A few months ago, I made arrangements with Absolute Underground to have my caricature of the Forgotten Rebels’ Mickey De Sadist be featured alongside an interview with him. I wasn’t sure when that issue would be coming out– turns out it was early August (in their 101st issue), and I’m a bit late to the party here.
Regardless… I AM STOKED!! The Rebels are one of my favorite bands, and it’s absolutely insane to have this happen. The magazine is free to download, and you can click here to do so and witness this monumental meeting of the chaotic Canadian minds. The whole issue is about Canadian punk, and features tons of under-appreciated icons of the genre like the Modernettes and Teenage Head if everything else wasn’t enough to sell you on it. Give it a read!
I was watching the TerryToons short “Pastry Panic” on YouTube last night, and there were some incredible freeze frames in it. I was having a blast just going through the cartoon frame-by-frame. This kind of stuff has been especially helpful lately because I’m about to make my fourth-year thesis film cartoon at Sheridan, so seeing all the most effective ways to do the inbetweens have got my creative juices a-flowin’.
My skill with identifying animators by their scenes isn’t as good as I’d like it to be– Rod Scribner is usually the one I’m best at with this, because it’s fairly easy to tell when it’s him based on the way a character’s teeth are drawn alone— but I’m fairly confident that the frames I’m about to show you are Jim Tyer’s handiwork. For those who don’t know of Tyer, he had an incredibly distinct and lively style of animation that was gloriously wacky. Lots of little chaotic touches a more boring person would never think to use in a million years. He’s not credited within the short itself, but I did some digging and according to IMDB, he was in fact an animator on it, so I’m thinking my suspicions are more or less confirmed. (Interesting to see that Carlo Vinci was on the team too! Wonder which parts he did.)
Anyways, without further ado, here are some delightful drawings where Tyer absolutely went to down making this cat move:
Love it! TerryToons were never the outright funniest of that general era’s cartoons, but they always had great, surreal, imaginative and appealing drawings like these. I’m definitely aiming to incorporate some stuff like this into my own cartoon– the trick will be to keep it fairly subtle, so that the inbetweens don’t distract the audience from what’s happening in the short.
Anyways, if you liked that, feel free to enjoy this highlight reel featuring some more Tyer lunacy:
Not sure when the last time I did a self-portrait was, but I felt mine needed an updating. In recent months I’ve gotten a haircut and lost the chub I put on during the quarantine phases of COVID. Who woulda thought that exercising regularly and binge-eating less would make you look/feel better?
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