make mine madness

Excuse the long delays between Posts.. I will try my best to keep it more updated from now on. Funny what happens when you are painting something and then a bunch of ink falls on it. Here I was planning some Rocketo drawing and a bunch of sumi ink spilled over and covered a good part of the page.. well, good things like that cant be ignored! One must be bold and change direction!! So from Rocketo came out the Incredible Hulk! I pushed the ink all over the page and then came at it with some Gamma green. Well the energy must have kept going, because I played around with Spidey and some of his great bad guys. The great thing about those early designs is that one can be so bold, and play around with these wonderful giant shapes, very graphic styling in those early days of comics. Comics for comics sake.

Just looking at that great Spidey cover where he fights Electro got me thinking, of doing my own zany version. I figured from now on its a good experiment to find those old classic cover and paint them in a crazy fun way.

BTW. One of my favorite costume is the old Phantom. I love how graphic he looks, I saw the trailer for the new Phantom television mess of a show, and there is a line where the kid, looks at the suit and says he will not wear that. Funny, how the makers of that show think they are better than the material. You would think they would want to do something different, graphic, bold.. naw... lets give him a black hood thing. What a waste. Anyway back to work. Real men wear purple in the Jungle.

Best to all of you.

Frank.

Are you J.C OF MARS?

John Carter of Mars was one of my all time favorite series of books as a kid. Looking back I can see the crazy racial stuff that Burrough was trying to pull, a similar device to his Tarzan books. But we can ignore that or loop it off as a thing of the past... still, for a hispanic man like myself its still a bit colonialist. JC was a Confederate soldier, lands on a planet of green men and kicks their ass. In that case its not so dissimilar from Avatar, sucker lands on planet and becomes better than the people that have been evolving there for millions of years, but those are topics for long and thoughtful conversations back and forth.

John Carter took my imagination for a ride, out of the inner city New York neighborhood I was living in, threw me on Mars, rode me up and down the Martian plains full of dying martian forests, and introduced me to a legion of Martian lifeforms and cultures that tumbled and rumbled my tiny mind.

So I have great love for the Carter books, and a while ago, while living in California I had heard that the young lads that were responsible for Sky Captain were working on a John Carter film. You can imagine what happens next, I sat around my drawing desk for about a week, putting Rocketo on hold for a while ( The Journey to the Hidden Sea had not been published yet.) and launched myself into John Carter land.

A week later I had over forty pieces of artwork. By some miracle Lisett Torres a very gifted composer had managed to get an interview with me and the Conran brothers. I presented all the artwork and had a great meeting, talking to them about my ideas for the opening sequence of the film, my ideas for the Martian ape, how the Tarks should be able turn and move their bodies and how that would effect their fighting techniques, among many other things. The Conran brothers treated me wonderfully listening and then... I never heard from them again. I am sure that they had another vision in mind, and would have pulled off a nice looking film. The thing about Carter is that everyone sees it in their own unique way.

That was many years ago, and now Pixar is at it.. sadly its in live action.

My idea for the John Carter series was animation based, what we now see Avatar doing so well. I wanted a film that was a mixture of the old John Carter book illustrations of the fifties and sixties and a Max Fleischer, Superman cartoon.

Carter was in a way the first Superman, and at some point I even had the colors of his tunic resemble the Superman colors.

The funny thing about all of this is that John Carter would have been the first animated feature if Bob Clampett had been able to

do his vision, instead animation history drifted into the fairy tale world of talking rats and dancing ducks that has engulfed it for over seventy years now.

So here was this great adventure story ready to m

ake its mark on the animation world again, in a way to bring it back to its roots. An animated tale for adults and kids, that would be full of fun and adventure. Naw.

Which would be a good topic for another giant post, why the animation industry is so insanely backward. Instead of competing with live action, they should be thinking of surpassing it.

Anyway, here are some sketches, done very fast for the presentation, like stated above their were many more done, and as I find them all I will post some up, some I will not, for the simple reasons I found the ideas very creative and used them for Rocketo Journey to the New World.

Whew. If you are all still awake, bless you.

One of the big inspirations for the opening of the film was Jack Kirby... I thought that the cave that Carter runs into with his wounded friend should be an old Martian base, full of strange Martian machinery from way in the past.. John would somehow trip open the machines and be teleported backward to the distant past of Mars..

The small black and white cities sketches are part of a large group that tell a story.. The idea of a Martian city that is grown from out of the sand.. with a giant cave network as its support was fun to play around in. I was taking Burroughs and playing with it.

