Doug TenNapel's Blog, page 9

Doug TenNapel – EWJ and GEAR

There are really only two of my projects that could apply to start up video game designers or graphic novelists and that’s Earthworm Jim and GEAR. One is my first original video game, and the other is my first original graphic novel… both were the exact kinds of things that don’t get made by other content creators every day.

I recall writing and drawing Gear where I had no idea where the story was going, and I was changing paper stock, inks, even page dimensions as I learned along the way. It’s hard to tell if this is good advice to give, or if it’s just the way I did it, but I always do something before I’m really good enough at doing it. This isn’t something I learned in the art department, it’s something I learned from life.

I didn’t learn to be a father before I had kids. I didn’t become an expert at marriage before I got married and I didn’t get good at graphic novels and video games before attempting to make them. Our desire to do the thing comes long before we’re good enough to do that thing. I fell down 15 times learning to waterski before being able to do it. So why do so many gamers and comic book artists wait to make something before some magic moment happens?

This is your excuse to get in the game. I’m not trying to fill you up with empty promises and poofy dreams, your game will likely be bad, as will your graphic novel. I think my own characters weren’t polished masterpieces; they were clunky, energetic, creations of a young mind that didn’t know he couldn’t do it.

Lest you think I make it look easy, you probably don’t know that I cut a record in the late 90s in a band called TRUCK. Horrible music, but I made a record. I know of musicians and bands that are still talking about recording music one day, and I’m terrible at making music yet I’ve recorded more than them. I ran a marathon before I was any kind of serious runner.

So let’s make it! Go-go-goooo! Have that child, write that book, make a play, build that boat! It’s better to make than not to.

Doug TenNapel EWJ Commission

Commission of EWJ and the Princess. Ink and brush on paper.

When I’m a guest of conventions I do like to sell books, but I also like to draw! It’s a high pressure situation to do commissions at conventions because I don’t want to destroy an artwork in front of a collector or my work. I love it when they turn out and this is one that I’m particularly proud of! Earthworm Jim saves the day!

 

 

Doug TenNapel – Art

We’re working on my Sketchbook Archives… a compilation of my best, mostly unpublished art scribbles, from the last 25 years. I’m most proud of a series of oil paintings I did in the early 2000′s. It made me feel like a real artist, though I don’t mean to insult my cartoon art by insinuating that it’s not legit. Here’s one of my favorite oil paintings… a self portrait of a trip to Mendocino the Beloved Mrs. TenNapel and I took when we found out she was pregnant with our first child.

Doug TenNapel – Gear

Jim Oil Painting

Repost this if you would want a poster like this on your wall! Should there be more Earthworm Jim gear out there for our walls and tee shirt drawers?

Doug TenNapel – EWJ

If you love Earthworm Jim, then you’re probably older than 22 and younger than whatever. But part of my experience in creating a mass media character has been in watching the audience mature and develop.

One thing I could never have anticipated was how when a 5-9 year old consumes a character, that it deeply effects their person because it’s in their formative years. When people at conventions or online tell about their EWJ memories, I can see their eyes drift back to being a 7 year old, and it just hits them in a very deep spot that perhaps they haven’t accessed in months or years.

It’s a great honor to get to entertain children, and now adults, and the children of adults! Part of my job is to be a responsible cartoonist that cares about the audience I draw. Thanks again for your support… even after all of these years. You make me feel like a 27 year old kid again!

Doug TenNapel: Don’t be a job bigot

For most of man’s history, we didn’t have a lot of different jobs to choose from. To go into a field that wasn’t already in the family was a luxury, probably reserved for the wealthy, the highly educated or well connected. If your dad hammered armor, you hammered armor… then died at 47.

I’ve been writing a lot about the job of an artist because I’m watching a crisis in the up-and-comers in the field, and their lack of belief that people don’t want to pay them to do what they love. Stranger still, reality doesn’t comport with what most artists think happens in the professional arts. The animators I know don’t get to work on their own projects, they work on someone else’s. If you work in video games, you didn’t likely come up with the idea for the game you’re working on.

I like to take ownership of whatever job I do. If I do the dishes, then that is my self expression for that moment. The way we do everything says a lot about who we are. Drawing is just one kind of job, and in many ways it’s not much different from digging ditches. On some level, it’s still just rearranging molecules for an increment of money or self satisfaction. The difference between ditch digging and webcomics is that more people from a broader cross-section of  humanity will likely use and enjoy the work of the ditch digger.

So why the worship of jobs like artist, animator, actor, director and game designer? The noble answer is that these jobs enable creativity, the scandalous answer is that it allows selfish megalomaniacs to get paid top dollar to express themselves, then attain the applaud of the masses. Nobody applauds a ditch digger, everyone assumes he would rather do another job if he could.

