BIRTH OF A BURGER and other news….

Ever since I began dreaming of a life as a cartoonist (approximately age five to be exact), I also dreamt of a name, a title by which my work could be identified by the viewing public.

When, as an ambitious gradeschooler, I drew greeting cards for family and friends, I emblazoned the back of each card with “Fosgitt ‘N’ Friends” in true Hallmark style. I eventually dropped this nom de plume when it was pointed out to me that there were no friends involved, since I created the cards all by myself.

In my pre-teen years I tagged all my homemade comic books with the moniker “Foz Comics”, placed in Marvel Comics fashion in the upper left corner of each incomplete issue (in those days, I never finished a comic. On a good day I had a complete cover and half the first page before I lost interest).

When I was in my early college years and aspired to one day have my own cartooning studio, names like “Fozworks Studio” and “lowercasegods Studio” were at the top of an ever-growing list of possibilities. “lowercasegods” was a term I coined in 1998 and eventually became my e-mail address until I got the shit spammed out of me and had to create a new account using fourpanelhero.

In this past year, as I toyed around with my old character Dead Duck and his newly created sidekick Zombie Chick, I began to fantasize about on ongoing comic book or graphic novel with the duo. The stories began to flow fast and naturally, and the characters jelled very quickly into fully rounded personalities. I knew if I wanted to that I could make something out of this, for my own enjoyment if nothing else. But still, like all those times before, I needed a name.

That’s when it hit me, as many a fella with a bright idea has remarked in his lifetime.

At the time, I was enjoying online popularity for a cartoon I drew showing the McDonaldland cast in place of Jesus and his disciples in a piece I titled “The Last Happy Meal.” Fast food has always inspired me. There’s a real art to all that cheap and greasy commercialism if you look for it. But to whittle down my muse to its core, cheeseburgers have always been a very significant staple of my existence. Hands down, they were my favorite food from childhood into adulthood. Even today, I can tell you the best places to get burgers within a half hour radius of where I live (Mount Pleasant: Freddie’s Bar and Grill with their Chicago Burger, Midland: The Boulevard with its legendary Bully Burger, Bay City: Steamers Pub, whose burgers are small but their flavor is oversized, and Saginaw: Jason Premo, my best bud from high school, with his indefinable and untouchable Premo Burgers). So it goes to show that I’m a connoisseur of the cow. All this all-beef blather has a purpose, folks, for it’s what ultimately inspired me in christening my comic book company, publisher of Dead Duck and potentially a lot more of my brainchildren. Break out the A-1 sauce kids, for I give you….

Like it? This is pretty much how I imagined the logo when it first came to me around last Halloween. I’d done a few rough sketches since then, but this was the full-out baby that I gave birth two, and man do my mommy parts smart. So anyway, Cheeseburger Press is my little publishing house. That is, when I’m actually ready to publish something. I’ve got ideas for Pillow Billy, a new line of greeting cards, all sorts of stuff that will fit nicely under the Cheeseburger Press heading. I suppose it’s possible that my studio, as a collective entity of my creative process and end product, could be thought of as Cheeseburger Press Studio. Yeah. I like that. Guess that makes it official now. Dig it. Anyway, you heard it here first.

I also wanted to report that Interlude Magazine has allowed me to revisit my old style in my latest assignment for them, an illustration for an article about allergies, and I couldn’t be happier. My Vector-style art is fun to look at, though a bit of a bitch to create. But I don’t want to employ it at the expense of losing my old style, which is truly my creative identity. So as you can see by these samples, my identity is fully in tact. Who needs a thumbprint when you got cartoons like this?



The Vector style will no doubt resurface in assignments which best suit it, so don’t think I’m devolving artistically. Emotionally, sure. I’ve met twelve year olds that could school me in maturity contests. But artistically, I’m at the top of my game. More later, kids. Much more.

Jay

Oh, and P.S. A mad love shout out to my favorite TV show, “Scrubs”, for being the best antidote for the weekday blues. Tonight’s episode was absolutely the best. God, I love that show…

Righto, Guvner! A Spot O' Art News And A Hero To Boot!

This photo was an idea that came to me last summer. I found the shirt I’m wearing in the pic at Steve And Barry’s in The Midland Mall and fell in love with it. I’m a huge fan of the Rockabilly 50’s-style shirts, and this is as close as I could come to buying one without having to sell a kidney (if you visit Rockabilly Apparel sites, you’ll see such garments are hella pricey). Anyway, the shirt made me think of the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk The Line” and its graphically stunning poster, so I wrapped my artistic sensibilities around it, employed my new digital camera and a healthy dose of Photoshop, and what you see is what you get. That’s my tool of the trade, a Micron Pigma Marker, in my sweaty palms. I truly am a rock and roll cartoonist icon, in my imagination if nowhere else.

