Hook swords & Editorial Cartoon books

I spent a lot of this weekend doing expressions and mouth shapes for the next cartoon. I don't have anything scanned yet, but I will put some in soon. I am experimenting with expressions that are pushed a little more than normal, we will see how it works.

Sam Deats finished a background for the opening shot of the cartoon:

Pretty cool, huh?

On Saturday, I had a Kung-fu seminar for a few hours on the hook-sword.


Looks like something out of Star Trek doesn't it? The form we learned was pretty difficult. I think I might be able to remember this one better than some of the others.

I saw the rest of that South Park episode, nothing is too similar to what I am doing.

It is amazing what Trey Parker and Matt Stone have created. There is a strange expectation that the public has from South Park, and they can get away with more just from the way they have slowly blurred, pushed and moved the line over time.

South Park can get away with more than any other show on television. But I also think that South Park maintains a great logical middle ground. I honestly think it teaches extremely valuable lessons. South Park is like the best kind of editorial cartoon, it presents and lampoons both sides of an issue, and some how makes you examine what you believe...while you are laughing. Except that unlike an editorial cartoon, the South Park world and its characters are extremely well developed, which is more than most live action sitcoms can say.

Speaking of editorial cartoons, this weekend I picked up a couple of new Editorial cartoon books; Daryl Cagle's "The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2006 Edition" and Charles Brook's "The Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year: 2006 Edition"

This is the first time I have bought one of Cagle's books. I go to his website daily, and really enjoy his blog (during the Danish Mohammed cartoons, his blog was fantastic.) The book is nice, some of the cartoons are unfortunately printed pretty small, but it seems to have a really good mix of cartoons. I have been collecting the Brook's book for a long time. I have them set-up almost encyclopedia like in my office going back to 1975.

More about Captain Capitalism in the next post...