#Netflix cartoonist table day even

[chaoticavenuebasement]

Reminding other artisitz

I didn't fire him we don't have new money if he feeling burned out turn something in to me 😭🙏🌙🔥🐅📱🐰🦍🎅🐐🎃🐖👑🧑‍🎨

[acaseforpencils]

Lars Kenseth.

Bio: I’m a cartoonist and writer living in Los Angeles. I love being creative, but cartooning was my first love. My mom always tells me how much I loved the “marker table” at Montessori School— I was obsessed. That obsession never waned, as much as some of my teachers wished it had. I grew up all over New England, moving towns almost every year. Drawing cartoons was the one constant. Somehow, I got into Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. I discovered the animation department in my Junior year and finally found a way to keep drawing, while still technically earning a degree.

Find this print here!

To be honest, I never really thought I was good enough for The New Yorker. My dad introduced me to Charles Addams and Sam Gross when I was very young, speaking of them with a kind of reverence usually reserved for the Framers or the 1970 Boston Bruins. But, eventually I got over myself and decided to go for it. Now I’m happy to say I’ve been published in The New Yorker, MAD, Playboy, Esquire, Barron’s, Alta Journal Of California and The American Bystander. It’s stupid that I get to do this.

Me hosting an NCS-LA meeting with Ann Telnaes of The Washington Post!

Before I ever mustered the resolve to submit to The New Yorker, I made my living (and still do) writing comedy for TV. I’ve written for shows like MTV’s Popzilla, Voltron and Norm Macdonald Has A Show for Netflix. Currently, I’m developing Chuck Deuce, an animated TV show I created for Adult Swim.

One other tidbit, I’m the current Chairman of the National Cartoonist Society - LA Chapter. We wear plaid, sing, and have fun guests speak. If you’re a cartoonist in LA, swing by.

Tools of Choice: I really only have one tool. My Apple Pencil. I’m almost exclusively on the iPad these days. I used to use a Cintiq, which I did love. It was an old, glitchy unit, from around 2007. The stylus would often skip.  But, I give that skipping stylus a lot of credit for how I draw today. Since I have an animation background, my drawing style always used to be a little too “mainstream”. Closer to Simpsons than Steig. So before I started submitting, I took some time to work on my style. I was trying everything - long heads, squat bodies, pointy noses, etc. But one afternoon, that stylus just kept glitching out… and I kind of liked it. I was getting this variable line quality that I thought was really unique. So I went with it. The Apple Pencil lets me get the same line variability, but with a lot more control.

Me drawing at home on my iPad. Which, to be honest, looks a lot more like a Grizzly Bear trying to drink a Capri Sun.

If I ever do an original, I’ll use the Rotring Art Pen. It uses an ink cartridge. I like it. And it’s the only thing I’ve been able to find that can even get close to replicating my line style. Although, sometimes I have to go over a line a couple times. Or hover the nib over the paper a little to get more ink to come out. If there’s another way, I’m open to suggestions, by the way.

Tools I Wish I Could Use Better: Dip pens. Sigh. I dunno, I’m just such a fuck up with dip pens. I’m a messy artist anyway, which is partly why I love digital, I can undo all my mistakes. But using dip pens to me, it’s like trying to break a wild stallion. And I’m a rodeo clown in this scenario, so. You can guess how that would go.

Here’s the one cartoon I got into Barron’s before they shut the door!

Tools I Wish Existed: I just wish there was some kind of ink pen that better replicated what I do digitally. It just seems impossible. Again, open to suggestions. It’s strange - I’m tech obsessed, and I also love the environment. So saving a lot of trees with the Apple Pencil is something I enjoy. However, I love the feel of paper. I miss it.

Tricks: If your hand gets tired or hurts using the Apple Pencil, I recommend getting some pencil grips. I like the cheap foam grips you can get on Amazon. I’d say get them at Blick or somewhere, but honestly, I haven’t found them in stores. I tried ripping the comfort grip off of a BIC pen, but it just didn’t feel right. Also, it’s a strangely brutal task. I don’t recommend it.

Don’t get too fancy with the ergonomic grips. In my opinion, you sacrifice too much control in the cause of comfort. I can’t even with those things.

A cartoon for Mad. Misc: I love making pizza. I’m obsessed with great pizza. The greatest is Pizzeria Regina in Boston’s North End. And that’s the North END OF DISCUSSION. Here are some shots of pizzas I have made…

My standard thin crust.

The above is a clone of Spontini pizza — a deep dish place in Milan that is INCREDIBLE.

Ooooo check out that gluten development! All hail gluten!

Anyone for bulk fermentation?

Website, Etc. Follow me on Instagram: larskenseth

Or, go to my website that’s sorely in need of updating: www.larskenseth.com

Me at the signing of MAD issue No. 1 - after the reboot. That’s Sergio Aragones in the foreground. That’s me smiling idiotically at the line.

Find more posts about art supplies on Case’s Instagram! There is a Twitter as well. If you like watercolors of baby animals, I recently created a professional Instagram for my own art, which you can find here!

If you enjoy this blog, and would like to help me do things like renew the domain name etc, there is also a Patreon! Thank you!

Hope you all are having a wonderful Holiday Season!

[argocitycosplay]

I’ll say this for Great Lakes Comic Con, I never fail to have a good time there – it’s always been a good show all the way back to that first year that Maddie and I discovered it when we were looking for an alternative to Wizard World Cleveland. I skipped this one last year mostly because there were no guests that I was interested in and as such, it fell prey to the streamlining of my schedule. This time around however, not only were they bringing in the actors from the old Shazam series, but they were also bringing in one of my bucket list writers – Jim Starlin. His run on Batman is transformative, and the combination of him, Mike DeCarlo and Jim Aparo are my definitive creative team for that book.