The Thoats were inspired from looking at the way the American Indians branded their mounts with the fingerprints and designs of each tribe.

Enjoy

Frank.

ROCKETO VIDEO TEST 1

Many, many moons ago when the Earth was young and I was in Animation school it would have taken me hours, maybe days of shooting under my faithful Oxberry Animation camera to get this result. Now with the magic of Imovie one can make a quick little bit like this and have endless hours to play around with it. I do not know which in the long run is better, but I had a blast working on this.

At some point it would be nice to make a short Rocketo story with narration and original music. The music is by Barry Gray of the Thunderbirds fame and its from a film called Journey to the far side of the sun, known as Doppleganger in Europe.

Sadly the final version of the music cuts off a bit at the end, but that will be fixed when the original Rocketo theme replaces it.

Hope all is well with all of you.

My best

Frank.

DANGER WILL ROBINSON! NEED YOUR EMAIL!

Well after ten years, my trusty computer decided it was going to that big round up in the sky.

Just hearing about the new Ipad must have sent my old Mac into panic mode. Sadly it did not give me any warning... ok.. it was making strange animal sounds for a couple of weeks before the big crash, but one minute it was on, the next well the less said would be less better. The main thing is I wound up losing my address book, so for all of those who have not heard from me in a bit, or want to hear from me in the future send me and email, so we can all stay in touch.

frank

Looking forward to putting some more stuff up very soon. Excuse the delay.

The best to all of you!

Email is

rocketocomics@verizon.net

So I was saying...

 Its been so long, I think I forgot how to do this. Lets see... Push a button here, and bang, instant art comes out. Nice. I think I can get to like this computer thing. Excuse the long delay, lots of stuff going on.

 I cant believe some of you are still following this insane blog. Thank you, I really appreciate that. Its nice to come back to the old homestead and see the family is still around.

Now its time to try to get to that magical Rocketo finish line that keeps moving backward every time I get within feet of it. 

 I did these small sketches to just play around and also to put something up besides comic pages. Some of these  small quick sketches point the way to styles that will wind up in the coming books.  

 Here are some cover ideas for Book 1 of the New World. 

   I want to get some strange feel with the Art, is this struggle to get the know and the unknown down at the same time. 

 Again excuse the long delay.

 My best to you all!

 

Still around just being a monkey

Sorry about the long delay between blogs, I will try to keep move it a much faster.
One of the reasons is I am deep in working on Vol 2 The NEW WORLD. Writing, drawing, painting, its all one giant jumble right now, now and then I stop and say, hell I should post this.. but then I would be ruining some of the surprise of reading the actual book for you guys.
So I pick and choose very carefully.
Here are some rough sketches, that give you a sense of my insane storytelling. I basically lay it out in these small thumbnails, usually a couple of versions of the same scene. By doing multiple versions I can pick and choose from the scene which part I can start in and end with. After that stage I do a page layout, that I will post later, so you guys can see how it all comes together on the page. I have block out in white some of the notes I make around the images, only for trying to keep the story fresh for you guys, when you read it.
I threw in some of the color work that is going along, not yet all finished, lines have to be added here and there, colors have to be a bit corrected, but right now I am moving on, I will do all the corrections in one or two days, after the book is all painted, that way I can hopefully catch everything with a fresh eye.
Again sorry about the delay.
Best to you all!
Frank.

EXPLORING THE NEW WORLD IN MY NOGGING

Yeah I know, more painting stuff.. more ideas, more thinking.

 Pushing again.. 

 Yep, it takes a while for me to put things down.. I slow down then, move through it quick. There was a time when people would wait until books would come out, or films, or novels, the audience, the fans gave time for creators to think about things before they knocked stuff out. 

 I like to explore all the avenues, for me this is the way I make the world come alive, testing and testing, most important for me, is learning. What do I get out of it? A better understanding of my craft and something new has been learned along the way. It would be easy for me to knock out the next book in the same style as before, no worries and everyone is happy.

What have I learned from that? What do I take with me?  

 So I paint and learn, and push that envelope.. I am not at Warner Bros. anymore. 

Best to all.

