Pig Goat Banana Cricket!

Pig Goat Banana Cricket premiered on Nickelodeon today! Or last Thursday really, but officially, today. Here's a piece I did for the group art show last December! Click for a larger version!

コウモリダニプレゼンツ：バットマンの奇妙なケース！

It's all come full circle - here's a link to Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Cases! translated into Japanese! Sadly, it won't let me embed it here, but the Bat-Manga section starts at 6:35. Check it out before it gets pulled!

Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Comic Book Pages (MAD Edition)!

Hey, guess what - Batman: The Brave and the Bold Season Two, Part Two is now available for purchase at your local retailer (and Season Three will be available June 19)! Which is just the event I've been waiting for to post my final inside look at the making of Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Cases! Remember, in this post, I promised a spoiler-filled look at Batboy and Rubin? Probably not. Either way, now that it's available on DVD, I don't have to worry about spoilers, so here it is.

A bit of backstory first - when we first mixed this episode, Sam Register had concerns that the teaser (the part with Batboy and Rubin) played a little slow. So we chopped about a minute out of the teaser, which left us a minute-long hole to fill, since we're required contractually to deliver the show at a particular length. So we put a few scenes that had been cut back into the Scooby section (everything with the ticket girl), added a couple drifting pans to the manga section, and created a framing sequence for the teaser, featuring a fake comic book starring Batboy and Rubin, which looked a little something like this -

The cover is drawn by Lynell Forestall, over a background from the show painted by Bill Dunn. The lettering here, and in all of the interior pages, is by Peter Girardi.

Once we get inside, all of the panels are screen captured from the teaser itself, because that's really all we had time to do at that point. I certainly would've loved to take a month or two and draw 9 pages of faux-Wally Wood, but it just wasn't meant to be.

So I laid these pages out, which are all from the animation Lotto did for us, based on storyboards by Bret Blevins and myself. I tried as much as possible to emulate the page layouts from the original story...

...but we had a few panels that had to match the ratio of a hi-definition television screen, since those were the panels we were trucking in and out of to transition between the show and the comic.

And yeah, I know that guy should be strung up by his neck, but Standards and Practices had a problem with that.

Peter also added a layer of texture to age the comic up somewhat - I think the coffee cup stain was a nice touch, although I'm sure it lowers the value of our nonexistent comic to Fair or even worse.

The astute reader might also notice that our stand-in comic has some pacing issues - partly, it's a natural side effect of adapting a seven page comic into a nine page simulacrum thereof...

...partly, too, it's a result of not spoiling the vampire reveal at the end.

By the last page, the pacing is positively glacial - it's almost like we were planning a multi-part story to be collected in a longer trade. But of course, no one making a real comic book would ever let their pacing get shot all to hell just to pad a story out to six issues.

Any ways, there you have it - our fake Batboy comic. It doesn't work so great as a comic by itself, but flipping by for a few seconds, I think it works pretty well, and it was a lot of fun to make. And you can use it to read along with the episode, now available on DVD!

In other news...

Today I just wrapped a project I still can't talk about, because it hasn't been announced by Warner Brothers. But rest assured that this unnanounced project, of unspecified length, will sooner or later be available for purchase or rental or viewing in some as-of-yet-undesignated format or medium. So look for it at an undisclosed store, network, website or theatre near or far from you!

Here's a sneak preview -

DC Nation

So here's what I've been doing instead of updating my blog - working on shorts for a brand new block of superhero shows for Cartoon Network called DC Nation.



The shorts with the cheerful little plasticine heroes are of course by the geniuses at Aardman Studios - in this case, the specific genius is director Rich Webber. Here's a peek at a short I directed myself, starring some some familiar faces (and voices) -



These "previews" are more than half the length of the actual shorts, so I guess they should have had spoiler alerts. Sorry! This next one, by Andy Suriano, has already aired, so check it out -



This short, which is actually cut from a longer short made years ago by David Production in Japan (directed by Toshiaki Hontani, produces by Koji Kajita and Taito Okiura), will be airing this Saturday, so if it's not already too late, spoiler warning!



