Behind the scenes of the making of: "Converters (Not Transformers)"

More junk treasures that inhabit my attic (see Notes from my attic #1-4). Mogwai, Christmas 1984. Gator, M.A.S.K., summer 1986. I remember everything. Silent witnesses of joyful, relatively carefree times.

Transformers hog up most of the space in my attic it seems. My first Transformer was Tracks. This was in 1984. Tracks came in two colors: red, and blue. Initially I wanted the red one; it seemed cool, funky. And very red. But my brother picked the blue variant, so, having been drilled to do what others do and think what others think, I did the same. Of course, the red Tracks is extremely rare and worth roughly $1,000 now.

I liked Tracks though. He looked nifty. But I quickly discovered he wasn’t one of the main players in the cartoon. It was a cameo here, a bit part there, and sometimes you’d think it was him in the background but oh wait, it’s just Sideswipe with Tracks’ colors because the cartoon studios have outsourced the animation to some small Asian country in an effort to cut costs. Oh well.

Anyway–soon after, I started making my own Transformers comics:

“Fire de laser.” I remember sitting in front of the TV, pausing the VCR and trying to get those models right. I was quite pleased with the fruits of my labor actually, especially Soundwave’s dynamic attack pose. Of course, I never finished the comic. I didn’t have a story to tell, I just wanted to learn how to draw explosions and how to suggest glossy, metal surfaces and glass windows. That always was my main interest in cartoons like He-Man, Transformers, et cetera anyway–I was always absorbing styles, learning tricks, trying to hone my skills.

Many years later, and here are the Transformers I did for my YouTube channel, Tales from Weirdland. That was a fun video to do really. I hadn’t drawn any Transformers since, well, since that comic probably. The character on the right is Crack. He’s rusty, dusty, his colors are faded. He coughs. The left one is called Knockoff, and the idea is that he looks like a bootleg Transformer. I owned a few of those: they were dull, cheap, their color schemes were off, and they transformed into a clock or something equally lame. I’ve always been fascinated with the jumbled world of art forgery: knockoffs, bootlegs, fakes. Glimpses into an alternate universe.

The one thing that always struck me about those old Transformers cartoons, were the mountainous backgrounds: they were hand-painted, and quite atmospheric. They looked pretty good actually; even as a kid I attempted to mimic that style, as you can tell from the comic. The image above is from the Converters video–I just had to include mountains, or else it wouldn’t feel like a 1980s Transformers cartoon to me.

This is Crack’s transformation process. I based it on Bluestreak or Smokescreen, or one of those busty Transformers anyway, but still it was very tricky to get this right. Obviously you have to cheat a little. The car is an old Chevy. Initially, I tried to have him clap his hands one time right before his wheels hit the ground, cool breakdancer style, but it looked not so much cool breakdancer style as “Look, this animator obviously doesn’t know what he’s doing”.

This is how Knockoff transforms. It’s more of an optical illusion really, but that’s OK–ever seen Megatron change into a gun in the cartoon?

For the video I didn’t want to just use the existing Autobot and Decepticon symbols, so I designed my own. They are warped, yet still recognizable.

Original pencil drawing of Optimus Prime clone Principus Alpha. I draw everything with pencil on paper, then scan the result and tweak it a little in Photoshop. Transformers aren’t rigidly mechanical, they are kind of robust, organic: they consist of curvy lines and plump spaces.

It’s glimpsed in the first scene of the video: the power plant that the “Disrupticons” are heading for. This was a simple, compact drawing, as it had to register quite quickly.

The video’s end title is also done in the style of Transformers: I could easily have left it and spend those few hours on a new video, but I always want to do something extra, add some special element where nobody expects it. There are a zillion Transformers parodies on YouTube, but they’re all kind of jokey jokey and lazy. What I like in parodies, is earnestness, veracity. The best Transformers parodies are those 1980s bootleg toys.

Lastly, one thing that always intrigued me as a kid was that many of the characters in the cartoons looked nothing like their toy counterparts. At the toy store, they formed a ghoulish parade of mutilated freaks and misfits, merchandise from another reality:

I toyed (hehe) with the idea of having one of my Converters look like one of those complex monstrosities, but couldn’t find a way to make it work. And anyway, Transformers just don’t transform in a believable way. You have to cheat, or you end up with complicated, lumbering, ungraceful creatures, like the Transformers in the Michael Bay films.

