NEW PAGES FOR SALE. SKUNKS AND WONDER WOMEN

Well, just A Single Wonder Woman this time out, though there is more than one image of a skunk in this Monday’s new scans of ORIGINAL ART.   The Wonder Woman is from the lovely and aforementioned SUPERMAN AND BATMAN Magazine (a moment of silence for this forgotten hero of publishing….). This was a poster insert (from a series of eight, a different  DC hero in every issue) that ran on the inside STAPLED middle page of the mag.  So WW was the centerfold, so to speak.  And you guys thought Marge Simpson was the only cartoon character to pose for the staple section of a magazine!  Diana did it ALL first.  You know, I’ll bet this, and the Hawkman of last week, would look nice in colour.  I will dig those out for tomorrow, promise.  The WW has some lovely colour, if I recall, and I think I coloured it.

And WOO HOO!  The last of my unsold pages from the Pepe Le Pew story I did with Sam Agro for Looney Tunes Magazine, all going up in the all for sale gallery.  I can’t price ’em, myself.  My wife doesn’t trust me.  (I used to sell Batman Adventures covers for seventy five bucks and my wife smacked me around after I’d sold three or four!).  Sewer Transformer aside, I really like the “wet Pepe” image in the middle of the page.  I couldn’t think of an episode where Pepe got wet, so it was daunting to see if I could make it look “on model” without any reference for that appearance.  I hope I pulled it off.

Is there anything more fun to draw than the Chrysler Building?  Perhaps sewer crocodiles with an eye patch.  And here it is, all in one page?  Sometimes I have a good job.

I got to work in a little “EC” style lettering in the POW! POW! stuff, I notice.  (That last line sounded more like Beat Poetry than I meant it to.)

It was great fun doing the two or three Looney Tunes jobs I did.  The pages with Pussyfoot and Bugs Bunny on ’em are long gone.   I think the Daffy pages are gone too.  C’est la vie!

Ty Le Guy

Busy day today, with classes, a slightly late deadline on something I’m inking, and my family just getting back from Montreal last night, WITH A STALLED CAR ON THE HIGHWAY FOR A FEW HOURS!

I didn’t mean to yell, sorry.

…and a Christmas Eve Day morning gift

from Ty the Guy.

SOMETIMES, THE ROUGH…and another of the increasingly late Hoverboy Fridays!

Clearly, I’m mad, I tell you.  MAD.

I’m one of those guys who spend their lives liking the rough sketch better than the final art.  It’s a curse.   I have a fondness for the scribbled, eccentric, humanistic and unembarrassed linework of a rough sketch.  There’s a lovely connection to movement and thought in the first contact with the image to muscles and paper,  often softened unbearably by turning it into a final illustration.   As a professional drawer-boy, I’m always fighting between “cleaning it up” and “letting it live”.

The Batman sketch from an old, old Adventures cover, (which I just found in a box yesterday, and hence this post) is less than three inches high.  It’s drawn in pencil and a thick pentel marker which was clearly drying out, as the background becomes less dark to the right. But the sense of danger, the monster, and the expressions on everyone’s face works for me in a way the final doesn’t.

My Pekar’s AMERICAN SPLENDOR work last year did the same thing to to me.  I was going for a very sedate, “realistic” Curt Swan type of storytelling for Harvey, since that was the basic feel of this particular script…but the rough layouts had a Kirby-like energy to them, with a lively and playful sense of proportion that I wish had fit the story.

( for more Harvey online, click here)

Again, these layouts are about three inches tall, and the final art is fifteen inches high…so the movements of your hands vs. the movements of your shoulders are going to be different.

I just got through reading an issue of Marvel’s new “STRANGE TALES” comic, with folks like Peter Bagge, and James  Kochalka doing very indy looking work on Marvel super-heroes.  Astoundingly great fun, and some of the pages have the same feel as my rough pages do…before I clean myself up.

If only I hadn’t seen so much Harvey Kurtzman while growing up.  I could rid myself of this demon of liking the roughs.

AND NOW—

FOR THOSE WHO DEMAND THEIR HOVERBOY FRIDAYS ON FRIDAY, I GIVE A FIE TO THEE!  A FEE FIE!

Hoverboy Fridays continue to wander the calendar, and we find one barging into Sunday.  I’m only making this rare exception to move Hoverboy Fridays from its regular spot on Tuesdays, to this weekend, because the most recent update is topical!  It has to do with Hoverboy’s very tenuous connection to Sesame Street, which celebrated it’s 40th, or 45th anniversary this week, I wasn’t paying enough attention when Wolf Blitzer mentioned it.

