story, at least, for the bald aliens with funny (Russian perhaps?) accents. Not getting much farther than that concept, it would have been called “Die, Monster, Die!” Ultimately, however, in whatever form, it’s existence would only be to justify this one strip and would be way, way beyond the core of TAGS.

Mmmm. Ice-Cream.

Tuff-Girl the Movie - 2009

“Allison Miller as Tuff-Girl”

Graphite on paper.

21.6 cm x 27.9 cm (8.50 inch x 11.00 inch), 2009.

With this drawing I cast actress Allison Miller (“Kings” (TV 2009), “Blood: The Last Vampire” (2009), “17 Again” (2009)) in the title role. It might not be the best bit of casting since she doesn’t have an uncanny resemblance to Janine Turner (the initial primary model for Tuff-Girl’s civilian identity, Debby Durrance), and she’s doesn’t at all appear to be half Asian. But she does appear to be tiny and someone the bad guys would underestimate.

Here I minimized the eye mask considerably to reveal more of her face which is drawn a bit too full to be more than a moderately good likeness. Already I’m making Hollywood concessions. In my conception she would answer the question “why do you wear a mask?” with “because a broken nose really hurts,” inferring that she’s built in some sort of guard in the bridge of the mask.

Matt’s Back

Co-worker Matt will be out due to a little back surgery on a “huge ruptured disk.”  He tried to describe his condition with bacon as an analog, but that really didn’t help me. Mmmm, bacon.

I wrote this up between answering the door for “Trick-or-Treaters,” following up with inking, and coloring later into the next morning. I think more things should rhyme.