Some Bill Mauldin finds.

Bill Mauldin(1921-2003) was a cartoonist during and after World War II, most famous for his creations "Willie and Joe", which first appeared in the 45th
I'm not qualified to speak of Mauldin's life history as others have done , but I have found a vintage magazine, showcasing his work.

Mauldin insisted on drawing his wartime cartoons in the field.  Unlike many domestically produced cartoons or propaganda pieces, there is very little depiction of the enemy, silly, threatening or otherwise such as in the Disney film "Education for Death".  Nor is there a lot of "wacky" humor, a-la the "Private Snafu" shorts, or "New Yorker" style drollery.

     In fact, the life of a soldier comes off as depressing and mundane.

 Rumor has it that Mauldin's gags ticked off more than a few officers, but the army saw fit to publish them, anyway.

   War, the soldier's plight and lifestyle have been examined and depicted for as long as human history, but more often than not, from the outside, with an editorial perspective. 
  Perhaps the reason that Mauldin's wartime work has endured is the simple honesty. 

  In the afterward to the magazine, Mauldin wrote of his fellow soldiers:
     "They've aged 15 to 20 years, have beards, their eyes have bags underneath, and they wear a dopey expression because they need a lot of sleep . Some of them are getting bowlegged and flatfooted from hiking too much. The poor guys have changed so much that I hardly recognize them". 

  I guess that's why he drew the pictures, because sometimes, there are no words.

New Year, New Stuff

So here is a foray into logo design. I attend a local Improv Workshop, and I noticed show flyers and official materials looked like this:

Mike Gordon is a great cartoonist, and presents his ideas with clarity and appeal, but, as I shot my mouth off, the typeography on this flyer is a freak'n nightmare.

There's Poor choice of typefaces, and a lack of readability and negative space. Gradients and drop shadows are used indescriminately. Plus, the colors are loud and obnoxious.

After everybody agreed to let me volunteer a logo, I asked the group leader a few questions. He made it clear that the workshop was to be more of a club than a performing troupe. The performance recitals are secondary, and the first order of business of the logo is to get people to join.

So what visual devices and schemes have organizations successfully used to get people to not only support, but actively participate in their organization or club?

Both Facebook and Greenpeace use cool colors and very open, balanced type to immediately set up a comfortable, supportive mood. White or white space is used, probably to make things feel airy and open. Also, Greenpeace uses almost every "good" symbol one can do in sillouette, people holding hands, plush-ready animals, a standard-issue tree of hope, and as a bonus, the curvature of the globe, showing that the group's goals are a worldwide effort.

Blizzard's "World of Warcraft" does get a lot of "joiners" in the form of paying subscribers, but the imagery in the WOW logo didn't seem like the right social atmosphere for an Improv Club.

Second, I looked at the typefaces for well-known professional Improv Venues or troupes, to see if there's some ready-made symbols or typefaces already synonymous with stage Improv.

Okay, there isn't. Second City's brush script emphasises the spontaneity of Improv. Upright Citizen's Brigade's "Stencil" look appeals to the 'underground' feeling of the troupe's branding. The U.S. version of "Whose Line is it Anyway?" uses an art decco look, which in my mind, emphasizes the theatrical experience due to connotations to the golden age of Broadway musicals.

Actually, my first thought for an Improv logo was a "Ransom Note" style typeface, much like the logo for the movie, Clerks.

But my first pass at a logo really stressed for the "public club" look with a built type.

The smaller text is "Creator Credits" a free font from Blambot I had in as a dummy, ideally the whole logo would be built out of the same typeface. I wanted to use perfect geometric circles as part of the font's anatomy, to evoke a sense of community through associations with the PBS "Viewer's Like You" vibe.

Okay, I kinda liked the sizing, the overall shape of the piece, but it just didn't have a feeling of whimsy. What Mike Gordon's little three guy graphic clearly put over, is that Improv is supposed to be funny.

Uh, yeah. Aside from being fairly clichéd, the titly text doesn't play well with the horizontal bars of text at the top or bottom. Besides, the small counters make the typeface fairly oppressive, looking.

Here's a mockup, keeping blambot's font as an element and that wacky comedic tilty text, but using scans from book jackets to make up the word "Improv". I like this clip-art look because it shows disparate elements and sources, making up a whole, which is what improv players do.

