Comics By The LB

When I was very young I was already acutely aware of the difference between REAL products and generic brands or knockoffs.

For every real and successful brand name, there was at least one cheaper, crappier version of it. This applies to ketchup, tissues, sodas and comic books.

My Dad would buy me comic books when I was very little (later he decided I was too old and that they would rot my mind), but to him a comic book was a comic book. One was as good as the next.These logos were warnings that you were being cheated by the makers of the content inside.


Dad had an instinct for finding only the "fake brand" comics - the knockoffs or what I thought of as badly drawn books.
Charlton comics, CDC comics were fake in my head. Harvey, Dell, Archie and DC were real because they were slicker and more "professional" looking.
I even thought of Marvel as fake superhero comics in the early 60s, because they were inked so poorly and everyone had strange square heads.
Later, I became obsessed with them and started to appreciate quirkiness in drawing styles. The inking got better too and that really helped.


They used to bundle generic brand comics by groups of 3 to 5 in plastic bags and sell them cheaper than if you had to buy them separately for a whole dime each. So when I needed new comics to read, my Dad would go out and buy them by the pound and never check to see what brands they were.

That's how I knew about Timmy the Timid Ghost.I would usually save the generic comics like Timmy the Timid Ghost for when I ran out of the real comics that I bought myself by collecting empty bottles and cashing them in at the


drugstore.

They were especially good for "sick days", when I stayed home from school. The fake Casper comics were drawn in a pseudo-animation style, as if someone who wasn't an animator was trying to figure out how cartoons were supposed to look.

http://comicrazys.com/2009/06/11/timmy-the-timid-ghost-7-the-magic-book-al-fago/

Later, as the 70s approached, even real characters and brands started to look fake to me.

"Real" Versions of cartoon characters in comics:

"Fake Versions"

Awkward Design

These old "fake" comics had an awkward unbalanced design sense to them, and I thought of that as being unprofessional. Harvey comics and Casper in particular were well balanced - but to the point of being completely generic. Same thing with DC comics and Archie.


Later, I came to discover cartoonists who had quirky styles that seemed slightly unbalanced, but were highly appealing despite that: Jack Kirby, Clampett, Harry Lucey, Carlo Vinci, etc. My favorite entertainment is a combination of skill and individual quirkiness.

After the 70s, to my growing dread, almost everything became generic and awkwardly designed -without the skill.Even famous brand names became unbearable to look at and lost all their appeal.

Now I appreciate the bargain bags of fake comics my Dad used to buy me. But I don't miss drinking RC Cola.

Kitschy Corporate Mascots - Before and After

BEFORE

Mike Fontanelli sent me these images from ebay as further proof that everything went to Hell after the hippie revolution. Even bad taste.
Corporate logos are cheesy looking by tradition. But they used to be funny cheesy.


Even poor taste was good at one time.

AFTER

I love the Best Buy package of lumps. A real collectible.
Someone said I need to get more up to date and reference stuff like this in my cartoons, and add a hip hop track. Then I'd be cool.

Why Cartoon Animation Steered Off Course

It happened in the late 40s.

ANIMATION GREW FASTER THAN ANY ART FORM IN HISTORY

From the 20s and through the 30s animation exploded as an art form. From simple stick figures to a whole new discipline that took advantage of a visual element that was never possible before - movement.

A few animation "principles" were developed and refined within less than a decade!

IT WAS THE MOST APPEALING OF ALL VISUAL ARTS

Animation, born of the also recent invention of cartoon art and comics was a whole new way of looking at the world.

ITS WHOLE POINT WAS TO DISTILL THE FUN - LEAVE OUT THE BORING PARTS

It took all the boring parts out of life and just left the fun parts. It was fun to look at and fun to watch move. It told funny, ridiculous stories. It was the ice cream of the arts and because of it became the most popular of all the visual arts. Most people like fun - except executives who prefer market research.

To me the first half of the 20th century could be known as "The Cartoon Age" just as well as "The Jazz Age" or "The Age Of Progress".

IT WAS NOT CONSIDERED ART- IT WAS MERE "ENTERTAINMENT"

Astoundingly, this unbelievable new creative medium didn't get much respect - surely because it was so inventive and obviously directly enjoyable by so many people.

