WHAT'S COMING UP IN BOOK 2

OF COURSE there’s a Book 2. If things go the way I want, there will be a Book 3, a Book 4, and on and on. Mac, Robin, and everyone else have been with me for so long that they’ve sort of become my extended family. Naturally, I’ve got lots more stories to tell about them. So here’s a taste of the trouble they’ll get into in Grease Monkey Book 2: A Tale of Two Species.

This image was previously seen on the intro page of Book 1. It depicts the enemy who almost destroyed the Earth. In Book 2 we meet them up close and personal.	Here’s a Barbarian’s worst nightmare: the enemy fighters they have to repel. These guys are impervious to energy weapons and just love to ram into their opponents.

First, if you’ve read the article about Grease Monkey in the world of animation, you might already know how the concept for Book 2 originated a little over ten years ago: as a pitch for an animated series. That pitch hasn’t yet become an animated series, but it did turn into something else.

Here’s a new member of the family. She was born with a flightstick in her hand. Unfortunately, she wasn’t born early enough to participate in today’s combat. But no Barbarian lets a little thing like military regs get in her way.	As you may recall, Robin starts designing a 2-person fighter at the end of Book 1. By the start of Book 2, he’s got a working model. He calls it the Whirlwind, but everyone else keeps suggesting cooler names, prompting him to ask, “why does everyone have to edit?”	But he’s not stopping there. As Book 2 progresses, Robin’s ship gets continually powered up. Only two problems: getting one of the Barbarians to fly the thing and keeping it out of Henniker’s sight. Hey, if life was easy it wouldn’t be any fun!

When my development deal with Film Roman expired, all the rights reverted back to me and I decided right away that I wasn’t going to let them fade into nothing. By 1999, I’d gotten enough animation experience to create my very own pilot film. One part of the process of making cartoons is to assemble the storyboards and voice tracks into an animatic--a sort of slideshow version of the finished program that is used to blueprint the timing and editing. By ’99, animatics could be assembled on a home computer. This gave me a brainstorm: why not make a Grease Monkey animatic and use it to pitch the series again for TV? I had everything I needed, including friends who could supply the voices. The only thing I lacked was a sense of what a monumental undertaking it would be.

Stills from the Grease Monkey pilot. The Fist of Earth is immediately threatened by incoming enemy ships and the Barbarians have to mobilize.

In the fall of 1999 I wrote a script entitled "All You Need is Love". I thought it would run about 5 minutes and I could do the whole animatic--start to finish--in a month or two. The script actually timed out to about 7 minutes, so I figured maybe three months. Then I started drawing and the thing just kept growing. The more I worked on it, the more I added. I also decided to go full color (animatics are usually black & white), which meant even more production time. In the end, it required over 2,000 drawings, took 6 months to make, and totaled 17 minutes of screen time--just 5 minutes shy of a standard made-for-TV episode.

More stills from the pilot. Robin helps Kim to defy orders and sneak into the battle. Darn kids…

Now I could march into a Hollywood studio, shove a tape into a VCR, and say "look--here's my show!" Did it work? Of course not. Why? Lousy timing.

The first time I pitched Grease Monkey, the animation industry was pretty unstable. A lot of studios were being bought by other studios, or management was changing, or execs were just too scared to start anything new. The year 2000 was also pretty unstable. The TV animation biz was shrinking again (it does this every 10 years or so) and everyone wanted goofy slapstick shows like the ones that were successful the year before. I tried internet companies, but they only wanted adult (i.e. shock-humor or soft-porn) cartoons. Once again, Grease Monkey was a misfit. The odd thing was, everyone outside Hollywood loved the cartoons and demanded more. The guy who said "nobody in Hollywood knows anything" must have gone through something like this.

Lyle Brand, Book 1’s most irritating character, has formed his own squadron that flies the bomber seen at the end of Book 1. This has only made his ego larger.	Lyle will split off from the Nighthawks and team up with both Val and Figgis to pilot the newest fighters. STAC stands for Strategic Tactical Assault Corps.	Here are the new superships that will be specifically designed to combat the enemy. As we’ll find out, they actually do the job a little TOO well.

One more thing occurred during this time. Thinking that Grease Monkey could also be pitched as a feature film, I decided to write a screenplay for one. This was easier than it sounds, since I already had development material to fall back on. The pilot worked perfectly as an opening act, so I just took off from there and started writing. This took about a month, and in late July of 2000 I finished a 95-page first draft.

Progress Exhibit A: The 120-page screenplay.

I didn’t quite know what I’d do with it, though. Nobody seems interested any more in making animated SF movies (half-assed attempts like Titan A.E. pretty much killed that market), and any studio that picked it up for a live-action production would most likely mangle it beyond recognition. So as I neared the end of drawing Book 1 in the summer of 2002, I figured I ought to just listen to my muse the way I did 10 years earlier and do it myself.

I toyed with the idea of making the whole thing into one huge animatic and pitching it somewhere as a movie, but that would just add more years to the thing without substantially increasing its chances of getting made. So at last my mind was made up: Book 2 it would be.

Progress Exhibit B: The thumbnail pages for Book 2. Four pages are shown here. Don’t worry, they make sense to me.	Progress Exhibit C: The full-size layouts, ready to be drawn for publication. Unfortunately, that part takes the longest.

I hope you’ll be relieved to know this project has already left the launch pad. In 2003 I converted the entire 120-page screenplay into a 229-page thumbnail, then in 2004 I converted the thumbnails into full-size rough layouts. Then I went and got distracted by a totally different project, a webcomic called Star Blazers Rebirth! If any of you have visited www.starblazers.com since the summer of 2005, you already know what I’m talking about. I first saw the Star Blazers anime series back in high school, and it pretty much changed my whole life. I might still have come up with Grease Monkey if not for Star Blazers, but I don’t think it would have been quite as good.

Anyway, Star Blazers Rebirth is exactly what it sounds like: a story that revisits the characters from the show and gives them an entirely new adventure. Like the Grease Monkey pilot film, I had no idea going in how much time and energy Rebirth would demand from me, but I’ll sum up by saying that it’s been practically a full-time job since it began. Fortunately, I love working on it as much as I love Grease Monkey, so that’s how I justified putting Book 2 aside for the duration.

As of right now, the end of Rebirth is in sight. If everything stays on track, I’ll wrap it up this summer and get right back to Grease Monkey Book 2. Since I’ve become sort of addicted to the webcomic format and the ability to get something into the public eye as soon as it’s done (rather than waiting years for a paper version) I’ll be posting pages to this site as I finish them. So please make it a point to stop by as time goes on. Book 2 isn’t nearly as far away as you might think!

-Tim Eldred, February 2007