Tom Racine is one of those really lucky guys that you just can’t help but have a tinge of jealousy toward. As podcast host, he has had the pleasure of interviewing many of the greatest cartoonists working today, from Jeff Keane (Family Circus), Tom Richmond (Mad Magazine), Jef Mallet (Fraz), Dave Kellet (Sheldon), and Patrick McDonnell (Mutts) to name just a few.
So when I got a little email in my inbox from Tom saying that he wanted to have me on his show, Tall Tale Radio, as a guest, naturally I was a little surprised at the invitation. When He said he wanted to record the interview on April 1st, I was sure it was a prank. But it was no prank! Tom had me on to discuss Robot Beach, and to take the opportunity look at the cartooning world through the eyes of someone who is brand-new to all of this. Hopefully I was able to provide some insight on the subject.
The interview has kinda forced me to reflect on the state of Robot Beach over the last week or so, and I want to take a moment to thank everyone who reads my strip. I am just a few months away from my one year anniversary and I am sure that I would not have made it this far had it not been for all of the support I have gotten from everyone in the form of comments and personal emails. I have made a lot of really great friends because of Robot Beach and those relationships just push me to constantly do better. Robot Beach originally started as a simple three year project. A simple story with a finite end. However, I have been having so much fun lately that I have recently decided to drop the original plan and continue drawing the strip for the foreseeable future. So, as long as you keep coming back, you can find new Robot Beach strips here for many years to come!
So go check out my Interview with Tall Tale Radio and please forgive my nervous incoherent ramblings. Thanks again for the wonderful opportunity Tom!
If you would like to see more comicry goodness from me this week, check out my guest strip over at Marooned. Tom was kind enough to let me play around in his sandbox for a while and man, was it a fun piece to draw! I love Mars and space travel and I really loved playing around with the relationships between robots and man and how we may view the world differently.
Tom has developed a really fascinating world within the pages of his comic. His characters are a lot of fun and his story is light-hearted yet intelligent. I have been a big fan of his for a long while now, so why not head on over to his site and give it a read? I promise you won’t be disappointed!
I have also had the exciting opportunity to produce comic art for a new mobile learning strategy site that some very talented coworkers at The Iona Group have been working on.
These illustrations are a bit of a departure from my normal comic work and it has been fun playing around with new ideas and new techniques. I’ve learned that cross-hatching, though beautiful to look at, is insanely boring and tedious to draw! Not that it’s a bad thing of course, I’ve gotten an opportunity to sit at work and draw all day and that is always a good thing!
This will be an ongoing series of illustrations to accompany blog articles written by some of our mobile learning experts, so feel free to stop on by occasionally to see what is new!
A new site called Pixton just launched which allows creators to make their own custom comics using a variety of stock assets. It is really a technical marvel and the whole thing works very well, yet I can’t help but think that this kind of thing only encourages the current stock of lazy and disconnected young “creators” to remain so.
For me the issue is simple. Tools like Pixton seem like a wonderful shortcut to creating comics (I made the comic below in less than three minutes by “remixing” a comic created by a co-worker… which makes it even more awesome then it already is.) But these shortcuts are not substitutions for the kind of work that can be achieved through years of careful study, hard work and dedication to the craft. Now, you may say “Of course, that is obvious.” But I am not so sure that it is so obvious to a lot of young people looking for an outlet for their creative talents. (Full Disclosure: I have been drawing comics for less than a year, so you may want to take what I have to say with a grain of salt.)
As a teacher, I have at times had a rather difficult time convincing my students that a pencil and a sketchbook are the most basic and essential tools of a good animator. Ten years ago, it would never have been an issue. “Why draw when the computer does it all for me?” or “Well, such-and-such a site is successful and those guys can’t draw very well either.” are common sentiments I overhear quite often.
An engaging conversation is going on over at Scott McCloud’s blog concerning this site and the nature of comics and is worth checking out.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to go smash some Ray Charles records while listening to T-Pain.
I found out something very interesting while reading yet another article about how newspaper comics are dying. Apparently in 1945 LaGuardia, the mayor of New York City read the comics page to children over the radio during a newspaper strike.
I did a quick YouTube search and found this video. How awesome is that! I can’t imagine anything like that happening nowadays.
Tom Racine is one of those really lucky guys that you just can’t help but have a tinge of jealousy toward. As podcast host, he has had the pleasure of interviewing many of the greatest cartoonists working today, from Jeff Keane (Family Circus), Tom Richmond (Mad Magazine), Jef Mallet (Fraz), Dave Kellet (Sheldon), and Patrick McDonnell (Mutts) to name just a few.
Thanks again for the wonderful opportunity Tom!