So I'll try to be better about updating this blog with DC Nation stuff, but mostly I've been dumping it onto my tumblr or tweeting about it, so for the full picture, you might want to check those out too.

Two Atoms Enter, One Atom Leaves

    While Cartoon Network is still holding off on airing new episodes, someone hasn't passed the word along to iTunes or Amazon, because they're releasing new episodes every week. Grab 'em before they notice their mistake! So this post is about episode 7 (listed as episode 6 with the online vendors), and if you want to avoid even the tiniest of spoilers, stop reading now (although the title is about as spoilery as this post is gonna get anyways).

     Still reading? OK then, here's the thing - Show 7 is our Atom episode, the one where we introduce Ray Palmer. But don't fret, Ryan Choi fans, he's in it too. But by the end of the episode, only one will be the Atom. I just wanted to take a moment to say that DC's been really good with giving us a lot of leeway in our show, but they did have a specific mandate for which Atom would still be our show's Atom at the end of the episode. All the same, thanks to DC for mostly giving us free rein.
    Also, for those who are interested in the behind-the-scenes kinda stuff, we switched the teasers for Battle of the Superheroes! with this show. So really, there wasn't quite so much of an Aquaman barrage in the script for this one, it just kinda worked out that way.

All art and characters ™and © DC Comics

Sorry

    As promised, here's an apology for Night of the Batmen! Not for the episode itself, which I think was a good one, and one I'm proud of. Also, I won't apologize for the fact that "The Ballad of Batman" is now stuck in your head forever, because that's what a good song is supposed to do. No, my apology is not for anything that was in the show, but something we left out.
    In the original script, from first draft all to the final version, Joker was accompanied by his cute but calamitous companion-in-crime, Harley Quinn. But as we started to get ready to board it, I asked James Tucker if he'd mind if I replaced her with one of Joker's previous sidekicks, Gaggy - which he obviously agreed to, because in the show, we did this -

    So to all of the Harley Quinn fans out there, I'm sorry I removed her from the show. But here's the thing - in an 22 minute episode with five guest heroes and six villains with talking parts already, there was no time to include Harley, except as a silent partner. And if you're gonna use Harley, you want her to have some dialogue - it's just out of character for her to hang around quietly in the background. Not so much for Gaggy. So while I don't regret swapping Gaggy in for her, I know she has a lot of fans who would have liked to have seen more of her in our show, and to them, sorry.

All characters ™ and © DC Comics

The blog that ate itself

I meant to post something about Joker: The Vile and the Villainous! a while back, but I didn't want to post anything before it aired, because I couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't spoilery (even the title itself is a little spoilery for my tastes), so I figured I'd post something after it aired. But then I got really busy, and this is the first chance I've had to sit down and blog, so here we go.

So anyways, Joker: The Vile and the Villainous - this was the first story written for Season 3, and according to Michael Jelenic, the concept for the episode was inspired by none other than this very blog, specifically this post! So that was nice to hear.

We (Michael, James Tucker, Jim Krieg and I) blocked out the structure of the story over the course of a morning, then James left us with one unresolved piece of the puzzle - who would the Joker team up with? So spent a lot of time (most of a full afternoon) trying to come up with a partner for the Joker, running through a couple of candidates that weren't quite right, until James saved our collective behinds by emailing in from nowhere with the Weeper.

This Friday, Night of the Batmen!, our adaptation of issue 13 of the comic book - after which, another blog post, featuring an apology from me to one particular fanbase that's sure to hate me when they find out what we've done (or rather, didn't do)!

Image ™ and © DC Comics

Wow, you guys really like Superman, huh?

This is a little unusual - I thought the Superman episode was pretty good and all, but now that it's aired, the response has been pretty dizzying. It got some nice write-ups at Wired, io9, Topless Robot, Newsarama and even the Onion's A.V. Club (although they listed Dana Delany as the voice of Lois (it's Sirena Irwin) and misspelled Mxyzptlk - how can you misspell Mxyzptlk?), as well as an overwhelmingly positive response in the usual places. Still, it's weird how they all seem to make grim note of the fact that the show's in its last season - let's focus on the positive, people!