I knew when I started this, that any bitmap elements would have to be converted to vectors so that the source file could be scaled and played with, so here's the final, again.

Here I played around with spacing and font sizing for legibility. You'll also see I removed the horizontal lines from the P and the benday dots from the R, as they felt like the intense detail pulled attention from the statement as a whole. Also, I pulled the corners of the letter boxes around to give the word "Improv" a unified shape.

Honestly, I feel the bright candy colors from the bitmaps are more fun. But like I've mentioned before, this group is a club first. Ultimately, a unified, calming, stable analogous color scheme that's more "coffee shop" than "Malibu Circus" seemed to fit that purpose better.

OMG Ponies!!!

Recently, I've started loving "My Little Pony :Frienship is Magic" (Hereafter referred to as "MLP:FIM" because that's a damn long title) developed by Lauren Faust.

A lot of people have praised the show, and drawn some terribly, terribly disturbing fan art but MLP:FIM's real strength isn't so much the witty exchanges, the slapstick humor , better than average flash animation or even the phenomenon of male adult viewers shucking their masculinity to watch a horsie show

Not that I'm insecure, of course

...But it's the same thing that animation gurus Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston claimed made (their) Disney feature cartoons so wonderful...

and honestly, how can you not trust these guys?

Which is a focus on Character Personalities, first off, that they have different personalities.

Compared with earlier pony shows, certainly

...and those personalities motivated the plot, like in Die Hard!

not like I'm compensating or anything...

In movies like North By Northwest and Raiders of the Lost Arc, stuff just kinda happens to the hero for no real reason; cropdusters from nowhere, posion darts from the wall. The absurdity of it all is part of the entertainment value of those films. But Die Hard's slightly different.

What would otherwise be walking plot devices: antagonism, exposition, a plot twist , are made interesting and believable through characters with compelling personalities and clearly distinguished motives. The villain, exposition guy and the second-act end plot twist become Hans Gruber, Officer Powell and Dick Thornburg, the effect is the scenarios on the screen are not arbitrary, but created by the actions of the characters.

MLP:FIS's best episodes focus on the naturally occurring friction between the members of the "mane" cast.

In "Sonic Rainboom", Rarity's massive vanity both heightens the conflict and provides a catalyst for the resolution. Kinda like Shakespeare, actually.

...Specifically A Midsummer Night's Dream. Absent of bewitching prophesies, vengeful ghosts or other external means to kick-start the plot, stuff happens because a group of people happen to be in the same place at the same time. From serious crush issues to a really bitter marriage between supernatural monarchs and Puck's love for trolling, it's like what did you expect when these guys are all thrown into the mix?

Here's a link to Hasbro's official site: a clip from the MLP:FIS episode Applebuck Season. Note that in a show where time and budget demands a lot of work done from templates...

and sometimes it shows

...That every character is unmistakably distinct. Not only do the leads has a different speaking voice and attitude, but different ways of approaching the podium. Twilight shuffles index cards, Rainbow Dash simply barges in, Fluttershy slouches and Pinkie Pie jumps up from nowhere.

The reason why the entire internet (or maybe just 4Chan) has gone ballistic for this show over the past few months is because, like good fiction and great drama, from the Looney Tunes to Moby Dick, everything in it is grounded in and motivated by the characters' personalities. Which I think is worth getting excited over.




























.... BTW my favoritest pony ever is Fluttershy

Hey, there's a Ralph Bakshi Thingy

There's a neat interview with animation legend Ralph Bakshi here .

For readers not in the loop, Bakshi is probably one of the most underrated filmmakers of the 20th century.

If you ask me, without Ralph Bakshi's feature films, we would not have the Simpsons, South Park, Robert Zemekis'es creepy mo-cap flicks or even the Don Bluth film catalog .

Periodically, there's a push to formally recognize animation as an artistically legitimate film venue, usually though handling themes unexplored in the medium or through "adult content. But inevitably, public perception seems to swing back to the "children's entertainment" profiling, animation listed as a "genre" on IMDB and so forth.

But if anyone came closest to breaking that glass ceiling it was Bakshi.

Bakshi's profile, career info and influence can be summed up better at his official website or even just his wikipedia entry so I won't burn up more page space here, just check out the interview.