Here is the video:

Notes from my attic #4

I was a huge fan of the Hulk. This was mainly because of the TV series, The Incredible Hulk, which ran from 1978 to 1982. I was old enough to be able to understand what was going on, and young enough to still be impressed by a spray-painted bodybuilder wearing a Beatle wig. I used to imitate that typical slow-motion run he always did, upturning all furniture in my way, and to his dying day, my grandfather called me “Hulk”. I must have been a very entertaining kid.

The local ice cream vendor sold ‘Hulk ice’. This dubious, possibly unlicensed product consisted of two colors: not green and purple, as you’d expect, but green and white. It had such a bizarre, unreal taste that, even now, I’m still able to read in the dark without the need of a light. But the association with the Hulk made it cool, so I had to have it each time we passed the vendor. And I mean cool as in dandy.

Then there were the toys. I fondly remember a Corgi Hulk car, which was part of a slightly bigger line:

Apart from the Hulk terrain car, also in my possession were the Spiderbuggy, as it was called, and the Batmobile, which came with Batman and Robin figurines and little plastic missiles. I loved such little details, like the Spidey decal on the bonnet/hood, or the Batmobile’s front razor and plastic exhaust flame.

The “Supervan”, however, could not claim such love from me. It was quickly relegated to my private Hall Of Sorry Toys, where it joined, among other misfires, the Strawberry Shortcake figurine of the Purple Pie Man; the talking toy robot that could only utter German phrases and then swiftly died on me; and a Bespin Security Guard. The Supervan was quietly atrocious. Why would Superman need to drive a van anyway? Spider-Man in a jeep, that was pushing it, but maybe he was stuck in a desert and there weren’t any high buildings around to swing from. Superman in a van, however, that is just a disheartening sight. As if DC’s “Muhammed Ali vs Superman” fight hadn’t been terrible enough.

Superman reminds me of ice. Why, I do not know. Perhaps because of all those crystal cave shots in the 1978 movie? I owned a Superman Atari 2600 game, and the mere mention of it makes me think of thin, watery ice lollies. Possibly strawberry-flavored. Welcome to my world.

The Superman movie was pretty great, and I was sort of a fan. I saw it the other day though and it bored me a bit frankly; I found myself checking my phone way too often, like some guy whose wife’s expecting. Yet it’s lightyears better than Spider-Man’s live action outing of that period. If you’ve ever accidentally been exposed to Spider-Man Strikes Back, you’ll know what I mean. It’s a clueless guy running around on rooftops. It reminds me of those hideous YouTube videos of Spider-Man, Elsa, The Joker, and so forth. What’s up with those videos anyway?

To my eternal regret, I lost that Corgi Hulk figurine. I lost the car too. I lost Spider-Man, the jeep and the green troll–probably buried them at a beach somewhere, because I was raised by wild dogs and always buried my toys when I had the chance. I lost Batman, Robin, and the Batmobile. But I still have that Supervan. In collector’s terms, I guess it would be described as being in “near-mint condition”. Simply because I hated it, it’s worth money now. Hate with an interest rate. There you go.

I’m supposed to add a video from my YouTube channel Tales from Weirdland in every post, so I guess I’m going with Escape from the Planet of the Robot Zombies, which is a nod to old Atari 2600 games. In a later entry, I’ll provide background information on that video.

Notes from my attic #3

Smurfs figurines. I come across these damned things everywhere in my attic. The whole floor consists of Smurfs figurines. I had so many of them. Even now, after all these years, sometimes when I sneeze a Smurf comes out.

I used to believe that the Smurf on the left, the golden one, was worth a lot of money. It wasn’t.

These comics hadn’t seen a human face for nearly three decades when I upturned the box this afternoon. The instant I saw these covers again, I remembered them like yesterday (there, the first cliché is in the can). They look remarkably well, considering they’ve been taken to the beach, the swimming pool, to the coal cellar whenever I was locked up there by my parents for having “girly manners”, to family, and to everywhere really. I always took my stuff along with me like a hobo. Let’s pick one comic and see what we have, shall we.

It’s a Prince/Michael Jackson hybrid on a motorcycle, called “Ace”. This was the time of street gangs, graffiti, flashing blades, ghetto blasters. And it’s everywhere in these old Marvel comics, isn’t it. You can’t cross a street without running into some young thug with a headband and a knife.

