You know what that means - Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo is available on the 7th! Wouldn't it make a great Christmas present for all your Titan-loving friends and family? Sure would! And look at that temptingly low SRP!
Or not - apparently, they moved the release date again, this time to February 6th. Grinched again! Oh well. In the meantime, here's a page of sketches I did for the DVD cover.
Hey, American Titans fans, since you can't buy the Titans DVD this Tuesday, make sure to go out and vote! I know you have 70 minutes suddenly freed up, so no excuses!
If you're awake by 10 AM, there's a new show you'll be wanting to watch on whatever channel airs Warner Bros stuff in your neighbourhood. That's right, Legion of Superheroes starts today. Check it out!
At 7:30 on Cartoon Network. We made it a long time ago, and it's been sitting on a shelf for a while now. They dusted it off for San Diego, but if you didn't get a chance to catch it there, it finally airs tonight at 7:30. If you miss that, don't worry, it airs again at the same time tomorrow (Saturday). And if you miss that, apparently you can buy it November 7th. Really, after that, you're on your own.
I don't normally do this, but I want to recommend a movie. I only mention it because I haven't seen any ads for this yet, and I'd hate for people to miss it because they don't know about it. It's called The Descent, and it's coming out today. I happened to get lucky and see it a few weeks ago, knowing nothing about it, and enjoyed it immensely. I don't want to give too much away, but it's about 6 spelunkers who go down into a cave, and things go wrong. It's tense all the way through - it's already scary before the horror movie genre stuff kicks in. If you're tired of slow-moving Japanese ghost women and/or scratchy-looking torture-fests, and just want to see a finely crafted horror film, check out The Descent.
Coincidentally, I recently recovered a painting I did last year for a show at a store called Robocon. I think it demonstrates quite vividly why I'm not making a living as a painter, but I enjoyed painting it. It's cel vinyl on illustration board, for those that wonder about stuff like that.
Here's something weird about blogspot - if you start a post in, say, February, and don't publish it until July, it'll still post as a February post. Just sayin', is all.
Any ways, here's an old page of scribbles from the days of the second Doom Patrol episode of Teen Titans. Glen had designed a bulky Robotman, and I was messing around, trying to get a feel for it.
At the time, someone had suggested Mr. T as a potential voice actor for Robotman. But then, that same someone suggests Mr. T for just about every voice being cast, so I don't think there was ever any serious consideration of the idea.
I'm not sure how to apportion the blame for this one. Derrick was the one who found the Gamecock entry in the Marvel handbook, but Canete was the first to draw him. Soon enough, everyone was drawing Gamecock, and I got swept up in the tide (this happens from time to time - it's how I started the blog in the first place). So here's my Gamecock-
So a spammer decided my comments section was a great place to plug their internet survey. No thanks. I adjusted my blog to moderated comments from now on - that means that when you post a comment, blogspot has to email it to me for approval before it can be published. Which I will do, as long as it's not spam. But that does mean when you post a comment, it won't appear right away. Please don't let that stop you from posting, though - I don't reply to comments very often, but I do read all of them (especially now).
For those that are in the direct mail business, please, do me a favour - go get a real job. Sell drugs. Become a whore. Overthrow a small island and set up a banana republic. Whatever, just do something with more dignity than spamming or junk mail, okay? The rest of the world knows what it means to sleep soundly - feel free to join us sometime.
(I know I'm probably directing these comments to some program that randomly posts on blogs automatically, but on the off-chance that there's a human being responsible for spamming up my blog, please, rethink your life. Everyone hates you. That can't be any fun.)
In the meantime, for those who've been having problems loading the Quicktimes in my previous post, don't trouble yourself - they deliberately reveal nothing about the show. I can't post any Legion images until the show's already aired - the movies I put up are cropped too close to see anything, really (although hard-core Legion fans could probably deduce which character is in at least half of the movies - hint - each movie features a different individual Legionnaire). I thought it was funny, but my wife thought it was mean. Maybe she's right, and the spam is karmic retribution for my little prank. Although it was really as much a parody of all the secrecy surrounding the project as anything else. Sorry to anyone who got their spirits up.
In the meantime, I've dug up an old drawing I did in my Titans days. It has nothing to do with the new Legion show, even though it bears a strange resemblance to a certain green hero. Rest assured that in the show, that particular green character looks nothing like this drawing.
If you're here for the Watchmen drawings, scroll on down to the next (previous) post. For everyone else, some news-
Somehow, the fine folks at titansgo.net have figured out that the [secret project] I'm working on is Legion of Superheroes. Not a terribly big secret, but credit where credit is due.
Anyways, now that the secret (such as it is) is out, here's some Legion stuff. Sorry about the low-res, I don't want the blog to load too slowly.
This is all stuff we put together to give some idea of the feel of the show.
Hey, Warner Bros marketing people! If I'm not supposed to post this stuff, let me know, and I'll take it down.
The show's looking great so far, as you can see. This is all early footage, though, so some things have changed.
We've got some great stuff lined up, too. There's a story with Starfinger lined up that I'm really excited about (Taylor Negron is playing Starfinger).
Also, the Legion of Substitute Heroes guest star in the episode, and Starboy and Matter-Eater Lad join the team.
