I think this is from 2003. After my animated series Teddy & Anna had been online for a few years, I made VCD’s (video CD’s) of the episodes and sold a few discs at Open Studios events. Here you can see the design of the wraparound cover (the pastels! they burn!) and how it looked in real life.
You can still watch Teddy & Anna episodes on their website. The sort-of-a-prequel, “Nightcrawler” (which was a bonus track on the VCD’s) is here.
Someday I need to re-design my original Plastic Box Web Graphics site and bring it back online. It’s amazing how much digital stuff gets strewn around when you’ve been on the web for more than a few years.
In the spring and summer of 2004 I worked on a slightly unusual comics project, “The Big Wheel.” It was a story featuring characters from an animated series I had started in 2000, Teddy & Anna. It was the first sustained comics story I’d done since high school. And it was drawn, in ink and marker, on sheets of paper that were about 4 1/2 feet tall by 3 1/2 wide, for display in a window space in downtown Lowell. I’d go down there when a new page was done, take down the old one and put up the new.
It was tremendous fun to do. I made up the story as I went along, figuring out what would happen on the next page midway through the page I was drawing. I drew a minor character into a few panels and figured out later that he’d have to be one of the villains. The story was vaguely steampunk-y, with clockwork robots, pennyfarthing bicycles, airships, and a Tesla coil (the Big Wheel, a weapon developed by a secret society called the Electric Victorians.)
It was also pretty exhausting to make, and I got behind schedule pretty quickly. Then I got married to my lovely wife and went away on the honeymoon and by then the next exhibit scheduled for the windows space had to go in, so the story stopped on a cliffhanger with our heroes’ airship under attack. Someday I hope to finish up the story and find a new display venue for it (or at least take photos and publish it here.)
I made a “production blog” as I worked on the pages, so that anybody that saw them in the window could go home and look up how that day’s page had been made. I did a lot of research for the story (on airships, Tesla coils, early aviation, Victorian dress, etc.) so that’s the bulk of the blog entries, but there’s also some silly stuff. I’ve copied the entire blog into one big entry, for posterity.
Man, how did I avoid that joke for the past few years. “The Big Wheel” (panel sample above) is my Teddy & Anna comic book, which I began in 2004 and haven’t yet finished. It was a challenging project on a couple of fronts: a) it was the first long comic book story I’d tried since I was a teenager, and b) each page was about 4 feet high. The piece of paper at left in the window is 8 1/2″ x 11″.
The story was serialized in the windows of a cultural organization downtown; I would go and change out the pages a couple of times a week. The office was at the corner of the block, and it was cool to look out the window and see cars creep up to the intersection, as the drivers tried to figure out what the hell they were looking at in that window.
I should really finish that story up someday. The window space isn’t available anymore, but this newfangled internet thing might work for letting people read the comic.
Student animator Lewiss Needham interviews me about my animated serial Teddy & Anna. I worked obsessively on Teddy from roughly 2000-2004, running out of steam at Episode 7. Hopefully I’ll finish the storyline someday, though I don’t know if it will be in animated form.
Click through to the school’s main animation page to see student work and an interview with Naoki Mitsuse (creator of many Flash series and an inspiration to me when I started on Teddy.)
I also have a comic starring those two that needs finishing. I left them up in the air (they’re piloting a dirigible), getting hit by lightning from a giant Tesla coil. Here’s the first page of the story.
I’ve been posting various bits of junk on the interweb for seven years now, long enough to have forgotten about some of it. Here’s a little animation thing (from waaaaaay back in … 2004) I just stumbled across, for my animated web cartoon Teddy & Anna:
http://www.teddyandanna.com/episodes/sketchbook2.html
Someday I hope to get back to Teddy and Anna. Animation’s just so time-consuming, though …
The monstrous guy is a character study for KBT; the other painting is part of my ongoing attempt to refine Anna’s character design. Here she’s looking more mischievous, which is what I’m looking for.
