Welcome To Eltingville Production Art/BG: Ironjaw

I'm going through the remaining character designs I did for the Adult Swim Eltingville Club pilot. 

I haven't looked at this stuff in some time. I have two binders filled with photocopies of the pencil designs I did and the inked versions done by artist staffers at the Network. With the recent interest online regarding the pilot and the comic I'm also going to root around for the original storyboards done by Stephen DeStefano and start scanning them to post here. I own two acts from the pilot, I gave Stephen the third. Since the storyboards came out of my budget -- on the assumption I'd be doing the boards myself -- I own the physical work. I did too much on the pilot as it was, I knew beforehand my doing the storyboard was a bad idea. I'd treat it like a comic book and start noodling with the art and adding unnecessary details. I helped Stephen a little bit by cleaning up and solidifying some parts of the board, and Stephen used some of my character and set designs as board panels. I could never be a serious storyboard artist, my brain doesn't work well when it comes to disposable art. Boards need to do a job and don't need to be beautiful pieces of original art. Some board artists will slap a drawing done on a post-it note down on the board for a correction. They can get messy and sketchy and as long as they tell the story well and add some oomph t the script, that's all good. I would sit there whiting out stray lines or something crazy like the murderer in the Ray Bradbury story that keeps wiping down an entire house in case he missed a fingerprint. 

One of the things I did do (against my better judgement, perhaps) was to provide a voice for a character in the pilot. Actually, I did two voices, maybe another (each actor could do three separate, distinct character voices only because of some rule I can't remember, actor's union or something like that). The character I did a voice for was Ironjaw, the spitting and spraying employee at Joe's comic shop with the big pants. He uses the extra space for shoplifting from Joe and holding his lunch and snacks and odds and ends that he almost magically produces when someone is in need of an item like a corkscrew or a kazoo. At least, he would have if the show went to series.

Ironjaw was based on a person who worked at Jim Hanley's Universe for a short time, a customer who got hired when the store was in the Staten island Mall for a (very busy) year. It didn't work out well, he was constantly bewildered and forgetful. He did not shoplift, however, I don't want to malign the guy as a criminal . But he did have a voice that gave me the idea to have Ironjaw be "filled with the juices of life" (a line a former roommate and friend busted out with one day after spraying people with spit while talking -- it stayed with me for years and I was happy to finally get to use it). The reason I did Ironjaw's voice was because I knew his voice and thought it would be easier to try to do it myself than to explain it to someone. I was not looking to become a voice actor, and he only had a few lines so I thought why the hell not. As it was, I was even more scared and nervous about doing it than I thought I would be, so I made sure I recorded last after the four actors who voiced the club members left. I turned away from everyone in the studio, and to up the spray sound I popped a Super Lemon candy and had a cup of water. I also did the voice of the Major Violence talking alarm clock and I think I did another one. The most fun I had was taking part in the "ECW" chant, which was easy because a bunch of people were with me. 

Anyway, there will be some more Eltingville Club content in the future. 

I'm also going through the material for the next World's Funnest retrospective, which will be the animated Super Friends "universe", drawn by Jay Stephens doing a terrific Alex Toth impression. There's a bit of a story behind how we got Jay involved, because the Toth artist was the hardest one to find. This was the only artist that we got for the project because of a chance meeting. 

Otherwise, hope everyone's having as decent a Halloween season as possibly considering the state of things. Horror is a release from the terrors of the real world. Unreal. 

More later soon.