Fun With Scissors - part 63

Choo Choo, a member of Top Cat's gang.

Fun With Scissors - part 62

Unlike yesterday's post, Mr. Spacely here was one of the easiest characters to collage. He's a total of eleven individual pieces of paper, and took me maybe half an hour to cut and glue together.

Fun With Scissors - part 61

Rope Man from "the Mighty Heroes" was probably one of the worst choices I could have made at a time when I was desperately trying to get ahead a bit on these collages after falling woefully behind. Each segment of rope had to be individually cut and glued, which made this character more time consuming than probably any other I've done so far in this series. having said that, I'm pretty happy with the way he turned out.

FYI, even though it appears that his cape should hang in a straight line across his shoulders, it's actually tucked into the back of the knot beneath his jawline. I thought it looked a bit weird myself, until I tracked down an image which showed this to be correct. See, you do learn something new every day.

Cute Creeps from Popular Culture

Jay Stephens runs a terrific website called Monsterama where I go to get my daily dose of monster goodness. Jay recently plugged my site over there, so now I'm returning the favor. Not only is Jay an incredible artist in his own right (and Emmy nominated to boot), but he's posted an incredible assortment of images, links, and other monster artifacts. It's one of the few sites I visit every day, so I highly recommend it.

Fun With Scissors - part 60

Ricochet Rabbit's sidekick, and deputy, Droop-a-long Coyote.

Fun With Scissors - part 59

   
 


I've wanted to collage the Gruesome Twosome for some time now, preferably in their great car, the Creepy Coupe, but Fun with Scissors was meant to be an exercise in brevity, with each character taking about an hour's time to create, or less.

The Creepy Coupe is just too involved for that sort of time limit. I may tackle it anyway in the future, is my schedule ever allows for it. In the meantime, here's Big Gruesome and Little Gruesome sans their car.

Fun With Scissors - part 58

Sylvester

Illustration Friday - "Monster"

I don't have time to do a new piece today, but here's a collage I did of Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein Monster, from my archives. There are plenty more monsters over in my art gallery .

Fun With Scissors - part 57

John Sims, alias the Witch Doctor from the SCOOBY-DOO episode "A Tiki Scare is No Fair."

The Trap-Door Maker - available now

The Trap-Door Maker should be available in comic book stores now. I did an illustration for this issue, which unfortunately did not reproduce well. Don't let that keep you from picking up this highly enjoyable prequel to "The Phantom of the Opera." Here's the image I did, the way it's meant to be seen.

Fun With Scissors - part 56

Mighty Mouse.

Fun With Scissors - part 55

Magilla Gorilla.

Fun With Scissors - part 54

Casper the friendly ghost. I had a morbid fascination with Capser as a child. He was probably my first trigger into thinking about mortality because he was so obviously the ghost of a dead child around the age of 2, or so. I still want to know how he ended up that way.

The winner!

I've made numerous mentions of the cool Fat Albert contest over at SACKS10 . The results are in, and my daughter Daphne was the winner of the junior prize. You can see the loot she won in the picture here. Her winning entry, as well as all the others, can be seen at the above link (or scroll down a few posts here). Congratulations!

Fun With Scissors - part 53

This portrait of Sam the Sheepdog was designed to go withthe previously posted Ralph Wolf piece from Fun With Scissors - part 37.

I think this one turned out pretty well.

Fun With Scissors - part 52

I'd considered doing Inch High, Private Eye at actual size, but reconsidered when I thought about what a pain it would be to cut out details that small.

Hey, Hey, Hey. Whaddya Say?

Here's Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, a piece I did just for Saxton Moore's Fat Albert contest (see previous posts).

I veered away from the collage style I was using for the other cartoon character pieces I've been doing, not doing such a literal depiction of them.

Fun With Scissors - part 51

Here's Gravity Girl, member of "the Galaxy Trio."

I think this one turned out really well.

Fun With Scissors - part 50

Maybe it's from all those years reading comic books, where they felt compelled to mark their 50th and 75th, and 100th issues with something "special" that I felt compelled to make sure that this post had a cartoon character of stature, and who could be greater than Bugs Bunny?

I can't believe that there have been 50 of these cartoon character posts already, and 55 characters so far. There are still so many to do, but at the same time, it seems daunting that I could possibly do enough for a full 365 days of this.

Russell vs the Chicken Heart

Here's an illustration my 7-year-old daughter, Daphne, did for Saxton Moore's Fat Albert Contest depicting the chicken heart and Russell. It also displays her first attempt at writing cursive.

