Lepus Studios Artist Blog

Nightmare House (Part Three)

2014-10-30T00:30:00.000-07:00

I wrote a short story for Halloween. I'm going to post it in three parts for three days.

Part One can be found here.
Part Two is here.

Here's part three:

Nightmare House, A Halloween Story

Part Three:

We passed through a little door and entered a small, round room. It was almost a relief to see my three bosses, looking almost human, just as I remembered them. They were standing in a circle, locked in deep discussion, just as humans would. But when they looked up and saw the boy and me, their faces turned serious. The door closed behind us.

At once the boy fell into his chant. My bosses advanced on us with inhuman speed. They began to change as they moved. By the time they were near us, their appearances matched that the creepy feeling they always gave me. The feeling which, by the way, had multiplied ten fold. The demons looked like smoke and ashes and shadows that held an almost human shape. About where their stomachs should be, each demon had a transparent sack, which was almost full to the top with a thick purple liquid. Two of them advanced on the boy, hissing in a tone no living creature could make. The third started to approach me and I felt terror like I had never known was possible. And as he came near me, I saw his stomach sack grow fuller. That purple liquid must be the fear that they had been storing. Now that he couldn’t take any more fear from children, he was going to take it from me. And their stomach sacks were almost full. Whatever they were collecting fear for…they almost had enough.

The boy was scared too. His chanting was steady, but his voice was higher and shakier than before. The demons swarmed around him frantically, their stomach sacks filling slowly.

Suddenly, the stomach of the demon closest to me filled to the top. It dropped out of his body and burst on the ground like a water balloon. A glassy puddle splashed across the floor. But in this liquid pool, where a reflection should have been, I could see a chasm. And this chasm was filled with the monster worm beasts I had seen in the boy's nightmare. One of them, roughly the size of a Volkswagen bus, turned towards us and began to move upwards, as though he was down in a hole and the puddle was the hole's opening. Fortunately, the puddle was too small for these monsters to climb through, although the liquid was still spreading out.

SPLASH! I looked up and saw that a second demon had dropped its stomach sack and a new puddle was combining with the old one, making a much larger opening. The worms were very aware of this portal now and they were all scrambling to get closer. The largest worm had begun to extend its tentacles to the surface and, to my horror, the tentacles passed through the puddle as easily as passing through an open window. The worm could not squeeze it whole body through and he was blocking the way out for the smaller worms. But if that last fear sack were to fall, the puddle would be large enough for everything to pass through. There would be nothing stopping them.

All three demons were swarming around the boy, trying to stop his chants. They seemed unable to harm him directly, but this whole thing had to be throwing his concentration. I thought they had all forgotten about me, until a violent jerk pulled my whole body to the ground. But it wasn’t a demon. The largest worm had gotten ahold of my stupid costume cape. The creature didn’t even realize it had me. If it did, I’m sure it would have effortlessly dragged me to hell, or wherever it was trying to crawl out of. Instead, it was simply twitching it tentacles, like an insect’s feelers and my cape had happened to get tangled up in them. Inch by inch, the monster inadvertently pulled my to my doom while I frantically tugged at the catch of my cape. I was certain my life was going to end in the most horrific way imaginable, when everything in the room seemed to stop moving. The boy finished his spell.

It wasn’t a big, theatrical end, the kid’s voice didn’t change or anything. But it was like the last word itself had weight. And, the word itself seemed to catch fire. A white flame hung in the air in front of the boy’s face. Then the flame spread in all directions, filling the room. I was sure that the boy and I would be burned alive, along with everything else in the room. We would be martyred to spare the world from a demon invasion. Considering I was about to be pulled into a pit full of the worst nightmare creatures imaginable, getting burned to death would have been a welcome relief. But the fire passed right through the boy without harming him. It passed through me as well. But the demons were quickly consumed by it and it burned them into nothingness. Not even ashes were left behind. The fear pools burned up like puddles of gasoline, leaving the worm beasts trapped wherever they were. And suddenly the fire was gone, and there was nothing left but the two of us. The boy, shaking and barely standing upright, and me, lying on my back and wearing the tattered remnants of a Halloween costume cape, both of us on the top of a plywood shack, next to a fake four-foot plywood steeple.

The entire area was empty except for the two of us. The crowd seemed to have left. Perhaps some last little bit of the glamour led the people away so to protect the secret of Nightmare House, or some deep-rooted self-preservation instinct made everyone decide to leave the site of our near-Armageddon without understanding the reason for their departure. I had a faint realization that I should be grateful that they all left quietly instead of hanging around to press charges. I knew I would be able to process this gratitude more fully in the days ahead, once my mind stopped reeling from tonight’s disaster.

As I collected my bearings, I realized that the boy was staring at me. He was making no move to leave. I figured he either wanted to thank me for my help or punish me for the lousy part I had played in all this monster summoning. “What do you want?” I asked bluntly. I had no energy left for tact.

“You can see them?” the boy asked, incredulously.

“Of course I can see them.” I answered. Couldn’t everyone see the demons? I had always assumed the demons needed me to help them because no one else would cooperate with them. It had never occurred to me that they might be invisible or something.

“I’ve never met anyone else who could do that!” The boy exclaimed. “Well, except for my grandfather, he’s the one who taught me how to fight them.”

“But grandpa’s gone now,” he continued, “and I’ve had to fight them all by myself. But now you can help me. And you’re an adult, so you can drive us places and buy weapons and supplies. Maybe you could get a job at my school so you could help cover for me if I have to leave class and stuff.”

“Stop!” I interrupted. “I don’t know how to fight demons. I can’t do any of that stuff for you. And I certainly can’t get a job at your school. Schools aren’t the kind of places that hire people like me.”

The kid was undeterred. “They’ll give you a job if you use your glamour power on them.”

Just when I thought he understood all this supernatural stuff, he goes and makes a dumb assertion like that. “No, I’m not the one with the powers. The demons had all the magic.”

“But you were with them for more than a year. That means you’ve absorbed some of the glamour by now. The magic won’t convince the school to hire you as a teacher or principal, but you could be a janitor or something.”

This was too much. The kid was trying to convince me that, not only did I have a small amount of magic powers, but I should also use these powers to get a job as a school custodian. Incidentally, even without the demon fighting, working as a school custodian sounded horrible. Bratty kids making a mess on purpose because they think it’s funny that someone else has to clean up after them. And after tonight’s fiasco, I imagine more than a few of them would have it in for me.

“No.” I said. “I’m not doing any of that.”

“I can’t do this by myself and you’re the only other one who can do something.” He said. I knew he was going to argue my decision, but he couldn’t change my mind. The boy may be able to fight monsters, but when it came to other humans, he was as powerless as any other kid. Or so I thought.

“You have to do this.” He said. It sounded as much like a plea as it did an order. And I realized that all my complaints and excuses were simply my mind’s way coming to terms with a simple, concrete fact. Yes, of course I had to do this.

This was it. I would atone for my crimes against humanity by risking my life fighting evil in place of this kid’s departed grandfather (by the way, I noticed how vague the kid was about why, exactly, grandfather was out of the picture.)

I put my head down and prepared to brace myself for this new chapter in my life.

The End

Author's Note

The idea for this story was simple. In fantasy tales, we often read about kids with fantastic powers who become heroes. They are often reluctantly dragged into their destined role by an adult mentor who helps them face the tasks ahead. (I've been watching a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer lately, just to name one example.) I thought it would be fun to write a story that worked the other way around, where the hero kid has to convince the reluctant adult to take up a heavy role. Off the top of my head, the only other tale I can think of that scratches on that idea is the plot to The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass (a beautiful game with a charming story).

I don't plan on writing anymore stories with these characters. Part of this story's appeal is that it looks like and origin story, but I never dreamed up a larger world for it to be an origin to. Besides, my ongoing comics are already overpopulated by roguish characters seeking redemption. If I were to expand on the narrator character's arc, I fear it wouldn't be long before I ended up repeating myself.

Amusingly, to keep the narrator from seeming too derivative of my other characters, I provided as few details as possible. You can't even tell if the character is male or female. I've tried reading the story back to myself imagining the character in either gender, and I think it holds up both ways.

However, this probably won't be the last short story I ever spin. Keep an eye on the blog. I may keep throwing the occasional piece of fiction in, along with all my rants.

Happy Halloween.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

Nightmare House (Part Two)

2014-10-29T00:30:00.000-07:00

I wrote a short story for Halloween. I'm going to post it in three parts for three days.

Part One can be found here.

Here's part two:

Nightmare House, A Halloween Story

Part Two:

It was the Halloween night, and trick-or-treating had ended, easily our busiest time of the year. It’s tough to notice individual people in a big crowd, but somehow, this little boy caught my attention. He looked about eleven or twelve years old and his eyes were kind of bright and kind of hollow at the same time.

I figured that he was going to be one of those mean kids. I’m not proud of this, but I kind of enjoy watching the mean kids get scared. They’re the ones who try to show how fearless they are by making fun of demon house, which usually means mocking me and ruining my act. I’ve had kids throw trash at me more times than I’d like to admit. Sometimes they shout me down during my introduction, which, as I mentioned, is the only good part of my job. This is going to sound a little silly, knowing what's about to happen to them, but those kids hurt my feelings. They don’t know what I’m planning. As far as they know, I’m just some working stiff who they push around for selfish amusement.

So, back to this kid. I thought he was going to be a jerk, so when his group got to the front, I gave them the best, most mock-proof “Welcome to Nightmare House” spiel I could muster. But the kid was quiet and respectful the whole time. When I was done, a few of the youngest kids gave a tiny applause and he joined in. He seemed to be nothing but polite. I had no time to figure him out because they were all in the house in less than a minute. I shut the door and stood back as the nightmares began to come to life.

As usual, the room came to life with skeletons, zombies and clowns. There was a kid who seemed to be dreaming that he had poisoned himself (I hate watching the smart kids. They always come up with the worst psychological tortures to inflict on themselves.)

That’s when I noticed the worm. I had been working for Nightmare House for years, so I’d seen pretty much every imaginable fear in some form or another. But I had never seen anything quite like that worm before. It was the size of a small dog and growing fast. It had skin that looked like my demon bosses’ skin, except folded into worm segments. It was oozing a putrid purple vapor and it seemed to be growing tentacles that could be feelers or extra heads. It seemed to be chewing on the remains of something that was probably once human. Again, descriptions can’t do it justice. It just gave me a really awful feeling. And it was about to get worse when I noticed that no one seemed to be looking at the worm beast. What if it wasn’t a nightmare? What if this thing was actually in the room with us? By now, the worm had grown to the size of a small car and showed no signs of slowing. Watching other people’s nightmare come to life had always been more disturbing than scary to me, but this thing was flat out terrifying.

The creature started to advance on the boy with the strange eyes. It must be the boy’s nightmare after all, but that thought did little to comfort me. How did a kid even imaging a thing like that, even in a nightmare? Is he psychotic? Or…is this something he had seen before?

Somehow, over the usual sounds of screaming and panic, I became aware that the boy was talking softly. No, he was chanting, chanting in a language unlike anything I had ever heard before. And the more he chanted, the slower the nightmares seemed to move. Then, the nightmares started disappearing. Not all at once, as they usually do when a tour ends, but one at a time. And, for the first time, kids were coming out of their trances at different times, so the first to break the spell could clearly see they were standing in a room full of nightmare illusions and traumatized children. Then, just like that, all the remaining nightmares vanished, along with my demon bosses. The little boy yelled, “everyone get out of here!” and all the other children took off either out the exit or back through the front door, until there was no one left in the room except the boy and me.

He turned on me and asked, “Where did they go?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, trying to shake off my own fear as fast as possible, “there’s just this one room.” From inside, without the distraction of the illusions, Nightmare House was very clearly made of just four plywood walls.

“Think hard. Where else could they have gone?” He asked, sounding very serious. It seemed like such an absurd question. Where could they have gone? My demon employers had never told me about any escape plans. Thinking harder was not going to change that. Somehow, the urgency of the moment forced an idea to form. Nightmare House had a few cheesy decorations to help convince people that this was a normal haunted house. One of these decorations was a fake door, covered in fake chains to imply that there was some kind of fake monster behind in. Most of the decorations went on the outside of the house, but the door was the only one that fit on the inside.

“Over there.” I said, “Try the fake door.” The kid ran to the door and flung it open as if that were the most natural suggestion in the world. If it had been a fake door, the boy would have opened it to see a plywood wall. If it had been a regular door, it would have opened into the parking lot outside, where, no doubt, an angry mob of parents would be demanding to know just what was going on here. The door was neither of those things. Instead it opened to reveal a staircase, a staircase which led up to what looked like the inside of a steeple tower. From this angle, the tower looked disturbingly like the fake, four-foot plywood tower I fixed to the top of Nightmare House. That is, if that prop tower had been real. The boy started up the stairs. “Come on!” he called down to me.

Going up those stairs felt like a horrible plan. But then, so did staying behind, so I decide to follow and see how it all played out. After all, I knew these demons. Maybe I could still smooth this over and keep this kid out of trouble. “

They’re not as bad as they seem,” I said in my most parental voice as we climbed the staircase, “they just need fear for food. They do this to stay alive.”