Some comic strips artists were respected (and made tons of money) but animators - who were doing a much more sophisticated form of cartoon got paid less and no respect. Most animators, excluding Walt Disney, were practically anonymous - unlike their comic strip counterparts who were rich and famous.

ANIMATION ARTISTS CAN'T DRAW AS WELL AS ILLUSTRATORS AND GET LESS RESPECT

Even the best draftsmen of animation's Golden Age couldn't draw as well as the average illustrators from the same period and I think many suffered an inferiority complex because of it.

This was probably mostly Walt Disney's fault. His own inferiority complex was contagious and poisoned much of the rest of the business.

He diverted almost everyone away from their natural cartooning instincts and made them all want to create "quality" rather than fun. Quality meant animating things that other mediums could do better and much more easily, like:

More detail
Human proportions
Elaborate special effects
Spectacle
Crying
Tribes of Naked Babies

None of these things lend themselves naturally to animation. They just make the work harder and eat away precious time that could be better spent being imaginative and doing what only cartoons and animation can do.

But creative cartoons and impossible magical animation don't get respect, remember. They just generate tons of money for the studios that release them - who in turn crap on the artists who made all the money for them.


ANIMATION ARTISTS TOOK MOVEMENT FOR GRANTED BECAUSE THEY WERE SO GOOD AT IT

Animators too busy comparing themselves unfavorably to illustrators, comic strip artists, live action movies and other related forms of art didn't realize how wonderful and unique their own skills were. The things you could only do in cartoons and the crazy amount of skill the animators developed in performing them came so natural to them that they didn't think much of them.

ANIMATION FIGURED OUT ITS BASICS BY 1940 - then stopped

What we think of today as "animation principles" were pretty much figured out by 1940 and nobody invented any new ones after that. For a few more years, they developed and refined this handful of techniques and produced the best animation in history.

ANIMATION LEADERS AIMED MORE AT THE DRAWINGS THAN THE MOVEMENT BY THE MID 40S

While most animation leaders stopped developing new techniques in movement itself, they instead started thinking about "improvement" coming only from the drawings themselves. Different studios and leaders approached this in different ways, but all of them slowed down or reversed the tools that made animation its own unique art form.

DISNEY - MORE COMPLICATED DESIGNS - SAME MOTION PRINCIPLES AND FORMULAS

Disney kept designing more and more complicated or "realistic" characters. They didn't change the way they moved them so much, just made it harder to move them.

Taller proportions-long legs. Much harder to move convincingly.

More detail - the more details on a character, the slower and more difficult it becomes to animate the character. More effort is expended on just not making jerky mistakes than on making the characters fun and entertaining. For 25 years, Disney's characters became harder and harder to draw, but the animation hardly varied at all. The characters moved the same way the simpler characters did - according to old Disney formulae.

Other animators see how technically well animated these elaborate Disney features are and know the incredible effort that went into them and are impressed. This doesn't automatically impress laymen or the audience though.

CHUCK JONES - LESS ANIMATION, MORE CLEVER AND STYLISH POSES

Chuck Jones developed his own unique drawing style and humor and year by year, toned down the animators' input or directed it to point to Chuck's poses and expressions. By 1948 he was making his funniest cartoons, but the animation was less inventive and fun for its own sake than just a couple years earlier.

By the late 50s the animation had become completely stiff and Jones' drawing style tastelessly out of control.

UPA - MORE LIKE RESPECTABLE MAGAZINE CARTOONS - STYLIZED - LESS ANIMATION

Magazine cartoonists drawing for Punch or The New Yorker got a lot more intellectual respect that cartoons from the "funny papers" or animation. Don't ask me why. The UPA artists drifted towards these graphic styles and abandoned creative movement - and definitely funny drawing almost altogether.

IN GENERAL - MORE TALK, LESS WALK

By the late 50s most non-Disney cartoons were left without clever and fun motion. Instead they traced back layout poses to make evenly timed inbetweens. The characters talked a lot more than they moved.

Disney continued doing elaborate movement because they could afford to and they believed still that that was what animation should do - it should move. At least!

But it was mostly movements you had already seen before in previous features.

The exception would be the imitation UPA cartoons they did - the ones you see imitated in all the "Art of Pixar" books.

