In case you’re unfamiliar with his work, Dave Kellett is a super talented cartoonist and all-around nice guy, who does a webcomic called Sheldon. He’s been working over two years now on a documentary about cartoonists and the comics industry. Specifically, comic strips.
Since I follow Dave on Twitter and elsewhere, I’ve known of this project for some time and have been massively excited about it. Today, he finally posted the first trailer for the film, along with a new Kickstarter project to help fund its completion.
This film looks ah-mazing, featuring the likes of guys like Jim Davis (Garfield) and Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine). Any cartoonists and comics artists out there, I urge you to help this project along, however you can. I myself just pledged $50 towards it.
If you’ve been on Facebook for any length of time and/or have more than a few FB friends, you’ve likely seen statuses like the one in this strip. At first it wasn’t so bad, but I started seeing several of them a day, posted by multiple people.
On their own, some of them aren’t so bad. But then they start getting preachy and passive-aggressive, like one that suggests you weren’t raised right if you didn’t re-post it as your status. They vary, but the general insinuation is if you don’t re-status, well, you’re just a bad person.
“Set this as your status if you have a [insert relative] in heaven…”
“Re-post this if you love your kids…”
“Make this your status if you think mean people suck…”
It goes on and on. What’s weird is I’ve never seen anyone actually use the same status as anyone else. So I wonder if anyone is ever re-posting at all. But then again, the original posts are being written by someone.
Either way, I hit the “unfriend” link several times this week.
About the Art
Obviously still playing with character designs. Came to the sad conclusion that only a select few cartoonists can pull off the single oval for eyes (Bill Watterson, Dave Kellett), so I’m playing with options. Better, but still has issues.
The thing that’s been hardest about drawing these on paper is that it’s infinitely harder to deal with mistakes than on the computer. Things get out of proportion easily and you can’t just scale them. Sure, I could do a lot of post-production after it’s scanned, but that defeats the purpose. What you see is what I drew, for better or worse.
The comic pretty much says it all. Remember when TLC stood for “The Learning Channel”? Not sure what it says about us as a society that we consume the kind of garbage they’re making shows out of these days. I’m talking about these shows like Hoarders, Extreme Couponing, and the show about people that like to dress up as babies and make love to cars (yes, this exists).
The worst offender, I think, is Toddlers and Tiaras. The parents behind that show should be arrested for child abuse. They’re breeding tomorrow’s monsters.
About the Art
In a word…rubbish. While I think this strip is funny, I really struggled on the art. I kid you not, I erased and re-drew one of those arms at least 12 times. And it still looks horrible. Still feeling my way around this “brushed” style, but I gotta tell ya, I feel I’m struggling to find my way. Will keep at it, though.
My wife and I recently got to see “Cowboys and Aliens”, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It wasn’t as mind-blowing as I’d hoped for a movie I’d anticipated for over a year, but I thought it was pretty fun.
As usual, they showed lots of trailers. Some got me excited, some were “meh” and some were just downright perplexing. The latter was a trailer for “Battleship”, a little movie based on the popular game. Not a video game. A game game. A board game. A game with ships and pegs. Somewhere, somehow, somebody had played this game and at one point thought, “This should be a movie!” Apparently, this person also had connections in Hollywood, or someone owed him money.
It’s clear right from the get-go that the plot is pretty flimsy. Some hot actors (and Liam Neeson) are out on a battleship when this big alien ship comes out of the water and attacks. They fire back. End of trailer. Don’t get me wrong, the effects here look amazing, and maybe it will be at least a fun popcorn movie. I’m not above that. I mean hell, I still loves me some Armageddon. But what amazes me is that this is a licensed translation of an incredibly simple board game. I’m dying to know how they make any real connections to it, although there’s a hint in the trailer. At about the 1:55 mark, the alien ship actually fires what looks like “pegs” at them, embedding themselves in the hull of the ship. WOW, just like the game!!
At any rate, I had fun drawing the strip. On the second panel I’d planned on doing the blacks in ink and adding some painted stars, but I’d completely forgotten about it until I’d scanned it. So I did that part digitally. I might still go back and do it to the original piece.
Check out the Battleship trailer. The “pegs” show up at about 1:55.
Oh, and here’s the classic 1981 “Connect Four” commercial with the line “Pretty sneaky, sis”
