Corn Nuts.

I hate Corn Nuts. I've always hated them. I hate the smell of them and I hate the sound of them. It used to drive me out of my mind in high school when someone would tear open a bag of them in class and start crunching away. The awful smell would permeate the entire room, and the combined sound of the crinkling bag and the obnoxiously loud crunching would send my nerves through the roof. And the thing about them is that people never eat a handful of them at a time. They enjoy every single Corn Nut one morsel at a time. With luck and the right combination of sluggish motor skills, one could turn a small bag into a half hour experience from hell. To top it all, Corn Nuts are never eaten outdoors or in large rooms where the fresh air would allow the pungent fumes to drift away freely. No, they are eaten only in small classrooms, packed cars or other enclosed spaces, such as to create a wonderful Dutch oven effect. I hate Corn Nuts.

Some Development Sketches.

Per Mr. Yoon's request...

The lineup of Candy Cane Ave. as it currently stands (apologies for the poor scan)...



The lineup as it looked for a long time...

Morning Metrolink Ride.

A suggestion to the middle aged woman angrily telling the train conductor not to speak to her like she were a five year old - set down the Harry Potter book.

Update.

Where are things at? Well, as I mentioned previously, I have the website domain. Now is the time for the drawing and coloring. My cousin has told me that he could turn around the website in a matter of days when he has my stuff. Due to some family illnesses, I've been putting off things. Now I am wondering if I should launch the site now or after the holidays. The work still needs to be done now, but I may not want to start the strip knee-deep in the yuletide season, as the strip really isn't centered on the holidays (funny as that may seem). Regardless, the time to put things on paper is now.

Website.

Well, I took a giant step forward today (at least in my mind) when I secured the domain for my website, CandyCaneAve.com. Now, thanks to my cousin Todd, we will begin building the site and hopefully we'll have some daily strips soon.

Argh.

I may actually drive myself mad with the character designs. The more I try to refine things, the more new directions I seem to go.

Dragging.

I know I haven't posted for awhile, but I have to admit that I felt a little ashamed posting again before I had artwork to show. I have piles and piles of gags and themes to go with for my strip, but I just haven't nailed down the design of the characters yet. Its not due to lack of effort. I'm inches away, but I just can't decide. Angular and simple, or round and animate-able? Cute or alternative looking? Its probably a very good thing I never became a designer. The curse of working in an industry where every show you work on brings a new style is that, unless you make a real effort outside of work, you never really develop your own personal design sense. My wife told me last night to just pick a design and I will make it work, and she's probably right. To be continued...

Comic Strip.

I've recently found a renewed sense of urgency in regards to getting my comic strip done and sent off to the syndicates. Recently, as I've sat on the train my mind has wandered, and I've thought quite a bit about my life and how it affects my children. Regardless of whether it leads to any financial or critical success, I feel I may owe it to my children to get off my arse and make a real attempt at achieving a dream. How will I tell my kids to make the most of life when I myself haven't done the same? Sure, I love animation and drawing cartoons for a living is hard to complain about, but my lifelong ambition has been to publish a newspaper comic strip. Outdated dream, yeah. Newspapers seem to be in a pretty steady and rapid decline with the online availability of news. I've had the intent to submit stuff for years, but I've always found an excuse to put it off. I drew a comic panel, "bughouse," for my college newspaper years ago and loved it. The creative freedom combined with the challenge of not only being vaguely smile-inducing (cough, cough, Family Circus, cough) but funny is exciting to me. So now the task is to focus on the work that needs to be done and create the time to do it. Perhaps, if nothing else, typing this in a public forum for all to read will shame me into doing it...

Candy Cane Ave.

I find that with every show I work on, the style of that particular project seems to seep into my own personal style. Going back and looking at the development work I did last year on Candy Cane Ave. reflects this. Drawn while I had had back-to-back stints on "Fairly Oddparents" and "Teenage Robot," my line-ups and roughs are very angular and graphic - a very appealing style, but not necessarily what I think will be the best fit for Candy Cane. So I literally go back to the drawing board and redraw this stuff for the 50th time...

SpongeBob SquarePants.

This image has been my screensaver at work for a few months now. It is from the short "Chocolate With Nuts." In a chocolate bar themed episode, Patrick and SpongeBob get frightened by a would-be stalker, and then we cut to Patrick's shorts as a Hershey kiss drops out the bottom. I can't think of too many children's animated shows that would get away with this.

Palm Desert.

We had a nice weekend planned. A condo in beautiful Coronado with some good friends and a trip to Sea World with the kids. The condo was owned by our friend's family, so we'd be saving a little cash on the trip. When those plans came crashing down, we fell back to Plan B - staying at another condo owned by the same family in Palm Desert. After loading up the car on Friday, my wife left Santa Clarita at 2:30, picked me up at work at 3:30, and we arrived, thanks to Los Angeles's well-oiled transportation byways, at 8:30. When we arrived, we found a beautiful condo in a gated community on a golf course... with a barely-functioning air conditioner. With the temperature outside still in the high 90's/low 100's, we immediately changed clothes and headed over to the pool. The pool, under the blazing sun all day, was as warm as a hot tub - nice in the winter, not so much at 100 degrees. After a night of sleeping in pools of our own sweat, we hoped a day with the air left on in the condo would leave things cool for the next evening's sleep. So we headed off for the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway in the 126 degree heat. The weather at the top of the mountain was nice. Breezy, warm but cool - the way summer should be. That only lasted a couple hours, as we had to return to the condo for the kids' naps. We returned to find the condo had gotten even hotter. We tried swimming again and, although we were determined to stay in the pool longer this time, the water was no cooler than the night before. With no relief in sight, we all agreed to cut our weekend away short and evacuate Palm Desert. We were relieved when we arrived home that night at midnight in a Santa Clarita that was only a cool, refreshing 99 degrees.

Metrolink Mother.

I can't tell you how many times I've encountered this person while taking the train to and from work.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/49603

One Got Fat. Again.

In an incredibly odd coincidence, the subject of this film came up again. In the middle of a random conversation with the Animation Guild's Business Rep, Steve Hulett, he noticed a screen cap from "One Got Fat" taped above my nameplate on my cubicle. He remarked that HIS FATHER and a couple associates MADE this film in 1963. His brother played one of the monkeys in the film (the one that wasn't brutally maimed) and his mother and her best friend played two women knocked into a tree by one of the monkeys. After physically assaulting Steve, I crawled under my desk and spent the next four hours in the fetal position.

One Got Fat.

Years ago, Monlux Elementary School would gather all the students for "assemblies" in the auditorium where they would screen educational films on the movie projector. When I was in second or third grade, they showed us a film on bicycle safety that brought me years and years of horrifying nightmares. I remember not being able to sleep well for weeks, and for years after would periodically get a flashback of a scene or two. When I tried to describe this film to friends years later ("monkeys on bikes" was the best description I could muster), no one I knew had ever heard of it and thought it was a figment of my imagination. Well, a few weeks ago at the ripe age of 35 I got another of those aforementioned flashbacks and decided to Google "monkeys on bikes." To my surprise I found the film - called "One Got Fat." With a creepy voiceover by "Fractured Fairytales" Edward Everett Horton, it is the terrifying story of a bunch of half monkey/half teenage kids not obeying bicycle safety laws and meeting horrible fates. Since rediscovering this film, I've periodically watched it as a sort of therapy for the second grader inside me. Its still weird.

http://www.archive.org/details/OneGotFa1963

First Post.

Candy Cane Ave. is the name of a project I've been developing for... well, far too long. It serves as my imaginary escape hatch from the restrictions of a career in the animation industry.