World's Funnest: Super-Friends Sequence w/Art by Jay Stephens Pt 1 (Pg 37-39)

After a prolonged delay, here's the latest installment of the ongoing WORLD'S FUNNEST retrospective. This time we're looking at the Super Friends/Hanna-Barbera segment, illustrated by Jay Stephens, colored by Lee Loughridge and lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

This section of the story was probably the most difficult as far as 'casting” an artist went. We needed someone who could pull off a solid Alex Toth impersonation – since Toth designed all the DC characters for the cartoon series – or at least work in a style that seemed appropriate enough.

Toth was still alive at the time World's Funnest was in production, but it was inconceivable that we could get him on board, let alone even approach the notoriously difficult artist from a distance. I believe he was retired or semi-retired from comics, if nothing else, he was considered unapproachable by anyone outside of a few industry folks. Then-DC art director and artist Mark Chiarello was apparently one of those people, but editor Joey Cavalieri and I knew it was pure goddamned folly to even dream of Alex Toth participating. I half-jokingly tried to get Joey to write him just to possibly get one of his infamously venomous postcard replies.

At one point we talked about approaching Chiarello to do the segment, but I don't remember if we ever went through with it. We asked a few people, my memory doesn't recall names right now, but what became clear to us was that the people who could “do” an Alex Toth impersonation didn't want to offend him. And everyone felt he would be offended. Chiarello might have been the one who explained it to us that way. The other reason people didn't want to do it was that Toth was hard act to follow/emulate, even if it was “only” the “simple” Hanna-Barbera designs.

Anyway, we had a hell of a time finding an artist. The segment sat without a name attached for some time.

The way we found Jay Stephens is a story. Two stories, maybe, but they connect. Bear with me.

It starts with Sarah and I being nominated for an Annie Award in 1999. We were nominated in the “Outstanding Achievement for Writing in an Animated Television Production” category, for the Space Ghost Coast to Coast episode “Lawsuit”. The story involved Space Ghost's former kid sidekicks from the original Hanna-Barbera series, Jan and Jace, suing him for abuse, child endangerment, back pay and sundry other things. Their lawyer is Dr. Nightmare, Attorney At Law, another old H-B villain. The script has several other Hanna-Barbera and animation jokes in it. It's probably our best Space Ghost script. Even so, it was absolutely unreal for it to be nominated for an Annie. I knew about the award because I was an animation nerd since childhood – I had a subscription to Mike Barrier's fanzine Funnyworld (”The World of Film Animation and Comic Art”) when I was thirteen (and hoped to grow up to be an animator). I thought you had to be a member of some organization to be nominated, so I never expected to find myself in a position to possibly win an Annie. And winning an Annie was something I desperately wanted. I'm not ashamed to admit it. There were two reasons for this, one, I thought it might boost our animation careers. The second, and more trenchant reason, was that I coveted the Annie Award itself, which is based on a zoetrope. I wanted one like you wouldn't believe.

However, there was no way in hell I'd ever place one on my mantel. Even if I had a mantel. Why? Because we were up against The Simpsons. And another better-known, more well-regarded and probably much funnier show script. I think all the other nominees would have beaten us, we were a dinky show and not much of an “animated” animated show. If that mattered. But from the start, we knew we were doomed, and lucky to have been nominated (this situation was repeated when I was nominated for a National Cartoonist's Society award, from not being a member and assuming that exempted me to knowing I was never going to win because I was up against Amanda Conner, and we were both up against Bernie Wrightson).

Even though Sarah and I knew we didn't have a chance, it would have been nice to have been able to attend the awards ceremony in Los Angeles. But it was too much to do out of pocket for a lark, and this was also during the time when my fear of flying wouldn't allow me to step on a plane. I was disappointed, but we knew that there was no way we could attend the Annies.

At least, I assumed we weren't going.

CUT TO: Sarah and Evan's bedroom, some time later. Early morning. Sarah is waking Evan up. She's holding a glass of water and one of his anti-anxiety pills.

Offering Evan the pill, Sarah says, “Take this.”

Evan gets scared, thinking something terrible had happened.

Sarah says, “Everything's okay. Just take this”.

Evan takes the pill, drinks some water, swallows the pill.

Then she says, “We're going to Los Angeles for the Annie Awards.”

Evan stares at her, bewildered. “Wait – what? What? But we don't have tickets!”

“Yes, we do. Keith set everything up, the Network's paid for it.”

“But – we aren't packed!”

“Yes we are, I packed last night.”

“But – we don't have a ride to the airport!”

“Paul will be here in about fifteen minutes, come on”

“Where are we going to stay?”

“We're staying with David and Maria. Now get up!”

END SCENE

Some time later we were on a flight to Los Angeles. Without weeks of built-up anxiety, and the help of the medication, I handled the flight very well. Behind my back, our producer Keith Crofford and Sarah had worked everything out. It was a delightful way to be kidnapped.

We had a nice weekend in Los Angeles. We dropped our things off with the Laphams, then meet up with Keith for the awards. At the ceremony we ran into Glen Murakami, who we knew from working on Superman and was also nominated for an Annie (and, coincidentally, ends up working on World's Funnest. More on that in another post). And then we ran into Jay Stephens! I love Jay and I love Jay's work. Back in the day I was the first person to buy original art from him, the first Nod page from his first comic, SIN. Jay had been nominated in the category of “Outstanding Achievement in Production Design” for one of his Jetcat cartoons. We got to catching up, and talked about how we couldn't believe we were all there, how crazy it was to be nominated, how we were going to lose, etc.

The ceremony itself was exciting and terrifying. I was nervous as hell. When they announced our names there was a nice round of applause and a few whistles, which was like a shot of adrenaline. Then they showed a terrible clip from “Lawsuit” and nobody laughed (it was a scene with a lot of arguing cross-talk, a really weird pick to show off the script). This was like being kicked in the groin. Everyone laughed at The Simpsons clip, including me, Sarah and Keith. It was a great clip. The Simpsons won, of course. Glen Murakami won, as well, which was very cool.

Afterward, Keith, Sarah and I had an enjoyable losers dinner with Jay and his agent (Jay also lost, we hugged one another and fake-cried). At one point I was telling Jay about World's Funnest, and I mentioned we were stuck for someone to do the Super-Friends stuff. Jay's eyes light up. As it turned out, he'd been studying Toth's Hanna-Barbera style, drawing a series of his own superhero character designs as practice. At the end of the night we shake hands and he's going to send me copies of his Toth studies.

When I got them, they were perfect. Joey agreed. We had our “Toth”. I had to be tricked into flying to Los Angeles to find him, and lose an award, but it worked out terrifically for the project. I love Jay's pages, his designs for the Toth-like imps and the gag he added with Aquaman's hair.

Jay is currently back in comics in a big way, if you haven't seen his award-winning series Dwellings, do yourself a favor and check it out. He studied Harvey Comics and put them to work as a vehicle for adult horror stories. Creepy and gorgeous cartooning.

Okay, that's a longer than usual backstory for a WF retrospective, so I'm going to post the Super-Friends script pages and the World's Funnest segment links in a follow-up post.

Whew! This is why it took a while for me get around to this section of the comic.

Back in a Flash, with the rest of the Super-Friends stuff.