So I wrote in haste the other day, not taking into account a bit of artistic info that I’d wanted to share with you cats at the time besides the now defunct Bay City Times sitch. So to remedy that mistake, here goes…

A month back I was on Craigslist.org and found a listing for a magazine cartoonist in, of all places, London, England. So I sent them a message, linked my website and assumed I’d never hear from them. Fortunately, a few weeks later, they proved me wrong.

One of the magazine’s editors wrote and said she liked what she saw on my website. She asked me to come up with some sample comic strips concerning full figured women being happy with themselves in a weight obsessed world, which was the magazine’s core demographic and mission statement. So I whipped up some samples and sent them off. A few more weeks later I got another message saying they liked my samples, would show them to the editor in chief and get back with me.

So that’s where I stand now. If it all works out, I may be seeing my first internationally published work, which would be a whole new plateau for my career. Excited much? Me too. More later when I hear something.

Now I’m going to do something that I promised myself and Web, Funk, Tetris and Jedi Master Foco I’d never do; break trend, throw continuity asunder and, GASP, write about something on my blog that has nothing to do with my artistic career! So here goes….

Many people have heard me sing the praises of Joss Whedon, the creative brain trust behind the Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV show and much more importantly, the Firefly TV show and its theatrical follow up movie Serenity. Firefly made me fall in love with television all over again (a mega shout out to my pal and brother-from-another-mother Pat Dooley for introducing it to me. Wash lives on, my comrade).

So when I heard that movie mogul Joel “Die Hard” Silver anointed Whedon with the holy crusade of bringing Wonder Woman, the first lady of female superheroes, to the big screen, I was all kinds of excited. Whedon, in my opinion at least, wrote heroic women very well. And as soon as I began hearing his ideas for the film, my Joss Whedon semi-hetero man-crush grew to unseemly proportions. He said he was going to ditch the whole “stars and stripes” motif to WW’s costume because logically, she was an Amazonian warrior of Mediterranean stock, not a female Captain America born at the base of purple mountain’s majesty or any such smear (my words, not his). He still intended to keep the general look of the character, i.e. headband, wristbands, metallic brazier and lasso, which was iconic and appropriate.

The next bit of excitement was the possibility of casting. Since Whedon was writing and directing the movie, he had that much more clout to determine who WW would be played by. Film footage of him at the San Diego Comic Con in 2005 saw him with his old Firefly/Serenity cast member, Moreena Baccarin, in tow. When asked by an interviewer if she were up for the role of WW, Whedon coyly joked about the possibility. As he was known to re-use his actors for a lot of his projects, the likelihood of Baccarin being cast seemed fated, and I couldn’t have been happier. From then on, she was the only choice to play the superhero in my mind.

Jump ahead two years. No news on the progress of the project, and I’m getting antsy. The longer it takes for something like this to come together, the more likely it would all fall apart. It’s strange that I would be thinking this, with no new info for at least a year, just to have a buttload of info dropped in my lap the day after I thought of it.

News came out that Joel Silver had purchased a “spec script” (i.e. a script written without studio involvement in the hopes of a studio eventually picking it up) written by a pair of unknowns concerning a certain lasso-wielding, head-banded super heroine. Silver went on record as saying he bought the script outright in the event that, if it were later to turn out that there were unintentional similarities with their script and the one Whedon was writing, that there wouldn’t be any legal shenanigans regarding stolen plot ideas and such.

Then, last night, a bit of news broadsided me like a blimp colliding with the invisible jet. Whedon was fired off of Wonder Woman because, ultimately, Silver didn’t like the work he was doing. Silver, it seems, outright lied about the precautionary measures taken with the unknown duo’s spec script. He liked it well enough to give Whedon the axe.

Now, as sad as I am the Whedon is leaving the project, the one silver lining here is that the guys who wrote the spec script are planning to have the story take place during WWII. That was when Wonder Woman came around, and I think she fits that time period. If only they would have set The Fantastic Four in the 1960’s like I wanted. Anyway, I wasn’t entirely sold on everything Whedon was doing anyhow. He wanted to create a whole new villain for the film and disregard WW’s pantheon of villains from the comic. Though her villains by and large sucked, if you’re doing a movie based on the comic, don’t skimp on the villains. The Cheetah may be a lame villain, but at least she’s part of the source material. Beyond that, though, Silver’s gonna have to conjure up one hell of an impressive director and star to win me over on this new Whedon-free Wonder Woman.