These flattened Disney cartoons look to me like a misunderstanding of the UPA philosophy. Disney made harsh looking cold designs, but animated them very fluidly as if they were still animating Mickey and Donald. It's definitely clever (the first time!) but not very entertaining - except to Cal Arts alumni.

CLAMPETT LEFT WARNER BROS. IN 1946

All growing art forms need bold charismatic talented leaders. Clampett was the biggest most influential leader in funny cartoons for the first half of the 40s and everyone imitated him - even Disney was obviously influenced.

His cartoons were constantly inventive and he wasn't a total slave to the "Disney principles". He more than anyone, kept expanding the medium of impossible movement (animation) and dragged the rest of the business along with him while constantly creating and developing characters.

Then at the peak of his inventiveness and the peak of the Golden Age - he up and left!

Some say he was fired, he says he quit. But I think this single event in animation history was the most catastrophic thing we've ever endured. His momentum carried Warner Bros. for a few more years even as they gradually slowed down, but it created a hole in the art form that has never been filled.

TEX AVERY LAST LEADER TO KEEP UP CARTOONY ANIMATION

Tex Avery was the last leader to continue doing cartoony inventive animation, but he had less influence than Clampett because he didn't create characters. He made gag cartoons based on funny ideas rather than stories about funny personalities.

History has decided to award him the creation of Bugs Bunny, somewhat arbitrarily in my opinion - but how could it be that someone who created the greatest animated cartoon character in history could never again create even 1 character that the public really wanted to follow?

TEX DIDN'T CREATE CHARACTERS AND THE PUBLIC WOULD RATHER STICK WITH LESS FUNNY CHARACTERS THAN MORE FUNNY CONCEPT CARTOONS

Tex still made some of the funniest cartoons ever, but we remember Chuck Jones, Hanna Barbera and Disney more. - because we associate them with casts of characters. Most humans would rather watch continuing adventures with characters they are familiar with than a series of brilliant one-shot cartoons. Of course we love star characters the best, but we'll even take less charismatic continuing characters if there aren't any stars around.

It's a natural impulse for us to bond with friends. We bowl with our neighbors and party with them - even if they are not the most interesting folks in the city. Today's networks have come to realize this. They will leave a boring series on the air long past the period where they aren't getting ratings - because the audience will soon get used to the characters and accept them and even believe they are entertaining. Especially since there is no competition.

THE END
Tex was the last guy to uphold cartoon animation's roots, but he wasn't enough of an influence by the 50s to halt the ever more decadent trends that the rest of his colleagues were following.

Progress died and even worse - cartoons as a unique form of entertainment and art died.

Saturday Mornings and The Decline Of Imagination in Cartoons

http://www.hlla.com/reference/hanna-chron.htmlArdy said...

Wait a minute. When Joe Barbera died at the end of last year, you had a great post about him and how you met him when you were first starting out. You said he agreed with you that Hannah-Barbera's early stuff was way better than Scooby Doo and it's clones, and he agreed with you. He couldn't understand what people saw in it. Now you're saying he deliberately pushed HB in that direction? Whats the story?

I read Ardy's comment and thought it deserved a good response. The answer is not simple though, and I doubt I can give a complete one in a single post, but I'll start...

JOE BARBERA TALENTED AND CONSERVATIVE

Joe Barbera was very talented, but he was also a very conservative guy. He wasn't someone to "push the envelope" or experiment. He liked to stick to the tried and true.

How else could he and Bill have made the same cartoon over and over again for 15 years straight at MGM?Once they had found their hit characters, Tom and Jerry, they never created any more. They just kept polishing their jewels. Why mess with a formula that works?


When Bill and Joe opened their TV studio in 1957, they had no choice but to break all the rules of how they had previously made their cartoons.

TV CARTOONS ARE CHEAPER THAN THEATRICAL CARTOONS

They had been used to making high-quality fully-animated Tom and Jerry cartoons for budgets around $35,000 per 6 minute short.
With that kind of lush budget, you can take your time and do smooth, flowing animation. You can do a new angle for every scene in the cartoon. You can have shadows on the characters. You can have a small crew of top animators that know what you will approve and what you won't. You can watch over every detail of production and have it come out exactly the way you want.

http://klangley.blogspot.com/2007/09/bill-hanna-saturday-evening-puss.html

To Joe, the more rounded the characters and the more lush the cartoons, the more quality they were. Joe was a very proud guy and he liked to be known as one of the top creators in the field of animation. He was a real Hollywood kind of guy.

