A just fight...

...and a good cause.

I know it's been quite awhile since I last blogged and I will blog again to bring you all up to date a little later, but in the meantime this seemed somewhat time sensitive....

As many of you know (or have surmised by now) I've been an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan since I just about started reading. One of my favorite series of his was the John Carter of Mars series. This was even before I started to see Frazetta's wonderful and sensual depictions of the characters in these books. I first started to collect the books with the Abbett covers.

 It wasn't just the images that captivated me but the excitement and swashbuckling derring-do as well as the romance. If asked I'd have to say that ERB's sense of right, wrong and romance had a lot to do with shaping my way of thinking and treating women.
Over the years I'd tried my hand at drawing these wonderful characters and after entering the world of animation there always seemed to be plenty of opportunities to talk about the possibility of working on a feature based on A Princess of Mars. At one point I even worked out a Thoat run cycle that (if I recall right) was pretty decent and towards the end of production on Fire & Ice, Ralph Bakshi said he was in discussions with ERB, Inc. about producing a John Carter of Mars feature. Ralph said he wasn't interested in directing it (just producing it) so he approached me and another animator (my friend, Bruce Woodside) about directing on it. The budget was going to be minuscule and it all hardly seemed feasible. Thankfully, in retrospect, it all fell through for one reason or another. Even though it would've been exciting to do this (small budget or not), I suspect it would've been a major disaster and disappointment to ERB fans - including myself.
Since then I'd always kept the idea of a Barsoom film in the back of my mind and always thought it would make a great film if done right. Needless to say I kept track of all the various incarnations of who was currently working on developing it and when that would fall through and so on. So when Andrew Stanton finally took the project past development and to filming I was cautiously optimistic. Unlike many film fans (especially animation fans) I had issues with Stanton's Pixar films (Finding Nemo and Wall-E) and could argue to death why I thought they didn't work, but everything I read about his take on Barsoom gave me the feeling he was on the right track. Even the really bad marketing (or lack of ) couldn't deter me away from seeing this film when it finally premiered. I convinced my wife and oldest son to go with me using the lure of easy popcorn and candy.

Perhaps I was primed to like the film anyway (though I was braced for major disappointment), but I did find this film to do everything I had hoped it would. I was ecstatic and willing to see it again and again and that's something I can rarely say about any film. I was surprised to find that my wife really liked it as well and wouldn't mind seeing it again - this is really not her type of film at all.
I'm not saying the film is perfect in every way (what film is?), but it gets so much right that the minor flaws are completely overwhelmed and not even worth dwelling on in my opinion. The most important part is they got the TONE right. The feel of a pulp adventure with a sense of wonderment and romance. They also got the most difficult part right: Dejah Thoris. Even though she is an iconic character that every fan-boy worth his salt has an opinion on I hardly expected her to really work. But she does. In spades. If you need an excuse to see this film, Lynn Collin's performance is reason enough. Her acting is absolutely worth the price of admission alone. I hope Ms Collins gets an Oscar nomination, but I rather doubt the acting branch will acknowledge what she accomplished here.

Anyway, enough of the long-winded fan-boy prelude and time to get to the meat and bones of why I'm posting this and titled this post as I did.
Disney so screwed up the marketing on John Carter (in ways too numerous to discuss here), as I'm sure all of you know by now, appears to be a flop in the domestic Box Office and the chances of a sequel being made are pretty slim. So a bunch of fans that are as equally ardent as I am (maybe even more so, if possible) have started a Face Book page called Take Me Back to Barsoom and a petition to try and persuade Disney into greenlighting the planned sequels to John Carter.

Here is the link for the FB page  - if you're a fan, and on FaceBook, I encourage you to join this group. There's lots of good people and discussion (as well as bellyaching) there.



And here's a link to the petition which was created to help show Disney the fans' desire for sequels to be made  - it only takes a second to sign.

feel free to post your own thoughts here if you'd like, but I'd rather not get into any arguments if you disagree with me....you're obviously wrong and I don't have the time to educate you (just kidding, of course).

A chance to relax...

...sort of.

I survived the Con and met a lot of good people and hooked up with some old friends, sold a few books and posters and also drew a few sketches.
What can I say about the Con? It was the Con. It's always good as long as you know what to expect and don't think it's going to be something it's not.

For those of you who didn't get a chance to say "hi" you can swing by CTNX in November - I'll have a table there and be selling my books and drawing sketches.

This weekend I've actually had a chance to catch up on some other stuff I'd been putting off due to a crazy work schedule. I finally had a chance to scan in a lot of the Fire & Ice drawings so the blog about that production and Mr. Frazetta shouldn't be too far off - in theory. Kind of timely considering Robert Rodriguez just announced he intends on remaking the film and has showed off some of his concept art for the production (just click on the link to see it).

In the meanwhile I'm continuing on with my Supervising Director duties on Voltron Force - which I understand is doing GREAT in the ratings and I highly recommend for all you action/adventure cartoon fans - whether you're an old Voltron fan or not. I also just wrapped a freelance board for Young Justice and I'm continuing on with the illustrations for another HarperCollins book featuring Batman and Killer Croc. And in my free-time I'm working on a Graphic Novel for a great new line of GNs that should be announced pretty soon. 

These are some rough exploratory character sketches as well as roughs and inks for the promo piece. I'm having a lot of fun with this and I'm wondering why I never ventured into this type of thing before now. Since these drawings have already been shown on Facebook I assume it's okay if I share them here as well.