Fun With Scissors - part 49

Godzooky, the clumsy, flying child relation of Hanna-Barbera's "Godzilla."

American licensing of the character has never done favors for Toho's biggest star. Never mind the Matthew Broderick movie, the Marvel comic book series, and the late 70s Hanna-Barbera cartoon had very little to do with the character either. His distinctive roar was nowhere to be heard. Instead He growled. No radioactive breath. No cool Toho kaiju to fight. Instead he had some really poorly designed monsters, and was at the beck and call of a crew of dull people, who appeared to have been oceanographers, but certainly did not exhibit even the most basic knowledge of science. They were led by Captain Majors who delivered his lines in the clench jawed acting style made popular by Charlton Heston.

Fun With Scissors - part 48

I wonder how many kids these days know Barney Rubble only from the Cocoa Pebbles and Fruity Pebbles cereal boxes and commercials. How many of them are familiar with "The Flintstones"? It seems like "The Flintstones" was the Saturday morning equivalent of tv royalty when I was growing up. There was a new show with those characters every season, plus all of the syndicated reruns which seemed to be on all the time. Now, sadly, nothing. Thank goodness for all those DVD box sets, so my own kids can get a classic education.

Fun With Scissors - part 47

Yesterday, I posted a super genius chicken, today...well, Let's just say that Beaky Buzzard shouldn't sit by his mail box waiting for his Mensa Society membership package.

His face and neck is actually a pale pink, which my scanner didn't want to reproduce very well, no matter how much I played with the color and darkness.

Fun With Scissors - part 46

The Foghorn Leghorn cartoons with Egghead Jr. are the best. Not only was the smart little chicken a great foil for Foghorn, but what other cartoons have the protagonist trying to murder a child?

Fun With Scissors - part 45

Much like when Godzilla and Angilas spoke to one another in "Godzilla vs Gigan" I've always found it jarring and unnatural to hear Tom and Jerry speaking in some of their cartoons.

Here's Jerry, silent as he should be.

Fun With Scissors - part 44

Here's Hanna-Barbera's Moby Dick. Instead of taunting Ahab, he rescued two boys cast adrift, and helped them in adventures against all manner of strange undersea criminals. Like a number of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, such as "Jonny Quest" and "Frankenstein Jr." this was a boy's wish-fullfillment series. There were two boys this time, Tom and Tub (guess which one was overweight?)and besides having a giant albino whale for a pal, they had a pet seal named Scooby (like the more famous Scooby, this one was voiced by Don Messick, who also voiced Moby Dick).

Fun With Scissors - part 43

Loopy de Loop

Fun With Scissors - part 42

Ranger Smith

Fun With Scissors - part 41

Captain Caveman, for some reason gave me all sorts of trouble. Maybe I just didn't have my collage mojo going that day. Whatever, this seemingly simple piece was just one disaster after another, and I'm not too thrilled with it.

Monsters From The Vault #21

Issue #21 of MONSTERS FROM THE VAULT is now available. This is the best, and best looking, magazine covering classic horror films. There are lots of rare photos as well. This issue includes an article I wrote on the 1950s movie "I Married a Monster From Outer Space." Copies are hard to find in stores, though I'm told Tower Records carries them. I recommend getting a copy from the folks at Creepy Classics . Tell them I sent you.

Fun With Scissors - part 40

Judy Jetson.

Illustration Friday - insect

I wasn't sure I was going to have time to get this done, so I'd put up a default image earlier.

I could nitpick a number of things with this image, but considering how little time I had to put it together, I'm pretty happy with it.

Fun With Scissors - part 39

I haven't picked up the DVD boxed set of Pink Panther cartoons yet, but it doesn't look like it contains any of "The Ant and the Aardvark" cartoons. This is too bad, as I remember really liking them. In fact, an early attempt at a newspaper strip that I did, back around third grade, was a complete ripoff of these segments of "The Pink Panther Show." It's possible this strip still exists, and if I ever find it, I'll post it.

Fun With Scissors - part 38

Here's another one of the Herculoids; Tundro!

Fun With Scissors - part 37

Often, and understandably, mistaken for Wile E. Coyote, this is actually Ralph Wolf. The way to tell them apart is the nose. Ralph's is red. the Coyote's; black.

I really enjoyed doing this one. I love the design of the sheep in these cartoons.