Go to the Hoverboy museum and read more about this astounding connection between Kermit the Frog and The Boy Who Hovers.

www.hoverboy.com (for those who don’t hyper link well).

Ty the Guy.  AWAAAY!

New Pages!

Just finished putting up some new Spidey/Torch pages, some New Batman Adventures pages…a couple other things.  Will be posting more tonight and tomorrow, including some Dark Claw Adventures.

Piles of Paper

Ty is going through piles of pages, sorting through his career.  Quite the retrospective.  He’s trying to decide what stuff to scan for this site.

Every now and then, one of us will check eBay to see if any of Ty’s stuff is on.  Sometimes, we’ll see a bunch of pages Ty’s inked over a particular penciller.  About eighteen months ago, someone was trying to sell a bunch of Jim Mooney pages, as Jim needed the money for medical/living expenses (he died early last year). Ty had inked Jim on Superboy pages.

It took Ty aback a moment as he tried to remember the issues:  as I’ve mentioned before, with such a wide and varied career it can be hard for Ty to remember what work he’s done, let alone who he’s inked over, or who has inked him. It can be easier to remember the big ones (Ty inked Curt Swan), and/or a tragic story (Ty drew two issues of Batman Adventures, when Mike Parobeck was unable to finish them not long before his death).  Sometimes, Ty will talk to a penciller or inker, through email or facebook, and will be confused when the other artist refers to their mutual work.  This sends Ty off through his pile of pages (or off to the Grand Comic Book Database!).

And, of course, even though Ty has been doing a lot of work on his own in recent years (pencilling and inking Simpsons’ stories which he has written), he’s still busy collaborating.  He was immensely pleased to work with Stephen Molnar on Revolution on the Planet of the Apes, and on Hoverboy, having first seen Stephen’s work in a portfolio review at a local convention.  And the artist for Moonstone’s upcoming Johnny Canuck and the Guardians of the North is David J. Cutler.  David was in Ty’s classes when Ty taught at Max the Mutt Animation School in Toronto.

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A page from Superboy #6 (1990) Jim Mooney pencils, Ty Templeton inks

Something New…

Just added into The Art Store the Mad Magazine piece, the Superman drawing, the Harvey portraits and a page from Secret Origins with Elongated Man and Flash. More to come as soon as Ty loads up the scanner…

Artwork Deux

Ty decided to try something new with his American Splendor pages. He’s always been a perfectionist with his inking, and is known for his clean, tight style.  For this, he aimed for a looser style, and was drawing on paper rather than board–his thinking was that, on board, an artist has the idea that they have to get every line right (there’s only so much erasing you can do without ruining the board and having to do a patch).  With paper, he could just crumple it and throw it out; this freed him just to put the lines down and not stress.  Ty was pretty pleased with how it came out.

Ty teaches…

Ty taught courses at Max the Mutt Animation School for a couple of years.  He began by teaching his Comic Book Bootcamp, then turned to teaching courses during the day for the school’s Sequential Arts program.

After a semester teaching three courses full-time, he realized he had no free time to actually work on comic books–and Ty has always maintained that in order to teach others how to do something like “how to make comics for a living” one has to make a living at it oneself.  Not only to make a living–but to keep up on what is new, fresh and modern.  The comics of 2009 are very different from those of 1989, and it’s a style difference that is not just from the widespread use of computers to make those comics.

So, Ty left teaching at Max the Mutt.

The Toronto Cartoonists Workshop was founded by a student, Walter Dickinson, who took Ty’s Comic Book Bootcamp courses (and had actually lobbied to have Max the Mutt offer those courses, and to create the Sequential Arts program). The Workshop is currently offering courses taught by Ty and by Paul Rivoche.  There are plans to offer other courses including some weekend-long ones.  If you live in the GTA and you’re interested, check out the website periodically to see what’s on offer.

Ty’s current workshop is fully booked (and has a waiting list).  But, Ty will be teaching other workshops next year (February 2010).  If you’re interested, book early–these courses fill up quickly.

Batman Adventures: The Lost Years

Nothing to say, today, so I’m posting a cover…

Stig’s Inferno

Looking for Stig’s pages?  We got ’em.  Ty sorted through the few that survived a basement flooding,  and chose the ones he currently feels he can part with.  He had to pick out four to save for the children…this, more than anything, is definite proof that we will not be having more children.  The oldest is slightly luckier than his siblings–he actually has a Stig’s Inferno cover (#4), framed and hanging on his wall.  And an extra page.  It pays to be the eldest…