Non-MST3K art: My cartoon characters!

[jjb3k]

As some folks know, I'm a big classic animation fan. I also love to draw my own cartoons, and I'm heavily influenced by the work of legends like Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Robert McKimson, etc. So a while back, I created my own gang of "classic" cartoon characters and built a backstory for them, billing them under the fictional BarbozaToons label and brainstorming all sorts of ideas for them. As I have no scanner, I had to laboriously render these guys in MS Paint to share them with all of you, so here they are - the BarbozaToons!

img.photobucket.com/albums/v477/JB86/Cartoons2006.png

From left to right, allow me to present:
- Commander O'Hare, a vicious and slightly psychotic rabbit who acts like General George S. Patton and talks like R. Lee Ermey
- Ken Kangaroo, a quick-witted and sly Outback native with a strong sense of survival and an even stronger Australian accent
- Smelson Skunk, a nebbishy little guy who doesn't want to offend anybody and wears a diaper to cover up his smell; but when he gets angry, he knows how to take care of himself
- Vixen the Reindeer, an easily stressed yet ultimately indefatigable woodland creature with no patience for idiots and one awfully curvy figure
- Regulus Raven, a scheming little birdie with an eternally empty stomach and a total lack of foresight for all his efforts at getting his food
- Turbo Tortoise, a globe-hopping turtle with a jet pack on his shell and a love of foreign cultures
- Satchmo Salmon, a hep fish with an ear for the trumpet and an endless supply of moxie (the characteristic, not the drink)
- Dawg E. Dawg, an irritable-yet-rock-stupid dog who never thinks things through and always pays for it
- Bitty Kitty, Dawg E. Dawg's three-inch quarry who uses his miniscule size and vast intellect to his advantage
- Buck Beaver, a brace-faced busybody with a rapid-fire speaking voice and even quicker wits when it comes to protecting his dam
- Bra-ma Bull, a dopey yet lovable bovine who can't get out of the women's undergarments someone put on him as a joke
- The Whatzit, eternally squashed into an accordion under the weight of the anvil atop his head; doesn't even know that Regulus Raven is out to kill him
- Rabid Rodent, a criminally insane rat who drools a lot and takes extreme pleasure in torturing the alley cats who would rather have him for dinner
- Gunter Goat, a geeky yet determined little Casanova wannabe whose every attempts at woo end up catastrophically misdirected
- Maxine Mink, Gunter's smoking hot unrequited love interest; despite her total lack of interest in the goat, she still has to tolerate his futile advances

I've worked on these guys for over two years, and I keep coming up with more ideas for them. What do you think?

[Pete]

Hey, well done! I'm very impressed you did these in Paint.

You definitely have that Looney Tunes look down, it's as if someone cracked open a vault at Warner Brothers and found long-forgotten character designs.

Some thoughts ('cause I have way too much free time ):

Commander O'Hare - An okay character but there's a comic book character (also a rabbit) called Bucky O'Hare (by Neal Adams), so you may want to reconsider the name.

Ken Kangaroo - from the name Ken I'm assuming that it's a male, but "he" appears to have a pouch (the zipper is a nice touch), but only female kangaroos have pouches (please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.) I know it's just a cartoon, but some people are picky about that sort of thing.

Smelson Skunk - I would've liked to have seen the diaper too. Have you considered putting glasses on him? It might enforce that nebbishness you're going for.

Vixen the Reindeer - is this Santa's Vixen?

Regulus Raven - he looks like he needs a hat, I don't know why.

Turbo Tortoise - I'm guessing this was inspired by that tortoise (his name escapes me) that raced Bugs Bunny and used a rocket in his shell.

Satchmo Salmon - I don't really "get" this one. Fish characters are kind of limiting, I think.

Dawg E. Dawg - I like that he's purple, but I don't care for the name.

Bitty Kitty - I like him, he has a Tweety Bird quality.

Buck Beaver - I knew this name sounded too familiar... www.mouseranch.com/buckybeaver/BuckyBeaver.html ... no big deal, you can come up with another name.

Bra-ma Bull - I must admit, this doesn't work for me. Seems like a one trick pony, so to speak.

The Whatzit - odd character, but I like it. It plays nicely on the idea that cartoon characters usually are never permanantly injured, yet this poor guy never recovered.

Rabid Rodent - I guess you need at least one totally crazy character. I would put more crazy in the eyes, though.

Gunter Goat - a good underdog character.

Maxine Mink - a good looking character, but what is her gimmick other than being a foil for Gunter?

I know I would want constructive criticism if I was in your place (and I have been, I'm an artist too), so I hope the above comments are of some value. Anyway, good stuff. It's clear you put real work into them. If you need/want any more feedback I'll be happy to give it.

