Heroes Are Hard To Find

Heroes Convention, June 4-6, 2010
Charlotte, NC


Thursday, June 3 is set up day.
It was humid that day in Charlotte. It was humid that day in the convention hall. And if I failed to mention, it was humid that day in the Charlotte Convention Center as we were setting up.


At the last minute, I called my friend Garret Webb (seen here above) to help me with the set up duties when I learned that my planned help, well, wouldn't be there to help. The booth is a standard 10' x 10' footprint with 2 eight-foot tables with skirts and 2 folding chairs supplied by the convention center.


The front table where writer Merrill Hagan and myself sat to greet the attending masses was pretty well covered with book racks, prints, comics, sketches and free buttons (not pictured).

What I see in the photo above represents a lot of things I didn't have (nor had the notion of having) before last 6 month's effort to have the first copy of "Unstoppable Tuff-Girl" printed and a booth at HeroesCon: An original independent comic book (duh); 2 book racks; 1 DVD spinner rack for more books and cards, 1 vinyl banner; printed black "Tuff-Girl" hoodies; 2 hooks for hanging things like tee-shirts on hangers from the back scaffolding; 1 toilet paper roll floor stand for use as a make shift table top arm to hang things like tee-shirts on hangers, 10 boxes of various sizes to store and transport books and stuff; 2500 pin back buttons for promotions; 1 glass jar to hold the free promotional buttons; 4 business card holders, 100 laser-print posters, 18 sets of 12 ink-jet prints; a set of bed sheets and a table cloth to cover things between show days; a table top spinner intended to display a sculpture of Tuff-Girl; and about a half dozen other miscellaneous things.


Knowing what a struggle for attention it is for small independent start up publishers in a field dominated by Superman, Spider-Man and the like, I'd say the Monster Enterprises booth and Tuff-Girl received a bit less than moderate reception over the weekend. However, folks who stopped at the booth generally seemed pleased with our offering, most welcoming a free button.

We exchanged books with Tom Bancroft ("Mulan", "The Lion King", "Opposite Forces" comic), who was complimentary about our book. We also traded a few stories about our respective days with Disney.

http://tombancroft.blogspot.com/
http://www.funnypagespress.com/
http://tombancroft.deviantart.com/

Merrill passed a copy of UTG #1 to comic writer Mark Waid ("Kingdom Come") who said that he spotted our booth and was interested in what he saw.

Michael Neno, a contributor to Juan Oritz's "Silver Comics", was pleasantly surprise to see copies of Silver Comics" at our booth, although we only had up to issue #7.

http://www.nenoworld.com/

http://www.silvercomics.org/


Here are are 3 thing I learned:

1) There's no air-conditioning during loading and breakdown because the loading gates are open to the outside.

2) Kid's safety scissors can cut flesh.

3) The maid will not clean up your room if you leave a "do not disturb" sign hanging on your hotel room door knob.

I Need a Hero

Look for Merrill Hagan and me at the Monster Enterprises booth #329.
Heroescon
June 4 - 6, 2010
Charlotte Convention Center
501 S. College St.
Charlotte, NC 28202

Open to the Public:
Friday: 11.00 am - 7.00 pm
Saturday: 10.00 am - 6.00 pm
Sunday: 11.00 am - 6.00 pm


http://www.heroesonline.com/heroescon/

http://www.heroesonline.com/

120 [m ] : Ben 10 Art

Part of the function of the Illustration group at Cartoon Network is to create posed character art to be used on licensed product. While there are times art is created especially for specific product items (a.k.a. SKUs), most of the art for licensing business is created prior to the decision of what and at what quantities of product will be made. That art along with logos, color palettes, patterns and more go into a "Style Guide", kind of like an album of assets.


Character poses in rough pencil, "Ben 10 Alien Force"
Color pencil and black roller ball pen ink on copier paper.
2008.



Gwen poses in rough pencil, "Ben 10"
Color pencil and black roller ball pen ink on copier paper.
2008.

With such a schedule, there is a sizable amount of guessing done with these pieces, but generally the artists try to mix up the static with the dynamic, the left-facing with the right facing, and the ones towards the consumer with the ones off-stage interacting.

With Ben, who wears the ever important Omnitrix only on his left wrist, most of his poses have that arm coming forwards to the consumer. It's become kind of iconic. It's also, arguably, become a little boring.

With the alien heroes, and really most action characters, you get a lot of running and jumping. Hitting and kicking are good too, as long as you keep any swish lines and bursts under control.

Making a set of poses of Gwen, Ben's cousin, is a relatively rare assignment, since most of the network's programs are aimed more to boys. Here Gwen from the first "Ben 10" series is a ten-year old girl with magic powers. What she is not is a princess, a sexy video-game heroine or moody vampire. As such, it was actually fun drawing these.

