Destined for Greatness Bun Toons! YAY!

To think I knew them when…

Well, it’s Canada Day Weekend, as well as the 4th of July, as well as Pride Week, as well as the second weekend of Summer…so in honour of all those events, the Bun Toon has nothing to do with any of that.  Instead, we present the lives of great comic characters…

                                                                   Ty the Guy OUT!

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Speaking of “Before they were famous”…You ever wondered how Bugs Bunny got his name?

It’s also where the “Looney” part comes from.

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for last week’s Bun Toon, click here.

For the Bun Toon archive, incomplete, but hey, it’s free…click here.

Four Characters, Four Panels Bun Toons! YAY!

Fourth time is not the charm.

Jon Stewart retired this week, and Don Trump won the Republican debate.  But neither event can hold a candle to this week’s real disaster…

There is so much wrong with this movie that it defies critique.   At its heart, it’s a movie about brilliant creative people, written and directed by slow-witted dullards who understood nothing of the source material.

I tend to root for comic book movies, and it’s very rare for one to disappoint as much as this one did.  Green Lantern and Jonah Hex are the only other two that got down to this level of pure, unfiltered awfulness like the new FF movie did.  If you’ve seen either of those previous bombs, you know where we are.

Sigh.

A terrible adaptation encrappens us all.

Ty the Guy OUT!

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Without question, this is STILL the best Fantastic Four movie:

It even made a pretty good comic book, drawn by my buddy Marcio Takara!

Now, if Pixar ever made a live action Incredibles movie, we might have something resembling a proper FF picture.

Sigh.

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For last week’s Bun Toon about the internet’s favourite lion, click here.

For the Bun Toon archives, going back YEARS, click here!

Woke up and Drew for the King and for HERO

Jack Kirby, controlling the universe with a pencil.

Back on August 28 (Kirby’s Birthday, and inter-galactic holiday) the fine and dandy folks at Hero Initiative worked with Kirby’s family to make the day about raising money to support comics creators in need. Hero asked artists to “wake up and draw” something to do with Jolly Jack, as a birthday card to the King, and as a piece of quickie artwork that can be auctioned off to raise funds for those creators who need Hero Initiative’s help.

I love to throw my two cents into Hero Initiative whenever I can–and when I heard about the campaign, I jumped in with a Kirby drawing of my own.

Here’s my woke-up-and-drew sketch of Bashful Ben sucking back on his beloved cheroot…’cause if you’re paying tribute to Jack, it should at least smell like Cuba’s on fire.

click here to be taken to the auction

The blurry-eyed morning doodle is up for auction on Comicartfans. There are lots and lots of other sketches by lots of wonderful generous creators who rolled out of bed and drew before they’d even properly woken up! Check ’em all out! The bidding ends on Wednesday October 16. Give money to Hero Inititiave and take home a piece of art drawn by one of us in our underwear before our morning coffee.

Ty the Guy OUT!

And here’s your BONUS Kirby Sketch Moment:

The rarely seen Jack Kirby sketch of what Doctor Doom REALLY looked like under the mask. Stan had other ideas, but Jack believed it was a really teeny scar.

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This week’s award-wishing BUN TOONS featured Mr. Kirby, and some flash in the pan painter from Europe. Click here to read it.

The Convention Sketches Came From My Basement!

A couple of weeks ago, I put together a sketchbook for an open house/gallery show at the Toronto Cartoonists Workshop.    (click on Sketchbook by Ty above!)  We printed up a bunch of ’em, and had a dozen or so left over after the event, so we offered up em through our little website here.

Each sketchbook has a first page left intentionally blank, so that I had a space to scribble a doodle and signature and a message for the person getting it at the open house.    I can’t remember what I sketched in those books, as my brain forgets the image as soon as it’s drawn.

But when I did little front-page doodles for the fine folks who ordered copies  through the website, there was a scanner handy.  So I’m posting a bunch of them today.  While you guys are looking at them, I’m busy finishing up a script for Heroes of the North, and designing a giant killer robot for a project I’m doing with a fairly famous pal of mine at a fairly major comic company.  (What a tease I am!)  I’ll keep you posted.

This last sketch below comes with a small story.   On Tuesday I got into a conversation with someone about what is the “right” tool to ink with, and responded with the advice Joe Kubert once said:  “grab anything and use it.  If you need a specific brush or pen,  you’re not making the line, the tool is.”

Within reason, obviously. Kurbert didn't mean for anyone to ink with one of these.

Well, just for the straight up hell of it, I tried inking a sketch with the giant fat marker pictured above.  A really beat up, half dry one, too.  In fact, I searched for the skankiest marker in my studio.  This is what I got.

I wasn’t particularly trying to ape Kubert’s style when I did this, and pulled the Tarzan portrait out of my head, but there’s an eerie hint of Kubert-isms in the final sketch.  I think that’s the secret of Joe’s style.  Ink with the most awful piece of shit tool in your studio, and the constant awareness that you’ll never get a line you’ll like, that you stop looking at each stroke and focus on the whole drawing.

I’m going through the garbage and rescuing all my horrible dead brushes and gnarly markers.  That was fun!    Next sketch I do gets inked with a spray can.  I’ll show Kubert there’s tools you can’t use!

I think we have one or two sketchbooks left.   You’d have to check with my wife by going HERE.

Ty the Guy OUT!

PS:  BIG events at the Toronto Cartoonist Workshop tonight.  I shall speak of them tomorrow.

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Here now, a BONUS sketchbook page, left out of the printed collection for space.   I learned to draw the WildCATS: Animated style from back in the 90s…