Wednesday, August 09, 2006

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 Outdated dream, yeah.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...