Crush

“Romantic love is the ennoblement of basic lust in a society with too much time on its hands”

I had formed something close to that “revolutionary" statement in college regarding what may be the world’s largest wastes of time, resources and finances next to linear particle colliders. It is exactly the type of statement to be made by a bugeoning cynic with knowledge collected and sorted like precious coins to be forged by youthful idealism into a sharpened edge to sunder outdated notions and unproved myths.

Such a well-formed concept then meets head-on its first and eternal antithesis in the Copernican-like submission, the crush.

The crush as opposed to the object of the crush may be explained as some combination of pheromones, thoughts and feelings focused by civilized politeness. But to say that much is to admit that it is real. It has weight and occupies space. There are no small crushes. It is loud and insistent and pulls upon your attentions at all hours. It is both the fuel and ignition for stupid poetry and brainless ballads. And more than that, it is the filter that makes the stupid and the brainless truer than one’s own name.

Unfortunately, it is one sided, because a crush isn’t a crush after it’s been mutually expressed. When that happens it’s mush, and at best it has only a one-in-four chance of happening: 1) he does but she doesn’t - strike; 2) she does but he doesn’t - strike; 3) neither he nor she does - strike, duh; and 4) he does and she does - bingo! See, one in four. And of course the odds grow ever worse with “he lied”, “she just wants to have fun” and $1,000,000 in prize money. But it’s the one-sided aspect that makes the crush a private bittersweet thing, with high chances for it to crash and crumble.

On the up side, a good and thorough crush will boost creativity. But even at it’s worst, what harm is there to write the 24,601st song to rhyme “girl” and “world”, or to bake cookies with too much salt in them. Practically speaking, the world is a better place for crushes if it accomplishes no other thing than encourage people to more closely attend their hygiene and bathe more frequently.

On the extreme down side: Grecian/Trojan level destruction and super-villains.

Left Brain say, “you fool.”

Right Brain says, “yeah, so what?”

I know that everything that I’ve ever written and drawn is in part an attempt to impress some body else. That may be as much an awkward form of social integration as it may be symptomatic of a crush, but in either case, that’s a lousy statement with which to conclude this article, so let me try this:

Only the crush knows why birds suddenly appear,…

… you fool.

120 [m ] : Ben 10 Alien Force DVDs

Right on the heels of the Cartoon Network premiere of the animated action show "Ben 10 Alien Force" (2008-2010), itself the spin-off/ sequel of the popular "Ben 10" (2005-2008), the network's licensing group started rolling the plans for the consumer line of DVDs.


16 concepts for "Ben 10 Alien Force" DVD, vol. 1.


"Ben 10 Alien Force" DVD vol. 1
Final illustration.
Digital painting by Brian McGee.

For any given project like these, as few as three and as many as 24 iterations of concepts might be generated, usually on the "more" side when clients are involved. Past that, the illustration might be tweaked multiple times before it's called final.

With the first volume, I, as part of a team designing the packaging, was proposing not just one cover, but also the elements for the "Alien Force" line look - the visual bits to be carried through all the property's like packaging. Initially, the chosen concept was based on what is shown above here in the second row, second from the left.

Some thing like a week before work on the final illustration was to start, the white border was decided upon to go on all Carton Network DVD packaging starting in 2008. As a result, the entire illustration had to be redesigned. The three concepts to the right on the second row are part of that redesign as well as being proposals for the first three volumes' illustrations .


Three concepts for "Ben 10 Alien Force" DVD, vol. 2


"Ben 10 Alien Force" DVD, vol. 2.
Final Illustration.
Digital painting by Brian McGee.

Each volume in the DVD series as separate design projects, were spaced roughly about 3 months apart, meaning the delivery dates of the final packaging art were about 3 months apart.

The second volume would have featured Echo Echo, the small self-replicating guy shown in the first two concepts, until after research of the DVD's five episodes revealed that the guy just didn't have much to do in them. Four-armed Spidermonkey was chosen based on his presence on the DVD and his popularity for the 3-month old show.

With volume 2 as a type of template, volumes 3 through 6 would feature Ben and one of his alien hero transformations, and as a whole the decision to stick to that "template" would have its ramifications. Looking at the 9 different illustration concepts of the initial 16 concepts (the other 7 feature line look design explorations) and then looking at 5 of 6 covers featuring only two characters with logo centered at the top, does not at all display a straight line logic to the process, unless you follow the limited design and composition formula of "big main character in the center."

My theories regarding DVD package art, all of which which I have yet to convince my licensing clients, are these: a) be true to the property/ show; b) make it for the fan; c) don't try to win over the uninitiated, the person who has never heard of the property; and d) literally make it attractive.

120 [m ] : Water Babies Hungee Squad

Digital color over digitally manipulated scan of line.
2007.