This street fetish is one of the forgotten themes of the early 80s. The streets, back then, meant danger. It was evident in music videos (Billie Jean, Beat It), films, TV shows, comics, computer games… I developed severe Agoraphobia because of this. But I guess it reflected the times. This was when Times Square (NYC) was a sleazy place with cheap cinemas, crack dealers, prostitution, high crime. And it wasn’t just New York, it was like that in all the big Western cities (Amsterdam, where I live, London, Paris, et cetera). Then in the 90s, almost all of them were cleaned up and turned into homogenous shopping zones. But of course they weren’t really cleaned up: as it so often goes, the problems were simply shooed away to another area, outside of the city center.

This is typical Marvel Bronze Age, I think. A sudden, short burst of introspection in the middle of all the dynamic fight scenes. Several faces strung together against a sort of nebulous, otherworldly background. In this case it’s… Well, I recognize Hulk, Dr. Strange, and, top left, Valkyrie. The others I don’t remember. It has been a while.

Right, Hulk. Good old Hulk. Let’s talk a bit about Hulk next time.

Notes from my attic #2

Let’s look at some more childhood drawings I found, I know you love those.

That’s of the very first comics I made, if not the first. Ambitiously presented in a deluxe edition here, it’s Little Captain and Sailor, the imaginatively named comic about a little captain and his bud, a sailor. Any similarity to Asterix & Obelix or Popeye is completely coincidental. This is what the inside of the booklet looks like:

I love how the last picture of the last panel dryly states, “It all ended well.” That’s how the big boys do that. End of story. No lollygagging.

The reason I post these, is basically because nothing has changed in my life. For my YouTube channel, Tales from Weirdland, I still make stuff like this. The Lord He Knoweth why artists do what they do. When I was a kid, I made comics nobody read but me, yet I kept making them; now, as an adult, I make animated videos that hardly anyone sees but me. There’s a light that never goes out.

So, Little Captain and Sailor had a satisfying ending. “It all ended well.” This was a rarity, as I often prematurely abandoned whatever I worked on. I have crates and crates of unfinished comics–once wildly ambitious undertakings, masterpieces-to-be, until real life events interfered or I simply lost interest. At one point, I wanted to create a comprehensive comic about the American Civil War. It’s likely I was inspired by a popular TV mini-series at the time, North and South (1985). But as usual, I started to bore myself, and the comic more or less sank under the weight of its own insanely informative text balloons.

Let’s take a look at some more aborted projects. Indiana Jones–of course I attempted an Indiana Jones comic at one point:

Or how about an Agatha Christie-like murder mystery:

And action-packed thing starring one Spike Jumpstone:

I think the red robot’s design was, eh, inspired by ED-209, the Robocop villain. Well, I don’t just think it, I’m actually pretty certain. The hero’s name, Spike Jumpstone, was a pun on Bruce Springsteen (“Spring” is Dutch for “Jump”, and “Steen” is Dutch for “Stone”). His look was inspired by the impossibly muscled Schwarzenegger figure in the old Amiga game, Total Recall. That design was so over the top, it had my interest. I noticed little things like that and mentally filed them away. (By the way, my brother and a friend cameo as soldiers in this panel. The friend of course had to die a gruesome death. We got a good laugh out of that one.)

Where did I find the strength to start yet another new comic after so many failed attempts? Amazing resilience, it can’t be anything else. Actually, that’s me still. Rigorous self-discipline, a religious sort of patience. I survive on willpower; and also, a kind of natural asceticism that prevents me from craving material things, success, popularity, wealth. There’s nothing wrong with the marginal, the unseen. We live in a world where the most famous celebrities are the ones that nobody has heard of. A world where there’s such a thing as “reality television”, that people watch believing it’s all unmediated truth, whereas it’s manipulation, trickery, freak show tactics. Our world sometimes seems like one global L.A., where every waitress dreams of stardom. Fame, though, is a monster, and most people who want to be famous, and then become famous, end up unhappy. Fame distorts your reality until it looks like a Van Gogh painting. The few people uninterested in that kind of life though–well, surely, you must be a hipster, too cool for this planet. I’ve always hated the term “hipster”. It’s really just shorthand for people that can’t be readily classified, that go their own way, and there’s something sinister to the term, isn’t there, a certain kind of anti-intellectualism, which seems to have made a comeback recently. “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’, I unlock my Browning.”

We live in dark times. But:

“There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”

“I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”

“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”

That aside.