F

SOME ROCKETO CONCEPTS

Sorry about not putting up some stuff in a while, things just got a bit wild. On one end the NEW WORLD pages are coming off a good nice good clip, although on the other hand,.. on the other hand, I am thinking of painting this sucker by hand. Between pages, I like to get some concept work done, small little things, that make me think ahead visually to were I am going to go. This time, during a break, those concept sketches started to really point the way into a new direction color wise. There are things that a brush can do, that computers just can't get to yet. Its a nice thought actually, that a thousand year old invention some hair and a stick can still kick the crap out of the digital age. Wet meets dry. Opaque meets transparent. The brush opens up at the last minute. Something happens that one could never plan.
Things happen on that painted page, that is magic to me. So here is a vote, how many of you would like to see a painted version of Rocketo?
I started with some concept work for climax of one of the books.
Trying to get a feel for how our technology would look in the future, a future that has had to reinvent itself along a different philosophy, it would be closer to magic, their machines would be more like idols. One of the bad guys, has reached a machine that is part living organism, part dimensional gateway.

Here are some concepts for Lucerne, the land that rules the world. My original thinking was to have a city that was so lovely, so beautiful to look at that it would dazzle the eyes. The buildings would resemble giant trees, acorns, floating gardens, a sort of fake natural world,
to make its citizens happy and proud, so they can ignore the horror that Lucerne does around the planet. That big green Acorn is the King's palace, a super large city in its own right.
Back to the drawing board.

Best to all of you.
Frank.

NEW WORLD SWAMP JOURNEY.

 Here are some panels from some of the pages that are being worked on.

 The color is rough and tumble and just to see if everything is reading at this point. When I color the work I like to do it all at once so I can set up a rhythm for the colors, based on emotion, design, and mood, but every once in a while, a panel sticks out when the full page is scanned, and I cant wait to see what a little color will do to it. When I start on the next book, Rocketo Journey to the Broken Moon I would like to paint the entire thing by hand. Right now time is running, and its best to tackle the thing with a bit of computer help.  Although I plan to add some "real" paintings to the covers and to last pages of Journey to the New World, this would be a nice way to end each cliffhanger.

 It's cloudy, windy and looks like rain.. and this is the daily weather cast for lovely grey scaled NYC.

Frank.

Best to all today.

Frank.

NEW WORLD DOUBLE PAGE SPREAD.

I thought I would show of the steps and the thinking that went into working out a Rocketo page.
In this case, it was going to be a nice long panel, maybe, taking up half the page. The idea was simple enough Rocketo and Spiro leave their ship to go exploring in the new world. The thumbnails are really small, and I group them in one page, originally they are on two separate papers and they are both so small that if I scanned the entire pages, it would be hard to spot them.
So out comes the Bristol paper. Now normally if this were a painting I would use an Illustration board, but when working on a comic, I try to keep the Illustration board work down to just the covers. I sketched out the figures and once a couple of corrections were done, I started the inking on part of them, just so I could remember certain details, that would tell me more about the flow of the action.


keep it flowing now. The sky tones are put in as quick as possible, so I can control how much white of the paper is going to show through, that way my values will be a bit more controlled in the end. Another reason is, just to get the ball rolling... we all have this fear of ruining the picture, I like to ruin it as fast as possible. From this point on I better work at fixing the blasted thing.

The values of the car are thrown in, big thinking at this point. The textures of the car and some of the forms that I like to bring out are played with in very fast strokes.


Once some of the values of the car are worked up, I go back into the characters at this point about twenty minutes or so has gone by. I use a hairdryer to dry the paint even quicker, yep, the pages warp a bit, but since I want to scan these, it's not a big deal, I can always flatten it later.
This is were it slows down a bit. The characters shapes are blocked in, and some back and forth happens between car and characters and background, everything starts to erupt fast at this point. I pretty much work this sucker up to the finish state.
Now, remember the thumbnail, it shows a big ship at the end of it, well I threw out that idea and wanted to add something a bit more open, to give the feeling of a big vista. This story is called the NEW WORLD, not the New ship. So now the panel upgrades to a nice double page spread, that took me by surprise.



Here is the rest of the background, same process, big strokes and quick shapes. In fact the background takes even less time, because it's nice and loose and should not have fine details to it. There is still foreground work to be done so I tackle that and soon it's pretty much done. It's back and forth and sideways, going back from dark to light and light to dark.



Here are the two black plates for the pages, more or less at a ready point for the next steps it will take to finish it. Basically it's not finished until the lettering gets put in, and the color is final, the borders are defined.. that is when its ready to send out, but at this stage its fun to see where it can still go.


A very rough color, shows me how the values and textures will look with some color on top.

Best to all.
Frank.