Now to answer a few questions...

A follow up question from Anonymous (feel free to come up with some sort of screen name so I can tell who's who - sort of):
I'm not sure why I didn't mention Cauldron. I imagine it is because I've only seen the movie about once and it was forever ago. But since you mentioned it, how was your time at the Disney Studio during that period? I ask because I've seen "Waking Sleeping Beauty" and from what I understand that period was rough on the studio and its staff.

I'll only briefly touch on my period at Disney for this answer since I intend on writing a more in-depth blog about my experiences there and especially about working on the Black Cauldron.
Let me just say working at Disney was something I'd never experienced prior to that and very few times after. Before working at Disney I'd worked only for Bakshi Productions and a brief stint at Filmation so the chance to only rough animation (without having to do your own Clean-Up) and to take the time to work on a scene until it was as close to perfect as you could get it was pretty foreign to me. Due to mostly these reasons I felt very liberated and tried to take very little notice of the politics that were going on below the surface. Unfortunately by the time the Black Cauldron was finished I, like everyone else there at the time, were heavily involved in some political craziness due to the 'takeover' at Disney (though in retrospect it seems like less of a takeover and more of 'saving'). The time period that is shown in "Waking Sleeping Beauty" I only had first hand experience with the very beginning since I left before Oliver & Co got into full swing. I had heard quite a few of the stories  that were going on at the time, since I was till friends with many of those involved, and all I can say is that Don Hahn and Peter Schneider seemed very fair about what went on during those years and could have easily made a MUCH longer film without boring anyone. Though I suspect if the film had gone on much longer a lot more fingers would've been pointed and the film wouldn't have been quite so even-handed.

ThePast asks:

Do you actually pay attention to the many MANY fans of your work out there and their attempts to recreate your genius? And if so, what is your reaction? I am sure there has been times you have seen people butcher your ideals of specific characters (sadly, the saying is true, death of the author/artist).

First I'm not sure there are that many that are trying to recreate my "genius" and if they do I don't have a real problem with it. I find it flattering and as long as they don't try to pass my actual art off as theirs I won't bother them. Though a mention and a link to my web-site are always appreciated. There's another saying I'd rather live by and that's "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"....I hope...

and ThePast also asks:

And one last, in a way to do with the con... is there any chance we could steal you down to New Zealand one year (or more than one :D) for one of our main cons? Preferably the Auckland Armageddon :) for us poor cartoon fans trapped 12 hours away from ComicCon.

 

I would love to go to New Zealand one of these days and if I were invited (and my traveling expenses covered) I'd probably go. So start a campaign to get me down there ;)

and another Anonymous (at least, I think it's different one) asks:

I've seen your drawns in your blog, and most of them are teenagers and adult people. How do feel about drawing kids? It is harder, it is easier, it is the same?
Is there any kind of people who is harder to draw to you?
[Sorry, my bad english, lol]

I've drawn lots of kids, but I guess I haven't posted many of them. I'll have to do that soon. As to who is harder to draw...? A lot of different factors are involved including what day it is and whether my drawing and is co-operating. Some days every drawing (regardless of age, gender or style) comes out easily and other days nothing comes easy.  In general I don't find children anymore difficult to draw than adults or teenagers.

Remember to send your questions and I'll answer them as soon as I can.

When it rains...

Once again I'm running late on my choices for Fan Request Friday, but this time the reasons are more mechanical than organic.
I had been working pretty steadily on quite a few choices all week and thought it'd be nice to post them before Friday's next request went out.
Now that I'm working pretty exclusively at home for awhile I'd planned on getting a bigger, better computer, but I wanted to wait a few more weeks before I made that big of a purchase and I hate changing computers and having to reload all my software and programs and drivers, etc. - thankfully all my files are already on external drives so that's not an issue. But apparently computers have a mind of their own. I've spent the entire day Thursday screwing and fighting with Outlook and my computer in general.  I guess my current computer decided it wanted to push up that timeline if it could, so instead of getting ahead on work and FRF choices I just spent the day rebooting Outlook and my computer over and over.
Finally I've gotten it to the point where it's somewhat functional....somewhat...

Anyway, here are my choices for the last 2 weeks:

The first is Creeper. This is a character I've had little contact with even though he was created when I still read comics years ago. He never interested me that much just like Ditko's other attempts to catch lightning in a bottle for a second time. I thought I'd try to update his look a bit - or, at least, his hair style. Not sure it helped or not.

This one was an interesting challenge for me. I never liked most of the other versions of Balrog I've seen, from all the fanart to the Bakshi film to Jackson's version (though I will say Jackson's was probably the best). Not sure if this is any better, but I had some fun with it. If I have time I might take this to full color and that should improve it considerably

Popeye has been suggested several times and I wasn't sure how to approach it. I could do a straight cartoony version and keep him on model or I could go very staright and just make it look like a muscular guy in a sailor suit, but then I take the chance of making it seem as if I'm not capable of drawing in a cartoony style (that is an accusation that gets thrown at a lot of us action/adventure artists in animation quite a bit). So I thought I'd go with a hybrid and use my own sense of cartoony/straight . Not sure it works, but I had some fun with it.

And last, but not least is something I'd been playing with since frank died and finally decided to just finish the portion featuring Larn and Teegra. haven't drawn these characters since I finished work on the film and now I remember why I didn't animate that many scenes of Teegra.