Theatrical cartoons in the 50s began being dropped from many theaters and most cartoon companies closed shop.

Now Joe and Bill - and all their animators were out of work. They were forced to innovate. It was that or starve.

They started their TV studio and had to adapt their methods to a much lower budget and faster schedule.
http://www.animationarchive.org/2007/05/filmography-ruff-and-reddy-and-pinky.html

The TV cartoons were $3,000 now per short - less than 10% of the budgets they were used to.
Bill and Mike Lah (and maybe others) created a "limited animation" system that would allow them to do new cartoons every week at the terribly poor budgets.

LOW BUDGET RESTRICTIONS

Here are what you might think are the worst handicaps to quality that a low budget would cause:

Less Animation

They had to cut down the number of drawings in a cartoon from about 15,000 in a Tom and Jerry cartoon to a few hundred in a Huckleberry Hound cartoon.





To anyone who loves full animation they will not like animation that barely moves at all. Some people hate limited animation on the sheer grounds that there is not much animation in it. I'm not one of those. Joe Barbera was.

Less Camera Angles

Hanna Barbera Cartoons were made so that almost every shot was left to right with a low horizon. This way, the same animation drawings can be used in multiple scenes.
If you think tricky camera angles are important to your storytelling, like Brad Bird and many others do, you aren't going to be happy with your new restriction.

This type of simple layout forces you to live or die on your characters, because that's what the audience is going to be looking at all the time - mainly their faces.

A Simpler Design Style


Joe didn't like Ed's designs when he was working for Tex Avery and he told him so. "Why are you drawing this Mr. Magoo stuff? No one wants that! People want round, cute, lovable characters."

Bill must have convinced him to use Ed's style because they had a theory that on small 50s black and white TV screens you would need simple looking easy to read characters that had bold thick lines around them. They didn't think Tom and Jerry designs would read as easily on TV then.

A Simpler Background Style

Tom and Jerry (top), Yogi Bear (below)

Tom and Jerry VS Huckleberry Hound

Simple backgrounds can be painted faster and again will probably read clearer on small tv screens. Too much detail will be lost with poor picture quality.Bill and Joe adopted the style that Tex and Ed Benedict had been using in the theatrical shorts at MGM.

Art Lozzi and Montealegre worked out a fast but appealing Background painting style.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/06/art-lozzi-and-lush-limited-palette.html#comments

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/12/color-theory-montealegre-lion-hearted.html


Less Hands-On Direction

The cartoons now had to be churned out at a greater rate than theatrical cartoons. There was no time to polish anything or even talk directly to every creative member of the team.

In fact, Bill and Joe split their directorial duties severely.

Joe would be involved up front in the creations of the characters. the general show concepts and the designs, while Bill would handle the actual production.

Joe worked with the voice actors- Daws Butler and Don Messick.
...with the writer-storyboard artists- Mike Maltese, Warren Foster, Dan Gordon, etc.
...with the designers -Ed Benedict, Dick Bickenbach

Bill handed out some of the production work to in-hose crew and freelanced the rest - the layouts, animation, ink and paint, backgrounds, camera etc.

He didn't personally supervise much of it. He used industry professionals whom he trusted and accepted whatever they handed him. It was the only way to meet the schedules and budgets.

Music Library Instead Of Custom Scores and Recordings

Whereas at MGM Bill worked directly with Scott Bradley to custom score every cartoon to each and every animated action, now he could only afford to use stock library music. (Like we did on Ren and Stimpy)

Bigger Crew and less Person to Person Communication

They had to hire a lot more artists and staff than they had ever supervised at MGM, so now many artists who had never worked with Bill and Joe directly were speedily doing HB work in their own styles with no time to get everyone to standardize.
2 key members of Tex Avery's crew helped forge the Hanna Barbera style.

All this lack of control probably horrified Joe. But it made him and Bill rich and more famous than ever. But less respected by their peers.


NEXT- The surprising creative advantages of the new cheaper assembly line system.

http://klangley.blogspot.com/

There are lots of articles about Hanna Barbera at Kevin's site. TV and theatrical era. Check 'em out!