Oh yeah, and he directed that really weird Lord of the Rings movie every one mentions, no not that one.

Improv

Improvisation, at least in a theatrical sense refers to a collaborative form of on stage play that others somehow find amusing. Like you suppose, I't kind of hard and involves making stuff up as you go along. Also, it's totally a learnable skill, and requires a large amount of discipline and structure to create "off the cuff".

Obligatory "Whose Line is it Anyway?" Photo

I'm an avid Improv hobbyist. Once a week, I go make an ass of myself with a bunch of folks at a local community center, playing theater games. There I develop my skills of reincorporation, acceptance, scene building and playing nice with others.

There's awesome books about it, like "Truth in Comedy" by Charna Halper, "Impro"by Keith Johnstone and Viola Spolin's "Improvisation for the Theater" or you can learn for free.

Granted, Improv may not look like it has a lot to do with cartooning but it so totally does.

Did you know Frank Thomas played the Piano? If you know who Frank Thomas is, you probably know that he played the piano, but the late Mr. Thomas, as well as most of Disney's classic animators, played a musical instrument, and even insisted that it was beneficial to their craft.

One of these men is not Frank Thomas.

Jeez, that's like, the zillionth Disney reference I've made! Maybe I'm dangerously obsessed or something. Ollie Johnston looks scary there, doesn't he?

Where was I? Oh, Improv and cartooning, which is sort of like pianos, except they aren't.

So take for example Jean "Moebius" Giraud

Moebius has very little to do with Disney, I think.

Basically one of the most influential Sci-Fi artist/writers in the freaking world. When he started his Sci-Fi themed work which included "The Airtight Garage" and "Arzak", he did the whole damn thing one panel at a time. Seriously. Moebius was all about exploring the unconscious, and as most Sci-Fi is an allegory for stuff, Moebius' realms were an allegory for modes of perception (or so he claims, I dunno, he's French).

Here's another one of my favorite cartoonists, Jill Thompson.

She kinda looks like this. She also drew Sandman
which means Goths everywhere should start doing Improv.

At a comics forum in 2008. Ms. Thompson spoke of the value of Improv training as a writing aid, particularly in developing scenarios and concepts for stories, like for her creations "Scary Godmother" and "Magic Trixie".

Oh yeah, and there's also Scott McCloud.

He actually looks like this: he has no eyes, and it's scary.

Among other things, McCloud's a big proponent of improvised comics. He also has invented the 24 hour comic, which is an excersise that it a lot of fun, whether or not you finish it.

The value of improvisation is that even the creator/performer doesn't know where it's gonna go or how it's gonna end. As a form unto itself or as a tool in early drafts or rehearsal, improvisation provides an invaluable resource to the cartoonist/performer. It's also fun.

Help a Brother Out.

One of my associates from SCAD, Coleman Engle, is going to France.

This is quite thrilling, as Coleman has been accepted into a comics residency in Angoulême, which is rare for Americans (Coleman is the second EVER). He's going to be drawing a comics album titled V'Ger: "Intergalactic Delivery Boy".

I had the good fortune to travel with Coleman and several other artists, all immensely talented and skilled, as part of a SCAD off-campus program last year, in France, we got to witness the Franco-Belgian Comics scene firsthand . How cool are European comics?Take for instance the Angoulême BD Festival : Imagine the insanity of the San Diego Comic Convention if it actually were about comic books. And now one of us has an opportunity to be a part of that!

So give him money, like, right now. Help get a talented artist the major break he deserves, and represent U.S. in the big comics leagues.

P.S. : As of January, 2011, Coleman has canceled his Kickstarter fund. Best wishes to all your future endeavors, Coleman.

Holy Crap!

One of my extremely talented former classmates, Elena Barbarich draws a highly amusing webcomic: Sister Claire.

I had the privilege of seeing some of her earlier strips back in class, which showcase a sense of humor somewhat beyond the pale. (note the subtitle: "Pregnant Nun: Holy Crap!") Naturally, nuns with Diarrhea are hysterical in college.

Elena manages to mix 4Chan style insanity with a superb eye for color and damnright cuddly nuns.

So if you like the strange, potentially controversial and cute, check it out.

Heads up

Michael Sporn is posting some pretty awesome Mary Blair artwork here . This post is on Cinderella, which looks like it could have been a much more interesting film at some point.