If we knew how much everyone liked Superman, we would have... well, we would have done what we did, since we didn't have permission to use him until now. Anyways, there are a couple of folks working up some annotations - check 'em out! And yes, Michael Jelenic does know about a certain website, which did provide some inspiration for the story.

So I'm glad the show went over so well... I hope the rest of the season goes over half as well! And oh yeah, I guess Season One Part Two has been out on DVD for a couple weeks now, so go buy that if you haven't yet. And watch Bat-Mite this Friday at 6:30!

All characters ™ and © DC Comics

New B:TBatB episode tomorrow!

Tomorrow night at 6:30 on Cartoon Network - this guy!

Sometimes we dig pretty deep into the deeper recesses of DC's library for some obscure heroes to team up with Batman, but this time we outdid ourselves... we went all the way back to 1939 to dig out a hero named... lemme check my notes here... Superman! Anyways, he'll be on the show tomorrow, so check it out.

Superman and Batman ™ and © DC Comics.

Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Deleted Scenes!

Cartoon Network has announced airdates for a couple of new B:TBatB episodes, starting with Battle of the Superheroes!, which is actually the fifth episode of Season 3, airing March 25th. That's the one with Superman, but I can't say anything much about that until Warner Bros. decides to let some stuff leak out, so instead, I'll use this post to gab on at further length about Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Cases!, which also had its airdate announced. And that airdate is...

April the First!

That's pretty much the perfect airdate for Bat-Mite. Well played, Cartoon Network!

But now that an airdate has been announced, I feel hesitant about posting any more B-MP:B'sSC spoilers. So that spoiler-filled Batboy post I was planning will have to wait, but I wanted to post something more than the news about the airdates, so here's the compromise - I'll post stuff from the Bat-Mite episode that never actually made it to the air. No spoilers in footage that isn't actually in the show, right?

Normally we don't have much in the way of deleted footage, but Bat-Mite has a knack for messing up our normal schedule one way or the other. This time around, when we finished the storyboard, we found that it was a couple minutes short of a full show, so we had to scramble to make some stuff up to patch up those gaps. We put back some of the gags that had initially been cut from the Batboy and Rubin section, James wrote the bit where Bat-Mite magically adds fight scenes to the Scooby section, I wrote a shark safety PSA, and James came up with one last thing - a commercial parody that we would have squeezed into the act break during the manga section.

First, a little history - for those who didn't live in Canada in 1987, you might have missed these department store commercials (although they were being rediscovered on the internet around the time we were working on B-MP:B'sSC).




They were directed by the amazing Greg Duffel in Toronto at his Lightbox Studio, with designs by the great Ty Templeton.




That's also Greg as the voice of Robin, by the way.




As a side note, these commercials eventually led to Greg's studio being hired to do some test animation that was used to sell a little show you may have heard of called Batman: The Animated Series.



So along with all of the other stuff, James wrote a script for our own fake commercial, and we whipped this little number up (pardon the crudeness of the drawings, I had to bang it out pretty quick)-

But then, a funny thing happened - when we added all the new stuff into the show, we were actually a minute OVER. So we cut the commercial, since it was easiest to lift out and also, it saved us from doing a bunch of new designs in an episode that already had to be completely re-designed three times over already.

That's it for now - the show will finally be on the air in a month, so everyone will be able to enjoy all the stuff's that's actually in the show, and I'll be more comfortable posting some more spoiler-heavy Bat-Mite stuff again. Superman news before that, hopefully!

Batman characters ™ and © DC Comics

Zellers logo and commercials ™ and © Zellers, probably

Zigglers logo and commercial ™ and © Warner Bros Animation, maybe?

Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Comic Book Pages (Manga Edition)!