~Pete

[jjb3k]

Thanks kindly for the critique! In regards to your questions and suggestions:

- I had heard of Bucky O'Hare before I created and named Commander O'Hare (though I didn't have him in mind when I did so), but the way I wrote these characters' histories, Commander O'Hare first appeared in 1943. Thus, any resemblance to any modern-day characters, in name or otherwise, is entirely coincidental.
- I know that only female kangaroos have pouches, but when I first drew Ken, he was just a nondescript animal with floppy ears and big feet - even I didn't know what he was supposed to be. I almost made him a rabbit, but I already had O'Hare and I didn't want to look like I was ripping off Bugs Bunny, so I drew a pouch on his stomach and classified him as a kangaroo. I added the zipper to the pouch later on to make it a little more obvious that it was a pocket - I eventually bestowed Ken with a running gag in which he uses his pouch much like Felix the Cat uses his bag of tricks, pulling whatever the heck he needs out of it.
- I hadn't thought of glasses for Smelson, but in his early design, I gave him this droopy, pathetic little flower to carry around. It was supposed to make him look sympathetic and soft-spoken, but it leaned too much on sappiness so I threw it out. Really, I guess "nebbish" isn't the best way to describe Smelson, now that I think of it - he's more of a bundle of nerves than anything.
- According to my backstory for Vixen, her first cartoon from 1944 features her as a member of Santa Claus' sleigh team, as does one of her follow-up cartoons from 1945. In these cartoons, she's more of a stressed-out character - her first appearance sees her chasing a renegade jack-in-the-box around Santa's workshop in an attempt to get the toy to stay in its package (random trivia: the jack-in-the-box was going to be another one of my main characters, but he didn't offer me any other ideas beyond this one, so I made him a one-shot). After I refined her a little more, I made her more confident and less of a buffoon, so I set most of her stories in the woods rather than at the North Pole, where she's less likely to get pushed around by Santa and the elves.
- I never thought of clothing Regulus, but he did evolve a lot from his initial design. When I first drew him, he was a chubby little canary-like bird who carried a huge anvil around in his talons. When I decided to use him as a recurring character, I decided that it'd be better to have him be a little more mobile, so I made him taller and lengthened his beak, neck, wings, tail, and feet. It ultimately allowed me to draw him more exaggeratedly than any of my other characters, and I tend to give Regulus a lot of the crazier wild takes.
- Turbo was partially inspired by Cecil Tortoise (who actually only used a rocket in Friz Freleng's 1947 "Rabbit Transit"), but also on my own little tinkerings with the tortoise and the hare story. I began thinking to myself, "What if the hare wasn't lazy; what if the tortoise was just faster than him?" So I sketched out a very early version of the character, sailing across the sky with a jet pack on his shell. I originally named him Speedy Tortoise, but I realized that it was too reminiscent of Speedy Gonzales, so I went with something more alliterative.
- Satchmo's trumpet-playing skills are a trait that I don't use very often. I created him as just a fish who played the trumpet, and I tried to think of a good name that would reflect a musical fish. I settled on Satchmo, the nickname of legendary trumpeter Louis Armstrong, then classified him as a salmon (though, for some reason, I always saw him as blue-and-yellow in my mind, even though my first drawings of him were only in pencil). The trumpet didn't offer as many ideas as I liked, so I downplayed that but kept his jazzy attitude and cool manner of speaking. After a while, I even stopped treating him like a salmon, and he became a sort of "every-fish", popping up in lakes, rivers, the ocean, goldfish bowls, and anywhere else I came up with a story for him.
- I don't really like Dawg's name either. I named him before I came up with the idea that these guys were created in the 40s and 50s, and the first thing that came to my mind was actor Doug E. Doug (who hasn't really done anything since 1997, but I digress). I'm still trying to think of a better moniker for him. I did, however, create him and Bitty Kitty as an intentional parody of the Sylvester and Tweety series. The primary difference is that Tweety eventually became a much more passive and helpless character in the 1950s, while Bitty has always maintained a ruthless violent streak.
- Nor do I really like Buck's name. It was just the first thing that popped into my head when I was naming my guys, and I never bothered to come up with anything else. Plus, I've recently discovered that the Walter Lantz studio did a few cartoons in the 1940s where Woody Woodpecker locked horns with an adversary named Buck Beaver, so that's even more incentive for me to come up with something else. Any suggestions?
- Bra-ma was probably my weirdest character, or at least the weirdest that I kept (I plucked these guys from a page full of random doodles that I sketched one day during my Economics class, and you should see some of the characters I didn't use - I had a giraffe with a welder's mask, a Phantom of the Opera-type guy who lived in a coffeepot, a little eggplant-looking alien guy...it was really funky). I didn't plan on using him as a main character until I showed my drawings to a few kids in my Math class. One kid asked "Why does the bull have a bra on?", to which another kid wittily replied "'Cause he's the Bra-ma bull!" I hadn't named any of my characters at that point, but that name was so perfect that I knew I had to use it (I got his permission, in case you were wondering). In developing Bra-ma's personality, I made him somewhat Foghorn Leghorn-esque - depending on what the story calls for, sometimes he's the winner and sometimes he's the loser. I'm still refining him, actually.
- The Whatzit was another guy I didn't expect to keep, but I had already decided to keep Regulus and I knew that he needed an adversary. I remembered the anvil that the early Regulus had, and I thought, "What if the bird dropped the anvil on this guy in an attempt to catch him for himself?" So for a while, I used the idea that Regulus had squashed the Whatzit under the anvil years ago, but it didn't actually subdue him, and since then, nobody else had seen his face. I decided that it was a little too complex for a series of short subject cartoons, so I took a page out of Chuck Jones' book and pared it down to the bedrock essentials a la Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner - Regulus wants to catch the Whatzit, who just happens to be stuck under this anvil that limits his mobility and keeps him oblivious to all of Regulus' backfiring attempts.
- Rabid was originally a lot more graphic. As his name suggests, I originally drew him as a mouse who had rabies. This concept isn't all that funny, and realistically, I really don't think it would have flown with the censors back in the theatrical era. Plus, I really hated drawing him, because he was always foaming at the mouth and it didn't allow for many good facial expressions - I always had to block off the lower half of his face with the foam, so I just changed it to drool. MS Paint isn't very good at rendering subtletly, but I do draw him with a touch more craziness in his eyes when he's on paper.
- Gunter and Maxine arrived a lot later than the rest of the gang. I drew Maxine first, sometime in early 2005, but she looked a lot different. I had created her as a one-shot adversary for Vixen in a cartoon in which they both wanted a modeling job. Her original character design was hardly even feminine - she basically looked like Ken Kangaroo in drag, only with shorter ears, longer legs, and a bushier tail. After a while of drawing gag ideas for this cartoon, I realized that I didn't really like her character design at all, so I began reworking her. I added the Veronica Lake-esque hairdo, made her mouth and nose significantly smaller, gave her eyes the heavy-lidded look, made her body more curvaceous, and dressed her more seductively. I was satisfied with the results, but I had no new ideas for her. Thus, around late 2005, I invented Gunter as her foil, sort of an anti-Pepe le Pew type who wanted women but had no idea how to get them. I really liked the new angle this gave Maxine - Gunter's attempts to impress her only result in his catastrophe and her exasperation. But I knew that this sort of formula was going to get stale if I just did the same thing over and over, so I came up with a bunch of various settings and time periods in which the two characters could play out. I've set their escapades on a beach, in a building being constructed in the 1930s, in ancient Egypt, in a black-and-white film noir parody, in the Arabian desert, in the Renaissance period, in a parody of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid", and in a science-fiction serial spoof. And as the stories developed, I had Maxine get increasingly more violent in her attempts to get Gunter away from her, only for Gunter to harden his resolve and remain blissfully ignorant of her desires to shun him away.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, I'll probably share more of my cartoon ideas with you, as well as the self-fabricated studio history I wrote for them.

