Swimming finals

I'm posting the final set of pics from the Adult Swim party last Saturday. Inbetween the cabaret show of singers and strippers







featuring a lady detective


and her pet monkey




dancers




The Venture Brothers dancers featuring DR. Girlfriend




Dr. Venture


The Monarch


A drinking contest


A mermaid who sang a song about wanting a vagina




More Superfriend action!




After all this, plus airing of new episodes of Tom Goes to the Mayor, Venture Brothers and Sealab 2021 I headed back out into the cool Philly night and home to dream of strippers and their pet monkeys.

South Philly Style

Like I said in earlier posts my brother Marc was visiting this week in Philly, so all three Manley brothers were once again united. Marc is shooting pics of my other brother Dave and his band, so we went to South Philly to pick up some more film for his camera after we had a nice lunch with John (Major Bummer, BPRD) Arcudi who also lives in Philly. It was a great day so I snapped some picks while driving along in the most colorful part of the city, South Philly, along Washington Ave where the South philly Italian Market meets and blends into East and Southwest with a large asian community, mostly Vietnamese (one of the largest communities in the US), Mexicans and central Americans too. A mexican resturant one corner, the next Vietnamese or Italian. A great place to visit and eat!

Swimming with Sharks

Here are some more pics from last Saturday's Adult Swim Party. While the Adult Swimmers went back stage to debate and argue bitterly amongst themselves to choose the winner of the pitch contest (aided by copious amounts of free beer in small plastic cups) the audience and your's truely was treated to a swell cabaret floor show of strippers, superfriends, monkeys and more like the Sealab 2021 Dancers!




Superfriends!






Ladies and Gentlemen...BLACKLIGHTNING!






I'll spare you and me the next few pictures dear reader...




You're a mean one MR. Grinch!



More tomorrow!! Pics courtesy of my brother Marc Manley

Swimming to Philadelphia

The main reason I went to the Adult Swim show was to meet Jackson Publick AKA Christopher McCulloch. I storyboards storyboards on the first season of the show (including the episode they ran at the show, Ghosts of the Sargasso) and I had never met him in person, and I am doing an interview with Chris which I will be running in DRAW! later this year.


Here are a few boards from one of my espisodes






Bigger version



Bigger version



Bigger version



Bigger version

More Swimming...

The pitching continued live in front of the audience and judges. And man, were these ideas pretty lame for the most part. Each contestant would give a 30 second pitch about their show, then they'd play a clip of some really terrible animation for the most part. The best clip animation wise was Piano Dog, but still really none of these ideas as presented had much of a story, it was just sort of things happening, none were very strong concepts in my opinion.


BELOW: But man, some people will do just about anything to sell a cartoon in Hollywood.
These young men removed their trowsers at the command of Eric Warehiem, who obviously enjoyed his "casting Couch" position as did the roaring crowd.

BELOW:These contestents pitched two ideas, both of which were funny ideas, one was called Super Scare Squad about a bunch of cutie-pie monsters that....scare people and one about action figures who have 24 minutes each week to save the world before they disintigrate after being freed from their packages. This I thought was the best idea of the bunch but had a terrible clip.
The smartest guy as far as pitching was concerened was the fella who picthed Piano-dog. He brought "pitch art" with him which he flipped through in his pitch and then he narrated his clip which had the best animation, which looked like it was done in After Effects. The style was sort of Yellow Submarine meets Sesame Street.


The judges often looked confudsed when watching the animation on the screen and listening to the picthes from the contestants.



After the contestants were done, many who's names were called being a no-show, the judges went backstage to choose the winner and the cabaret show began. I noticed Doc Hammer had a cool Skull belt buckle, and later on stage when heckled, The Hammer told the heckler to come get a piece of "this"-- Ouch!

Swimming with adults

Last nite here in Philly The Adult Swim fan Picture show took place.



It was put on with co-operation and sponsored by the Philadelphia City Paper one of the big free weekly newspapers here in town. The shin-dig was held at the FESTIVAL CABERET a madeover old brewry

located in the re-gentried Northern Liberties section of Philly, north of Spring Garden. An area that is replacing blight and crack houses with yuppies who are spending hundreds of thousands to fix up rundown and abandoned old row homes in an area of the city which started to decline early last century with the decline in the textile industry in Philadelphia.

This area is pretty historic, as is much of old Philadelphia



I arrived early at the Festival Cabaret with my brother Marc who is in town for a visit. He took many of these picks. You can also read his taake on things and see more picks on his BLOG.
Before the show started the bar was packed with many people waiting 3-4 deep for very small cups of FREE BEER.

The door to the stage area was blocked as a "rehersal was going on".
After about an hour of this I was pretty bored and the cigarette smoke started to get to me, the free beer was foamy...bring on the fucking show!


