It's hard to imagine 2 cartoonists with such different styles as Vincent Waller and I - and that's one reason why I like working with him.
Vincent draws much better than me on a technical level, and his influences are probably a somewhat different group than mine. I suspect he's a big Robert Crumb fan- I'll let him tell you who inspired him. But his style is totally unique to him and he gave animated cartoons a big kick in the ass -which it needed.
What I like about collaborative animation, as opposed to independent animation, is that you get to combine the best of a bunch of artists' talents - in theory.

For example the comic book cover above is drawn by Vincent, probably inked by Shane and beautifully rendered by Rick Altergott of Doofus fame.

These comic pages are nice examples of collaboration between different cartoonists.

Before we ever started drawing a finished cartoon or comic, we would "write" it. We'd start with a gag session between a few cartoonists, write a structured outline to keep the story in order, then I'd assign someone to draw the story in rough sketches like these. Along the way the story sketch artist would add lots of extra gags and do the continuity.I would sometimes scribble on top of Vincent's drawings if I wanted to use a different staging or expression. Once the roughs were completed, the final artist- Vincent here, would draw tighter more detailed drawings. Then I'd get an inker (I think this is Shane) to make the final art look super polished. A good inker is a Godsend. Shane preserves the guts of which ever artist he inks, but also brings his own style into the work - without changing the art underneath.
If you wanna see how much influence an inker has over the finished look, go and find some Jack Kirby comics from the 60s. Every inker made the stuff look different - and some of them actually hurt the art underneath. Joe Sinnot was my favorite because he preserved Kirby's style and dynamism and made it feel even more solid - like Shane does.

Sometimes I would throw a post it on top of a panel if I wanted a completely different staging as in the lower right panel on page 28.I would like to make a pot about the difference between "individual style" and "group style". Vincent, Jim Smith, Katie Rice, Bob Camp, Gabe Swarr, Nick Cross, Helder Mendonca and many of the top Spumco artists (I could name a ton more, so don't feel left out) of the past have very strong individual styles. I of course, blended my own and other artists' styles in the cartoons and that's what you see in the final work. It's usually pretty easy to see when one artist leaves off and another picks up a scene. I, being a cartoon and comic nerd and huge fan of cartoonists love to see different styles within the same worlds. That's one of the reasons I love Clampett, 60s Marvel comics and Terrytoons.

It's also why I hate model sheets - or at least the way they are usually used.

Besides the few really strong individual styles that exist, there are also the "group styles" - the Disney style, the Spumco style (which is really the "Games style"), the Anime style, The Canadian style. I discourage that in my cartoons. I've hired many talented Cal Arts graduates and had to encourage them to stop relying on stock expressions and poses and to just train their pencils to put their own personalities on paper. Some learn to. Others are forever trapped in whatever group style they have absorbed.


One Cal Arts kid who started at Spumco is now making the most cartoony cartoon on television. He is super talented and worked extra hard at Spumco.
I've known many cartoonists who personally have a ton of individual quirks-funny facial ticks and expressions, unique gestures and are great storytellers. Some of them have been so conditioned by a group style that they don't translate their natural personality traits through their pencils no matter how much I beg them to. It's because the other studios they've worked at actively frown upon it and they have made a habit of suppressing themselves at work.

Anyway, Vincent has no qualms at all about getting his personality into his drawings, in fact he can't help it - and also no qualms about mixing them with other quirky artists to try to get the best possible results through collaboration.

This is not to denigrate Independent animation. Some artists are so unique, they just want to say what they have to say and the only way they can do it is to completely make their own films. Bill Plympton is a super talented and unique and funny guy that has made whole feature length cartoons by himself!

I always wondered how he did that and then I did a show with him in Chicago and witnessed his secret for myself . But that story is for another day.

Today, let us honor Vincent for kicking our animation butts.



VINCENT

This cartoon almost never got made because the Nick execs hated the story so much.
Some great Bob Camp poses I had to cut just so we could be allowed to make the cartoon at all.



Bob J did such a great job on the animation direction and even went to the Filipines to follow it through, that I had to go to bat for him again just to get him an upfront credit. Nick always hated when I asked for extra credits. I have no idea why, but that was the case. They themselves added all kinds of credits to the show - of people who didn't do what they got credit for, and half of them that we never even met!A couple Bob Jaques animation drawings from Stimpy's inventions.

This was an episode where I had to go back to Vanessa and ask if we could give more credits upfront. "Oh, John...This one time only!" was the response. Then later I did it again for a couple other episodes.





Chris did some great designs while he was storyboarding at the same time. He did the long vertical pan of the weird machine in the History Eraser Button room for one.

Oh, and David Koenigsberg did the cool waving credits and fx at the beginning of the cartoon-the old fashioned way, under a camera with ripple glass!

Henry Porch picked out Dvorak's "New World" for the opening music, which lent the cartoon a very serious ominous atmosphere.

Bill Griggs did a phenomenal job editing the music and Tim Borquez killed himself coming up with all the cool old style science fiction sound effects.

Mike Fontanelli did the layouts of Ren and Stimpy at the end for the History Eraser Button Sequence. Maybe I have some frame grabs somewhere.