In the Spring of 2007, the adult swim web site was promoting the theatrical "Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters" and one of the initiatives was a daily changing landing page. This first page that pops up when you went to the adult swim site was simply a piece of art that appeared for a few seconds before directing your browser to the main site. The site had an open call for art work.

This was my submission.


Movie information on the Internet Movie Data Base:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455326/

When the Tough Get Going

120 [m ] : South west Animation Conference & Expo

SWACE Banner art
Blue and black pencil on paper
38.1 x 20.32 cm (15.00 inch x 8.00 inch)
2008

Here is a piece of freelance where the assignment was to draw and draw and draw some more for one night. It's also an example of what you can get for $100 and a good story. The catch is this: with the job's initial specifications as the client's only input, I delivered just the drawing with no inking, no coloring and definitely no vector work or fancy Photoshop® layering of elements.

The art was intended for the top banner of the SWACE web site an event celebrating all sorts of animation. The art is intended to reflect that. Most of the characters are intended to represent or be reminiscent some animation character, show, short or style without infringing on those copyrights. In regards to that last part, I may have overstepped that line in a few places.

Without going over the whole piece, of which I haven't even counted the characters, here are some highlights:

- Bunny the Birthday Squirrel in an early WB shorts style (McKimson-ish maybe?).

- Little Tuffy with over-sized mallet in a simple style a la "The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy".

- "Time Flyers", a fourteen year old idea featuring time travel in a cardboard box.

- A baby oyster which I used to hide as a signature in occasional Disneyland work.

- Walt Disney.

- Lots of Shmoo-like characters inspired by Hayao Miyazaki's work.

- Cowgirl with giant revolvers. Not a specific character, but just because I wanted to draw a cowgirl with giant revolvers.

- A sky scraper which was a very obtuse reference to the Tom Hanks movie "Big." I think now I should have at least drawn in "Transformer" like arms. No, it has nothing to do with animation. It spilled out in the whole free-association process.


http://www.swace.net/

120 [m ] : I Think I Shouldn't Like To Be Around Mad People

Early 2009, let's say January, I was asked to lend my artistic talents to design a mascot for a then upcoming event for kids. The character was the Mad Hatter, and the theme, of course, involved Lewis Carroll's "Wonderland" characters. The event was put together by The Young Audiences Arts for Learning group, a part of Atlanta's Woodruff Arts Center which also includes the High Museum of Art.


Mad Hatter concept sketches.
Black ball-point pen on paper.
21.59 x 27.94 cm (8.50 in. x 11.00 in.)
2009

Of course, even with copyright laws preventing me from merely copying either the popular Disney design or the John Tenniel designs from the original books, this was an opportunity to see what I could come up with.

What I came up with was an amalgam of those influences, plus a little bit of caricature of actor Ed Wynn who provided the voice in the 1951 Walt Disney Animated Feature.

Mad Hatter
India Ink on paper
2009

Besides adding color to what you see here, that would have been the end of that bit of weekend pro-bono work.

However, Dennis, who was on the Y.A. Committee Board, asked if I might volunteer to do sketches at the actual event. This request was predicated by the fact that Dennis had worked at Cartoon Network and was familiar and impressed by my ability to draw decent sketches of cartoon characters from memory.

On the Saturday of Mother's Day weekend, there I was drawing Alice, the Hatter, March Hare and other Wonderland characters while Queen Glitter read 10-minute stories of Wonderland. It wasn't a setting where I did request, although I've worked those types of events too which in my Disney days were called "chat and draws". Actually I did draw one request that day, a Princess Jasmine for Dennis' daughter.

This year, I again volunteered, however, the setting was more like a how-to-draw session where participants, both kids and parents, got to follow me and draw and color their own pieces of art. It turned out to be almost two-hours of non-stop drawing and talking about drawing.

More about the High Museum:
http://www.high.org/

More about Young Audiences:
http://www.yawac.org/

120 [m ] : Disneyana Fan Club

Back in December 2009, I submitted some designs for the new logo of the "Disneyana Fan Club", re-named from the "National Fantasy Fan Club" (NFFC).


Here, the first logo features Mickey Mouse's gloved hand which was transferred from a piece of signage c. 1930.

Admittedly be tastes run fairly conservative. Maybe they couldn't trademark and copyright it. I like the combination of character identification (Mickey's hand plus the nod to the "Mickey Mouse Club" logo, 1955) and the the sense of nostalgia with Disneyana collectibles going as far back as 1929 with posters and lobby cards for the early Mickey Mouse short films.

Here's the second which is as basic a distillation as I could make it and convey the essence of the club. Is the "f" to difficult to see?

Maybe these look a bit too much like branding for the next high-end coffee house. Primarily, I was designing something to be identifiable as a 100 x 100 pixel icon.

And here again, my choice of desaturated colors for that nostalgic feel.

And here is the winning design by Mickena Guillaume.

http://www.nffc.org/