So that’s all for now. I have some ideas for my upcoming blogs, so stay tuned kids.

Kinda Curious About That Bay City Times Job...?

Who’s the guy in the Central cap, Buddy Holly glasses and Canada jacket standing in front of the tridge?
Foz.
Y’know, they say that cat Foz is a bad mutha…
Shut yo mouth.
But I’m talking;’ ‘bout Foz.
Oh, we can dig it.

So, after absolutely no news for over a month from The Bay City Times, I decided to call up the editor in chief and just ask flat out what the results of the contest were and if I got the gig as cartoonist. It came as no surprise when he didn’t answer the phone, resulting in me leaving him a message. It came as even less a surprise when it took him over a week to call me back. Bottom line is, I didn’t get the gig. He told me that Stoutheart and Cholly (the strip I submitted) was the lowest-voted strip out of all those in the running. The highest voted strip was one about senior citizens. And as he pointed out that senior citizens make up the bulk of The Times’ core demographic, it kinda made sense. He went further to explain that the voters wanted the familiarity of the older strips (i.e. Garfield, Marmaduke, etc.) as well as new strips about old people, so that’s what he wanted to provide. That was basically the end of the conversation. He implied that if I wanted to do the occasional editorial comic for very little pay that such options were still open, but knowing my firm stance on cartooning being my career rather than an unpaid hobby, he knew I wasn’t interested anyway. I took the news well enough. Seeing as how The Times didn’t alert me when the contest began, never called me when the contest was over, and took a week to reply after I called them, I knew we weren’t meant for each other. So that’s the end of that minor saga, for those curious as to how it would unfold. And unfold it did. Quite wrinkly, and with a musty aroma. Fortunately, I’ve cut a fresher pattern from a whole new fabric in the form of Interlude Magazine, who’s kept me in good supply of assignments. Whether or not a steady position on their staff is on the horizon is impossible to forecast. But for now, it’s good work, good people, good pay and good exposure. And though two wrongs don’t make a right and two rights don’t make a left, four goods make me happy. ‘Nuff said.

HDJP: The Foz In High Def!

Like the hair? Thanks. Grew it myself. Why drop cash on a product called "Bed Head" when I already own a bed to do it for me? Just add ten hours of sleep and voila. You've got Buddy Holly, Kramer and Kevin Smith's illegitimate love child.

So the last two assignments I've gotten from Interlude Magazine have seen me turn a new corner in my artistic career and abilities. Jean Charbonneau, the ed in chief, often refers to illustrations she's seen in other magazines when she has an idea for an assignment. In the case of these two I've mentioned, the examples she showed me were in the style of Vector art.

Essentially, Vector art is cartoons shaped with big blocks of flat color without the typical black lines to give them definition. It's basically all computer work, if you do it the way graphic artists do it. However, I'm a hands-on kid from a hands-on background. I've learned Photoshop through a piecemeal tutorial via various friends in the know and my own trial-and-error experimentation. So I came up with my own way to create the Vector style.

I draw out the cartoon by hand, scan it into the computer, color it in Photoshop, then painstakingly go in, erase all the black pen lines and polish and sharpen the remaining blocks of color using a combination of the Photoshop tools. In the end, you'd never know that a good ol' fashioned marker laid the foundation for the final piece, which makes me kinda sad. But it's hard to stay sad after seeing the results. It's rare, but sometimes I impress myself. These pieces gave me good reason.


The hard truth of it is that, in my belief, any monkey with a keyboard can call himself an artist these days. That's what Photoshop and Illustrator have done; given the untalented the ability to buy talent down at Staples or OfficeMax, install it in their computer and print themselves out a masterpiece. But it takes a real scope of vision and keenly honed talent to think up an idea and execute it by hand with rudimentary materials. That's why I still use the tools I use. I want people to know that it takes more than a mouse and a modem for me to be talented. I was born with whatever I can do. I just hope that doesn't get lost in these new mostly-digital pieces.

Jean assures me she still has need for my standard hand drawn cartoon work. But for these last few assignments, a new approach was what was needed. Each piece took me between two and six hours to execute, which is a long time for me. But as I've said, the results speak for themselves. And this is the most I've been challenged artistically since taking Painting with Larry Butcher back at Delta College over ten years ago. It's refreshing to know I can still be challenged, introduced to new methods, and conquer them while making them my own.