Sometimes people ask me how to get into animation. Mostly I encourage them to keep drawing, preferably from real life to get those fundamentals solid, and that's pretty good advice, I think. But the curmudgeon in me just wants to warn them away, because the truth of the matter is that animation is, by and large, a lot of work for very little reward.

By way of example, lets consider a sequence from Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Cases! As a transition from Bat-Mite's lair to the manga section of the show, we had to come up with a few fake pages of a Japanese Batman comic, based on the old comics by Jiro Kuwata. Legal wouldn't let us just use scans from the originals, so we had to cobble together some fakes, made to look enough like Jiro Kuwata's art to be recognizable, but not enough to exact duplicates of the original.

So I spent a couple weeks coming up with these 6 fake pages -

-and then we sent it off to legal, who had some tiny changes. Next up, inks-

-so with the legal hurdles cleared, we got Craig Cuqro to colour the pages, and added a layer of aged paper texture from Bill Dunn. We also got some dialogue translated into Japanese by Toshi Hiruma (I can't remember what it says any more, sorry) -

 -and wrapped it all up in this cover, drawn by Lynell Forestall, inked by Robert Lacko and again coloured by Craig Cuqro and aged up by Bill Dunn -

All told, the whole process probably took about a month. Now watch it go by onscreen - 

And that's after we duplicated the cycle to extend it. So in a nutshell, we compressed a month's worth of labour into three seconds of screentime. So there's my advice for aspiring animators - always remember that animation is a medium that will drain years off of your lifespan and leave you mere snippets of footage in return.

And keep drawing!

All characters and art ™and © DC Comics

Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Spoilers!

I wasn't going to post anything about Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Cases until Cartoon Network at least decided when they were going to air it for fear of spoiling things. But now that's it's aired in the UK, it's starting to spread, so anyone who wants to see it probably has. In the meantime, if you're avoiding spoilers, and even if you're not, our background supervisor Bill Dunn has started posting some of his paintings from the show. He's working chronologically, and so far he's only up to episode 2, so it's spoiler-free. Check it out here!

As for Bat-Mite,  just to be safe -

(LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD)

That should do it. The spoilers will be pretty light-to-non-existent here in the first B-MP:B'sSC post, but it will get spoilerier with each following post. The details are leaking out across the internet already, what with Paul Dini and Weird Al already tweeting about their involvement with it (plus, tweet-wise, I got a nice shoutout from superstar comic book writer Tom Peyer), so I'm assuming anyone reading this far has seen the episode.

First up we have a look at the posters on the wall in Bat-Mite's lair. These posters were all drawn by me, inked by Robert Lacko, and coloured by Hector Martinez. The first poster commemorates Batman's teamup with Sherlock Holmes. You might expect a nerd like me to use the cover to Detective Comics #572 -

- and know that I tried, but legal wouldn't have any of it. In fact, the closest that I could get to an image depicting a teamup between Batman and Sherlock Holmes is this -

Long time fans of the show will probably now ask, "Hey, why not just use a screengrab from Trials of the Demon!?" to which I can only say that the legal issues surrounding the use of Sherlock Holmes are complex, labyrinthine, self--contradictory and ever-changing. In short, I tried that too, and legal said no.

Next up we have the Elongated Man. I'm glad Paul Dini put him in the script, because I actually like Ralph Dibny. He gets written off as a Plastic Man ripoff, but like many characters that have been around for four decades before being needlessly slaughtered in a company-wide crossover, Ralph's character picked up a few interesting aspects over the years, like his status as the JLA's #2 detective, and his rare-for-comics idyllic marriage.  I also liked the running gag started in Justice League Europe (I think) about how all the other characters are kinda weirded out by his mystery-sniffing nose, so I tossed that into the poster.

The next three posters weren't called out in the script, but there was a lot of dialogue to cover and I wanted to keep Bat-Mite moving, so I had to make some stuff up for him to float past. Now, DC has a lot of detectives we could have used for these posters - Slam Bradley, the Crimson Avenger, Roy Raymond, Rex the Wonder Dog, and so on - but we didn't have designs for any of those guys, and this show was already pretty design heavy, so I just pulled three detectives from the characters we already had designed. Detective Chimp was a pretty obvious choice. You can see the tracks he's following transform from human to simian, so maybe they're tracking a victim of Grodd's E-Ray, or a were-ape, or something.