“Is that what they told you?” The boy responded without looking back at me. “They don’t eat fear. They’re using it for something else.”

I had slowly been feeling more confident ever since the worm beast disappeared, but those feeling of confidence were slowly being consumed by fear again. This was a different kind of fear than what I had felt when the worm beast appeared. That fear was panic, pure and simple. This new fear was dread. Deep-rooted, psychological, all-consuming dread. Why had I never questioned the stories about eating fear? I’ve spend the last several(?) years of my life years of my life taking the word of demons, for pity’s sake! Why had I gone along with all of this so complacently? This boy’s comments were removing all my suggestibility. There was no glamour left. Only more dread.

“What do they use fear for?” I asked. Despite my years of demon experience, this kid somehow seemed to know much more than I did.

“I don’t know,” he said, still not looking back at me, “but it won’t be good.”

“What can we do?” It was laughable to think that I imagined myself the adult in all this less than a minute ago.

“I can finish my spell. I was powerful enough to chase them away. Maybe the whole spell can destroy them.”

We were nearing the top of the stairs. I tried to remind myself that this would be okay. These were the demons I’ve known for years, right? It was tempting to think that this was somehow all a misunderstanding, but if I held out any naive optimism, I might fall victim to the glamour again. I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of false hope. We were at the top of the steps.

(The third and final part of the story will run on Thursday, October 30.)

Nightmare House (Part One)

2014-10-27T21:23:00.001-07:00

I wrote a short story for Halloween. I'm going to post it in three parts for three days. Here's part one:

Nightmare House, A Halloween Story

Part One:

Halloween is my busiest time of the year. I work for a haunted house, so that’s to be expected. You’re probably thinking Halloween should be my only time of year for that kind of job, but no. Nightmare House runs all year round. Yes, business is kind of lean in the winter months, but we get a steady stream of customers again in the late spring and all through the summer. Of course, nothing beats the crowds I see in October.

Nightmare House isn’t actually a house. It’s a little plywood shack that travels from town to town. We set it up in parks or empty lots, wherever they’ll have us. I book our appearances, get all the permits, take out ads, hang decorations, print flyers, sell tickets, lead the tours…whatever my bosses can’t do themselves. Yes, that is too much work for one single employee, but I get it all done.

Each night, right after sundown, all the kids line up and I lead one group at a time into the house. I like to take groups of ten in the off-season, but in October, I usually need to take groups of twenty or thirty kids at once. I like to wear dark clothes, a costume cape, and maybe a little stage makeup, if I’m feeling it. I lead each group to the corridor and tell them that they are about to enter a space where their worst nightmares will come true to haunt them. I’m not a natural performer by any means, but I like doing the introduction. It’s the only part of my job that’s even a little fun.

Then the kids walk into the house and I close the door behind them. Right away, they’re disappointed that it’s just a big empty room. They always expect the winding halls and creepy exhibits like you see at normal haunted house. But when their eyes adjust to the dark they notice that we are not alone in here. My bosses are in the room with us.

That’s when the nightmares start to appear. It usually starts with something small, like snakes or spiders. In less then a minute, the room is full of nightmares. Mad dogs, lightning bolts, whatever scares those kids. But, no matter how crowded the room gets, the kids don’t even seem to notice anything except their own, personal nightmare. I stand in the back and watch the room fill up with these awful things. I’m not really sure how it works. Believe me, I try not to ask questions. The simplest explanation is that my bosses are, for lack of a better word, demons.

I’m not sure if my three bosses are literally demons, I just know that they’re not human. They do look sort of human, at least that’s the appearance they take whenever they meet with me. But they don’t look quite right. For one thing, their skin and eyes have these sort of purple undertones that look unnatural. They also have a low pitch to their voice. I’m not certain a human larynx can produce that exact pitch. Actually, these descriptions don’t quite do them justice. Whenever they’re around, I get this feeling of uneasiness, like an instinct that tells me something is wrong. No humans could possibly mistake these guys for members of their own species. That’s probably why they need a human employee. I can sell tickets and book locations for them. If any of our customers had to interact with these guys, no one would ever come near Nightmare House.

I know what you’ve been wondering. When the kids face their nightmares, do they get hurt? Of course not. I’m not exactly the kindest soul you’ll ever meet, but I’m not a monster. My bosses just terrify them for ten minutes or so, then the nightmares disappear, and everyone runs out the exit and into the back lot where their parents are waiting. The first few times I saw it, I expected the kids to tell their parents everything that had just happened. Then the parents would call the police or something and I’d spend the rest of my days in prison for child endangerment. But the kids just talked about fake bats on strings, wax figures, garbled sound recordings from 1973, and all the other regular haunted house crap.

I guess Nightmare House puts some kind of spell on the kids so they don’t remember what happened. I don’t think the magic is perfect, though. When it’s over, the kids always look a little more rattled than they should. And we never get return customers. If I’m in town for a week I don’t see the same kids on Tuesday that I saw on Monday. The spell must not work on adults either. I go into that house with the kids every night and I’ve never seen any of my nightmares. I guess that’s why we only take kids and no adults. That’s another strange thing about Nightmare House. With any normal haunted house, you can be sure that some kid won’t go without one or both parents tagging along or there will be at least a dozen parents who won’t let their kids go in without a chaperone. But when families show up at Nightmare House, the kids just line up at the door and the parents wait at the exit as if it that was the only possible arrangement. Come to think of it, we never see any childless adults, teens or college students either. Like I said, don’t question it.

I think I’ve heard of spells like this before, but only in fiction, of course. They’re called glamour spells. They make people see or think things that aren’t real. As I recall, for the spell to work, the victim needs to be open to the suggestion first. Glamour spells can’t make you believe anything unless part of you wants to believe it. I guess these kids really want to believe that nothing horrible really happened to them.

You’re probably wondering why actual demons would bother using their magic to run a traveling sideshow. Simply put, fear is like food to them. If they stop scaring people they starve to death. I suppose in the olden days, demons would run around terrorizing humans to sustain themselves, instead of finding willing volunteers. That actually makes this whole operation seem a little less nasty, if you ask me. I mean, what other creature can eat without killing anything? These guys just mess with their victims for a few minutes then send them back, physically unscathed and able to go on with their lives. Heck, their only victims are people who are asking to be scared. Sure, it’s lousy that they only prey on children with this arrangement. And it would be better if they didn’t have to scare them quite so much. And, yes, it’s a little unscrupulous that we charge admission for the whole thing, but I have to get paid somehow. I can’t eat fear.

I don’t remember how I started working here. I probably started the way anyone takes any bad job: I convinced myself that I really needed work and I would only do it this for a little while. But then the years piled on, I really can’t remember how many, and now I’m not sure I could quit. I mean, I don’t think my bosses are dangerous, but I’m not looking forward to their reactions if I ever bring them a letter of resignation. And I’m not sure how I would find another job after this. The longest running job credit on my resume would read, “Haunted House Worker.” Add that to the disadvantage of starting a new career at my age. Actually, I’m not sure how old I am. That’s the kind of thing most people remember, isn’t it?

(Part Two will run on Wednesday, October 29)

The Costume Dress

2014-10-21T13:24:00.002-07:00

Each October, whenever my errands take me to the mall or anywhere reasonably close to a Halloween store, I like to take a look at the costumes. I usually put together my own Halloween outfits, but that doesn't stop me from checking out everyone else's potential costumes. I guess I like knowing what different people are into each year.

Lately, I've noticed an odd trend in kid's costumes, specifically the costumes for girls. Designers have been dreaming up these outfits that are not actually costumes, but character themed dresses. For example, instead of dressing up as a My Little Pony character, girls can wear a dress in their pony's colors. The dress sports a tutu skirt, a T-shirt style top with a picture of the pony on it, and it comes with a head piece that features tiny ears and a little lock of puffy hair. Is the outfit pony inspired? Absolutely. Yet, no one will think that kid is actually dressed as a pony. Other characters to get the dress treatment are Hello Kitty, Sonic the Hedgehog, Pikachu, Batman, Spiderman, and all the Ninja Turtles.

This design choice begs the question: do little girls actually want character dresses or would they rather have more accurate costumes? Is this really the design that most girls prefer? Or is this design just cheaper to mass produce? Or are designers just incapable of imagining little girls wearing anything other than poofy dresses? I can't speak for kids today, but when I was a small child, I wanted to look like the character I was playing, and settling for a character-themed dress would have felt like a waste of a Halloween.

And yet…

When I was a teenager, I remember reading a short article in a gaming magazine about a Pokemon-themed ball gown. This was not a child's costume, this was formal attire for an extremely upperclass high society masquerade ball where everyone had to wear costume-themed gowns or tuxedos. If anyone arrived in a traditional costume the other guests would probably drop their monocles into their champagne glasses. And for what is was, the Pokemon gown was really nice. It was Pikachu yellow and it had little pokeball pins holding up the scalloped edges of the skirt. I don't know if it was the dress itself or the fact that someone had actually combined video games and women's formal attire, but I liked that dress. So it's not impossible for me to believe that some little girls would prefer the costume dress to a traditional costume.

Of course, the role of the costume dress may be something different altogether. My cousin, the mother of two young daughters, pointed out how often costumes double as play clothes these days. It's not unusual to see little girls wearing their Disney Princess gowns to the playground, Kids of all ages and genders wear costume-themed hoodies to school and such. Animal-ear hats have never been more popular. I'm a big fan of this costume-clothes trend. I think it helps kids express their interests while encouraging them to live up to the heroic attributes of the characters they take with them. (Or maybe I just like costume clothes. Either way.) So, if girls are planning on wearing these Halloween costumes year round, maybe parents are more comfortable putting them in a dress that can be mistaken for regular dang clothes instead of letting them run around the playground in a full Hello Kitty mask. My cousin even suggested that some parents are buying multiple costumes for their daughters - the actual costumes for Halloween night and the thematic dresses for everyday wear.

I guess the best thing I can say about costume dresses is that they give girls more choices, and choices are almost always a good thing. (Of course, the more effeminate, harder to design characters like My Little Pony and Hello Kitty seem to only exist in dress form, but that feels like a whole other issue, so I'm gonna move on.) My only big complaint is how many costume shops confusingly categorize the dresses as "girls' costumes" and everything else as "boys' costumes." I have noticed a few shops that designate their costumes as "kids' costumes" and "girls' costumes" which is more accurate (and, I imagine, these labels would sell more merchandise.) Personally, I would label them "kids' costumes" and "costume dresses." Then there would be no confusion.

Parents of daughters, if you haven't gone costume shopping yet this year, I strongly advise you to find out which version of the costume your kids wants before money changes hands. This is another precious opportunity for kids to choose how to express themselves, which is one of the best things* about Halloween.

*Aside from candy.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

I Made an Animated Short

2014-07-20T21:31:00.000-07:00

I made a short animated cartoon called Cookie Tree. It's about a stuffed turtle. You should watch it and share it with all your friends.

I've been working on and off on this short for about nine months. Here's the story of how Cookie Tree was made:

Cookie Tree started as a project for my animation class. I teach a weekend/summer class on Flash animation to kids, who generally find it difficult, but rewarding. Years ago, some of my students started complaining that making movies in the time allotted was impossible. To prove that it was, indeed, possible, I started making animated shorts along with them. During the school year, the students have, roughly eight hours each month to work on their art in the computer studio. So I would give myself eight hours each month to work on my animations at home. At the beginning of each class, the students could check my work and measure my progress. (I have no plans to post those early shorts online, as I am equal parts proud and ashamed of them.) In the end, the experiment was met with overwhelming indifference. It seems that the students were not really concerned with how possible the assignments were. They just liked complaining. So I ended the experiment.

Fast forward to last November. This year's group of students were different. They might actually appreciate seeing a movie get made. Plus, it had been a long time since I animated anything and I thought it would be good for me to try it again. I had been wanting to make a good short for myself and for my web audiences. Animation class might be a good excuse to make myself start something. I decided to announce the project as soon as I finished the concept sketches.

Coming up with a concept was simple. Each year, our project director gives the students a theme - a broad topic for their art. This year's theme was The Life of a Toy. So I decided to make a short about a stuffed bear who has to go on a short quest through his family's back yard. Only I didn't know what he was questing for or why.

The rest of the story came to my one evening as I was watching my one-year-old nephew. He was sitting in a bouncy chair, holding a small plush toy. Not surprisingly, he dropped the little animal and it fell to the ground below his feet. The poor kid started stretching a fussing as he hopelessly tried to pick up his little friend. As I handed it back to him, I thought about how frustrated he must have been to have something that he wanted go just barely beyond his grasp. I realized that was what my story was missing. The stuffed animal in my film should be helping a baby. The toy could come to life when only his kid was around and help him do thing that babies can't quite do for themselves. Since my nephew has an impressive collection of plush turtles, the bear became a turtle instead.

First concept drawings

After the kid went home, I finished the concept sketches, most of the storyboard and, later, the animatic. I presented them to my students the following week. This pre-production stuff carried over to the final project pretty faithfully.