It’s a bad idea to hate most jobs and only love the jobs that play into our nature’s greatest weaknesses. Some of the jobs that I irrationally hated the most were tough and uncomfortable, yet they sculpted my character the most. I don’t long for more of those difficulties, but if that were ever my lot, I’ve grown up enough not to hate them. There are times that plumbers do work on my house and demonstrate a greater commitment to excellence and craftsmanship than some of my illustrations.

Make Babies

In general, artists are narcissists. That is probably a little mean to say, but it’s true. We’re encouraged to introspect, then create according to our deepest emotions, and not to compromise on our vision. Nobody is more in tune with the self than the artist, just go ask any artist you know. We protect the self, project the self then sign our signature on every art work just in case you forget what the artwork is really all about. There is a cure for art narcissism.

I can divide my life into two segments, before children and after. Having a kid is the most life shifting moment of life because if you remain a narcissist after having children they’ll simply die. So imagine how strange it is to be in a group full of artists only to see them cringe in horror at the thought of having children. That’s right, some of the most creative people in the world refuse to create the most important thing we know of… people.

What bugs me about modern parenting is how everyone acts like they don’t know what to do. If you have kids, you’ll be perfectly equipped to be a parent. 14 year olds have been good parents, and 80 year olds have been good parents. Your inexperience is not what will make you a bad parent. If I had to wish for something that could help just about every person I know, I wouldn’t wish that the writer would get that movie deal, that the businessman would get that promotion, I would wish that every person could be a parent.

Most people who don’t want kids concoct an elaborate chain of excuses; I need to work on my career, I can’t take the responsibility, the world is a terrible place for children, the world is over crowded. Each argument is easy to refute with a little common sense, but my point is that we’re really good at coming up with excuses against having children and that any old excuse will do.

One reason why I love being  a parent is that very little else I do in life is of significance. I’ve created thousands of pieces of art, made games, played games, been on TV but the one thing I couldn’t live without is my family. This is where the coal miner is given the same keys to happiness as the most famous actor. The billionaire who has a child dying of cancer would trade his entire fortune for that child. The world’s most famous director would give up every Oscar to keep their kid alive, and the decision would be pretty easy.

If you ever wonder what title will be more important in your life, just go ask your mother or father if they can think of a better title than mother or father. Go do it, right now. I guarantee you that they will find their position as your parent to be greater than any other accomplishment in their life… and that is true no matter how big of a success they are and no matter how big of a failure you are.

As for career vs. family, when I’m old and the rest of the world has turned their back on me, my career won’t be there for me. On my deathbed, I’ll want to be surrounded by my family, not my art table. These days, as much as I love to draw all of the time, I’m at least as excited over my 6 year old daughter’s artwork as anything I come up with. Parenting taught me how to not just love art, but to love little artists. I love them enough to create a few of them.

Doug TenNapel: makes books, which can be as profitable as the cafeteria

I had lunch at Dreamworks yesterday and enthusiastically thanked the cafeteria worker for presenting me with a fine plate of food. I thought to myself, “Today, on this particular day, this worker is making more money than me.” It reminded me of how my friend Ethan Nicolle was thought to be rich by all of his fans for the blockbuster smash webcomic Axe Cop. Ethan figured out what he actually made on his comic and he would make more as barista at a local Starbucks coffee shop. My mind goes to the year of 2007 where I made $20,000 in a year… with a wife and four kids… and a house that drained every inch of our savings… we qualified for foodstamps (I didn’t take them).

It was 1987 and my comic strip had captured the attention of L.A. Times Syndicate’s editor David Seidman, so he came down to San Diego for a visit. We talked comics, and I was so impoverished my first question was, “When can I quit being a dish washer and make comics full time?” His answer, “Don’t quit your day job just yet.”

One of the more popular emails I get from up and comers is about when they can finally ditch their menial, good-for-nothing job and do like me… be rich making indie comics. If you’re not very good you shouldn’t quit your day job, but even if you’re great you shouldn’t quit your day job. I find artists ten times better than me all the time and they aren’t making money off of their artwork yet. Go to a California plein air art gallery in Laguna Beach and look at some of the greatest paintings of our times being sold for $400 bucks a pop. Half of that goes to the gallery. Good luck on that get rich thing.

My sister-in-law Debbie is a world class concert violinist but there is no big city symphony where she lives. She ended up joining a group that appeals to the masses by playing orchestrated versions of Doobie Brothers and Journey music. If you think all of those concert musicians studied Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven to play the chord structures of Doobie Brothers I’ve got news for you. Most of the great musicians who can play piano, violin etc. aren’t making a living playing Mozart. They must be in it for some other reason than the money.

