Summer’s almost gone.
WOW! What happened to the
month of July? Rainy rainy
rainy. And its my favorite
month especially becoz its
my birthday on the 28th.
And now its August and sum-
mer is almost gone. And I
have been waitin’ for this
glorious season since the
3rd of November.Man. One
more year.Of waiting.
The 11th issue of the Blaz-ing Squids is, well, blazing!We hope you like the con-tent ang give us your feedback.Check out also the sister comics magazine Octopulp, with a rare di-versity of inter-esting sequential art. The Squids and the Pulps are also on the Face-books. Send your drawings and feed-back [email protected]
- Igor
VORWORT
BLAZING SQUI
DS ARE
Laura Büch
ert Schjød
t, Steffen
Hansson,
Jim Smith
Matt Trave
rs, Sarah
Giacomina,
Mano Kapa
zoglu,
nas Mølgaa
rd Jensen,
Morten Jæ
ger, Anne
Over
Igor Noron
ha and Chr
istyan Lun
dblad.
Edited by
Christyan
Lundblad a
nd Igor No
Supported
by the Ope
n Workshop
.
More info:_
_blazingsdquids.
blogspot.com
_animwork.dk
_facebook.com/bl
azingsquids
No way! I am not having it.
Personaly I am going to save
up some money and go on va-
cation in the fall. Takin’
some revenge.
The band and I, the Can-
non Birds went to France to
pick up some hot weather.
The heat was wonderful and
the food was glorious and
the hospitality was memo-
rable. The grass was dry
as a bone though. I prefer
Danish grass.And the girls
were .....somewhere else.
So now I am still lookin’
for them. I think it was
Phil
Collins
who
sang:
“Dont look for love, dont
look for love, coz love
will look for you”.
And then there were this
other
song
saying:
“you
can’t hurry love, no, you
just gotta wait.” Those are
the words I try to live by.
It keeps me from getting
frustrated about it.
- CHRISTYAN
h,
Jo-
rgård,
oronha.
oms
Anne Overgård_TDA
Anne Overgård_TDA
Morten Jæger_OW11
Christyan _ KAU03, OW
Steffen Hansson_KAU07
OctopulpMagazine
A new sister magazine has emerged from the original Blazing Squids concept...
Available for
download and
in print.
More info at
- Lars Kram(Arch Enemy)
- Igor Noronha (Light Apprentice)
- Martin B. Peders-
en (Necrosis)- Tom Kristensen (Dead Boy)
and more!
Issue 1
Issue 2
Issue 3 coming soon!
octopulp.dk
Featuring
Issue 2
Laura BüchertSchjødt_KAU05
Jonas Mølgaard Jensen_KAU07
Anonymous
Pretty 90’s, huh?
Christyan_KAU03, OW
On his fi rst
time in Vi-
borg, Jim es
capes from
the concrete
jungle to
fi nd a quiet place
to
play his guitar
and
teach young,
talented
students.In
this inter-
view, Jim te
lls us a bit
about his ca
rreer.
A chat
with
Co-creat
or of th
e
Ren a
nd Stimp
y show
Jim Smit
h
How did
Ren and
Stimpy c
ome
to life?
Did Nic
kelodeon
ask
you to d
o a TV s
how or w
as it
you guys
who tri
ed to se
ll the
idea to
them?
It is ve
ry rare
tha they
come to
you.
In arou
nd
1991,
Nickelod
eon had
a program
where youn
g
cartooni
sts woul
d pitch
ideas to
them an
d if the
people
in char
ge like
d
it, they
’d make
a pi-
lot out
of them.
Among
them th
ere were
Doug,
Rugrats
and some
other
shows t
hat were
made
into pilo
ts and
if
they li
ked the
pilot
they’d m
ake the
whole
series.
How do you
feel abou
t the
big broa
dcasters
taking
control
of your
charac-
ters whe
never yo
u sell
a TV sho
w? >>>>
Was it an epicbudget?Our budget was small-er than the ones for some reason. They said “we’re not crazy about your idea but it might be funny” and they gave more money to the Doug crew and the Rugrats crew, but by the time we finished it had gone up 300 thousand dollars per half an hour or something. But it was still lower
With Ren and Stimpy,
the deal was
that we
would sell t
he show
to Nickelodeon
in
exchange to having
something we wrote
and created on TV.
That’s pretty
much
the standa
rd deal
with broadc
asters.
It’s kind of
a shitty
deal. We don
’t like it
but we will
take it –
we spent yea
rs trying
to sell our i
dea and we
finally found
someone
that would b
uy it.
than other sta
ndards,
like Warner
Bros. or
Disney. The new Ren
and Stimpy w
ere real-
ly low budge
ts, they
were made fo
r Spike/
TNN, less ce
nsorship.
How much censors
hip
would there be in the
old episodes?
We weren’t d
oing animat-
ic in those
days, there
were no comput
ers. We
would submit
our story
outlines and
they would
approve that
or not, wit
h
a lot of reservations
,
because our ideas
were
kind of crazy.