Here's page one of the storyboard, which was later scanned and turned into an animatic. The frame where the turtle wipes his nose was dropped. So was the cookie close up (you can see that frame is maked with an "X") Everything else is in the final film.

Even though the movie would only run for three minutes, it was an ambitious concept for one person to animate alone. I remember joking that I might one day be showing a newly finished film to a confused, fourteen-year-old nephew, who would ask "Why did you make me a baby?" And I, bitter from 13 years of animation, would reply, "because shut yer mouth, that's why."

Now that I was ready to start making the actual short, I figured it would be best to begin with the backgrounds. I decided that as long as I was challenging myself, I would really push myself outside of my comfort zone. Usually, when I animate, I draw the character frames by hand and then create the backgrounds digitally. This time, I decided to do the opposite - paint the backgrounds and draw the characters directly in Flash. I started painting the backgrounds shortly after Christmas. I used watercolor pencils for a clean but sketchy look. I had just received a set of rendering markers for Christmas, which I used to add the outlines. Since I was limiting the time I could spend on the project each week, the backgrounds took about a month.

One of the hand-painted backgrounds. The short used fourteen different backgrounds and five painted branches.

Character animation went quickly at first. I placed the backgrounds, drew rough shapes to represent each character, then gradually replaced each rough shape with a finished character made from shapes and lines. That gave me the clean look I wanted, but it was a little tedious and made fluid movements difficult, especially on the human characters. If I ever make another short in this fashion, I'll probably use the digital paint brush for characters outlines.

By the time spring classes had ended, I had finished all the turtle animations, some of the baby animations, and none of the father animations. I squeezed in a voice recording session with my brother-in-law so the movie would be slightly coherent when showed it to my students, with the promise that it would be finished by the time summer classes started up in July. At this point, the limited time rule had also gone out the window and I was giving this project all the time I wanted. (Well, maybe not all the time I wanted. I still finished my comics and went to work and stuff.)

Of course, every project like this has at least one set back, and mine came about four weeks before the film was due. My computer had started running slow and was becoming a little unreliable. In June, it actually destroyed an Urban Underbrush comic, which I grudgingly re-colored hours before it posted. Then it stopped opening the Flash editor, which is kind of important when you're making a Flash movie. I couldn't tell if it was the computer or the Flash program that had gone bad on me, so I took my computer to the shop, where it was diagnosed with faulty sensors. (I already told that story here.) A three-day repair job ended up taking more than a week. I would never have finished on time if my sister, Emily, hadn't lent me her laptop. I was pretty close to the end of the short, so it only took one night of computer-borrowing. I was never happier to stay up all night working on something.

So the animation was finished, but the film had no music. My sister Liz, the musician of the family, had offered to write the music. (I'm making her something in return. I can't talk about it yet, but it will be awesome.) However, since the action scenes have no sound effects, the music had to compliment the actions. The music had to match the timing of the animation, which meant that Liz couldn't even start the music until all the animation was finished. I gave Liz a version of the film and told her that the movie didn't need to debut on the first day of class. As long as it was finished before the first week was up, we'd be okay. We also looked at a few shorts and discussed what the tone of the piece should be. Liz is great to work with. She adds her own ideas, but she also really listens to what I had in mind. The music took Liz a few days, but she nailed it. The movie ended up with a score that feels like a blend of classic pop, video game soundtracks, and storybook themes. I guess that's about right.

I did a little adjustments to the animation to make sure everything was clear, threw in the rest of the sounds (birds chirping and baby crying) and hit the publish buttons.

The movie was presented to my class on July 11. Of course, by this point, it was much more than a teaching tool. I had planned on posting it online to share with my family, friends, and internet followers. A few of my cousins have already seen it before it went live. But it was nice to have my class as a jumping-off point. If I didn't have a reason to make this film, even a reason that I, myself, had invented, I would probably never had finished, possibly never had started.

Thanks to everyone who helped make the film and thanks to those of you who watched it. You make my work possible.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

Voices

2014-07-09T23:05:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I went to Anthrocon (Pittsburgh's furry convention) and got a hug from a stranger who I've known all my life.

I usually visit the con on Sundays to check out the dealers and bug Chris Paulsen. This year, I bought a full attending pass and went every day.

Because this year, they were doing panels and autographs with cartoon voice actors.

This summer, the guests of honor were the amazing Lee Tockar and (wait for it…) the legendary Mr. Jim Cummings!

Lee Tockar is best known for performing characters for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Transformers Beast Wars. He's also a driving force behind FanBuilt, a community for creative people (which all of you creative people should go check out.)

Now, if you don't know Jim Cummings, I can't possibly explain how awesome he is in the space provided. I'll summarize by telling you that he's best known as the voices of Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, The Tasmanian Devil, and roughly 25% of the Disney Afternoon characters from the 80's and 90's. (Then, I'll urge you to google him and learn more.) There are few people on earth that I would be more interested in meeting than Jim Cummings. As soon as I found out about this year's guests, I bought a weekend pass on the spot - fearing that once word got out that Jim Cummings and Lee Tockar would be visiting Anthrocon, all admission passes would instantly sell out and I'd be left cursing myself for my hesitation.

I need to tell you some stories from my shady past before any tales from this weekend will make sense. First of all, I have never aspired to be a voice actor and I'm very comfortable with my place at the drawing table. Yet, when I turned fourteen and actually started reading the credits of cartoon shows, I found myself remembering the actors' names rather easily. In the beginning, I was only interested in creators. I wanted to know who to admire for making these great stories, great art, and (above all else) great characters. But most cartoons have big teams of people to take credit for any ideas. It was impossible for me to know exactly who to put at the top of that pedestal. But if I knew who the actors were, then I always had one individual name that I could place on each character - or at least, that version of that character. So I started learning everything I could about voice actors. Keep in mind that there was no proper internet back then, so if you were a "voice chaser" (which was a stupid name people once used to describe fans of voice actors) you had to learn to identify them by the sound of their voice and glean the occasional write-up from newspapers and kids' magazine interviews. And these people were fascinating. They all seemed to have amazing lives, kind hearts, and great humor. (They're pretty much what you wish Hollywood actors were like.) Don't get me wrong, I had great fun learning about cartoon creators. But that was always a little academic, as I knew I was doing research for my own future projects. Learning about voice actors was pure indulgence.

In 1997, a year before I graduated high school, I drew my first serious comic book. It was an eight page book called Small Town Showdown, and it featured the first appearances of Cassidy, Maxwell, Vincent, Clayton, Blair, and Leslie. (Clive appeared almost a year later in a comic called Flip Side.) For reasons that even I can't fully comprehend, I used an old publicity photo of Jim Cummings as the model for Vincent. As the years went on, Jim and Vincent both changed in appearance. Perhaps the only common features remaining are the wide noses and some fly-away hair (although Vincent's hair is much messier now.)

Early version of Vincent and the photo I borrowed for reference

Of course, teenage me could never imagine Jim Cummings ever, ever, ever finding out about this. But adult me, who was trying to think of a way to tell Mr. Cummings how much he has meant to me, I couldn't think of any other story to tell. So, I thought up an "elevator pitch" version of the events listed above, wrote it on the back of an Urban Underbrush postcard (yes, I have those) and brought it with me to present to Mr. Cummings at the convention. I usually don't get nervous at these things anymore (heck, I once sang karaoke in front of the National Cartoonist Society) but in that autograph line, I was feeling anxiety like I hadn't felt in years. Finally, when my turn came, I awkwardly told Jim my story and handed him my postcard. Jim thanked me graciously and shook my hand. Then he changed his mind about ending with a handshake and gave me a hug. And here, I had been thinking a handshake was too much to hope for.

That's Jim on the left and me on the right, in case you were confused.

In the afternoon/evening, I attended all of the voice actor panels. Of course, both guests were funny and charming and everything was alright with the world.

The next day, things got weird.

On Saturday morning, I was ready to attend Jim Cumming's second panel (the Second Cummings) and my sister Liz came with me this time. The panel was late to get started, so, to keep the crowd busy Robert Bourke, the moderator, asked if there were any artists in the audience who would be willing to try and draw Jim Cummings.

Liz immediately started shaking my arm and emphatically whispered "You have to do this! Everything has lead to you doing this." Then she handed me a sharpie, which she apparently produced from thin air. I expected four or five people to draw caricatures, but (surprise) I was the only person who accepted the challenge. I ran my 90 second caricature to the front of the room. The moderator thanked me and held up my drawing to the crowd and I waved and bowed while they applauded and it was all pretty funny.

Unfortunately, they had to postpone the panel, due to the late start. Fortunately when it started up at it's new time, both Jim Cummings and Lee Tockar were able to attend together.

Me and Lee Tockar. I'm on the left this time.

Again, it was a fun show, but just as things were wrapping up, the moderator stood up and said, "Yesterday, one of the fans drew Jim's portrait and we wanted to present it to him." And he carefully produced my increasingly sketchy-looking drawing and passed it to Jim. Then the moderator asked, "The person who drew this, is she here?" And I had to stand up. And everyone applauded. And, for the briefest of seconds, the world stopped spinning.

As I recall those moments went something like this:

Jim: Thank you. You drew this?

Me: Yeah, I, sort of gave you some art on Friday too.

Jim: I remember.

Me: I suppose I'm your regular portrait artist now.

Jim: I suppose you are.

Lee: I get one of those too, right?

Me: Sure.

(The panel continues while I sketch Lee Tockar)

In the days that followed, I've told that story to friends, relatives, grocery store check-out clerks, people at the bus stop (which was weird, as I never actually took a bus anywhere) and anyone else I've encountered. And it still doesn't seem real. Because this is not the kind of thing that actually happens to people. This is the kind of thing that happens to people in self-indulgent Mary Sue daydream fantasies that we make up to amuse themselves while the wait in line to glimpse our heroes in panels or autograph sessions. We never expect these things to happen.

But, sometimes they do.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

Crash and Consequences

2014-06-29T19:46:00.001-07:00

So here's how it is:

Thanks to some computer trouble, Draconis Wicked is going to have to take a short break. However, starting next week (Monday, July 7) Urban Underbrush will update on Mondays and Thursdays until Draconis returns on August 4.

Or, if you ever wanted to write a guest comic to help me get back on track, I probably wouldn't say "no" to one of those.

That should be all the info you need, but if you're interested in the long version, read below:

I've been busy lately, but it's been a good kind of busy. In addition to making comics, I've been preparing to teach my annual summer art classes, getting ready for a big family wedding, and making some art for one of the auctions at Anthrocon (Pittsburgh's Furry Convention). Not an impossible amount of work, but a fuller plate than I'm used to.

Still, this has been one of the worst times for computer trouble. So imagine my surprise when my computer started running slow and wouldn't open all of my art programs. When restarts, advice from online forums, and voodoo failed to fix it, I took my computer back to the store where it was quickly diagnosed with failing hard drive sensors. It's kind of like my hard drive had a terminal illness. It was going to gradually work less and less until it stopped altogether. (At least it gave me some warning so I could back up all my data.) To complicate things even further, my computer was a custom model, built to my specifications, which meant that it took the Apple Store five days to get the special parts they needed to replace the malfunctioning pieces. (At least it's still under warranty.)

If that wasn't enough, my printer/scanner seemed to have some kind of suicide pact with my hard drive, because it promptly stopped working forever as soon as the hard drive glitch was discovered.

Now this Murphy's Law-proving technology incident is finally getting resolved, but I'm still about to start teaching my two-week computer art class and I've been unable to create a buffer of comics to get me through those weeks, as I've done every other summer.

I've looked at this problem from every possible angle, and the only solution seems to be that I stop production of Draconis Wicked comics until summer classes are over, then give myself another two weeks to get caught up again.

However I can ramp up production of Urban Underbrush comics and fill the void. This is possible because:

Urban Underbrush is much quicker to color than Draconis Wicked.
Urban Underbrush already has a buffer of comics stashed away, as I was able to keep working on Underbrush, even when the computer was failing.

While we wait for Draconis to come back, I'll try to keep posting about all the other wonderful stuff I've been up to that's been helping to make this situation so difficult.

Management appreciates your cooperation.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

Comic "Stripped," Part Two: My Response

2014-04-15T21:34:00.003-07:00

In my last blog entry, I reviewed Stripped a documentary on comic strips by cartoonist/film maker, Dave Kellett, and cinematographer, Fred Schroeder.

As I had mentioned previously, I’ve decided to write two responses to Stripped, a straightforward review, and a personal response. This is part two.

I have a lot of respect for Dave Kellett. His comic strip, Sheldon, was the first webcomic I ever followed (I believe I picked it up around 2005). So in 2011, when Dave announced that he would be making a documentary on comic strips, I was intrigued. I followed the project on twitter and threw in a few bucks for the Kickstarter campaign. I even shared the project on Facebook, Twitter, and on my blog (for whatever that was worth.)