Finally after we took our seats and waited some more my brother and I as well as every man in the place spotted these dancers...whoohoo! Let the show begin!

And it did hosted by the
Master of cerimonies was DANA SNYDER aka Master Shake from Adult Swim's Aquateen Hunger Force.

Snyder along with fellow Adult Swim Alumni(many former Philadelphians) came to town during the 14th annual Philadelphia Film Festival to try and find a dozen or so local film makers or animators to pitch their show ideas live on stage infront of Adult Swim show creators and a love/hate philly crowd. The winner supposedly had a chance of actually getting a shot of pitching his or her show to the newtwork in hopes of becoming another Adult Swim superstar or at least to leave a message on Mike Lazzo's answering machine, which as it turned out only gace the winner (more later) 10 seconds before it cut him off.
LEFT TO RIGHT: Jay Edwards and Ned Hastings (Aquateen Hunger Force) Christain Danley (Sealab 2021) Doc Hammer and Jackson Public (Venture Brothers)a RAT and Eric Wareheim (Tom goes to the Mayor) A contestant and Dana Snyder.

What we can learn from FRANK ROBBINS Part 1

I thought I would start a bit of a discussion on the subject of Frank Robbins, who may just be my favorite cartoonist. Sure I have many other artists I like more in other respects, Buscema for instance, Kirby, Moebius to name a few. But for his overall work, his esthetic, boldness/inventiveness and great skill with layout/storytelling and black placement, raise him past a mere Caniff imitator and in my book he surpassed Caniff as a draftsman, he had way more guts and vitality in his work, vitality he maintained from beginning to end of his career when he stopped drawing and writing Johnny Harzard in 1977 and retired to Mexico.

Again another thing to admire about him. He didn't grind away till 'old-man' drawing robbed him of his art, the long slow public slide of ability. No sad old "alkie", mean and bitter, or sad and bitter which was the fate of many old cartoonist, especially comic book artists. Nor did he ( that I'm aware of) "ghost out" his work having a handfull of assistants doing work for him like many cartoonist did and do, some even eventually giving up their strip to their "ghost" all together.

So though I don't really rank artist in this way I think Robbins is my top guy. I say this because I find myself looking at his work more for both study and at times inspiraton than any other cartoonist.

When I was younger, far younger artists like Neal Adams were my gods, more realistic guys, being young and foolish, immature really, I gave artists who drew more "realistically" more creedence. It seemed being 'correct" or "realistic" was more important to me for a while. I still loved cartoonie stuff, Chuck Jones cartoons and Jack Kirby. But it seemed to my young mind the realistic guys had an edge.

Yet though I ate everything Neal Adams, buying all his books, even the ones he just did covers on I still loved Robbins' tippy-toe' weird versions of captain America which was so anti-Kirby, so anti-Marvel. Though Kirby himself was also heavily influenced by Caniff as well early in his career. As a teen I couldn't really understand why I liked Robbins. I also was just not aware of the history of comic strips and Robbins' stripwork on his strip Johnny Hazard, or even the "father or cofather along with Noel Sickles--Milton Caniff beyond a few Terry and the Pirates reprints in a book on comics.
Here is a bigger copy of the Johnny Hardard Sundayfrom 1958 I own. This scan is at full size.

Sunset studio

A shot of the studio as the sun sets on this beautiful spring day, which I spent working and cleaning. Dam I have just way too much stuff from 20+ years of working and being a packrat! this job, being a professional cartoonist/artist/illustrator generates soooo much paper watse. Especially storyboarding, each storyboard job generates at least 3 Fedex boxes worth of paper for storeage or trash.





My brother Marc is visting this week so all three Manley siblings are united once again!
Quake and quiver! Time to walk the dogs!

Soggy Sunday

Well it looks like the rain is suposed to move off the coast soon. it has been one swampy mess this weekend adn to top it off my internet service has been spotty too. I'm pretty unhappy with my ISP lately, ths is the second time in a month that the service has crapped out, so I'm seriously considering swithing to cable for a try.

The worst thing about all the rain is that my dogs are bored to tears.
Shazam, my 10-year-old Austrailian healer mix sits in the livingroom window and just looks out, she even licks the glass inside as the rain runs down thinking that she's getting a drink...sometimes even sort of "hurumphing-sighing" like a kid trapped inside on a rainy day. Dogs just don't understand rain for days on end, they are creatures of habit and have a schedule, especially my other healer mix, Buster. and I don't blame them for not wanting to hunch in the cold rain to take a dump...hell I wouldn't either.

But rainy weekends are good for getting work done.I've been inking like mad all weekend to send a huge batch of Turtles pages out Monday via FTP now that (hopefully) my internet is fully restored.