Amazing Video Interview Collection

Courtesy of Mark Evanier, here is a link to a page of rare video interviews with animation personnel, many of whom were not usually the focus of attention.  Subjects include Willie Ito, Milt Gray, Larry Harmon, Irv Spence, Bill Berg, Norm Blackburn, Alex Lovy, Lew Keller, Bill Hurtz, Philo Barnhart, Leo Salkin, Ward Kimball, Carl Urbano, Hicks Lokey, Al Bertino, Rudy Larriva, Grim Natwick, Pete Alvarado, Tom Ray, Owen Fitzgerald, Lloyd Vaughn, Lillian Astor and Bob Carlson.

Evanier has some background about Paul Maher, the person responsible for the interviews, here.

Hitting Deadlines

Mark Evanier, who has written for many animated TV series as well as writing for comics, has posted some advice to a comics writer friend of his. An excerpt:

There are also times when they can't [give you extra time]...or when to give you that two weeks means taking it away from your collaborators; i.e., the artist is going to have to draw the comic in three weeks instead of the five he expected to have.

You may also have harmed his income. He expected to have that script next Tuesday. He planned his life and maybe turned down other work so he could start drawing your script then, plus he counted on being paid for it by the time his next mortgage payment is due. But because of you, he has nothing to draw next week and no way to make money on the days he cleared to draw your script...and he may have to turn down the assignment he was going to do after he finished your script because he's now not going to be done with it when he expected to be. Ask anyone who's worked in comics for a few years and they'll gladly unload a tirade of anecdotes about how someone else's lateness screwed up their lives and maybe even prevented them from doing their best work.

The above advice, as I said, is aimed at a writer for the comics market, but it is relevant to animation artists. Company-produced comics and company-produced animation are both pipelines. If you are an artist in working in either, there is somebody ahead of you and somebody following you in the pipeline. If somebody ahead of you is late, you've got less time to do your job; if you're late, somebody after you has less time. No matter what the length of the schedule, it's a standard complaint that you wish you had more time.

Two things flow from hitting deadlines: payment and return business. Companies don't get paid the full price of a job until it delivers and if it delivers late, a late payment can jeopardize a company's existence. A company that delivers late is likely to lose a client. A company that consistently delivers late is a doomed company.

No company will risk its existence on an employee who misses deadlines. Whether a project is a TV series, feature film or videogame, it's likely the budget is in the millions of dollars. No artist is more valuable than the company's existence or reputation, so artists who can't hit deadlines are artists who will spend more time unemployed.

Yes, the people setting up the schedules or passing judgment on work are often ignorant. They create impossible schedules or ask for changes that will take enormous amounts of time. It's the nature of the business and everyone has experienced it. It is better to avoid these projects and people rather than commit to them. Experience helps to read the situation, but things sometimes take a turn for the worse even if the project looked to be well organized at the start.

As Evanier says,

I tell beginning writers, "Never get a reputation for unreliability. You will never lose it," which is an exaggeration but only a slight one. What you need to do now is cultivate the opposite rep and maybe, just maybe, the new one will trump the old one. If not...well, you just may have to look for another career.

Kirby, King of Comics

Mark Evanier's biography of Jack Kirby, entitled Kirby, King of Comics, has been published by Abrams. The book is a retrospective of Kirby's career as an artist, starting with boyhood drawings and covering his lengthy career in the comic book industry. Evanier's text is a biography of Kirby.

I like this book a lot and anyone who loves Kirby's work won't need my recommendation to buy it. However, while Evanier's text does a good job of delineating Kirby's background, personality and work ethic, and while Evanier's love for Kirby as a person and a subject comes through, it doesn't begin to do justice to Kirby as an artist. Evanier has stated in an interview that, "I'm very happy that it came out from a very prestigious art book publisher. They're the same people who publish Picasso's work -- and I think that Jack deserves to be on the same shelf as Picasso." As much as I love Kirby, I don't know if I would agree with that. One thing I know, however, is that a book on Picasso would examine his artistic innovations and his place in the larger art world. This book doesn't do that for Kirby.

You can't write about D.W. Griffith at Biograph without talking about how his use of the camera and editing changed the way that movies communicated to an audience. Similarly, Kirby's dynamic figures, his tilted compositions and his page designs had a huge impact on how stories were told in early comic books. Kirby's treatment of the figure continued to evolve over the course of his career and surely the representation of the human figure is a topic of importance in the art world.

There are also sociological aspects to Kirby that are ignored. One of the most curious sides of Kirby's career is that he and partner Joe Simon created the genre of romance comics. I would be hard pressed to name a comic book artist who I think is less suited to romance, yet the books were immensely successful in the late 1940s. Gil Kane once remarked that Kirby's repressed anger showed up in his superhero costumes, which were covered with straps, buckles, and other types of restraints. Kirby's love comics are full of huge, operatic emotions and fit the zeitgeist of the time that produced film noir. I doubt they would have succeeded in any other time period. By the time the domesticated '50s rolled around, romance comics had degenerated into tearful women pining for Mr. Right, something alien to Kirby's sensibility.

Evanier's status as a comics professional is both a blessing and a curse for him as an author. It provided him with first-hand knowledge of Kirby and his contemporaries and access to many people who contributed Kirby artwork for the book. However, his life-long exposure to Kirby blinds him to the aspects of Kirby's drawing that someone new to Kirby would struggle to understand.

Furthermore, Evanier's friendship and professional relationship with Stan Lee restricts him to acknowledging Kirby's problems with Lee but he refuses to take sides. Lee is an immensely charming person with media smarts, but the fact remains that Lee's two most important collaborators, Kirby and Steve Ditko, both broke with him and that Lee became wealthy based on those collaborations while his collaborators did not. Instead, they had to fight for acknowledgment. That does not speak well for Lee, even if Evanier refuses to criticize him.

Mark Evanier is working on a more detailed Kirby biography that won't appear for several years. When that book is published, I will buy it and can already predict that I will enjoy it. Jack Kirby is fortunate to have a champion in Mark Evanier and would have been thrilled to see this book. However, Kirby needs other champions. While the specifics of Kirby's life are important, it's his art that is his main claim on our imaginations. Kirby's qualities as a draftsman and designer are too important to ignore. While anyone writing about Kirby is most likely affected by nostalgia for the man or his work, I believe that Kirby needs an unemotional re-evaluation. There's more to say about Kirby's art than is in the text of this book.