As other followers and supporters of Stripped already know, the documentary was supposed to take only a year or two to complete. It was also supposed to be a much simpler project. But, as I’ve said before, sometimes the worst enemy to a good idea is a better idea. And as Dave and Fred gained more support, they quickly realized that they could surpass their original vision and build something truly remarkable. But it would take a lot more work and little more time. Being such good community builders, as well as conscientious businessmen, Dave and Fred promptly informed their followers that the projected deadline for Stripped’s release was being pushed back in order to make a better product. They were so professional and non-flaky about the delay that I can’t imagine anyone felt offended by the decision.

Personally, I am very grateful for the delay. Because while I was following the film’s progress in the abstract, cloudy realm of social media, I was also out in the real world, learning and having experiences. And these experiences would make Stripped much, much dearer to me.

First of all, while Stripped was being made, I learned a bit about filmmaking. Back in 2011, I was making a few animated shorts, partly to show my animation students and partly to satisfy my own artistic interests. I was also doing some film editing and archiving for my job as a technology assistant at a university. Of course, comparing my projects to an independent film is a bit like comparing a grocery list to a best-selling novel. But my own little experiences gave me an idea of how a cartoonist’s skill set and a filmmaker’s skill set could fit together.

Then my sister, Liz, got involved with an indy film in the area. I had very little to do with her job, aside from lending her some props and helping her dye a few costumes to the perfect shade of imitation filth. But from the few projects I assisted with, and mostly from Liz’s stories, I learned just how hard it is to make a movie, especially when you’re a small studio. When Stripped began I remember one of the directors tweeting this bit of trivia: only one in five indy film projects is ever completed. I was amazed that the number was so small. How could people start a project so labor intensive and not finish? How could they just waste whatever time, money, and passion they had already spent? But, by the time Liz’s job was over, and I had a better understanding of the process, I was amazed that as many as one in five films were finished. And my admiration of Stripped grew.

Also, while Stripped was still in progress, I got to meet a number of cartoonists who would be featured in the film. I met Stephan Pastis when he gave a lecture at the Pittsburgh Toonseum. I ran into Shaenon Garrity at a karaoke party the night before the 2013 Rueben Awards. Two days later, I talked to almost a dozen more Stripped cartoonists at the Pittsburgh Comic Arts Festival. (I still treasure that turtle Patrick McDonnell drew in honor of my Noko.) Many of these cartoonists even asked me about my own work. Some of them gave me autographs and sketches. One of them may have called me “sexy” (It was Dan Piraro and he probably says that to all the ladies. ...still…)

Aside from the artists I met in person over the years, I can’t even count the number of featured cartoonists who occasionally responded to me on twitter on in message boards.

I didn’t even notice how many of these little experiences – these brushes with famous people – I had accumulated until I saw Stripped. Suddenly, so many faces looked familiar. Instead of watching the interviews and thinking, “So that’s what that guy looks like.” I was thinking,“Hey, I remember that guy.” At this point I was feeling so involved, I was starting to feel like a part of the movie.

Then, quite unexpectedly, I was a part of the movie.

In Chapter Seven of Stripped, there’s a neat little discussion about how cartoonists use social media to interact with their audiences. To illustrate that concept, the documentary shows a screen capture of Brad Guigar’s twitter feed. And they just happened to have taken that image from a day when I responded to one of Brad’s tweets. So, in that screen cap, you can very clearly see my full name and the Lepus Studios logo (my twitter avatar) in the actual movie.

You can spot this at exactly 56 minutes into the film.

When I first saw my own name and artwork on the screen, it didn’t quite sink in right away. A part of my brain was saying “It’s a tweet from you on a screen. You see this all the time.” But then, another part of my brain was saying, “No, this time it’s different and it's more important. Wake up and figure out why is this is different.” Then it sunk in. I was a part of Stripped. I don’t want to get too egotistical about my accidental inclusion. It’s a bit like being an extra in a movie. It’s cool to see yourself there, but you have no delusions about being a star. Still, this documentary is monumental and I am honored to have been included in some small way.

Over the years, it was very cool to watch the making of Stripped and to have been given the opportunity to watch it's journey along side my own journeys as a cartoonist. For me, one of the most inspiring moments of the film was when Bill Watterson points out that an audience doesn’t need to give an artist it’s time, so the artist must reward it’s audience for whatever time is given.

Between 2011 and now, plus the time spent actually watching the film, any time I gave Stripped was time well spent.

-Marjorie Rishel
www.lepusstudios.com

Comic "Stripped," Part One: The Review

2014-04-08T09:00:00.001-07:00

Last week, I finally saw Stripped, a documentary on comic strips by cartoonist/film maker, Dave Kellett, and cinematographer, Fred Schroeder.

While drafting this blog, I discovered that I have too much to say for a single blog entry, so I’m splitting my response to Stripped into two parts: My review of the film and my personal response. This is part one. Look for part two later this week.

The Review

Like many of you, I had been looking forward to Stripped for a long time. Some of you may even remember the “signal boosting” blog I wrote for the film back in 2011, when it was still crowdsourcing on Kickstarter.

I’m pleased to tell you that Stripped has been worth the wait and worth the hype. The self-proclaimed “love letter to comics” has something for everyone from die-hard comic fans to casual readers.

If you’re worried that this will be a dry documentary, cast those fears aside. Not counting the credit reel, the film runs about an hour and fifteen minutes - not too long and not too short. And all the while, it keeps viewers engaged and entertained with music, graphics and animations.

Stripped tells the story of comic strips: what they have been, what they are, and where they might be going. Along they way, famous creators like Jim Davis, Cathy Guisewite, Jeff Keane, Greg Evans, Stephan Pastis, Scott Kurtz and even Bill Watterson tell their stories.

Organizing this movie must have been a challenge. Obviously, it makes sense to tell the story of comics in chronological order, but some topics fit more neatly into the timeline than others. Ultimately, the directors settled on breaking the documentary into eight parts.

The Opening: A light-hearted beginning that describes comics and their significance.

Everybody Loves Comics: The introduction leads very naturally into this second segment, in which many of the featured cartoonists reminisce about their earliest memories of reading and sharing comics.

The Golden Age of Comics: Soon, we get into comic strip history. We learn about the great popularity of comics in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.

Picking up the Pencil: A few personal stories about how some cartoonists started drawing and how they broke into the business. Plus we get to learn a little about how the newspaper biz and syndication work.

The Creative Process: The challenges of staying creative and turning daily comics into a long-term career.

The Crisis: What happens to comics as newspaper sales dwindle?

The Digital Revolution: New technology creates new opportunities. We look at the emergence of webcomics, learn about the webcomic business model, and discuss the pros and cons of web publishing vs. print publishing.

The Future: No one knows what the future will bring but we have some ideas. All of them include comics.

The structure of the film is deceptively simple. But, just like a comic strip can fit a lot of creativity and depth into a couple of panels, Kellett and Schroeder fit a lot of valuable content into those eight parts. Bill Watterson’s advice to cartoonists is invaluable. Darrin Bell tells a story about selling and African-American comic to old-fashioned syndicates that surprised me more than it should have. Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik tell tales of starting webcomics during/after the “dot-com” boom that take me right back to the 90’s.

And all the while, the film masterfully manages to look sharp, polished, credible and completely professional, while still looking fun, engaging and a bit laid-back. The little sketches, title cards for chapters, and little notes and jokes in the DVD menus and credits are so distinctly Dave Kellett’s style, yet they fit the universality of the film so well.

Here’s the website again, for those of you who missed it the first time: http://www.strippedfilm.com/

I would recommend Stripped to anyone who likes comics. And to anyone who loves comics, I would probably have to recommend it twice.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

How I Met Your Series Finale

2014-04-01T13:15:00.001-07:00

Last night, I watched the much-anticipated series finale to How I Met Your Mother. (For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, I’ll warn you before I start the spoiler filled part of the blog.)

I write a lot about cartoons, comics, and occasionally movies. So me writing about romantic comedy sitcom may seem a little unexpected. I actually got into How I Met Your Mother through webcomics. As some of you know, HIMYM writer/co-producer Gloria Calderon Kellet is the wife of popular webcartoonist Dave Kellet, who creates the comics Sheldon and Drive. Sheldon was the first webcomic I ever followed and Dave’s blog endorsed his wife’s work often enough that I decided to give it a chance.

By the way, Dave Kellet just finished a major project of his own, a documentary on comic strips titled Stripped. (I am still waiting for my DVD to arrive, but once I see the documentary, I promise to review it in excruciating detail and geek out appropriately.) Anyway, with both the husband and wife both completing and promoting major projects at roughly the same time, I do not understand how the Kellet household has not imploded. Everyone in that family has earned my respect for getting through this situation with so much class.

How I Met Your Mother actually used a lot of the same devices as comic strips. The same types of jokes, running gags, and visual humor made the comic/cartoon influences look pretty clear to me. There are even some rewards for people who follow both Dave's and Gloria's work. For example, in HIMYM, did you ever notice that every time a male extra needed a name, he would inevitable be called “Arthur,” (the same name as Sheldon’s pet duck?) This also explains why ducks won the “Ducks vs. Rabbits” debate, when everyone knows that rabbits are better. Sometimes, stories from HIMYM some suspiciously like real-life anecdotes I previously read on cartoonist blogs. For example, the episode where Marshall’s obnoxious co-workers tease him when they find a love note from his wife sounds suspiciously like that real-life story from Scott Kurtz’s blog, where Scott teased Dave for taking a Skype call from his wife and daughter while attending a comic con. Sure, most sitcom writers borrow funny incidents from their real lives, but thanks to the internet, we’re interconnected enough to hear these tales from more than one of the people involved. My sister, Emily once joked, “So, you’re watching one of the most popular sitcoms on television to selectively stalk a small group of people?” I’m not really as creepy as it sounds (maybe 30% that creepy, tops.) I just have a weird memory for certain details and I have one of those brains that locks on patterns. I’ll get back to that in a bit.

SPOILER ALERT: I’m about to get into detail about How I Met Your Mother, the series and the finale, so if you haven’t watched it yet, go away and don’t come back until you do.

You’re still here? You either saw the whole series or you don’t really care about spoilers. Well, listen up, everything about this show tells us that the whole thing builds to the last episode, so if you haven’t seen it yet, you better be CERTAIN that you won’t ever want to watch it before you keep reading beyond this point.

______________________________________________

The How I Met Your Mother series finale has met with some mixed reviews. The biggest disappointment was that the main character, Ted and his long sought wife, Tracy, did NOT get to live happily ever after. Part of the twist ending was that they only had about a decade together before Tracy became terminally ill. Ted explains to his children that his long search to find their mother was necessary, because it made him cherish every moment of their time together. This was unexpectedly bittersweet for such an upbeat sitcom. We wanted to see Ted and Tracy live happily ever after. That was the ending we wanted.

But not the ending we deserved.

At a glance, this ending may seem like something the writers could have come up with at any time, but on examination, this was clearly the ending they were building to right from the start. Come on, every scene with Ted’s kids was filmed back when the series began in 2005 (how else could those kids have stayed teenagers for all these years?).

But there’s another indication that this ending was planned from the beginning, and this is where the writing is at it most brilliant. I mentioned earlier that my brain wants to find patterns in things and there is a strong pattern in way this series was written. The first episode is a map of the entire series, specifically Ted and Robin’s relationship.

Let’s recap the series so we can examine this pattern.

Episode One begins in the year 2030 and fifty-two year-old Ted sits down with his two teenage children and asks, “Did I ever tell you the story about how I met your mother?” Ted proceeds to tell the story, starting in 2005, on the day his two best friends got engaged. The engagement prompts Ted to think seriously about love and marriage for the first time in his life. Later, Ted meets a woman named Robin. He thinks she could be the love of his life. They go on a sweet-but-awkward first date. Ted later decides that the date ended too abruptly, so he goes back to her apartment to make a big romantic gesture, which Robin considers sweet but overwhelming. After all, they haven’t known each other long enough for Ted to declare his love for her. The episode ends with fifty-two year-old Ted telling his children, “And that was how I met your Aunt Robin … Hang on, kids, it’s a long story.” This was the first plot twist. The story leads us to believe Robin and Ted will end up together, then reveals that Ted will actually marry someone else.

The next eight years of the series show how Robin joins Ted’s group of best friends and we watch them navigate life. Marshall and Lily deal with marriage and family. Barney stay a confirmed bachelor and philanderer, but gradually considers settling down. Ted and Robin mostly remain friends, but sort of have some on-again, off-again relationships. But Ted and Robin want different things out of life: Ted wants a family and Robin wants a career in journalism. Can they make a relationship work despite their differences, or is their imperfect love for each other holding them back from finding their real love and happiness? Because of the first episode, the audience knows the answer, or at least, it thinks it does. In the final season, Robin does not choose Ted, but marries Barney instead. Then, Ted meets his wife-to-be, Tracy, at Barney and Robin’s wedding, leading the viewers to believe that the purpose of Ted and Robin’s relationship was to guide Ted to the real love of his life.

The final episode compresses the next seventeen years into a relatively short one-hour show. Ted and Tracy enjoy a perfect relationship. Robin and Barney are happily married for a while, but end up separating after three years. Robin leaves the circle of friends, partly because work keeps her busy, partly because she doesn’t want to hang around her ex-husband, and partly because being around Ted makes Robin wonder if she should have chosen him when she had the chance. Ted’s wife passes away in 2024 and Ted concludes telling the tale to his son and daughter.

