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TWISTED TALE

To do work “for the exposure” is a commonplace joke, but in a singular case in my life, it worked to my advantage.

I had been recruited to do illustration headers for “The Inbetweener”, the newsletter for the animation group of ASIFA-Hollywood. They were appearing when the club had a showing of Max Fleischer's TALKARTOONS series. I was there. Behind me were a couple of guys, one of whom kept snickering and saying “That's great!! That's great!!” I gave them a sideways glance. OK, OK. It's great, OK.

In the next couple of days, I got a call from Film Roman about an upcoming FELIX THE CAT series. The director/producer, Timothy Bjorklund, had seen my ASIFA drawings, liked my Fleischer affinity and had decided I was right for the show. That was when I began to worry; could he be one of the two guys I glanced back at? Would that cost me? He never mentioned it. Our meeting was successful, and he offered one of two open positions: designer or director. Are you kidding me???

I certainly wasn't rich; I hadn't had any regular income until then. But looking back, I'm observing that I took all my opportunities for granted. The high end assignments, the gallery showings; such things look very special now, but then it wasn't special; it was what I should be doing. In everyone's eyes, including mine, they were nothing special. Back then, one could do all that and still be regarded a failure because there was so much more. I should be R.O. Blechman. I should be Jaime Hernandez. Later, John Krisfalusci and Gary Baseman were what I had to “live up to”. I'm just saying I was in the midst of a creative whirlwind and it didn't register. So to become a cartoon director after being in L.A. a single year I didn't appreciate as anything special.

As usual at these jobs, it was hurry up and wait. All four of us directors spent about two weeks drawing Felix to get acquainted with the character while they were preparing material. Hell, I should complain.

I could tell that the original character was not going to be pure, which is common. The character remains a blank enough slate that he can be forever reincarnated. He is alone; no steady ladyfriend, no home. No canon. Efforts to make Joe Oriolo's TV incarnation his “canon” have never really stuck. The Film Roman crew had utter contempt for those cartoons because they were “limited animation”. Any poor unaware soul who said “Righty-O!” was shouted down. I found those amusing, but they were not part of the picture. Elements from that series were tossed in only under duress because Joe's heir, Don, naturally wanted to see his father's legacy in there somewhere.

“Limited animation”. I mentioned the industry's aversion to it a while back. On this show, Felix could pace only once. No repeats. A dance step was not allowed to be repeated, so it didn't have the necessary impact.

It wouldn't be the original, austere, monochrome silent FELIX either. Timothy Bjorklund had in mind a vision of 1930s animation, but it was more Crumb than Fleischer. He actually used an image from a ZAP cover on the series summation book to describe what was gonna be done; Mr. Natural driving a bulbous car. Felix the Character was almost dwarfed in this world of talking doorknobs and supporting characters. A writer felt that Felix needed to have someone to play off of. The appeal of Felix was that he was The Cat Who Walked By Himself, relying on his own ingenuity and not having to answer to anyone. This might be one element of why the character gave way to Mickey. It could be that Depression audiences preferred to see a character with a home, car, woman and dog to seeing one that scrounged garbage for food. Mickey meant security.

So Felix was no longer a Survivor. In the comic strips, he still wandered, hungry and homeless, but in the animated cartoons, he never faced those dilemmas were played down. Only the first one of the Film Roman segments I directed was food (“EATS”) an issue. And he was never alone. In my latter three he was never without a friend or a pet.

I didn't argue over it, but I felt that all this weighed the character down. I didn't even think the character should utter a word, but this is tv we're talking, and the people involved have a deep seated fear of silence. They are afraid that audiences will turn away without a voice to guide them. The voice director, Susan Blu, was royalty. She was used to giving her stable of players as much to say as possible. (I heard she was responsible for the perennial cries of “WHOOAAA!” as characters plummeted down holes.) She was as passionate about voice acting as we were about being cartoonists. When she went over my storyboard, she had lots of little suggestions of little sighs and murmurs, but, no, no. He was hungry, he was a tramp. I didn't win, because they added his voice making little side thoughts. In still another one, a western, a narrator was inserted: “The Old Pooperoo”, consciously or otherwise, lifted from Crumb.

So our Felix was more like the animated version of Krazy Kat of the 1930s. Felix was a little grouchier, but he was in a magic world instead of being a magical character. Everything in our Felix's world would be rounded. My suggestion of the strict straight lines in a constructivist/Bauhaus style to contrast with the characters was met with near hostility by the producer. In the beginning, he wanted every character to bounce like the BETTY BOOP cartoons, and even a comparative amateur like myself knew that would cause problems on a TV schedule, but they had to find that out.

The show was expensive. Lots of characters means lots of planning and lots of paint areas, and plots with characters on rolling ocean waves were work, time and money. A Noah's Ark? Impossible, but they did it. The actual animation labor was in the hands of our friends overseas, so the planners stateside were distanced from the labor intensity, and felt free to throw as much as possible into the stories in the security that they'd “take care of it over there.” In those days, overseas studios charged by the finished episode, not by the hours or length, so the Americans could demand constant “retakes”...even after the initial versions were inked and photographed...without extra expense. Even so, the costs rose. I heard it was a record budget for a TV cartoon show.