Surely the most ambitious comic I ever attempted was one about a little ninja rodent called Rodney Rat. Any similarity to Rodney Rat and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is purely coincidental. I must have been 13. Also note the very obvious Star Wars influences. It doesn’t look that bad actually, now that I see it after all these years. I’ll just leave you with some of its pages, and then everything can be stored away again.

Until next time…

Notes from my attic #1

I’m cleaning up my attic.

But listen.

In the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration eased the rules on advertising toy lines via cartoons. He-Man: Masters of the Universe, Transformers, G.I. Joe, Care Bears, and so forth, were the result.

Psychologists and other weirdos protested that these “program-length commercials” would pollute television and abuse and degenerate our innocent souls. Naturally, this didn’t happen; our souls were already so black and cold that we couldn’t possibly sink any further. We ended up with truckloads of toys, gullible little consumers that we were.

I have to say, I only really watched those cartoons because my brother did. Personally, I preferred Road Runner, The Muppets, Popeye. I also used to deliberately, against my will, watch cartoons that nobody else wanted to watch, because I felt sorry for those cartoons. I was a very sensitive kid.

The nook of my attic. Recognize Boba Fett’s ship? I’ll get to Star Wars at a later point, if I can find a way to reach the nook without breaking my neck.

That is all that if left of a B.A. Baracus figure. Right, the A-Team. My brother was a fan, so I was a fan. The team visited Holland in 1984–but only three of them. One, Hannibal, lucked out somehow and stayed home; he probably drew the longest straw or something. It gave me a strange feeling, I remember. It wasn’t right. I couldn’t be excited about it. Twenty years earlier, the exact same thing had happened when The Beatles visited Holland. Only three of them came over. I bet that if the Apocalypse happened, only three Horsemen would appear here.

A big, bloodthirsty crowd came to welcome the A-Team at the airport. It seemed like a huge event, the second coming of Christ (there you go, two biblical references in one post). Murdock yelled like a brain-damaged jungle creature, Face smiled and waved, and B.A. spouted confused gibberish at the unsuspecting kids. He seemed angry all the time. I hope he got himself sorted out eventually.

Let’s take a look at some of the sketchbooks I’ve found.

This late 20th Century marker drawing (circa 1978) depicts the artist being readied for his bath. A piece of soap can be seen on the left, the filled bath is on the far right. The violent, uncontrolled peeing and escaping turd, as well as the sneaky sideways look, are very typical of this period in the artist’s career, as he dedicated several other drawings to this particular subject matter:

Here is a self portrait from a later period, side by side with the actual model:

As you can see, I had a nice little Prince Valiant look going on. I had long hair to cover my floppy ears. I hail from a tiny rural village where the only people with long hair were women. Since I had an angelic face and feminine features, I was often mistaken for a girl actually–one of my big childhood traumas. I remember sitting on a sand hill, lost in thought, when a ball hit me. I looked, and this old man said to his granddaughter: “Ask that other girl if you can have your ball back.” You don’t forget things like that.

Donald Duck with a baby carriage. And why not.

I was a big Popeye fan. I dressed up as Popeye once for Carnival, a Dutch spring festival centered around “role-reversal and suspension of social norms”, as Wikipedia has it. Basically it’s just people getting drunk. I was Popeye, my brother was Zorro–photographic evidence exists of this, but common sense prevents me from scanning it. Anyway, I loved Popeye. Page after page, it’s Popeye fighting Bluto, Popeye in some perilous predicament, Popeye and Olive, Popeye just floating in the air and being hideously deformed, Popeye peeing violently, and so forth. I had Popeye figurines, bendables, Corgi cars, comics. I made my mother buy spinach all the time, up to the point where she said, “Wouldn’t you rather have french fries?”

I also owned a luxurious book that celebrated Popeye’s 50th birthday. I still remember the exact caption under one of the animation model sheets: “To aid the animation process, the characters were significantly simplified compared to their original comic book counterparts.”

That’s a comic from when I was 11 or thereabouts. Still drawing Popeye. And as you can see, I was happily butchering the English language, something that I still do, right here in this blog.

Until next time.

Behind the scenes of the making of: "Star Quest"

This post contains background information on the Star Quest video, which can be seen here on my YouTube channel, Tales from Weirdland:

It’s funny. As a kid, I wasn’t a big sci-fi fan. Or even a little sci-fi fan. There was Star Wars, sure–I loved Star Wars–but outside of that, nothing took my fancy. My brother, a real nerd, complete with jam jar glasses and an oversized digital watch that accurately showed all the moon phases, used to watch all the shows religiously: Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, V, and so forth; but me, I played with dolls and wanted a doll’s house for Christmas (which I got, thank you). My main memory of the 1979 Buck Rogers TV show basically is this hideous villain that appeared in one of the episodes: there was something wrong with him, his skin looked like mutant muesli. Boiled cancer. It made me lose all appetite for like, years.