BUT THEN, Ted’s children don’t believe that the story was only about their mother. Instead, they suspect that their father has been telling this story to explain why he’s in love with Robin. His children urge him to find Robin and be happy. The series ends with Ted outside Robin’s apartment recreating a moment from their first date, back in Episode One.

Do you see the pattern that the pilot episode sets up for us? The first episode leads us to believe that Ted and Robin will end up together, then the last minute tells us, no - Ted will end up with someone else. Then the entire rest of the series recreates that trick for the next nine years, as we are kept believing that Ted and Robin will never be together, until the last five minutes of the entire series flips our expectations. Again.

Heck, Ted and Robin’s first date is a road map to their whole relationship. They go out, and have a good time with some ups and downs. This part of the evening represents the bulk of the series - their eight years together. Then Ted goes home too soon, representing the years Robin spent distancing herself from her old friends. Finally, Ted comes back to declare his love and win Robin’s heart, which obviously represents the same event Ted recreates in the series finale. When Ted made that gesture in 2005, everyone told him it was “too soon.” While everyone meat “it’s too soon in the relationship to get so personal,” it’s actually “too soon” in Ted and Robin’s lives. They have to wait twenty-five years until they’ve accomplished all their conflicting dreams before they can be together.

“But what about Tracy? I liked Tracy. Why should she be sacrificed so we could have this ending?” I haven’t read too many responses to the series finale, but these seem to be the most common complaints. Of course we liked Tracy. We had to like Tracy. If Tracy wasn’t Ted’s true love, then all the time he spent waiting for Robin would just seem like a waste. Ted had two great loves in his life. And, just to keep it fair, Ted was already the second great love of Tracy’s life. She once had a perfect boyfriend named Max, who would probably have been her husband if he hadn’t died in an accident eight years earlier.

Sure, a “they all lived happily ever after” ending probably would have made me happier, but it would never have been as good. It’s impossible to look back without seeing that this is the way the story was meant to end. And the fact that they implied the whole thing right from the start is crazy genius. I think a lot of people didn’t get it simply because they just weren’t expecting this kind of cleverness from a TV sitcom.

Farewell to another good TV show. A series that well planned is certainly a rare thing indeed.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

"Let It Go" or "My Expectations for Frozen"

2014-03-18T19:07:00.001-07:00

Disney’s Frozen hits DVD this week. In the time between the theatrical release and the DVD release, I’ve read countless Frozen reviews and reflections. Because of some odd herd mentality, I’ve decided to post my thoughts on Frozen as well. Besides, many of my friends, relatives, and well-wishers still haven’t seen the movie yet, so this is my last chance to “preview” it for them. Please be warned, this will be a rather self-indulgent reflection, rather than an actual movie review.

Overall, I thought Frozen was a good movie. It mixed a new kind of plot with classic Disney storytelling. It was a crowd pleaser, garnered well-deserved accolades for Disney animators, and completing some work on the international versions kept my logo-designing cousin employed and out of trouble.

Producer Peter Del Vecho and my cousin, Brian Rishel, at the Studio's award party.

So, yeah, I liked Frozen, but I probably would have liked it more if I had known what it was about it before I watched it. The articles I read before actually seeing the movie had given me some false expectations.

I first became aware of Frozen’s existence early last fall when I read a blurb from one of the animators. This animator was discussing the challenges of working on an animation that featured “two female protagonists.” Two female protagonists? What a promising description! Princess stories have long been criticized for not including enough other female characters for the princess to relate to. Two princesses would certainly help right that wrong. Plus, while growing up, I was always very close with my own sisters, so this was a kind of relationship that I wanted to to see explored.

Unfortunately, the blurb was misleading. Frozen is not a story with “two female protagonists.” It is very much the story of Anna and her quest to save her magical sister.

Here’s a mostly spoiler-free plot summary: Elsa and Anna are the daughters of the royal family. Elsa was born with magic powers that let her conjure ice and snow. As she grows, Elsa becomes afraid that her powers will hurt someone, especially her beloved sister, Anna. So Elsa withdraws from everyone, including Anna. Finally, when her powers become too much to conceal, Elsa exiles herself. So Anna sets out on a quest to find her sister, help her control her powers, and save the kingdom from eternal winter. Along the way, Anna finds friends to help her and, somehow, acquires two handsome suitors. So, yeah, while Elsa may be the one who puts the plot into motion and gets the best song, the story clearly follows Anna’s journey.

There’s nothing wrong with making Anna the main character. (In fact, I find it interesting that the girl without magic powers gets to be the leading lady.) But I wanted to see more of Anna and Elsa working together. That line “two female protagonists” had me holding out hope that they would team up and cooperate sometime before the big finish. While familial love and sisterhood is the heart of the story, we rarely get to see the two girls enjoying that relationship.

I sort of thought kids would get more out of Frozen if they could see more of Anna and Elsa enjoying each other’s company. When I was a kid, I loved animated Disney movies, but not all of them stayed with me. The princess stories were the most quickly forgotten because they were the least relatable. Relatable stories were the ones I wanted act out with my brother and two sisters after the movie was over. If you suspect that my brother was the one who put a stop to princess tales, you would be wrong. My sisters and I gave up on princesses before he ever had a chance to veto them. Why? Because a princess has too much power, and that makes the narrative impossible to share with other girls. The girls who didn’t get to be the princess felt stuck waiting their turn in the spotlight. Playing the princess was even worse because of the guilt that came with putting oneself so far above the other sisters. So my family gravitated towards the stories that were about teams instead.

As an adult, I could see that same scenario play out whenever my little, princess-crazed cousins would try to reenact their favorite princess tales. As soon as the idea to play princess came up, it either turned into a battle over who gets to be Sleeping Beauty, or their was lot of awkward hemming and hawing as they tried to figure out how to tell a fairytale with multiple princesses.

I wanted little girls to see Anna and Elsa getting along so that they could incorporate the friendship into their own narratives, and, perhaps into their own lives.

But, just because Frozen didn’t meet this expectation doesn’t mean it failed. Instead of a story of cooperation, Frozen is a tale of understanding. Everyone who’s ever had a sibling knows how Anna feels when she’s waiting for Elsa to spend some time with her, as well as how Elsa feels when she can’t give Anna that time and can’t quite explain why. Frozen is not the story of how we feel when we’re together, it’s about how we feel when we’re apart and what we’ll do to be together again.

-Marjorie Rishel

www.lepusstudios.com

Chapter Six and Pre-Writing

2014-02-23T17:47:00.002-08:00

You all know the old saying, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." I had a plan to post an eighteen-chapter graphic novel without missing updates to catch up on writing. See, I had written the entire script to Draconis Wicked two years before the first pages were ever drawn. I write Urban Underbrush one chapter at a time (with a few grand plans and threads secretly tying things together) but since Draconis Wicked is one story with a definite ending, it just made more sense to write the whole thing first and draw it second. This way, I could weave certain themes through the story, drop hints at what's ahead, and, of course, I'd never need to stop making new pages due to writer's block.

As you may have noticed, I somehow managed to miss two updates in spite of all this prewriting. Shortly before I started drawing Chapter Five, I realized that I wanted to change the ending to Chapter Six. I won't give anything away, but the end of Chapter Six used a device that was interesting, but perfectly unremarkable in the Draconis world. I wanted to use this device in another story instead, where it would be a major turning point and an irreplaceable piece of the plot (more on that some other day).

No big deal. I'd just swap the parts I wanted to save for later with similar devices and adjust the story that led up to it. Well, as soon as I took out the ending I realized that the rest of the chapter didn't work. I don't mean it didn't work without the original ending. I mean it never worked. But that big finish was distracting and interesting enough to keep me from noticing. Now that I was forced to revisit Chapter SIx without the same finale, I could see that the plot was hollow, the character personalities weren't quite right, and the whole thing seemed out of sync with the other chapters.

Members of the audience, you will never get to read Chapter Six in its original form. Never. Don't go getting curious. Reading it will only make you sad.

Rewriting Chapter Six proved difficult. I wasn't free to write whatever I felt like. Chapter Six had to accomplish certain goals, the most important one being that the end for the new Chapter Six still had to match up with the beginning of the old Chapter Seven. I found myself mentally pulling Chapter Six apart into it's basic components. I put the parts I liked in one pile and threw the rest away. It took a few passes to put the pieces back together into a unified story. Gradually, I recognized exactly which moments were holding me back and which themes I should have been exploring all along.

Now that I've finished the new script for Chapter Six, I feel like it was well worth the time and even the delays. The new Chapter Six isn't just "better than the old one," "good for a repair job," or "successfully patched all the holes." It's actually a good story. And if I've done my job, not only will you enjoy it, you won't even know that it wasn't a part of the original script.

Except I just told you.

Forget all that you read.

Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

Draconis Wicked - Chapter Five Retrospective

2014-02-02T21:52:00.002-08:00

Today brought a close to Draconis Wicked Chapter Five: The Journal of Dr. Yapix.

SPOILER ALERT: Obviously, This blog will contain many references to Chapter Five and the previous chapters. If you don't want them to be spoiled, I suggest you read the comics first, then come back to the blog.

Chapter Five is one of my favorite chapters. In many ways, it sets the tone for the rest of the story. Chapter Five also gives us the last big piece of establishing information: the final destination of Draconis's journey.

If you're not sure what that means, then we should review everything that's happened so far:

Chapter One: Malcorona sends Draconis to investigate a lost treasure. Draconis learns about the Aurora Crystal and the magic barrier. He decides take the crystal for himself.

Chapter Two: Draconis goes to Phoenix Village, looking for someone he can trick into crossing the barrier for him.

Chapter Three: Draconis, Flight, and Snakey learn that no one can carry the Aurora Crystal across the barrier without absorbing its magic. They also learn about the secret passage to the treasury. Draconis decides to go out into the world and look for the passage entrance.

Chapter Four: Draconis and his crew have no idea where the entrance may be, but Chisel Town seems like a good place to start looking. They cross the Forest of Mists to get there.

Chapter Five: The mines of Chisel Town are a dead end. Instead the team finds Doctor Yapix, who figures out that the passage entrance is on the top of Mount Kyros.

As you can see, all of these early chapters are not exactly about Draconis going on his quest. They are about Draconis figuring out how to start his quest. It's sort of similar to Legend of Zelda games like A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. In these games, Link starts his adventure with a small quest (collecting spirit stones). When the small quest is complete (when Link gets the Master Sword), Link's real quest (the longer, tougher quest) is revealed to him. Draconis has finished his smaller quest and is now at the start of his real quest. Everything from now on will be about Draconis and his team finding a way to the top of Mount Kyros.

"Wait, how can the chapters ahead be the biggest part of the story? Can't Draconis just turn around and just walk up that Mountain?" Well, obviously, things are going to complicate this trip and Draconis won't be able to take the straightest path (even if he would like to.) If you need an estimate of how much longer this will take, I'd say the story is about 25% complete.

"Hey, you spent the first fourth of the story just getting to the starting point?" Well, I'm not in a hurry to finish Draconis Wicked. After all, it's a series of episodes, not a movie that needs to be told in two hours or less. But I also don't want this tale to linger on until everyone's bored with it. When I outlined the plot, I felt really comfortable with the length of each section and the length of the story as a whole. Spending this much time getting started won't seem strange by th time the stroy is through.

Besides, I may have dragged out some of the early chapters because they were my only chance to take advantage of different roles and character dynamics. Since a big part of the story is about building a team, it was important to enjoy each character combo while I had it. I can't go back to a point when it's just Draconis by himself, or just Draconis and Flight, so I had limited opportunities to play with those situations. I wanted to make sure I used these moments to their fullest before moving on to the next point.

"So, what's next?" One part of the story ends while another one begins. Some of the next chapters may feel a little different now that we have a larger team and a clearer goal. But much the mood will stay the same - Draconis still has the same attitude and the same relationship with his other party members. Speaking of which, Draconis has a real solid team now, but it's not quite complete yet. There are still plenty of reasons to keep reading. I hope you'll stick with us into the new frontier.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

Ninja Turtles and the Art of Villainy

2014-01-22T19:40:00.000-08:00

It's been almost a month since actor James Avery passed away. I've been meaning to write something about his work in cartoons here, but it's taken me some time to sum it up properly.

When I was a kid, James Avery played The Shredder in the 1987 version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When I was a teenager, James Avery played Uncle Phil on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. When I was an adult, James Avery was used as a piece of trivia (people my age were rather fond of asking "Did you know that The Shredder and Uncle Phil were the same guy?!")

Avery's depiction of The Shredder made a big impact on me. The character taught me a lot about how to write for villains.

Ever notice how when you're a kid, you can't always recognize the quality of children's entertainment? Sometimes, you watch a childhood movie in your adulthood and you find yourself thinking, "I never realized how good these jokes were," or "I never noticed how complex this theme music was." But every once in a while, you noticed exactly how good kid stuff was while you were still a kid. When I was a child, I recognized that James Avery's Shredder was the perfect Saturday morning cartoon villain.