They’d
say, “Let’s see how it looks on the storyboards”. Most of the stuff was so weird they didn’t know what to think. But when they saw the storyboards they had a little more of an idea. I don’t know if you remember Mr. Horse and his walrus, or RubberNi-ple Salesman. These were second season – on first season they were a little more reserved. Sometimes when they saw the finished cartoon they were like “Oh my God, that’s what they meant?” Storyboard is one thing, a finished cartoon is another… But also, on the other hand, at the
same time they’d see
stuff that they d
idn’t
understand and the
y’d go
“Ok, we wanted to
censor
that, but now that
we see
what you meant.” C
ensor-
ship is like a min
efield.
There’s things you know
you can’t do, lik
e nudi-
ty, kill character
s… they
think we’re trying
to sub-
vert or corrupt k
ids, but
we are only trying
to enter-
tain them.
How about the disgusting
close-ups – where doe
s that
idea come from? We can
see it
echoing in shows like
Sponge
Bob.It was th
ere on Sponge Bob
be-
cause a lot of peopl
e that worked
on that show also
worked on Ren
and Stimpy – story
board people,
designers, etc. Bu
t the idea of
the “gross close-u
p” started on
Ren & Stimpy. We got
the idea from
Mad Magazine from
the 50s, and oc-
casionally you woul
d see on a Loon-
ey Tunes of Bugs B
unny cartoon a
close-up painting
of something that
would me different
ly rendered than
the rest, not necessarily gross.
When Bugs Bunny wo
uld read something
and the camera clo
sed in, you’d see
there was a thumb
but it be a human
thumb, not a Bugs
Bunny thumb. That
was no explanation
for that - that wa
s
the gag. Kids like
gross stuff, fart
jokes are funny ev
en when you are ol
d.
Everybody loves a
fart.
Can you tell us a bit
about you work in
the show as co-directo
r?
I co-directed the
episode they go to
the
Galapagos Islands (U
ntamed
World), in which the
y make
a documentary Discov-
ery Channel-style
and see
that all the animal
s look
like them; and Spac
e Mad-
ness was my concept
. Star
Trek was a huge infl
uence
on that one – Captai
n Kirk
got crazy in one e
pisode
and there was the evil
Kirk and good Kirk…
What about your relation
-
ship with John K., whe
n
did it start?
It was in 1986, maki
ng the
Rolling Stone’s
Harlem
Shuffle music vide
o (di-
rected by Ralph Ba
kshi).
I designed some
backgrounds and did
some
layouts. I was worki
ng at
Marvel at the time,
doing
superhero kinda stu
ff. A
friend of mine from
Texas
introduced me to Joh
n, I
showed him my port
folio
and he liked my st
uff,
we became friends
fast
and worked together
from
then on. The whole
time
we were drawing ideas
trying to sell.
What is your relation-
ship with comic books?
Because I see that in
your sketchbook you
did some Chestaclese
comics already…
I got into comic boo
ks
back in
high school
in the
60’s and I wante
d to draw
comics really ba
d. I used
to buy them reli
giously
every month and copied
them. As years w
ent by,
I lost interest i
n them.
I became a music
ian for
most of the 70’s,
trave-
ling around. Rig
ht be-
fore I met John,
Heavy
Metal came to t
he US,
Star Wars came out,
Fantasia came ba
ck to
the theaters and
that
just killed me,
it was
perfect for me.
That
was music and draw-
ings together. But
later on we did
some
comic books at Sp
umco
published by Mar
vel.
How did you control the designs on Ren and Stimpy? Theyir bodies distort a lot from scene to scene.The process was story out-line to storyboard to lay-out, and the layout artist would take the storyboard and make a finished design of the character. In the old days, they’d just put the character on the background without any pose, just to show where he stood. Warner Bros., Disney, everyone did it like that. And somewhere in the 70’s, because the sched-ules were so tight, layout be-came almost like animation, with all the key poses of the characters. And then the ani-mator would take these poses. Mighty Mouse was done that way.How big a team were you when in production?There were five of us. We start-ed the company and we did the pilot episode. We were 5 in LA and when it became a series a lot of the keys were sent to Vancou-ver, Canada. Bob Jaques, a friend of ours from the Mighty Mouse and Harlem Shuffle times, had a com-pany there, and he did the most important scenes. Both Bill Wray and Scott Wills (background art-ists) worked from LA. By the end of Ren and Stimpy, the studio grew to about 50 people.What do you think about the tech-nological changes in the animation industry?In the old days, there was no inter-net. The fact that you can >>
Google somethin
g and find
reference instantl
y is a
huge thing. You
can draw on
a Cintiq, you do
n’t have to
go to a Xerox ma
chine any-
more… even thoug
h I loved
the machine beca
use I got
used to it. To m
e that was
hi-tech. Everythi
ng was
done in cells. They are
very hard to ha
ndle, you
can’t leave fingerprints
on them, gotta s
tore them
on the shelves a
nd stuff.
At around 1992,
when >>
everything start
ed to be
done on computer
, it put
a lot of people outta
work. Progress is part
of life, you kno
w. When
TV came in, radi
o died.
When sound came
into the
movies, a lot of
people
lost their jobs
includ-
ing a lot
of movie stars, because their voices were not good enough. If you don’t believe in evolution, just look at the entertainment business history.Do you have any advice for young artists?It seems that the young artists are taking ad-vantage of technology. I would tell them the same as Ralph Bakshi: just do your film. Just keep mak-ing films. Even if they are not great, you get better. You have all this power now at your hands, you can do anything. One person can do a whole film by him/herself. So imagine what three or four people together can do.
ISSN: 1904-6561