A lot of other good artists all worked on the show. A cartoon like Space Madness could never be made as an independent film - or even at another studio with all the same people. It took a lot of top talent, a production system designed for talent and a sympathetic creative director who urged the best from everyone - oh and a network executive who allowed it to happen. More than what we all thought we were capable of, I'm sure.

The kind of animation I like is studio cartoons as opposed to independent animation. I think you can make much better stuff if you work with people who have talents you don't. I don't believe one person is completely responsible for every creative act in a cartoon, although one person should oversee it and make it all work together.

Like I was saying in the last post about credits, in the 1980s no one in the business thought the artists had anything creative to contribute to the cartoons. (I'm sure they still wish they didn't need us pesky artists and would love a computer program that could finally get us out of the way.) The studios gave the writers credit before the cartoon started, but not any artist, not even the director. Well maybe because there were no directors in the 1980s. Not until Mighty Mouse. Ralph Bakshi was the first guy to open a studio and put the artists totally in charge of all the creative aspects of the cartoons. I instituted a "unit system" inspired by the old Looney Tunes system, where each unit had a director in charge who followed the whole production through from start to finish. We even had to bring back a whole job category - Layout - a job that the other studios didn't deem creative and were shipping overseas. This created at least 20 new jobs for American artists that did not previously exist.
But still no one got credit upfront-not even the writer this time (maybe because we were cartoonists too.)

The first time I was ever able to credit an artist on a title card before a cartoon was amazingly on Beany and Cecil in 1988. ABC hated artists, but the Clampetts and Richard Raynis supported me giving at least the directors credit on some of them. Quite a breakthrough.There was a lot of visual fun in Beany and Cecil and I wished I could give more of the artists credit - especially the storyboard artists and the key layout artists - the ones that were making the show have at least some interest.











But like 80s shows, they just piled everyone's credits together like cattle at the end of the cartoon and ran by them so fast that you couldn't even read them, let alone know which artists worked on which episodes.
I always liked reading the credits on old cartoons and trying to figure out who did what and seeing the different styles. I wanted to bring that back (while also bringing back the whole concept of cartoonist-made cartoons).
When we did the pilot for Ren and Stimpy I made sure everyone got prominent credits. I didn't ask for permission; I just did it.

I even painted the end credits myself and hand lettered them (well Libby Simon inked my hand lettering).










When we started the series I had to negotiate the amount of upfront credits. I had given an animation history lesson to Vanessa Coffey and explained the old unit system to her, and that old cartoons were not "written", they were drawn on storyboards. She agreed to this system. At last!
So I got together the funniest artists and we came up with story premises that we'd pitch to Vanessa. Once she OKed them, we'd then write an outline that was 2 or 3 pages long. Whoever physically wrote up the outline is who I'd usually give the "story" credit too, even though all of us helped gag each other's stories up.
I also negotiated for an upfront storyboard credit, which was unheard of at the time. The storyboard artists at Spumco were generally the same group of artists who came up with the premises and outlines but we would add a ot of gags and story material in the storyboards-the way cartoons should be written, and used to be.
I also wanted to credit key layout artists, animation directors, designers and background painters but couldn't get permission. Just getting a couple artist credits at all was a real victory in 1990.





Nurse Stimpy came out so ugly to me, that I didn't give myself credit on it as director.

I seem to be missing the storyboard credit, but am pretty sure Jim, Bob, Vincent and I did it.

Firedogs was written in an afternoon to replace a George Liquor cartoon that got rejected.
Jim and Chris made a very lively and funny board and added more gags.



This story came out of a deal I made with Vanessa. She didn't like the booger, fart and gross jokes we wrote, so I asked her if I could trade them for something she wanted. She wanted heart.
I was listening to the classical music in our APM stock music library and put on Clair De Lune by Debussy. I started picturing a sad scene with Stimpy in a fairy tale setting and that became The Littlest Giant. I pitched the story idea to Vanessa while playing the music for her and tears welled up in her eyes. She loved it! I tell you, that's a way to work with execs. Trade 'em. Find out what they like and meet 'em halfway. Not by eliminating or toning either of your tastes down, but by taking turns doing the kind of thing each of you like. This was very easy with Vanessa. Many times I would make up story ideas on the spot after asking her what she was looking for. Stimpy's First Fart was one of those.

Once more executives started to get involved, this became harder to do. There were too many "no"s coming from all directions and the idea of being fair and trading was harder and harder to achieve. Even people who weren't executives started sending us notes! Vanessa's secretary, a month after we had shipped the first couple of episodes to be animated, sent us a 30 page list of changes she wanted on our storyboards! Stories that were being animated and had already been signed off on by Vanessa. And what were the changes about? 90% of them were to tell us that the scenes on the storyboards didn't "hook up". A secretary telling us that.






Once artists starting seeing other artists get credits at the beginning of the cartoons, more and more wanted them - and I didn't blame them. On certain cartoons, I went back to Vanessa to beg for some extra credits for certain people who had done outstanding jobs on particular cartoons. This got me in a lot of trouble since we already had a signed agreement for story, storyboard and director only, but when she saw Space Madness and a couple other extra special pictures I bent her to my will. Others above us didn't like this encroaching artist recognition though. Especially when the press started coming over to Spumco regularly and I would take them around to interview and photograph all the artists at work.

To be continued....

Thanks to David Shreve and his crew for the frame grabs from Ren and Stimpy!