What made 1987 Shredder the perfect (cartoony) villain? He had achieved the almost impossible feat of being equal parts frightening and funny. When he was angry, he was genuinely scary. When he was on the losing end of a joke, he was truly funny. True, Shredder would probably be scarier if he were never funny, or funnier if he were never scary. But he wasn't going for extremes. He was going for balance.

Balance between fear and humor is difficult. Think of any cartoon villain you know and you can probably classify them as either funny or scary. Very few of them will fit in both boxes. (Honorable mention for Batman's Joker - especially the Mark Hamill version - for being funny until it was scary. Not exactly the same as striking a balance, but worth a shout-out.)

Of course, crafting the perfect cartoon villain takes more than a good actor. There were two other parts to The Shredder's success:

First is the tone of the story. How you set up your world and its rules are going to influence the characters. Obviously, the main antagonist usually has to match the story's tone. Funny stories need comic-relief villains to keep them light. Serious stories need darker villains to keep the tension high. The 1987 version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had committed to stories that were equal parts action and comedy.

***I'm going to go on a tangent here, but I'll let you know when it's over. Some of you younger readers may not be as familiar with the 1987 TMNT cartoons. If you've grown up with the 2003 4Kids version or the 2012 Nickelodeon version, the campy cartoons from my childhood probably look like a mockery of the more comic book-faithful versions that you know and love. If this sounds like you, then let me explain something about 1987. Back then, most cartoons were only run on network television. There was no internet or video-on-demand, direct-to-video was too expensive, and not everyone had cable. And the networks were only interested in "safe" ideas - ideas for stories that were likely to catch on with the biggest possible audience. Wacky sci-fi fantasy action stories like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were not considered safe. But when it comes to drawing a large audience, humor is a powerful tool. As long as your jokes aren't divisive (ie, offensive, obscure, gross, etc.) a comedy will usually grab the biggest number of followers. Turning up the funny on the Ninja Turtles didn't automatically make it into a safe idea, but it made it safe enough for networks to give it a chance. The later versions of Ninja Turtles may never have been picked up at all if it weren't for all the fame and good will that the first series garnered. Okay, tangent over, now back to The Shredder.***

The second element to creating a balanced villain was the writing - specifically the "writer's bible." Ninja Turtles writers understood their characters. They made it clear that The Shredder was clever, tough, well-trained in the art of fighting, and willing to break any code of ethics to get what he wanted. These were the qualities that could evoke fear and suspense. The Shredder also had qualities that made him funny. His desire for power and control was childish in it's selfishness and he was prone to temper tantrums. On the other hand, he was also the only villain smart and wary enough to deliver dry, sarcastic one-liners about annoying heroes or henchmen. Basically, the writers came up with both funny and scary qualities for their character, made sure these qualities didn't contradict each other, then used them consistently in their storytelling.

Of course, all of this ground work would have gone to waste without an actor who throughly understood who the character was and knew what the writers were trying to accomplish with him. Mr. Avery's acting brought a very challenging character to life in the best possible way.

And so I salute the memory of James Avery. Your contributions to villainy were downright heroic.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

New Year's Do-Over

2014-01-05T20:51:00.002-08:00

Here we are, at the start of a magical new year, full of hope, promise and disease (I'll explain that last part in a moment.)

I've been unusually interested in making New Year's resolutions this time. Heaven knows that I have some bad habits that can be turned good and some good habits that can be turned better. Plus, lately I've been stumbling into all kinds of great articles on how to get your resolutions to stick. Most of the advice I've read has boiled down to two main ideas:

1.) Be open about your resolutions. Public resolutions are more likely to succeed than secret ones because your friends and well-wishers can support you and help keep temptation out of your way. (These articles didn't mention the shame of failing in front of all these people you just talked yourself up to, but I'm sure that's a factor.)

2.) Set goals you can measure. For example, a resolution to eat a better diet is kind of vague, but a resolution to serve kale twice a week and skip at least one dessert has measurable results, and a better chance of success.

Since I've just advocated going public with your resolutions, I'll confess that mine is to keep better track of my time. I suspect I'm wasting too much of it in my current routine. So, I've talked about this resolution to me friends, family and anyone else who'll listen. I've drawn up charts and calendars to track my hours and progress in my various jobs and chores. I've sworn off some time-wasting activities and even devised some plans to put a cap on web surfing.

And when January 1, 2014 came around and I was finally ready to spring my plans into action…I got sick. Twice.

Around 10:00am, on New Year's Day, I realized that I was coming down with a bad cold/cough. On January 2, I woke up with flu-like symptoms.These two illnesses had teamed up to keep me in a sick bed for the next three days. I have been unable to do much of anything besides sleep and waste time while my carefully made charts have slid further into the red.

But I am not about to quit and throw away a perfectly good resolution just because of a rough start. (Most of my best projects have had rough starts.) I can solve this problem simply by bending time a little bit. In other words, I am declaring a New Year's Do Over.

A New Year's Do Over? How does it work?

On January 10, everyone who chooses to participate has the option of restarting their resolutions, treating January 10 as if it were January 1 (resolution-wise - I don't have time to clean up another party). Why the tenth? Because it's a friendly, round number and I want to give people a chance to spread the word about the do-over. Besides, while traditional start of resolutions on January 1 New Year's is a bit like hitting a wall, the January 10 do-over gives you a few days to ramp up at you own pace, like that stretch of road they give you to merge onto the highway before you have to keep up with traffic.

I've been told that there is a great deal of illness going around, what with everyone being so social during the holidays, so if any of you other poor, afflicted sick people also need another shot at New Year's, here's your chance. If you've already broken your resolutions for any other reason, you too can start fresh on the tenth. Kept your resolution, but wish you'd written it differently? Consider it your ten-day test drive, then start your revised resolutions on January 10.

Yes, New Year's Do-Over Day: the first* of many holidays I will spontaneously invent as the need arises. Tell your friends!

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

*Not actually the first.

Urban Underbrush Chapter Twelve Retrospective

2013-12-12T21:59:00.000-08:00

Well, dear readers, we've just wrapped up Urban Underbrush Chapter Twelve: House Inspection. Some of you may be curious about the changes to the comic world, and I'd like to tell you a little more about them.

If you haven't read Chapter Twelve yet, this is going to get pretty spoiler-heavy, so I suggest you go to the beginning and do the reading first.

If you have finished the chapter, or don't care about spoilers, then let's get to it.

The most recent plot line has brought about the following changes:

1.) Dynamite and Detonator are temporarily done working for the rabbit family business.

2.) Dynamite and Detonator are now working for the landlord.

3.) Dynamite and Detonator will focus on building fireworks and novelties instead of knocking down buildings.

These are small but important modifications to the Urban Underbrush rules.

I actually started writing the "House Inspection" story almost a year ago. Originally, it was going to be a silly, light-hearted escapade to follow the rather emotional Christmas Story. The original script involved Vincent tragically giving up his night off to assist with the inspection. Blair puts a hole in the floor by playing with Dynamite and Detonator's equipment, then runs off leaving Vincent to deal with the problem. Maxwell would cover the hole with a carpet scrap. Then Blair was supposed to fall through the afore mentioned hole right after the landlord went home ("Hey, how did you guys fix the hole so quickly - WhoOOAA!").

Then everything would return to normal.

It was a pretty good story. So, why did I change it?

Once I started to break this storyline down into comic strips, I found that none of the individual strips were interesting or funny. Whenever I have trouble turning a joke into a strip, I usually discover that the joke wasn't very funny to start with. But this was the first time that none of the strips seemed to work, no matter how I changed, tweaked, or rewrote them. If I can't get a single joke to work, there's probably something wrong with the joke. But if I can't get any jokes to work…is there something wrong with the comic?

In all honesty, this wasn't the first time Urban Underbrush had felt a little rickety to me. It was as if I was building on a cracked foundation and my once-steady walls were starting to shift and bend. If I ignored this problem and kept building, it was only going to get worse. I needed to stop and study the premise (the foundation) of Urban Underbrush. But I couldn't examine my work objectively while still writing new episodes. I needed to take a hiatus, hence the break over the spring and summer. During this time, I had two goals: 1.) Think about the kind of comic I want to write. 2.) Figure out what parts of the current comic are getting in the way of goal #1.

So, what kind of comic did I want to write…

I always wanted Urban Underbrush to focus on a large cast of both human and animal characters, with Dynamite and Detonator either driving each plot or acting as a catalyst to other people's problems. On examination, I realized that the jackrabbit family business was getting in the way of this. You may be thinking, "But, the rabbit family business was such a cool idea, how could it get in the way?" For one thing, it made the story kind of lop-sided. The rabbit family business was a huge plot point. Someone could easily write a whole series on just that one aspect. But it wouldn't be the story I wanted to write. Instead, the rabbit business was a competing "main idea" that was syphoning attention away from the Grass Roots House and splitting my story into pieces.

So that's why the March Hare Demolition Company has stopped operating. I didn't want to disband it permanently - I just wanted to downplay its role enough to keep all my story elements in balance.

Making Dynamite and Detonator work for Claude the landlord seemed like another good idea. The other problem with rabbit business was that only Dynamite and Detonator got to interact with it. In many ways, this cut them off from the rest of the cast. It made my characters feel like boring realistic neighbors with their own separate lives instead of hilarious sitcom neighbors, always caught up in each other's business. Having Dynamite and Detonator work from the house seemed like the obvious solution to that problem.

The last big thing that bothered me about past Urban Underbrush was that there were never enough explosions. I think you can figure out why. Dynamite and Detonator knock down buildings. I can't have them smashing a different part of the crowded city in every episode, especially when they themselves live and a cherished historic building. In order to make the explosions occur more often, I just had to introduce smaller, less destructive explosions. Now that Dynamite and Detonator are building "safe" fireworks, an explosion can comically result in smoke and annoyance, instead of the loss of property, limbs, lives and such. Rest assured, there will still be large explosions when needed.

So, there's you breakdown of what's changed and the reasons why. I think the comic world will be better for them. Stick around. The best is yet to come.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

Comic Creators for Freedom 2013

2013-12-01T21:18:00.000-08:00

December is upon us and the holiday season is beginning. This is the time of year where many of us are at our most charitable. If any of you are considering making donations to any worthy causes, I'd like to bring this one to your attention. Comic Creators for Freedom is holding another drive to help victims of modern day slavery.

From December 2 to December 14, Comic Creators for Freedom will be accepting donations for Love 146, a treatment facility for victims of slavery, kidnapping, and exploitation.

In return for a donation of any amount, you will receive an impressive gift. 167 different webcartoonists have each contributed a different character drawing, and all of these drawings have been combined into a desktop wallpaper. This high-res image is not available anywhere else. The only way to get one is to be contributor.

This year, the webcomic wallpaper has an extra special theme: awkward school photos! Yes, you can see 167 of your favorite characters as they would have looked in elementary school or high school. (I've seen the preview image - you can tell who went to school in the 80's and 90's.)

For my contribution, I drew Urban Underbrush's Leslie McGrath as an eleven-year-old grade schooler. As a reward for reading this far, I'm going to post a clip from my contribution:

If you want to see the whole thing, you have to go make a donation. Here's that link again: Comic Creators for Freedom

Again, I am honored to be able to take part in this. My deepest thanks to anyone who donates, or even passes the word along.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

My First Webcomic - A Guide for Beginners

2013-11-11T06:55:00.000-08:00

Lately, some of my art students have been talking about starting their own webcomics. Good for you, kids. I'd like to give you beginners some advice, but then I've only been in the game for three years myself. I still feel like I'm new to this. On the other hand, maybe that's exactly why I should be giving advice. I'm close enough to the start to remember what beginners need. There are many men and women more talented and experienced than I who can tell you the important stuff. I'm just telling you what you need to know to take those first steps. Please don't stop learning about comics after reading this blog.

Be warned: This advice is intended for serious contenders. If your plan is to draw some scribbly little sketch comics without a lot of care or plans for the future, not everything here is going to help you. But if you actually want to take a crack at drawing real stories with your own characters and posting on a regular/semi-regular basis for as long as you can keep up with it, then you've come to the right place.

1.) Start right now.

There will never be a perfect time to start, so you might as well start ASAP and start making progress.

2.) "Start right now" doesn't have to mean "post comics right now."

There's lots of work to be done before you start sharing with the world (see items 3 through 8 for examples of pre-comic work). Finish as much ground work as you can before you need to make comics on a tight schedule.

3.) Draw your characters often.

The more you know your subjects, the easier it will be to draw them repeatedly. This goes for props and settings too.

4.) Don't just draw characters, draw mock comics.

Drawing characters in backgrounds is harder than just drawing characters alone.
Drawing characters in sequential story-telling panels is harder than just drawing them in backgrounds. Drawing characters with words balloons in the panels is harder than just drawing sequential story-telling panels.

Mock comics don't need to tell jokes, or even a proper story. But they'll help you understand how your different elements come together before the real deal begins.

5.) Invent a style that you can recreate.

