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THE HISTORY OF WROBBERT CARTOONS
I love history. It's full of so many characters.
I have read that for some creators who deal with characters those
characters can be very real. So much so that stories can sometimes
seemingly write themselves (to a degree). Stories literally can unfold
on their own and in my case it's not uncommon for me to just be
sitting there during moments like these with a big silly grin on my face.
I'm glad my wife understands.
Though cartooning has always been fun I was never quite happy with
the results. I felt I never had a "winner". So I kept going back to the
old drawing board. Typical comic strip story. Nothing profound, really.
Finally I cut my losses and half heartedly admitted defeat. No big deal,
I just felt I wasn't one of the big boys. Average wasn't good enough
for me. So I started experimenting with animation again. But there
was a problem...
...my characters wouldn't leave me alone. Constantly popping in and
out of my head. Particularly Totso Mugraskinbird. The bald-headed kid
at the top of this essay and at the left of this paragraph. He's the
unofficial main character and my constant companion. I've always
thought he looks like a cross between Charlie Brown and a Koala
Bear. But that's just me.
At any rate, several years later I started thinking about comic strips
again so I took stock of everything I'd done to that point...which was
all a non-winner. To say the least. I felt there had to be a way to
rework all the characters and such I'd worked on into something
enjoyable. If this was the last hurrah I wanted to make something
halfway decent.
I got tired of trying to come up with a clever premise or something
that's easily recognized that worked so I decided to think the opposite
and get rid of any "premise" altogether. One thought I had was "What
part of comic strips that I see a lot do I hate?" and what came to mind
was the part of certain strips where the characters are aware that
they are cartoons and know that they are in a strip. I don't know why
I felt this way, but I did. So I set out to create a strip around this "self
aware" idea.
From there I started having this feeling that all of my characters had a
very recognizable world in my head. Everyone had a place and a role
to play. And it was a big place. Everyone had room to roam, to grow or
to change. It was really flexible and I could go anywhere with any of it.
Which brings me to Monsters, Inc.
Monsters, Inc.?
yes, Monsters.Inc.
Most of us have our influences and inspirations and Monsters, Inc. is
one of the biggest for me. I saw that movie three times in the theatre
when it came out and my granddaughter likes watching it with me now
on DVD. It was a huge factor in me continuing what I started with
animation and want to leave comic strips behind. It wasn't working
anyway.
At this point I knew that my characters weren't going to leave me
alone and it slowly dawned on me after seeing Monsters, Inc. that the
characters in the movie were living a lot like my characters. On their
own. All of a sudden my characters were holding meetings of their
own, having writing sessions to help me out and producing their own
yearly awards show amongst many other things and I was enjoying
the ride. They also tease me about my cartooning abilities which made
me laugh because they were right.
Their world is vast and wide open. There's other sections of wrobbert
cartoons like Monsters, microscopic characters, abstractions and much
more that I haven't even seen yet.I'm having a blast looking for things
and bringing them to your attention.
So where does wrobbert cartoons stand now?
I've thought about treating it like they're a corporation (wrobbert
cartoons, Inc.) but that doesn't seem quite right. Another possibility is
having all this be in Totso's head instead of mine. Oh, well. I'll just
keep it the way it is, for now. It's making me laugh and if it makes me
laugh chances are it'll make someone else laugh.
For now I'll just sit back and watch them and lay down some black
lines to show you where they are and what they're doing. My
characters have never made me laugh out loud until now. I guess
they all had to gang up on me for that to happen.
I hope you get a laugh, too.
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