And that's not our only guest star, either. We've got Cosmic Boy and Ferro Lad, one of them joining the team, with voices by Wil Wheaton and Dave Wittenberg. Also, we're doing the Sun-Eater story - that should be pretty amazing.
So I drew these today. Please don't ask me why. It just came up at lunch, and I had to get these things out of my head so I could get back to work. That's all. Please don't read anything into it, is all I'm asking.
I know I haven't posted in a while - I've been working on a nice little post that is turning out to be extraordinarily large. In the meantime, here's this -
I drew this during the Bunny Raven recording. Or was it Mother Mae-Eye? No, it was Mother Mae-Eye. Those were probably the two most enjoyable records I sat in on - Bunny Raven because Tom Kenny kept ad-libbing hilarious stuff (some of which we kept - the "You're great, I love you" bit from the Stagehand was ad-libbed) and the Mother Mae-Eye one because of Billie Hayes. Now, I didn't grow up on Sid & Marty Krofft stuff like some people, so for me there wasn't the nostalgic resonance when Ms. Hayes was recording, but when she did the evil Mother Mae-Eye laugh, I got chills up my spine. Seriously.
Anyways, this was drawn with a black Sharpie, then coloured with highlighter pens (yellow, orange, pink and green). I really like the way the highlighter pens smudged the Sharpie, making the costume look old and filthy. I don't really care for the drawing on the back of the page bleeding through, but what can you do.
Some time ago I promised to post an example of an idiot-style drawing that had a practical application. Of course, I also promised a moratorium on the Super-D - but I'll still keep the first promise. Here's a page of idiotic scribbles in search of a gag for "X".
Sometimes it helps to feel your way through a scene like this before you storyboard it. Most of this was in the script (probably not the multiple SD Starfires), but I can't find a copy of the script around, so take my word for it for now. I still wonder if the gag would have played better with a full-sized Starfire standing on Robin's head. Also, it looks like I forgot to include the drawing of Robin with an X in place of his eyes. Oh well. Another X gag lost to the pressures of deadlines. Remember kids, haste makes waste. I think we hid enough Xs in the show as it is. In any case, that becomes this -
And then we make this (this is my only character design for Titans)-
Then Derrick takes a pass to make it actually look like the rest of the show, Chris Hooten colours it, and we get this-
And then Tom McLaughlin adds the timing, and it gets sent overseas, where Lotto subjects it to their mysterious and wonderful processes. Then they send this back to us-
Then Joe Gall plugs that into his avid and turns it into this (I don't know why this is the only version I have in widescreen)-
The next step is very mysterious to me, since I'm not involved in any way. Someone writes some music, someone else adds some sound effects, Scott redubs a line or two of dialogue, and they all get mixed together to make this -
I guess I kind of lost track of the point in there somewhere.
And I mean that in the best way possible - Ladies and Gentlemen, Derrick Wyatt! Here's a stupid collaborative effort that dates all the way back to our days on ¡Mucha Lucha! For reasons I won't get into, I scribbled an ugly mess of a drawing of Jean-Luc Picard in a fat orange marker on a post-it, and left it at Derrick's desk. Soon after, he gave it back to me, with a layer of black ink added by him - thus creating a brand new style of drawing that I intend to use some day to illustrate my gangster comic. Some day! So the true value of the Idiot Style is revealed - it may not create beautiful drawings, but it's unbeatable as a means of springboarding fresh ideas that can be incorporated into a finished production (not that I've finished (or even started) my gangster comic). I'll post an example of Idiot Style drawing that led to something useful next post.
Oh, if you just got here from Titansgo.net, the Super-D's are just below. Scroll on down, and check out some of the other blogs in the sidebar - lots of Titans staff with amazing stuffs (may I recommend Norm's Mignola-style Raven drawing?).
Somehow my Idiot Style blog is becoming the Super-D theatre. Not that I'm knocking Super-D style drawing, which I obviously love doing, but it wasn't really my original intent for this blog. I'll transition slowly, though - first, here's some more Super-D:
More Justice League stuff from the same batch, rounding out the original seven. Still not scanning too well (especially poor Hawkgirl), but it'll have to do until I get a new scanner.
Is it because of all of the messed-up Cyborg heads in last Sunday's post? No, it's because he just found out that he's my girlfriend's least favourite Titan. At least, that's what she told me a year or so ago, so I drew this. It didn't do anything to change her mind. Better luck next time, Cy. For the record, you're not my least favourite Titan (that would be Jericho). Here's Cyborg in colour.
I was planning to update this weekly at first, and then gradually drop off to semi-annual posts, but I forgot that Brianne Drouhard's magic internet ninja skills would alert her to my blog the instant I made it (her blog is linked in my sidebar). I also neglected to anticipate that she would then set up a link, drawing people here when all there is to see is one page of messed-up Cyborg heads. So here's another post, and I'll post, say, every other day for a while, dropping to twice a week, then weekly, and eventually forgetting my password and drifting away, as originally planned.
This one is a drawing I did with a red Sharpie during the recording of Haunted.
As you can see, it totally encapsulates the somber atmosphere of the episode. Here's another version of the same idea, this time going over the rough red layer with a black Sharpie, while still failing utterly to achieve a finished look.
