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!

FF Bun Toons. YAY!

The World’s Greatest Webcomic presents…

If I’m ever asked to write the Fantastic Four, I’m ready with solid ideas.

As far as I know, Wonder Woman and Superman are actually making noogie nowadays, so you can’t keep up.

Remember, it’s only 13 days before the Mayan calendar runs out, so it’s not as if any of this matters after two weeks, anyway…

Ty the Guy OUT!

Here now, your BONUS moments.  Arguably the two most NEGATIVE moments in the history of the Fantastic Four…

From the much loved “FRED AND BARNEY MEET THE THING” series of the early 80s.   Benjy Grimm is a teenager with a magic ring, who fought crime and stopped trains on Saturday morning, while sharing the hour with the Flintstones (although they never actually met during the show).

From the Roger Corman FF feature film.  This is about as negative as you get.

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AND! If you’re in the GTA (or even as far afield as Barrie or Hamilton or Burlington or St. Catherines–yes, I’ve had students come in for classes from those cities. I swear to you–the classes are THAT GOOD!), we’ve got TWO classes starting up in January. Check out the information on the COMIC BOOK BOOTCAMP website

AND! We’re offering a One-Day/Night Workshop on RENDERING WITH MARKERS. Thursday December 13 7-10pm OR Saturday December 15 1-4pm. Price includes THREE Copics markers for you to take home. Info on the COMIC BOOK BOOTCAMP site or click the lovely image below (done by Instructor Megan Kearney in Copics)

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For last week’s Toon, Bun Toon…click on the words “James Bond”.

For every Bun Toon ever (and yes, the archives have been updated!) click the very positive bunny above.

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…

The End of the World Rapture Bun Toons! YAY!

This might be our last time together...

According to some pretty responsible sources in the media, today might be the last day of the world, and all the devout, religious people get to go bodily to heaven later this evening.  Sounds like a party, I hope there’s not much looting when it’s just us heathens left behind.

Yes Cap and Thing aren’t in their current outfits.   Don’t write me.   I hope to see you next week, with a bun toon for those left behind on Earth after the Rapture.  I hope the internet survives the end of days, as I have emails to catch up on.

Ty the Guy OUT!

UPDATE:  The world did NOT end on Saturday, citizens.  Go about  your day, and please, frequent your local malls and businesses. 

Here now, your BONUS Rapture Comic Book Moment:

You all knew there HAD to be Rapture Comic Books, right?

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For last week's Bun Toons, also about a god...click here

For every Bun Toons ever, click here.

And there’s more!

A surprise for all of us–actually didn’t know that this was coming out today. It’s a hardcover version of Strange Tales II and includes Harvey Pekar Meets The Thing, written by Harvey Pekar, art by Ty Templeton, lettered by Keiren Smith. Head for your Local Comic Book Store and get your copy today!

Keiren

New Comics Day

Amazing Spider-Man #657! Available today!

Keiren

My own little Thing

For various reasons, I’ve had to draw Ben Grimm  (the recently published Harvey Pekar Meets the Thing, for instance—from Strange Tales Volume 2 #3…)  Hope ya got one, it was a fun issue.

Well, after the third or fourth time you draw Ben’s mug, you realize how badly you want a detailed map of the cracks on his face, and the proportions of his brow ridges, etc, as it’s hard to visualize, otherwise.  The normal solution is to roll up your sleeves and do a turnaround on the character, but I happened to have a bit of clay laying about from a different project I was mucking about with…so….

 

It's Clobberin' Time!

I tossed this together in about half an hour.  It’s the size of a baseball, more or less, and after doing it, the Thing’s face makes complete sense to me if I have to draw it from a strange angle.

Or give him dramatic lighting.

The material it’s made out of is simple air dry clay, molded by hand, with a butter knife for the flatter parts, and a push pin (for the details).

In the long run, it’s almost a form of me being lazy.  It would have taken me about an hour to do a proper turnaround map for Ben’s head, and I wouldn’t have had a chance to get really mucky and sticky.

I’ve done this a couple of times before.  I made a Two-Face model like this when I was having trouble with a Batman cover.  And I made clay models of the main characters in my graphic novel BIGG TIME when I was working on that.  It’s a super-quick way to burn a character’s features into my brain to make them “real” with your bare hands.  Usually, I find I don’t have to use the little head as a model after I’ve made it.  The act of sculpting it creates the model in my brain.  Does that make sense?

Of course, with only one colour of clay, I can’t make those baby blue eyes, the ones that make Thing the idol of millions…

Ty the Guy OUT!

Here now, your Sculpture of The Thing’s Head Moment of Zen–

MARVEL ARTWORK YOU’VE NEVER SEEN

In honour of the fact that I’m doing some comics illustratin’ for Marvel at the moment (no telling you what it is yet, but it’s fun, fun, fun!), I figured I’d dig through the library all this week, to find some Marvel work I’ve done, that you guys have likely NEVER seen.  I’m not talking about comics  (Spidey-Torch, Mad Dog, Avengers, Ren & Stimpy and others) but things I’ve done for their toy department, licenses, special projects and other sundry items that fill an illustrator’s time.  All Marvel, All Week!  Collect them ALL!

Up above is the cover to a Fantastic Four DVD that collected up episodes of their cartoon from the mid-nineties, I think it only came out in Europe, as I’ve never been sent a copy, nor seen a colour version of the artwork.   Nevertheless, it was my first time drawing the famous first family (professionally, I mean…I must have drawn the Thing a zillion times as a child) and it was a little disappointing that I couldn’t draw Ben in his more familiar Kirby design…but the client wanted him “on model” for the look of the series.

Next , the first of MANY X-Men video boxes I did for the animated show that ran on FOX TV in the nineties.  I was a little ticked that they threw the title card over top of Wolverine’s arm for the first one, which mucked up the image a bit in my opinion (you’ll notice I figured out to work around it on the next two…), but I couldn’t have been happier with the colours that Paul Mounts put overtop of all three.  Somewhere in the house, I have Paul’s original colour pieces for these, done in gorgeous dyes, with a real airbrush!  Oh, the labour we artists had to put in, back in the primitive 20th Century!  Paul was nice enough to trade me all the colour art for one of the black and white pieces.  Hell of a trade on my end.

As I said, I did tons of art for the X-Men series, including designing the official jackets for the cast, with a fairly cool Wolverine patch on the back (that you can see a bit of in the corner of the video boxes, that little Wolvie is from the patch).  I may not be able to find the original art for that, but worst-case-scenario, I’ll find someone to model the jacket for ya.

Doing these covers was a lovely stretching exercise for my art brain, as I was doing them at the same time as Batman Adventures stuff in the late nineties.  Some days it took a few hours to shake the Bruce Timm out of my hands, and try to channel the more illustrative look of the Marvel house style.  At first I expected they wanted me to make the covers resemble the show designs, but they insisted I do nothing of the sort, and said “Draw it in your own style”.  Something I’m not sure I have any more.  But these are close to it, I suppose.

Tune in tomorrow for some Marvel 2099 artwork you’re not expecting, a couple of Moon Knight pages you’ve never seen, and plenty more X-Men…and then on Nepotism Thursday, my wife’s first ever coloring job for Marvel…and how it nearly ended the marriage!   And yes, it was all my fault, dear.  (She’s reading this, gotta be cool, gotta be cool…)

Ty the Guy

Doing these covers was a lovely stretching exercise for my art brain, as I was doing them at the same time