Moo! Bark! Howl! Bun Toons! YAY!

Four legs good.  Two legs bad.  Screw the penguins.

It may be the information age, but there are so many mysteries yet unsolved….

Someday we’ll find out of the critters have souls.

After we’re done eating them, I mean.

Ty the Guy OUT!

---

This is the oldest of my many, many Walt Kelly ANIMAL COMICS I’ve picked up over the years.

You can see proto-Albert and proto-Churchie in the drawing.  Pogo, one assumes, is off sleeping somewhere before his debut.

I’m still crazed for Kelly and Pogo, but haven’t picked up any new issues for a while, as they’re no longer dirt cheap “kiddie comics” that no one wants, like they were when I was young.  Apparently Golden-Age “animals” are popular now.

 

---

For last week’s slightly animal-themed BUN TOON, click the burnt creature carcass above.

By the way, Flounder, like all flatfish, have what is called the “wandering eye mutation”, one of the more controversial elements of the evolution/intelligent design debate.  Once a joke gets explained, it’s no longer funny, so I’m explaining it here, long after it wasn’t funny to begin with.

 

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.

———————————————————————————–

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…