But the gig was as close to perfect than I ever got in animation. It was still the “creator driven” period, so the writers submitted only plot outlines, and we took care of all the rest.

Our method I concocted myself, patterned after the I'd read it, then my co-director and I split up, and each of us concocted a goulash of gags inspired by the summary. Then I took all of it and united them into a storyboard continuity. The process of pinning up the sketches and pitching it to the producer was by then no longer common, but that's the way we did it. At that particular time, I was obsessed with a Van Beuren LITTLE KING entitled ON THE PAN. It will hopefully be forever cursed by its cannibal plotline, but gag after gag after gag, the good and the barely registered. After pitching the western storyboard, the producer asked bemusedly, “You think you can get any more gags in there, Milt?” The storyboards for one of mine hung in a corridor as inspiration to the staff. I was chosen to illustrate and describe animation approaches to the overseas studio executives. The Tyer-type stuff they found a bit difficult (“Do you want us to distort that much??) but when I showed them scenes from A Fleischer cartoon, MARIUTCH, they started nodding. I was getting every sign that of the staff, I was the one that “got” this stuff.

Of course, I look back and have regrets. Nowadays, I would have been harder ass with my assistant director and demand utter loyalty. He tried to undermine me a couple of times. He submitted a new ending behind my back, but mine won out. This was a shortcoming I had as a director; I was too softhearted to demand what I wanted and get it perfectly. Directing a film means directing people, and I lacked the self assurance to demand rather than suggest. Just another thing I wish I had a second chance at, but those days are long over, and the process now bears no resemblance to ours.

The series definitely wasn't perfection, and I see now where my direction wandered, but it will always be my favorite studio work.

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NEGRITUDE

When I paint any skin color, I use a solemn English Ivy Green underpainting, so even Caucasians tend toward an olive skin tone. It's a technique that goes back to the Middle Ages, which is why the skin colors of the Madonna and Jesus tend toward greenish in those ancient, aged paintings. In painting theories, red is the opposite of green, giving the works the lustre of opposites. The solemnity of an almost lifeless green lies under the layer of the life inherent in the skins of browns and yellow ochres (my favorite for Caucasian skin).

Occasionally I express my own blackness in my work. I actually don't think about what color the characters and subjects are. An image is an image; the way I see it in my mind, I do it.

In every branch of the visual arts, black skin is an immediate signal to most people. To different people it comes with different baggage. It always makes us the “other”; every situation is of the “other”. In European writings and paintings, it signals exoticism, in the positive and the negative. Free body and spirit and a dark threat.

So I am aware that when a black skin is drawn, expectations immediately come up for everyone of every color. Eating habits, musical tastes, character traits come with advance warning, and I avoided it in general, just because it gets in the fucking way. I don't like cartoons that are tracts, sledgehammer messaging. I prefer my messaging coated like a delicious candied apple.

My first published comic book series, HUGO, was of the medieval European trappings of which I was then enamored. Was Hugo black? Was his fickle lover, the Princess, white? Her skin was. She was blonde. At the same time, an AfAm woman saw her facial features as Negroid and took me to task for perpetuating the stereotype of the screaming black female. Maybe. Except for an occasional ejaculation like “That's jive!”, an incongruity in a mediaeval setting, I didn't think about it. I was working almost mindlessly, with the casualness of a Golden Age cartoonist meeting a deadline. I will say that I feel some good came out of that.

I created my next series character, MIDNITE, as a polar opposite of the Princess for which I got so much flack. Her blackness was unquestionable; her gleaming, jet black skin, and, inspired by a girlfriend of the time, thicker hips, prominent bum. (A guy visiting my table said, “I know what you're doing. She's built like a sister.” Furthermore, she was a “rebel” fighting against New York's robber barons.

In my sexy series, SLUG 'N' GINGER, Slug, the small rat, is definitely white. This character is patterned after the scowling, visage of Jackson Pollock, in his wife beater undershirt, brattish with entitlement, screaming and slapping the towering black cat Ginger, sans ego, begging for love and approval.

In a NINJA TURTLES story, I had them encountering the klan itself. Not a race situation, per se, but it was a town bent on assassinating a baby with an unusual disease. Like a sweet yam buried deep in the earth, I had AIDS in mind.

Felix the Cat was addressed as “You black imp!!” by a western gunfighter. I had actually lifted that from an old comic when he is chased by a stereotyped black Egyptian palace guard.

My two Zora Neal Hurston comic adaptations and my novelette, THE YOUNG LIFE OF CLR JAMES, gave me the opportunity to use my 1930s inspiration stylings to depict blacks as they might have looked in cartoons of the times if, as a writer said, “the artists weren't making assholes of themselves.”