Friday is a school day at the Kenosha Festival of Cartooning, and Mark Tatulli and Bill Morrison went back out to talk to kids in the morning.
Bill is a very soft-spoken guy, and middle school students are notably loud and chaotic, but good teachers know that, if you lower your voice, the kids will also settle in and quiet down, as long as you have something to hold their attention.
Bart Simpson will hold their attention.
Bill noted later that there is an interesting shift in media awareness: A few years ago, he would jokingly ask how many kids had ever heard of "The Simpsons," and, of course, every hand would shoot up. Today, it's more of a serious question, and while the vast majority know them well, he gets a more nearly-unanimous response with the follow up, "How many have heard of 'Futurama'?"
He started the story of his partnership with Matt Groening, however, earlier, with their initial collaboration when they were both working on movie posters for cheesy horror flicks like "Blood Diner," for which Bill contributed the scary-scary graphics and Groening wrote the tag line "First They Greet You, Then They Eat You."
From there, Morrison went on to do the poster for "The Little Mermaid" and a host of Disney DVD/Videotape covers for reissues like Bambi and Cinderella, and, together with a slide he showed of his pre-Hollywood days as a technical illustrator, that there is something similar in graphics to what I have cited in comedy writing.
That is, just as the best silliness comes from people like the Pythons and Beyond the Fringe, where the absurdity is backed by Cambridge and Oxford degrees, cartooning -- and particularly animation -- can be deceptively simple and draw on deep roots.
It was a point that Bill made in a different way when, as he described his childhood, he admitted he hadn't paid a lot of attention in classes he felt wouldn't advance his dream of drawing cartoons.
And later found out he was wrong.
Which sounds like the standard "Stay in school! Don't do drugs!" pep talk until he explains the need for absolute unity of style for the many hands that work on an animated cartoon and demonstrates how Bart Simpson is actually drawn: A cylinder with the placement of his features specifically dictated by geometry.
And as he first bluepenciled, then inked Bart, he could be as soft-spoken as he wanted to be.
The second part of the day was the annual visit to Indian Trail High, which is a magnet school with an academy of communications that includes graphic arts.
All six artists appear each year before a large audience of kids who have chosen to be there, which makes for a very different dynamic, since there is a constant buzz of conversations in the audience, but, if you pay attention, you realize they are talking about what they are seeing.
Tom Racine emcees the event, in which each artist has a turn sitting at Tom's end of the array, being interviewed for five minutes while drawing under a projector.
But before each interview begins, Tom gives the kids two or three choices of a theme, and the one chosen by acclamation is the assignment for the remaining artists and, at the end of the mini-interview, their papers are passed down and the results revealed.
Some artists use their own characters.
Others don't, but their style -- both in graphics and humor -- still shines through.
When the topic chosen was "football," Racine-native Ed Steckley showed his cultural roots.
Jan Eliot then lied to the poor innocent little tykes, though only temporarily, admitting after her piece was shown that she's actually (the shame of it all!) a Bears fan.
Speaking of which, Mark Anderson bailed on the topic ...
... with what then became the running joke of the afternoon, since he produced hapless bears -- and one hapless stand-in -- for the remaining assignments.
So when the formal portion of the program ended and the chat-and-sketch session began, Anderson was rewarded by being asked to draw enough bears that he may have recurring nightmares about them for some time.
This portion of the program is in many ways the meat-and-potatoes, because, in addition to coming away with a custom sketch, the kids have a fair amount of time to actually talk to the cartoonists, and while a lot of it is the kind of casual conversation that may prove to have been inspirational some time down the line, other encounters are quite specific: In this case, a young artist is getting pointers from Jan Eliot on how you can help beat hand-cramps with the proper choice of a drawing tool.
Then we were off to a quick but congenial dinner at the home of a festival patron, prior to a pair of presentations at the Kenosha Public Museum.
First up was The Bear Guy, who kept his audience laughing while offering interesting insights into the elements of cartoon humor, his own development as an artist and the process of freelancing.
For instance, the time-worn advice to study your potential client was well illustrated with his woeful tale of how, in the early days, he attempted to sell the ASPCA's magazine a gag about a wolf with his leg in a bear trap.
They didn't buy it. Big surprise.
Anderson often speaks to the business of freelancing in front of professional cartoonists, but he tailored his presentation to a less nuts-and-bolts-seeking audience that, if they weren't concerned with submission details, could well relate to his comment about trying to work while acting as an at-home parent to very young kids: "You have to get your work done during naps, and you never know how much time you're going to have."
And, as a lover of running gags, he did bring up once more his wife's horror that he had included this cartoon in the show at the university's art gallery as well as in a book of his collected work.
Also on last night's program was Darrin Bell, a recent recipient of the RFK Award for Editorial Cartooning, who chose to have Racine interview him, in large part because he has spent much of the week chasing deadlines and didn't have time to prepare anything.
It was a good choice, since Tom not only interviews cartoonists regularly but has interviewed Darrin in the past and was able to draw forth some wonderful stories in Darrin's dry, humorous speaking style, like how he became the cartoonist for his college paper and then held the position for a decade-and-a-half because succeeding student editors just assumed that the guy emailing in cartoons was still enrolled there.
And so not only kept running his stuff but cutting him checks.
And we learned how Lemont Brown, the lead character in Candorville, got his name.
Like Candorville itself, the interview was an interesting blend of comedy and serious conversation.
Bell told how, when he got a call from Ethel Kennedy's assistant telling him that he had won the RFK and that she would be calling in a week to formally tell him, it was during a stretch of time in which he had been pestered by sales calls and so he started the conversation with a curt "What?" followed by "I'm not interested!"
To which she replied, "I think you might be interested in this."
But, with the sense of "OMG it's good he didn't pick up Ethel's call like that" hanging in the air, he then went on to talk about how much the Kennedys meant to his parents and grandparents and what an emotional experience it was to have her calling, and to realize that a Kennedy wasn't simply giving him an award but had actually been following his work.
There was a great deal more, but that's why I keep saying you really need to come to things like this.
Besides, a local microbrewery had created a special ale to salute the festival, so both artists and fans -- including in this group one of last year's featured cartoonists, Terri Libenson -- repaired to the tap room for more conversation.
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