Your comic should have its own distinctive art style. This style needs to be something you are capable of drawing over and over for each strip. Ideally, it should take you 1 to 3 hours to draw a strip or page (it may take longer in the beginning.) If you invent a style which you can only draw once, or something that takes days to recreate, that style may not be right for a frequently updating comic.

6.) Create character model sheets and hang them near your drawing area.

You may know your characters inside-out, but when you're putting them in action, and trying to meet a deadline, you'll be grateful for a quick reference to help you remember if a character wears his hair parted on the left or the right.

7.) Draw reusable art.

I'm not suggesting you make a comic with copy/paste panels, but you'll want to make a few really good drawings of your characters that can be used in multiple places, such as on your "meet the cast" page, your future advertisements, your desktop wallpapers, etc. Just look at how many big name studios keep high-quality reusable character clip-art around for such occasions. P.S. be prepared to update these images as your work improves.

8.) Create a logo.

Your title and how it looks are big factors in snaring new readers. I suggest you design a logo in a vector program so it can be reproduced at any size. If you don't have access to a vector program, at least start with a big, high-res image.

9.) Set a deadline for when you want to start posting your comic.

It's easy to busy yourself with pre-comic work forever. Remember, no amount of preparing will train you like actually making work for an audience does. Many of you will never start unless you assign yourself a deadline. Think about what obstacles you need to clear before you can begin and take a guess at how long it will take you to do so. I also suggest you pick a date with some significance, like a birthday, anniversary, or holiday. This will make it harder for you to change your own deadline when the work seems too hard. For example, I promised to start my comic on New Year's Day, which was two weeks after I completed my first web design class. I combined a date with significance with a very real task I need to achieve before I could launch my comic site.

10.) Work in high-resolution and save all your work.

All webcartoonists should save two copies of their comics - a low-res web version to post on the site, and a high-res version suitable for printing - just in case you ever get to print a book. And don't tell me "I'm just a kid/teen/student/hobbyist. I'll never put this stuff in a book." You never know what people will be interested in printing. Wouldn't you buy a book of cartoons that Walt Disney or Charles Schultz drew back when they were kids/teens/students/hobbyists? Also, don't tell me, "But my early work is awful. I don't want it to go in a book." You can never guarantee that future-you will feel the same way. Having something you never need is usually not as bad as needing something you never have.

11.) You don't need an expensive website to start.

A custom website is great if you can get one, but many beginners do okay posting on DeviantArt, Tumblr, or other social media sites. This is also a good way to start if you're not sure you can write comics forever and you aren't ready to put down money yet.

12.) Be both harsh and generous with yourself.

Don't be so proud of your work that you never want to let it grow and evolve. Look for flaws so you can improve on them. But don't be so hard on yourself that you can't also enjoy what you've made. Keeping your enthusiasm up is often an overlooked part of the process, but it is essential if you plan on doing comics for the long haul.

13.) Love your work.

Love your characters, your stories, and your ideas. It is rare, if not impossible, to make a likable work without loving it yourself.

That's the best advice I can give you. Any successful artists want to add to the list (or any unsuccessful artists - I ain't picky) feel free to add a comment.

Best of luck to all aspiring artists. Go make me proud.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

A Tribute to Lou Scheimer: Why She-Ra was Awesome

2013-10-30T21:33:00.002-07:00

Cartoon Producer Lou Scheimer passed away recently. If you don't remember Lou, he was one of the key players behind the creation of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. (You should read his Wikipedia page. There's a neat little story there about how his dad may have punched out Hitler.)

I was just a little too young to remember much of the original He-Man, but I remember watching a few episodes of the spin-off She-Ra: Princess of Power. I caught up on She-Ra in my adult years, which was probably even better than watching the show as a kid. There are things about She-Ra that adult me finds awesome but young me would have taken these details for granted.

I've put together a list of my top 5 favorite things about She-Ra. Please note that this list is based on my memories of watching the 80's cartoons, plus about 15 minutes on wikipedia. I don't remember much of the movie and I haven't read the comics or watched any of the 2002 series. Many of you readers probably have He-Man knowledge that would put mine to shame. Please be kind to a causal viewer.

1.) She-Ra's Powers were Mostly the Same as He-Man's Powers

Before She-Ra was created, Flimation already had a hit with He-Man. He was super strong, super tough and could kick everyone's butt. When they decided to create a female version of this popular character, they decided that her powers should be… super strength, super toughness and the ability to kick everyone's butt. In short, they didn't try to give her the "female version" powers, like only making her super fast, or agile, or magical. She pretty much got the same powers as her male counterpart.

2.) …And They Played it Straight.

These days, female warriors in fiction tend to overplay their roles. Their stories are forever trying to evoke reactions like, "What's this?! The beautiful lady is also strong and good at fighting?! How Unexpected!" The obvious problem with these stories is that they disempower average women by overreacting to how extraordinary it is when women are tough. In She-Ra's world, neither the heroes nor the villains acted like a female warrior was an anomaly.

3.) She-Ra had Both Men and Women on her Team

A common complaint with princess stories is, while they are designed to appeal to little girls, the lead character is the only significant female character. Any other girls in the story are either third-tier characters or villains. The concern is that these tales might accidentally be teaching little girls that A.) If you're not the lead girl, you're not important or B.) girls don't need to cooperate with other girls. She-Ra, meanwhile, had a nice mix of competent males and females on her team.

4.) Masculine Women and Effeminate Men

Every thing in He-Man's world had a manly quality to it. Even the women. Don't get me wrong, they were still female and had many feminine qualities. They just had a little machismo as well. Conversely, in She-Ra's world most of the men had a feminine side. When I was a child, I remember thinking that She-Ra's friend, Bow, was rather dashing. As an adult, I think he looks like a super hero-themed chippendale waiter, or a chippendale waiter-themed super hero (hang on, I just thought of the best idea for a new comic book). Looking back, I think the writers and artists did a fair job of designing female characters that a male audience can be comfortable with, and male characters that a female audience can be comfortable with. Plus, it sends a nice message to kids about not letting your gender limit your friendships.

5.) She-Ra was a Bit More Hardcore than He-Man

Despite what I said before, He-Man and She-Ra didn't have exactly the same powers. He-Man was a little stronger and She-Ra's sword could do that transforming thing. But She-Ra definitely had a tougher back story. For those of you who don't remember, Adam (A.K.A. He-Man) was a prince on the planet Eternia. He-Man's job was to keep the bad guys from conquering Castle Grayskull. When the writers decided to give him a sister, they had to come up with a reason why we had never seen her before, even though many of the adventures began with Adam and his parents living in the family castle. So it turns out that She-Ra was kidnapped by the evil Horde and raised to be one of their elite warriors. She-Ra was taken to the planet Etheria, a place which was just about completely enslaved by the bad guys. He-Man eventually finds his sister and tells her who she really is and they escape to their home planet. BUT THEN She-Ra decides to return to Etheria and leads a revolution against The Horde. Okay, clearly He-Man and She-Ra had to go where they were needed. But you can't ignore the fact that one of them gets to stay at home with his parents in a castle, while the other has volunteered to live with outcasts and rebels in hostile territory.

It's funny. I tend to think that cartoon writing have evolved in the last 30 years, especially when it comes to writing for women. But I wouldn't mind seeing more contemporary cartoons take a few pages from She-Ra's playbook. Who would have thought that a cartoon about a barbarian action figure could be so enlightened?

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

Urban Underbrush Returns Soon

2013-09-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

You waited. You checked the site for updates. You scanned Facebook and Twitter for any news. You reread the archives, wrote your own fan fiction and held candle light vigils. Now your wait is almost over. Urban Underbrush will return with new comics on September 19, 2013.

Stopping a comic is hard. Starting it up again is even harder. It took longer than I thought for Urban Underbrush to find itself, and even longer to fit it back into my schedule again. But your patience will be rewarded. I think you’ll like the new comics even more than the earlier ones.

I can’t talk about all the changes yet. You’ll have to watch most of them unfold on their own. But here are a few of the things you’ll have to look forward to.

1. New clothes.
As you can see from the promo art, Dynamite and Detonator have been given new outfits. I always liked their old clothes, but they never really fit the webcomic. Back in the 90’s, when I first drew Dynamite and Detonator, I wanted to give them the best clothes, the best kinds of hats, jackets, and sneakers to make them look like the ultimate cool yet classic cartoon characters. And it worked for an adventure story. But the clothes don’t quite suit the situational/character driven comic strip that the rabbits now inhabit. Why not? The first thing comic readers need to know about Dynamite and Detonator is that they are rabbits who love building bombs. Having them dress it a way that suggests neither rabbit being nor bomb building is just confusing. Comic strips are better when they can be understood quickly. Any element that does not help tell the story should probably be replaced with one that does. So Dynamite and Detonator now look a little more like technicians so that their roles in the story are easier to read.

And it doesn’t hurt that these new outfits are much faster for me to color.

2. Returning Characters
Breathe a sigh of relief because no one is leaving. Many webcomics start with a large cast of characters, then the authors make adjustments by whittling it down to the few characters whom they like best. I’ve thought about removing one or two people, but I’ve decided that everyone is still necessary. Fear not, your favorite character is safe…for now.

However, I do think a few of them are a little stifled. A few of them even seem redundant. I think this is because I haven’t let you get to know all of them well enough. One of my goals is to let the characters be a little more vibrant. They will still be themselves, just more so.

That’s all you get for now. I expect to see you all for the grand unveiling on September 19.

See you soon.

-Marj
www.lepusstudios.com

National Cartoonist Society Weekend, Part Three

2013-06-20T21:55:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I had drawn a comic in honor of the 2013 Reuben Awards, the National Cartoonist Society's award for outstanding cartoonists. This year's awards were held in my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

I'm not an NCS member, but The Pittsburgh Toonseum hosted some NCS events and sold some VIP passes to the general public as well. I bought my ticket before they were even advertised.

My VIP pass entitled me to attend three different events on three different days: The opening of the Reuben Winner's Comic Exhibit on Thursday, Cartoonist Karaoke on Friday, and the Comic Arts Festival on Sunday (The Saturday events and award ceremony were for members only.)

As there were three separate events, I will be writing about my experiences in three separate blog entries.

I'd like to thank the Pittsburgh Toonseum for hosting the event. I have never purchased a VIP pass to anything before, but the Toonseum gave me every penny's worth and treated me like royalty.

Sunday, May 25 - The Comic Arts Festival

This one was not exactly a VIP event. The Comic Arts Festival was a free street festival that took over the Toonseums's block for most of a day. However, my VIP pass covered my admission to the museum gallery, saved me a seat at the panels and got me a place in line for cartoonist autographs.

But I'll get to that.

The festival itself was spectacular. Artist and vendor booths lined the street. Balloon sculptures of popular characters stood on tall balloon pedestals. And the whole street was quickly covered in chalk drawings, as the Toonseum staff passed out sidewalk chalk and invited guests to add to the scenery.

I drew Saber.

Then some kid drew an animal that looked kind of like Saber.

(But, clearly, his name was Spike)

But this was not just a day of drawing on the road. I also met a slew of cartoon celebrities, many of whom gave me sketches. All of whom gave me stories.

First, I met Mutts cartoonist Patrick McDonnell, who drew Mooch and a turtle for me.

This sketch was made in honor of my own pets.

("Oh, that sketch is an easy scene to renact. Ajax and Noko Noko can do that in five seconds," said no one, ever.)

Patrick must be sick of people telling him stories about their pets, but he was very polite and took the time to ask a few questions about Noko Noko (Noko's so interesting.)

Then I met Brian Walker, the son of Beetle Bailey's creator, Mort Walker. Brian takes the lead on the Hi and Lois comic, but I asked him to draw Beetle anyway.

I didn't want to miss Jan Eliot, creator of Stone Soup. We talked a bit about imaginations and she said I was "an absolute joy to talk to." <3

I got a sketch from John Rose, who currently draws Snuffy Smith. (This sketch was partly for my dad, who once knew most of the Barney Google theme song.)

Next, I met Brian Crane, who draws Pickles.

I also snapped a nice photo of Brian next to the Pickles-themed balloon sculpture. Apparently, he didn't know that he was stationed next to his sculpture until I mentioned it.

(The light was a little uncooperative, but that's a balloon sculpture of Opal and Earl dancing a waltz.)

Greg Evans, who draws Luann, asked me if I had a favorite character from his strip. I chose Bernice. I mentioned that Bernice probably has quite a following of fans who like geeky girls (like the guys who think Velma is cuter than Daphne.) Greg acted like he had never thought about that, but I can't imagine that I'm the first person to bring up that idea.

(For the sisterhood of girl geeks!)

Finally, I met the man himself. The president of the National Cartoonist Society - Jeff Keane (AKA Little Jeffy)

(That's right. He's the president)

Jeff asked me if I drew comics, then personally assured me that there has no longer any bad blood between syndicated newspaper cartoonists and web cartoonists. Those days are ancient history. You heard it straight from the top, folks.

After the signings, it was time for the panels. At this point, my cousin and habitual partner in crime, Kristine, joined up with me so I have at least one eye witness for the things that happened next.

