YES! YOU CAN HAVE A CAREER IN ANIMATION

Almost from the beginning, I thought an animated Grease Monkey TV show would be a natural. It’s in the nature of most comic book creators to think this way, since the two mediums are more closely related than any other forms of pop culture (nowhere more so than in Japan). In fact, comics tend to reach their full potential when you imagine them as moving pictures and then stop the film in your head to choose exactly the right frames to tell your story. Then, of course, it’s incumbent upon you to explore the benefits of the printed page and do what movies cannot, but that’s another story.

I didn’t know very much about animation production or even how to find the right doors to knock on back in 1992 when I got this ball rolling, but it wasn’t long before it found me. A sort of countdown began when I relocated from the Midwest to the Los Angeles area in late ’92 that ended exactly four years later (to the day, in fact) when I got my first full-time job at a big animation studio. I’m not at that same studio today, but it’s still my career and it’s going as well as it ever has. (For anyone who cares to pursue the evidence, you can find my name on such fine animated programs as Dragon Tales, Xiaolin Showdown, Scooby Doo and
Shaggy Get a Clue, and forthcoming made-for-DVD episodes of Futurama.)

The first time Grease Monkey brushed up against the animation world was in 1993, when I adapted the first comic book chapter into storyboard panels that I entered into a contest (sponsored by Hanna-Barbara) for short films. The winning entries would be fully animated and broadcast on the Cartoon Network with an eye toward turning them into real shows. I walked away with a score of 36 out of a possible 50, which made me a semi-finalist. (I’m still very pleased that my highest mark was give for character development.)

I didn’t actually win anything, but that was fine with me since the real goal was just to explore the process. Looking back on this with over 10 years of professional experience, I have to say I wouldn’t have picked that storyboard as a winner either. The drawings are okay, but the storytelling is woefully inadequate. Were I to redraw it today it would be at least twice as long and far more expressive. But on the other hand it’s kind’a nice to have an artifact of where I used to be so I can better appreciate where I am now.

Following that experience, I landed Grease Monkey with its second publisher, Kitchen Sink Press (see “The Many Faces of Grease Monkey” for more about that). Oddly enough, it was the comic’s potential for animation that helped it through the door. KSP had an agent in Beverly Hills whose job it was to shepherd their various projects through Hollywood studios and find the right combinations to get them made as films, TV shows, or whatever. They had already successfully turned an excellent comic series called Xenozoic Tales into a very respectable CBS Saturday morning cartoon called Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, and they were eager to do this with another strip when I happened to come along.

The first thing we had to do was develop a pitch. Nowadays I can practically put one of these together in my sleep, but back then it was like visiting Mars. Of course, my first and strongest instinct was to just adapt the comics into cartoons line for line, no changes, no modifications. No way would anyone tamper with my baby. It’s usually the same for all first-timers. But with experience you learn that no medium slides effortlessly into another. And if you’re trying to get other people on board (first producers and later viewers) you have to pick and choose what to emphasize in order to catch their eye. Comics have it comparatively easy. Your cover is your ad. Its purpose is to grab a reader’s attention and convince them to look inside.

With TV and film, it’s not so clear cut. Your pitch has to anticipate and answer a whole raft of complex questions, such as what do these characters have in common with the rest of the world, what sort of spinoff products could come out of it, and what segment of the audience will this story appeal to? This last item is the most vital and, even to me after all this time, hardest to get my head around. More on that later.

Keeping all that in mind, the standard pitch for an animated TV show or film is part words, part visuals. I thought I could do both myself, but KSP strongly advocated for (i.e. demanded) the hiring of an experienced TV writer named Jymn Magon to handle the word side. Jymn was the first actual animation writer I ever met, and managed through some early push and pull to drag some key information out of me that I hadn’t even thought of: core story points and long-term goals. We couldn’t just use what was there. it worked fine for comics but would have been used up in a heartbeat on TV.

So before I knew it we’d introduced a bunch of new characters, the actual alien enemy that is only hinted at in the book, a flotilla of hardware, and somewhere specific for the story to go. To my relief, none of what we developed contradicted or violated anything I’d done in the comics. It was instead a big step forward and in a short time I came to embrace it as the “rest” of Grease Monkey. Since at that point I’d still not written or drawn anything beyond chapter 6 it gave me a horizon to aim for when I returned to the comics.

In that sense, what you’re really seeing here is the genesis of Grease Monkey book 2, which will turn the animation pitch back into comics. See how these things come around?

Once we had our pitch package together, we started pounding the pavement. From the summer through the fall of 1995, we visited just about everyone who was looking for animated product and got turndowns from almost all of them. It wasn’t a good year to sell a space adventure show (some studios turned it down on that basis alone) and it also wasn’t a good year to attach yourself to any one development executive since none of them seemed to stay in one place for very long. Despair started to set in around October, and I was ready to give it up even as Jymn and I marched into Universal for one last flirtation. In the manner of all classic dramas, that’s the moment things take their turn.

We pitched to an amiable fella named Ralph Sanchez, who liked what he saw enough to make three things happen. He (A) hired me to create pitch art for a show called Wing Commander Academy, (B) hired me to work on the show itself as a storyboard artist and character designer and (C) actually put Grease Monkey into development when he moved to his next gig at a studio called Film Roman (home of a little thing called The Simpsons). For one reason or another, the development deal was as far as Grease Monkey was destined to travel on this particular road. The enthusiasm was there, but what it always came back to was that nagging question I outlined above, “what segment of the audience will this story appeal to?” It haunted me then and it still haunts me today.

My immediate answer to this was always “well, everyone! Duh!” But that doesn’t fly in the TV world. We have to remember that as long as advertisers pay the bills to get a program made, they call the shots. And they’re not about to throw millions of bucks into something unless they know exactly who’s going to watch it—and the commercials that interrupt it. TV viewers may think the opposite way, but that’s really what it all comes down to. We would all do well to remember that TV’s primary purpose is to deliver customers to advertisers. TV shows, for all their color and bluster, are a tool toward that end.

In those terms, Grease Monkey is hard for some people to quantify. If the characters deal with mature, adult issues then it’s an adult TV show. But adults don’t typically watch cartoons. So if it’s a cartoon then you have to deal with issues kids can understand. And if you want to sell toys based on stuff in the show (which is a prerequisite for most TV animation) then you have to aim the show at the age group that’s likely to buy the toys. From there the pie slice gets cut finer and finer until you determine (for example) the viewers will be boys age 8-12. From the moment that decision is made, it drives every creative choice that follows. This is why the end product can come out completely different from its source material, which I was never going to allow.

So when this whole experience was over, I came away with the notion that just delivering the concept for a show wasn’t enough. I would also have to deliver the audience. That’s when I decided it was time to get the book done.

Since that bridge has now been crossed, I’m looking toward the next pitch season with two things I didn’t have before; a bit more experience going in and (hopefully) a built in audience: all of you who are reading these words. Together we can do anything.