"We toons may act idiotic, but we're not stupid!"

Today is the 25th anniversary of the release of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", so I decided to make a little fan art.

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I can't even begin to describe what an impact this movie had on my life. I was 8 years old when it came out, and that is the earliest specific date I can recall. It's like when you're a child, you don't have a real solid sense of time yet. All events over the span of years get lumped into this one big nebulous chunk of time, with no real dates or years attached to any specific moment to delineate one from the other. It all becomes "back when I was a kid". But "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" was such a momentous event in my life, I've always been able to remember it as the summer of '88. 

This movie was like a depiction of my dreams made manifest on celluloid. My parents tell me that when I was a toddler watching Looney Tunes, I had tried to crawl into the TV because I wanted to live with the cartoons. I wanted a world where cartoons were real. Roger Rabbit was the first time I actually got to see that idea of cartoons as being real and part of our world. Now I know that Who Framed Roger Rabbit is certainly not the first time cartoons have been integrated with live action film. But, back in '88, I had not yet seen the Porky/Daffy short "You Ought To Be In Pictures" or any of Disney's "Alice" comedies, or even Disney's "Mary Poppins" (I never really cared for many of the Disney live action films when I was a kid, and sadly, I still don't)

I still remember sitting in the theater when the big "Maroon Cartoon" title cards popped up and "Somethin's Cookin'" began and while watching it with wide eyes wondering how they were going to make the jump from this 100% animated cartoon into the real world. I was thinking "is the jump into the real world what changes Baby Herman into a cigar smoking tough guy, like he is in the commercials on TV? Are they gonna have to try to get back? Is that plot?" 5 minutes later when the camera pulls back to reveal its all a set, and they were just filming a cartoon on a soundstage in Hollywood the same way they would make any other movie, it completely blew my mind. That was the world I wanted to live in.
After that, I drew Roger Rabbit obsessively for the next 3 or 4 years on any paper I could get my hands on. I'll have to post some of those drawings later. Roger Rabbit was definitely a benchmark in my life and I really hope he makes a return to the screen someday, and I really hope that I may be lucky enough to get to work with him professionally one day.

Grab yer crayons!

Hey, kids, here's something pretty cool! I had the honor of having my work featured in the newest issue of Color Ink Book!

Color Ink Book is a DYI art magazine by the Brothers Washburn and each issue features artwork from a wide selection of pop artists ranging from world famous to up-and-coming. Each artist's work is presented as simple black and white line art that the reader has the option of coloring however they'd like!
I'm in volume #19 which features work by Martin Ontiveros, Jason Jecenko, Cody Vrosh and Motorbot; also features works by 3 Sheets, Jared Wright, Jared Konopitski, Tom Joyce, Ciou, Mr. Penfold, and myself.

I submitted 13 pieces and 6 were selected. Here are the 5 that didn't make the cut. To see the ones that did, you can buy it here.

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Joyriding with the cool cats

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Here's the final cover art for the debut EP from Hooray For Our Side. The band's vocalist, Evan, and I are both huge Back To The Future fans, so we thought to create the cover, it would be fun create the album art, from concept to final product, while watching the entire Back To The Future trilogy over pizza and beer. It ended up taking quite a bit longer than that. We met with various other members and friends of the band over the course of 4 nights and while working on this, we watched the entire BTTF trilogy, Brad Neely's Wizard People Dear Reader, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and several episodes from season 3 of The Simpsons. We also had about 6 pizzas, 40 chicken wings, 2 burritos, 1 bottle of cake flavored vodka, 2 cases of soda, and about 45 beers.

"Where did you get that red sharkskin suit? It is awesome!"

Here's an illustration did did for the new episode of Podhouse 90, a scripted anthology series of original radio plays by Frank Conniff (Mystery Science Theater 3000, Cinematic Titanic, Invader ZIM)

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I had done an illustration for an episode last year, The Wonderful Pundits of Oz. This episode is full length musical comedy called "South by South Satan", Starring Dana Gould, J. Elvis Weinstein, Emily Maya Mills, Laraine Newman, Emo Philips, David Higgins, Janie Haddad Tompkins, Joe Keyes, Ron Lynch, Jimmy Dore, Stef Zamorano, Mark Thompson, Kipleigh Brown and Frank Conniff. You can get for free here on iTunes!

Here's are some rough concepts I sent to Frank.

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#5 was in reference to one of my favorite episodes of MST3K. I didn't actually think Frank would go for it, I just threw it into the mix for the hell of it (pun very much intended) since he was a writer and actor on the show. We decided to go with #4. You can see that originally Satan had a bigger, much more pronounced goatee, but the script called for a soul patch. Here are some other development sketches and an alternate layout.

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