In the end the artist, the book author, the musician has to decide why they’re doing what they’re doing. If it’s for the money, then I hope you make a lot of money. But most of us got into our art form for the love of it, and the money came second as a reward for years of hard work and a lucky break or two. By far, most every artist in the world, no matter how good, will not likely make a living off of their work.

My art pointed me to God, saved me, rescued me from boredom, gave me soaring thoughts, impressed my wife, developed my work ethic, brought me joy, stimulated my mind long before it ever made me a dime. My brother is a world class journalist who is a coal miner. I may one day join that cafeteria crew yet, but I still know one thing… I’ll be making books, artwork and having fun in my spare time for the rest of my life. You?

Come to my Art Show!

This is the largest display of my comic work in over 20 years! I’ll be displaying 100 original pages of my book in progress Hixon Bragg.

Sneaky Characters

You're sketching out the skeleton of your graphic novel story and you realize there's a lot of freaky stuff going on. There's a fish man, they travel through time, and there's this incredible blimp made of stone that defies all explanation! What's wrong with your story? It's not true. Graphic novel stories can be fantastic, but they still have to be true.

"Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten." – G.K. Chesterton

When we teach our children about fairy-tales, (we home-school FOUR of em'!) we never transpose words like fairy-tail or myth with words we use to describe lies. For example, if my son didn't take out the trash I wouldn't say, "You took out the trash? Tell me another fairy-tale!" Besides sarcasm being bad parenting, it's wrong to think of fairy tales as lies. Quite the opposite! Fairy-tails are true, they just aren't fact, and this is an important thing to remember when creating characters and developing plot for the graphic novel.

There have been endless essays and lectures on how to write women. You'd think authors were trying to figure out how someone from another planet spoke. There's a good reason why Jane Austin could write male dialogue and James L. Brooks can write female dialogue just fine. It's because every writer observes universal, common truths inherent to everyone then puts their own spin on it. Men and woman don't really talk the way they do in When Harry Met Sally, but it seems like it's capturing reality. Nora Ephron knows how to write a good fairy tale.

Stories aren't about other people, they're about us. Darth Vader isn't just Luke's father, if he was we couldn't feel anything about their relationship. But we know what Luke is feeling because we all have fathers, so Vader is our father and Luke is us. If you think I'm saying that your father can move objects with his mind, then I've lost you. If you've ever feared that you might pick up some of the more negative traits of your parents then you get it.

The key to writing your graphic novel is to realize that characters like Darth Vader are no more fairy-tale than When Harry Met Sally. We understand the scene in Star Wars because Vader is a father, not because he wears a black cape. The black cape tells us what kind of person he is, and though it's iconic, Vader could be a mafia don wanting his son to take over the family business and the lessons would still hold. The true things about Star Wars transcend the skin used to dress them.

"Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a consolation for the sorrow of this world, but an answer to that question, 'Is it true?'"- J. R. Tolkien

A graphic novel character can be a normal human or a talking wisp floating out of a haunted bog, but it still has to ring true. And the thing that makes it false isn't the skin, because we've all seen some terrible movies that have only human characters in realistic situations but the people were drawn so shallow, so ham-fisted that there wasn't anything true about them. Then take a look at Return of the Jedi when Han is thawed from the block of carbon and thrown into a prison cell with Chewie. They hug each other… that's true! We all believe it.

As I consume our most popular books, movies and television shows, a language of universal themes comes out of the material, though each wears a different skin. We love stories about fathers and sons, man and God, the underdog, the proud man who falls then finds redemption. Common, beautiful, true relationships have been around since the beginning of time, and none of the true things will stop being true. It's a safe bet, because only true things are reliable enough to even write about.

When I write a character I ask myself who or what they are. I pretend like I'm an employer of my graphic novel and these different characters are trying to land a role in my story. They will occupy valuable space after all, so they'd better justify their own existence pretty quickly by being necessary, entertaining and they'd better make me look good. I don't want to run a shabby story. I've got a reputation to protect and I'll only hire the best creatures to tell the truth in my graphic novels. It's an important job and I'll give them a lot of leeway to perform so long as they can keep my attention for more than a few pages.

"But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could." – C.S. Lewis

A magician never reveals the secret to his magic trick and Lewis just gave everything away right there. We cast things into an imaginary world to steal past the watchful dragons of a skeptical, jaded, modernist society. My readers do erect dragons, but I'm going to get past them. How do you get past a dragon? You don't run in swinging your sword and stabbing it in the face. That's what we do when we write propaganda, or political screeds that wake the dragon and infuriate him all in one go! A knight would be cooked for sure if he tried such a tact! We need to be sneaky. Now hush! Take off those clanking boots and tip toe with me! We have nothing to worry about. If we fail at making these characters believable we'll just be fried and eaten by a giant demonic lizard! Do you see what I'm doing to you right now?