On the job front, the whole Bay City Times things is down the tubes as far as I'm concerned. After the contest, they never contacted me to say whether or not I got the position, and honestly, I'm not too bothered by it. I doubt the money would be much more that what I make at my day job now, and there was no promise of health benefits or anything. The Times has shown me how bad their communication skills are, and that's enough to keep me from pursuing a career with them.

I have, however, had some gigs come my way, which is always great. I drew caricatures at my friend Jason's wedding last weekend, I have a two hour caricaturing gig at Northwood University this Saturday, I've got a date booked in March to draw caricatures for Hemlock Elementary (an annual event at least seven years running now), a slew of gigs lined up for May and June, I've got a caricature gig lined up for next October at a country club for a Dow Corning event, and I'm currently working on my first ever cover for Interlude Magazine.

This is a big deal to me, because essentially I'm responsible for "selling" that issue. Whatever I put on the cover is what people will first see and determine whether or not to peruse, purchase or put down the magazine. Plus, Jean tells me it's the first time they've used an illustation for the cover. Nice to know I'm setting a trend here. So for your benefit, I'm showing it to you guys, my core audience, before it hits the stands.

It's drawn in my newly adopted Vector style (as per Jean's request), and it was a bear to create. But it looks sharp. I could see it in Entertainment Weekly or Cosmo, y'know?

Lastly, a weird little moment came down the pipeline recently. Laura was online watching Youtube, perusing the Conan O'Brien clips. She comes across this one homemade compilation of Conan clips set to song by some anonymous fan, and in the midst of watching this montage, notices my caricature of Conan pop up on the screen. So anyway, I e-mail the guy who posted the video, telling him, "Great video. I especially loved the hella cool caricature of Conan. At least, I thought it was hella cool when I DREW IT." I then suggested that, while I didn't mind him using it, that'd I'd appreciate him giving me credit for it. He wrote me back soon after, saying he couldn't believe the artist who drew it found him, and didn't know where it had come from originally (meaning someone else must have ganked it off my website before he did and he found it from them). But he promised to give me props for my work, and as you can see in the clip's description, he has. Always great to snag these guys who try to use your work without your permission or knowledge. Bill Watterson should take note and nail the little bastards who employ Calvin and Hobbes for window stickers showing them pissing on Ford or praying at the cross.

So that's about it for now. More news as it comes. Thanks for sticking with me thus far. Hopefully one day I'll have something so big to report that you'll all be able to say, "Wow! I remember when that guy was just getting by doing caricatures! NOW look at him!"

One day......

STRIPPIN' FOR THE MAN...?

Back in late October I mentioned an offer from a local newspaper wherein I'd produce an on-going comic strip for them. They offered me a price, I talked to some industry pros, and consequently deemed the newspaper's offer unfit for the service I would provide. This ended up an ongoing saga with the newspaper, which I'm now comfortable enough to credit as The Bay City Times. Much as the editor disagreed with my asking price, he was relatively determined to get my services as a staff cartoonist. He upped the ante in the form of a contest.

He said if I created a comic ("I already have one ready to go", I challenged) and allowed him to run five of my strips alongside several established syndicated comics, The Times would hold a contest and allow readers to vote on their favorite strips. If mine turned out to be one of the favorites, we would then, in the words of the editor, "Talk turkey." I understood everything he said up to the turkey reference. I assumed it meant that popularity of my work with readers would incline him to sweeten the pot in order to bring me aboard his paper. However, I recalled him saying in an earlier meeting that he wouldn't allow himself to pay me more than the standard weekly rental fee that he paid for the established syndicated strips ($15.00. Per week. Try not to choke.). So I can only assume that whatever the new offer would be, it would amount to more than that.

So anyway, I agreed to allow him to run my five strips gratis, and then we'd see what came of it. The first strip ran Christmas day, and the subsequent strips ran until Dec. 31st, when The Times issued ballots in their New Year's Eve edition for which readers could votes for their favorite strips and mail in the results. It's now January 2nd, and I have no idea what's gonna happen. The mail hasn't run since the day the ballots were printed, so people won't be able to send out their votes until tomorrow. And let's face it, with almost four days having passed since the ballots were issued, I doubt anyone will remember or care to rush out to the post office and make their cartoon preferences heard. However, I am hoping that between the end of this week and the middle of next that I'll know one way or another if my strip will have been deemed worthy for consistent publication. Even still, if the money isn't green, I'd still pass on the offer. A guy's gotta pay the bills, after all, even if doodling silly cartoon characters 365 days a year is his source of revenue.