[Pete]

I've been playing around with making animated .gifs recently and decided to make this one of your characters. I took some liberties with some of the images, but I hope you dig it.

Click the thumbnail~



~Pete

[jjb3k]

Not bad, not bad - although, I must point out that you made Smelson a LOT fatter than he's supposed to be. I designed him as this skinny little guy with virtually no body fat to speak of. I'll put up a better picture of him soon, if you wanted to fix it.

[Pete]

Thanks. That wasn't meant to be fat, just a big diaper. That's the one character I had to really guess at, obviously.

[jjb3k]

Well, just for posterity, here's a full-body picture of Smelson...

img.photobucket.com/albums/v477/JB86/Smelson.png

I wanted to make him look like a pathetic little underdog, so I gave him a really skinny construction. It makes it all the more funny when he finally fights back, I think.

[Cleolanta]

Well, I don't have anything all that intelligent to say, but I do think you've nailed the old-timey cartoon style, as others here have already said. I could easily imagine this as being the cast of a real-life cartoon, and probably WOULD have thought so if I hadn't been told otherwise first.
I'm not sure which character I like best...they're all fun in some way. And I have to say "Yay!" to you for using MSPaint. Hardly anybody respects that program, but I use it all the time and can do some pretty complex stuff with it, too.

Anyway.

...Notorious

[lisalovelace]

look at my daughters work(in signiture) she has been drawing anime since sept of 2005