He’s wearing his mask there–this is to protect you, reader. (I took that image from a blog, John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV.) Google “Varek”, “Buck Rogers”, if you dare.

But anyway, the sci-fi genre wasn’t really for me.

And yet, I find that it’s exactly that, those old sci-fi shows and comics, that evoke some of the strongest childhood memories. Possibly because they promised an exciting future, somewhere in the background. Or maybe it’s like the songs you don’t really pay attention to: those get stuck in your head.

(A song gets stuck in your head when your brain is trying to finish it, to resolve it, but it can’t. To counter this, play the song in its entirety.)

That’s me, left, being my autumnal self in the early 1980s. My big brother is lost in a comic and unaware of reality.

Star Quest is an homage to this era of silver spacesuits, capes, medallions, bushy sideburns, tin foil antennas, robots made of gold-painted hard latex, and control panels that were really disguised mixing desks. I’ve always been intrigued by the technology from that period: those robust, bulky designs, built to withstand a bomb explosion apparently. 1970s telephones look like pre-school toys, with big buttons and thick, coated armor. The enemy ship in SQ is like that: it’s plated, heavy, a shark-shaped fortress:

Grand Vizier Rylox, captain of this evil ship, originally looked like the image above. His appearance resembled that of a Noh demon, but as much as I liked the design, it clashed with the 70s theme, so I abandoned it before I got to coloring the face. As I was redesigning the character, I wanted Rylox to look as if his face could be a rubber mask, or as if he was wearing prosthetics maybe. That’s why he has limited mouth movements in the video: it’s not bad lip syncing, it’s simply that the actor can’t move his facial muscles too well.

When Captain Logan is being addressed by Rylox via hologram, he just sternly stands there, listening. As Rylox himself wasn’t much to look at, with his small, black mouth, I had to vary the camera positions occasionally to prevent the video from losing its rhythm. That resulted in this tricky shot. I was very pleased with Captain Logan’s look actually: it’s a blend of Lorne Greene and a non-specific Filmation character (I was thinking of Journey to the Center of the Earth). To get the right 1970s feel for the video, I watched clips of all the relevant shows, but found that once you try to copy that style, you quickly venture towards caricature, parody, like that Starsky & Hutch film with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson: it’s so SEVENTIES you actually forget it’s supposed to take place in the 1970s. A better approach is to just try to come up with a good design first, and then adjust it so that it fits within the fashion perimeters of that era. After all, in the 1970s, nobody looked or dressed like it was the 1970s.

That’s a fancy way of saying I more or less stole the outfits from the 1977 TV show, Space Academy.

The shark ship, before I forget, was originally supposed to be a city ship, a floating metropolis, housing thousands of people. (That’s inevitably in our future.) I thought it was a grand idea, until I discovered that a similar design features in Alien 2. So, exit city ship. The interior of the Starship Olympus was inspired, sort of, by E.T.’s ship.

Because I animate the old-fashioned way, by drawing everything on paper with pencil, I have to be economical when it comes to using paper. Hence these three heads crammed together on one sheet. The “Star Commander”, left, echoes 1970s Marvel comics: he doesn’t feature in the video itself but is simply there to suggest you’re watching a series. Also, he was the first character I started drawing when I set myself the task to go for a 1970s sci-fi theme.

The introductions were fun to do. Admiral Jericho is paired with Sola, in typical 1970s split-screen style. Again, these shots were intended to suggest you’re watching a running series instead of a brief one-off. I always think up small backstories for such glimpses, just for myself. Sola is being briefed by a Galruggian worker–”All cells have been replaced, lieutenant”–Jericho, in his lab, is testing out a new laser, making adjustments, taking notes.

Jim Booker and Captain Matt Logan. Matt, you say? Yes. My brother and I used to play with Lego Space when we were kids, and we had invented this show called Space Police. My main character in it was Jim Booker, my brother’s was Matt Logan, after, I suppose Matt Trakker (M.A.S.K.) and Wolverine. So my video is an homage to that too: that brief, golden flash that is your childhood.

Until next time!