In Progress

Still got some details to finish...like another arm for Johnny.

Well it's not really a caricature of Kirby's style. it's more of a combination of him, Mad comics and Not Brand Ecchh - and me.

Kirby Is Killing Me

I know you're dying for an exlanation of that crying tree.
It all started with an assignment I have to draw an illustration using some Marvel characters in my style.
My idea was to do a cartoony caricature of Kirby. As you can see, this is not an easy task.
I'm trying to come up with one good pose of Crystal from the Inhumans.

So far, not happy with any.
Drawing girls is hard enough.
Trying to draw them in Kirby's style adds a wrinkle.
Then to draw Kirby's style but with a big cartoony proportioned head only adds to the problem.
rrrrgggghhhh...

So I have been doing a lot of studies of real people with varying degrees of success in the hopes of discovering some secrets.
I even have been trying to figure out how legs and hips work in balance. Nightmare.
I tried measuring the pose above and then drawing it in proportion.

Something went wrong because I ended up with stubby legs.So then I tried again just to draw straight ahead by eye alone. A bit better but still wonky.

So next was to try drawing different ways of standing to see if I could start to figure out the mechanics of knees, hips in assorted balanced poses. It's a long haul.

Anyway, Eddie has been laying awake worrying about me studying how things really look. He's afraid I might have a revelation and decide to stop cartooning. He says he's known cartoonists who started trying to improve their drawing skills and then ending up abandoning cartooning for the delicate art of painting sad clowns or trees.

So I've decided to combine the 2 arts and become a black velvet crying tree clown artist. Am I the first?Now if I could only paint.

Kirby Fantastic Four Covers

I was obsessed with these comics when I was a kid.

I didn't start buying them until 1966. Before that I thought the drawings were too bizarre.
Once I got hooked I wanted to buy all the back issues.Luckily, in those days there was always a garage sale every weekend where some kid would be selling all his comics for a penny each so I went and bought all the issues dating back to the beginning.
It was fun watching the Thing evolve from a melted blob of orange lava into a highly constructed pile of rocks.
I love the colors on these covers too. I think they are by Marie Severin. They are much more muted and moody than the DC superhero comics were.

The thing about Kirby characters is, once he stopped drawing them no one else was ever able to capture the magic. For me, they all died when he left Marvel around 1970.

Kirby Studies

Mystery Doodles

"How Can I Get Life In My Drawings?" - Tell A Story

If you agree with my dead cartoon style theory and you yourself would like to draw with life rather than death, here's a tip: DRAW STORIES

Write a short simple story and draw your characters performing it. Either in a comic or a storyboard format.

This forces you to draw characters, poses and expressions in context, rather than in the abstract. Your poses have a reason to exist.
This is much better for you than drawing random doodles in a sketchbook. When you do that, your drawings are slaves to luck and the skill of your wrist flicks-but the drawings don't mean anything because they have no other purpose but to exist in an obscure sketchbook. Or on your blog or Deviantart.
There is a huge difference between being able to draw a character that looks sort of like a character - and actually telling a story with pictures. Huge. The second thing is much harder, more important, and infinitely more rewarding.
All these individual Jim Tyer drawings have attitude and life, but they are part of a story and that naturally inspires him to draw certain poses-not random ones, not only poses that he's already memorized, but specific poses that tell the story and are funny.
When you read the actual story in continuity, you can see the characters change attitude, poses and expressions from panel to panel.
Someone in the comments the other day sent me a link of some superhero teenagers from an old Hanna Barbera cartoon series-but drawn in a more modern angular style. His point was to show me that even though the original designs were bland, a talented artist could make them look cool and hip. I looked at the drawing and just saw the same characters standing straight up and down smiling, like they were right off a model sheet. They weren't doing anything. Characters who do things are much more fun than characters who stand around posing as if for a family photo.

That's what is so bad about the modern idea of staying "on-model". Most modern model sheets just show the characters standing, doing nothing. And if that's what staying "on-model" means, who needs it?

The best model sheets are the ones that are made after a cartoon is finished - not before. They used to take poses that the directors and animators drew and paste them onto a sheet so that other animators could see the characters alive, doing things and feeling things.

ALIVE

This doesn't mean you should steal these exact poses and use them in place of poses customized to your story. That's another problem we have in animation today. We use the same poses and expressions that we have seen in other cartoons - instead of treating each character and story as something new.

DEAD

I worked on stuff like this for years and it was torture to draw such deadness - or trace it, which is what they wanted me to do.

I know when I try to just draw a character for somebody, out of context - not part of a story, I tend to draw stiff. My most lively drawings are done when I'm thinking about what the characters are doing and why, instead of merely what they look like.

http://jkcartoonstories.blogspot.com/2009/12/slabs-first-fist.html

That's why "designers" should have less say in the total look of a cartoon than they do today. The designs should be allowed to constantly improve as the actual storytellers put the characters into action, rather than just tracing the model sheets.

READ THIS FUNNY JIM TYER STORY: The Brand New Penny

I have lots more to say on the subject of getting life into animation again, but I'll wait and see how this goes over.