Our next detective is the Question - for his poster, I leaned more towards his portrayal in JLU than our show. I mean, he's still a detective and all in our show, but by that point, we'd only seen him tied up in a giant scale and breaking into Darkseid's lair on Apokolips. Here we have him sneaking around in a much more Earthbound environment, probably uncovering some nefarious underhanded crimes by a shadowy conglomerate. Or a 32nd ice cream flavour.

And finally, the Martian Manhunter helping Batman solve some sort of mystery on the moon. J'onn, of course, is a police detective in his civilian ID, and debuted in Detective Comics, so he's certainly qualified for the wall of detective teamups.

And that's that for that. Coming up, more B-MP:B'sSC posts, unless work gets crazy again, in which case, I hoped you liked this one, 'cause I won't have time for any more.

All characters and art ™ and © DC Comics, except Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes ™ and © don't even ask

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S., Eh?

So there's a new episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold airing tomorrow! This one's overflowing with more patriotic spirit than any half-hour of television ever. Check this out!

Naturally, when the time came to hand out this most American of scripts, it somehow landed on the desk of the show's only non-American director, me. To compensate, I have tried to jam it full of those vivid Stars and Stripes that you Yankee Doodles are so fond of. 

It's also a rousing adventure full of as much of the usual B:TBatB mayhem and whimsy as ever, so even if you're not in the USA, check it out! It's also got this guy in it -

If you can't wait for tomorrow, there are video clips and more pictures here to whet your appetite. They'll make your computer smell like Mom's apple pie!

All characters ™ and © DC Comics

Hey, Bat-Mite, what's new?

Emperor Joker is on Cartoon Network this Friday? Awesomesauce!

Coincidentally, at least 3 of the characters on the cover of that issue of Who's Who will be appearing in upcoming episodes. Watch for 'em!

Art and characters ™ and © DC Comics.

Doomed

Now that the Doom Patrol episode's aired, I thought I'd post a closer look at the sideshow banners from the circus, since a lot of work went into them. That's kind of the nature of animation - working for weeks on images that flash by in seconds. But in this age of DVD extras and blogsa and what not, there's no reason that work has to zip by unappreciated, is there? Let's all linger over this fine art, drawn by Lynell Forestall and Steve Jones, inked by Robert Lacko and coloured by Bill Dunn. They're all clickable for larger versions.

First up we have the bountiful Baboushka and Romulus and Remus, both background characters from Doom Patrol v.2 #37. There's not much to say about these guys, they're just there to fill empty banner slots.

Next up we have Lodestone, also from that era and that same storyline. Lodestone was also a member of the Doom Patrol in one of its less celebrated incarnations.

Following that we have a strongman, because every circus sideshow needs a strongman. This one was drawn by Steve, for some reason doing his take on the style of Frank Quitely.

Then we have Dorothy Spinner and Shasta the Living Mountain. Both were members of the Doom Force, although Dorothy is portrayed here in her Doom Patrol version. Shasta used to have a lot more line work on his tragic self, painstakingly rendered by Steve, but James pulled us back.

  

And here's the much-anticipated Brave and the Bold appearance of  Beast Boy - this is all the Beast Boy you get this episode. Sorry to those wanting him to be a part of the Doom Patrol, but don't be sad - if we put him on the team, we would have had to kill him. Is that what you want? Beast Boy's blood on your hands? I didn't think so.

For similar reasons, we kept Mento off the team - if we killed him, it wouldn't have seemed like a tragedy. That guy is such a jerk!

Next up we have Crazy Jane... wait, I didn't do a poster for Crazy Jane? What the heck is wrong with me?

To finish off, here's Negative Man himself. I wrote that banner copy myself, and I am as proud of those six words as anything I have ever written.

All art and characters ™ and © DC Comics.