We attended the first panel "Women in Comics." Lynn Johnson (For Better or for Worse) Cathy Guisewite (Cathy) and Hillary Price (Rhymes with Orange) told some amazing stories about starting their careers and which of their comics were based on personal experiences. If you ever get the chance to hear any of these people talk, I suggest you take it.

"Women in Comics" was well-organized, thoughtful and heartfelt. Then we attended Dan Piraro's panel... which was different.

(There are no words for what, exactly, happened here.)

Dan Piraro (Bizarro) talked about his comic, what it means, and what people think it means. He also talked about whatever was running through his head at the moment. Kristine and I ran into Dan afterwards and we got to tell him how much we liked his act. I didn't get a sketch, but it was one of the most fun conversations of the day. This was one of those rare cases where words are worth a thousand pictures.

So, that concludes my review of the NCS weekend and the Pittsburgh Comic Arts Festival. I hope to see all of your there next year.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

National Cartoonist Society Weekend, Part Two

2013-06-18T21:11:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I had drawn a comic in honor of the 2013 Reuben Awards. For those of you who don't follow comic strip culture, The Reuben Awards are the National Cartoonist Society's annual awards for outstanding cartoonists. This year's awards were held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My town. Naturally, I had to get in on it.

I'm not an NCS member, but I figured that there would be a few events open to the public. As luck should have it, The Pittsburgh Toonseum (that's "Cartoon Museum" in case you haven't figured that out) announced that they would be holding some NCS events and they would be selling some VIP passes to the general public as well. I bought my ticket before they were even advertised.

My VIP pass entitled me to attend three different events on three different days: The opening of the Reuben Winner's comic exhibit on Thursday, Cartoonist Karaoke on Friday, and the Comic Arts Festival on Sunday (The Saturday events and award ceremony were for members only.)

As there were three separate events, I will be writing about my experiences in three separate blog entries.

I'd like to thank the Pittsburgh Toonseum for hosting the event. I have never purchased a VIP pass to anything before, but the Toonseum gave me every penny's worth and treated me like royalty.

Friday, May 24 - Cartoonist Karaoke

The second event I attended was a private karaoke party at the Tilden Lounge, a little place near the Toonseum. The NCS members had attended a full day of panels and meetings to prepare for Saturday's big award show. The Karaoke party was their chance to unwind.

I was the second person to arrive. It turns out that the guests of honor were still finishing their last panel. They all showed up about twenty minutes after the doors opened. I was more than a little star-struck, but when the place was packed, I couldn't recognize anyone. To be fair, everyone was wearing a name tag (many of the artist had sketched their own characters on their tags) but in a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd under night club lighting, reading name tags was not a possibility. And not everyone there was a cartoonist. There were relatives, publicists, significant others, and anyone else you would want to take to a night on the town.

For the first hour or so, I didn't talk much. I just watched. It was enough just for me to be there. But through out the night, an odd thing kept happening to me. I was wearing my VIP pass (as per instructions) but none of the real guests seemed to know how one obtains a VIP pass. So every one assumed that the VIP's were local prestige artists or museum contributors. No one knew that I had just saved my pennies and bought my way in. There was only one thing to do. I scribbled some of my characters on my VIP pass, and started acting like a real cartoonist.

And I had a few good conversations with some notable folks. I met Ryan Pagelow, who I think I annoyed by declaring my love for his discontinued projects while saying very little about his current ones. I met the man behind GoComics, who voiced some interest in running my comics (I'll think about it.) I even toasted the event with Sandra Boyton's son, Keith, a playwright and an absolute pleasure to talk to.

The evening grew late and I was pretty sure I had wrung every bit of fun out of the experience. Many of the artists had already gone back to their hotels to rest up for the big day tomorrow. Some of them had probably just moved on to quieter venues. But there was still enough of a crowd for a party. All night, people kept asking each other "Are you going to sing tonight?" It was sort of a running gag. Obviously, the outgoing artists needed no encouragement, while the shyer ones never had any intention of going anywhere never that stage. I was in that second category. Or so I thought until an unexpected thought entered my mind: "If you were to sing karaoke in front of the National Cartoonist Society, you would never be intimidated by anyone else ever again."

Then I had to do it.

I picked out a song I knew and… I wasn't great or good or even forgivable. In fact, I probably ruined music and for that I apologize. But sounding good and being impressive was not the point (actually, I think I did get a bit better the more a sang, but still not the point.) I set a new high bar for my extrovert self.

Okay, I don't really believe that I'll never be intimidated ever again, and I know I kind of cheated by waiting until the end of the evening when everyone had left or was distracted, but it was still a pretty bold move, so you be quiet and let me have this.

Plus signing in front of famous strangers did make it seem like less of a big deal to ask for their autographs the following Sunday.

Please return for the third and final installment of my NCS blog, which will run on Friday.

-Marj
www.lepusstudios.com

National Cartoonist Society Weekend, Part One

2013-06-16T20:55:00.001-07:00

As there were three separate events, I will be writing about my experiences in three separate blog entries.

I'd like to thank the Pittsburgh Toonseum for hosting the event. I have never purchased a VIP pass to anything before, but the Toonseum gave me every penny's worth and treated me like royalty.

Thursday, May 23 - The Preview Gallery

The Toonseum announced that they had put together a comic strip gallery, featuring the big winners of past Reuben Awards. Keep in mind that there have been Reuben Awards for the past 67 years, so the exhibit had a lot of great comics to choose from. As I understand, the Toonseum moved heaven and earth to round up a fair sample of comics from all the great cartoonists and arranged them by era, with each artist's NCS biography card alongside his or her work. The gallery would be open to the public the following Sunday, but a preview gallery and reception was held that Thursday for the visiting NCS members, museum contributors, and VIP's.

I arrived early, but there were already a few people walking around and admiring the art. In less than an hour, the galleries were packed. That night, I saw the greatest collection of comic art I had ever seen. The pieces and their curation would not look out of place in the Smithsonian. Seeing them in the local museum was mind blowing. The first room held mostly early works. The walls held classic versions of Beetle Bailey, Prince Valiant (by original artist, Hal Foster, of course) Dick Tracy, and Lil Abner - just to name a few. Right in the middle of this room, there was an original peanuts comic, which was almost twice the size of the other strips on display. I had heard that Charles Schultz liked to use a larger illustration board than most of his peers, but seeing this large Peanuts comic, dwarfing all the other little strips around it gave the work a sense of majesty.

There's something strange about seeing original comics. When comics are published, you can only see the clean lines, but when you see the originals, you see every bit of white-out, every place where a new bit of art or dialogue was pasted in later, and every unerased pencil line. These early artists in the pre-Photoshop days used every trick at their disposal to finish their comics. In spite of this the quality of the art was undeniable.

The next room contained more modern comics from the 80's and 90's. As exciting as comic history was, these strips were more familiar friends. A hand painted "Calvin and Hobbes" stood in a display case, attracting many onlookers. I looked at original "Garfield" on the wall - it's lines so smooth and perfectly shaped that they could have been drawn by a computer. Why isn't Garfield drawn digitally? For whatever reason, it's a point of pride with the Paws staff that each comic still gets drawn and inked by hand. A Reuben Award-themed Fox Trot (obviously chosen for the occasion) showed such detail, you could almost see what pen Bill Amend used for each line. At the end of the row (a little overlooked, as it was right next to the bar) there was a Cul-De-Sac strip. I did not expect this one to strike me as it did. Cul-De-Sac cartoonist, Richard Thompson was forced to retire last year, due to the severity of his Parkinson's Disease. When I looked at that comic, I realized that every Cul-De-Sac strip that would ever exist in the world ever had already been made and the one I was looking at was part of a finite supply. The card below it said nothing of Thompson's retirement or his illness. It only wrote about how proud he was to have won the Rueben in 2010. I could not stop looking at that comic. I rather hoped the people around me couldn't see my eyes tearing up.

Later on, I found myself at the back of the gallery, contemplating wether I should get a soda or call it a night, when I noticed Joe Wos, the Museum Director, standing a few feet away from me. Suddenly, Joe was calling for everyone's attention. I felt like I should get out of the way and let the important people get closer to the event, but it was too late. The dense crowd was already gathering behind me. I had a front row seat for what happened next. Joe announced that he wanted to present a special award to a contributor. Apparently, the Toonseum has it's own local award, known as the Nemo Award, which is only given to people who make a great contribution to the advancement or preservation of the cartoon arts. I watched as the Nemo Award was presented to Jean Scultz - the wife of the late Charles M. Schultz - for her contributions to cartoon museums across the country. I watched as Jean worked her way through the crowd, which parted for her as best as it could, and she graciously accepted her award. It was during this magic moment when I realized that I had left my camera in the car.

So that was my visit to the gallery. Fun, inspiring, touching, and completely unforgettable.

I'll be posting Part Two of my NCS Weekend blog on Wednesday and Part Three on Friday, so don't miss it.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

Comic Phases and the Secret of the Grass Roots House

2013-05-22T19:49:00.004-07:00

This is a very special week for me. This weekend, The National Cartoonist Society is coming to Pittsburgh.

To celebrate the occasion, I’ve drawn up a new Urban Underbrush strip with a classic comic theme. (Regular strips will return soon!)

But that doesn’t feel like enough. I want to do something more to show my love and admiration for the comic strip medium. Then I remembered. I have a comic-related secret about Urban Underbrush that I’ve wanted to share with you. Now seems like the time to do it.

This is the secret meaning of the Grass Roots Boarding House.

As readers of my webcomic may have noticed, Urban Underbrush is a story about balance. It’s about preservation and destruction, courage and caution and (most importantly) civilization and nature. The Grass Roots House, the main setting of this story, clearly embodies that balance between civilization and nature.

Thoughtful readers may have figured out that the house represents balance, but its second meaning is known only to me (until now).

The timeline and history of the Grass Roots House represents comic strips themselves.

It’s like this:

Before there was a Grass Roots House, there was a neighborhood. This represents the early years of comics. Newspapers had just begun to carry comic strips, but there were no rules or conventions yet. Familiar patterns, punchlines, and writing styles had yet to emerge. Jokes were heavy-handed and over explained. No one knew how to draw a speech balloon.

The Grass Roots House was built in the 1940’s and served as a family home throughout the 50’s and early 60’s. During this time, comic strips now had rules, structure and snappy jokes that hit on correct comedy beats. They were also largely about families and kids.

In the 60’s and 70’s the Grass Roots house was transformed into an “Urban Commune” for a group of kindly, but somewhat clueless hippies. In the 1960’s many young adults were living on college campuses and in commune homes. Comic strips like Doonesbury and Bloom County recognized the comedic potential for putting a lot of diverse, unrelated characters together and making them live like a family. Roommate comedies about wacky friends living in close quarters has been a staple of the comic world ever since.

In the early 80’s, The Grass Roots House was bought by a shifty businessman, who rented its rooms to a string of yuppie types. If you remember comics in the 80’s and most of the 90’s then this phase should come as no surprise. This was when successful comics became big businesses. Newspapers were at their highest circulation, which meant that newspaper comics had their largest audience and were earning their biggest profits. Comics branched out into new media, such as TV cartoons, plush toys, T-shirts, and every other imaginable kind of merchandise.The 80's were like that.

In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, normal people were losing interest in The Grass Roots House, as it fell into disrepair. In the real world, newspaper sales were beginning to decline, due to the papers' inability to adapt and compete with the internet and electronic media. Comics were losing their audience.

Which brings us to the present. Cassidy and her friends and acquaintances have moved in to The Grass Roots House and fixed it up. Each of them has his or her own reason to live in the house and to keep it going. Care to guess what phase of comics this represents? (This one is easy.) That’s right, it represents webcomics! We webcomic cartoonists have found what others have left for us, and have used whatever skills, talents, and devotion we have to make comics a home for us. Can we keep it up? How long will webcomics last? Who knows? But for now, the comic tradition is ours. And we intend to make this chapter a good one.

So now you know.

-Marj

www.lepusstudios.com

It's Back! Easter Eggs 2013

2013-03-27T21:58:00.000-07:00

If you've been visiting this site for more than a year, then you probably know what's coming. I have finished the Fourth Annual Lepus Studios Easter Egg Gallery. See the eggs here in all their glorious colors and proteins!

http://www.lepusstudios.com/eastereggs2013.html

We've picked a new crop of webcomics to honor, and I think you'll be quite pleased with the array of new faces.

Meanwhile, I have been working a lot of odd jobs lately and even the regular ones have been needing a little extra attention. So it's been quite a task getting these suckers drawn, colored, photographed and posted on time. Sure, I could have finished them tomorrow when I'd have a little more time on my hands, but then you probably wouldn't hear about them before the weekend and less people will be online on a holiday... Anyway, the earlier I can get them up, the better, because no one likes stale eggs.

Seriously, I wanted to finish before Thursday, not just because I implied that I would on various social media, but because this is one of my site's oldest traditions and I want to make these things a priority no matter how busy the rest of my life gets. Also, even when I'm finishing up the last of the gallery pages at close-to-midnight after working for 8 1/2 hours (not counting drive time) it's still pretty fun.

But if any of my blog writing seems choppy or disconnected tonight, please see above.

-Marj
www.lepusstudios.com