Nevertheless, I woke up that morning with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. It was an early departure, primarily because Starlin had capped his signing line to 25 people per hour, due to a hand injury. I know from experience that means you better get over to that table and grab a line ticket as soon as the show opens or you may not get to meet the guest – I’ve been burned on Bruce Campbell this way and almost lost my opportunity to get George Perez to sign my stuff. On the other hand, I would’ve preferred to have shown up around Noon and wasn’t sure if I’d have enough to d all day. Still, I have faith in Great Lakes and so I drug myself out of bed and made the long, arduous journey to Deee-troit!

I was pleased to discover that the line wasn’t as long as it had been on my previous trip, and I managed to make it over to Jim’s table just after 10:30. I was able to secure a place in line between 2 o’clock and 3 o’clock – that was going to make things difficult with the costume, I’d probably have to get in and out of it a couple of times but at least I was going to get my books signed! Ticket secured, I made my way over to the Shazam booth where the guys were friendly and happy to see me. Bringing in superheroes from these old 70s shows reminds me a lot of Akron Comicon’s old philosophy and I’ve always enjoyed the selection that Great Lakes brings in. Across the sprawling, massive dealers room floor I found some fun blind boxes of Ghostbuster stuff as well as one dealer unloading a ton of Walking Dead swag for a buck apiece. I grabbed Lucille pens for Amy and Lydia, as well as a pack of Pokémon cards for Maddie. At the door, the freebie station was set up and people were handing out promotional items for the Harley Quinn movie – tiny hammer and bat keychains as well as posters and enamel pins. I’m not proud. I loaded up. Lydia would be delighted with the tiny Harley hammer that I brought her home. Right near the entrance I spied a vendor selling Spider-man Essentials volumes for two dollars apiece and picked up two of the huge trades and headed back to the car. It was time for a swag dump and a change of outfit.

Fortunately for me, Michigan was having a mild winter so it wasn’t too terrible as I lugged the Skeksis costume in, wearing only the sweatpants and shirt that went underneath it. I geared up and took a look at the clock – I’d have to get back into civvies in two hours, but that would allow me plenty of time to make a couple of rounds through the floor.

In the week between Zip Con and Great Lakes, I had completely reworked the left arm so that it now held a staff. The hand, staff, and arm were all one piece, repainted and sculpted out of Great Stuff and PVC but this would be my first time walking around with it. I’d also drilled a hole in the neck connector so that I could drop a nail through the joint, securing the head to keep it from falling off again. There in the front hall, I had people coming up to me for photos before I had even completely suited up. After my experience at Zip Con and with the addition of the staff I was feeling much better about this costume and was happy to see how well received it was at the show. One young man in his twenties came up to me and told me he recognized it – not from the new Netflix series, but because his parents used to play the movie for him all the time on VHS! Another person confided in me that The Dark Crystal was one of the few films that genuinely scared him as a kid and gave him nightmares. I smiled and told him I was glad to have contributed to his psychosis.

As I made my way to the back of the convention floor, the people over at Guy Gilchrist’s table spotted me. Gilchrist is a Henson alumni, and bills himself as Jim Henson’s cartoonist. His assistant jabbed at his arm, drawing his attention up and away from the piece he was working on. His eyes widened in amazement and he exhaled deeply in wonder. He invited me over to get photos and showed me a photo of him with Jim Henson “This was taken right around the time he was creating you!”. It meant a lot to hear how impressed he was with the costume, he insisted on signing a Dark Crystal print for me and told me to come pick it up once I was out of costume.

I checked the time, Tom DeFalco‘s panel was about to start and I figured I’d be able to make it through about half of it at least before I have to shuffle out of the suit. Some of the con staff were nice enough to open the door to the panel room for me and I slipped into the back corner. DeFalco was just beginning his talk and had been handing out notes. He grabbed the moderator and handed a stack f papers to him and then pointed to the back.

“…and let’s get one of these over to the… Creature… In the back.”

I enjoyed DeFalco’s talk about his approach to creating comics. This is another one of those things that great Lakes does really well, and I remember having a similar reaction when they brought Jim Shooter in for a talk much like this. I was disappointed when I had to slip out, but time is ticking away and I wanted to be in normal clothes to meet Jim Starlin.

I carried my bundle out to the car and decided it would be too much trouble to get the lizard feet off (they are the hardest part of the costume, and it always takes me forever to wriggle out of them. I usually don’t take them off until I get home actually) and decided to just put my jeans back on over top of them. It had warmed up enough that I left my leather jacket in the car and just wore my sweater, topping it off with a hat to cover my hair, mussed from the costume.

Starlin himself was warm and congenial.

“Batman was always my hero,” he told me. “ I mean back then, it was either superman Batman or wonder woman – and then maybe a little bit later the fly or the Jaguar, but it was really mostly Superman Batman and Wonder Woman”

He looked at my copy of Death in the Family as he was signing it.

“It was a shame, after we killed off Robin, somebody in merchandising realized it was a problem, and all of a sudden I was kind of persona non grata at DC. Work just dried up. Fortunately, there were some openings over at Marvel and I ended up working on a little thing call the Infinity Gauntlet – so I can’t complain too much!”

Before I got back into the costume, where I would stay for the remainder of the show, I managed to swing through and do a bit more shopping. No quarter bins, but plenty of 50 Cent bins and I managed to score some Punisher and Green Hornet. I was shocked when I discovered a bunch of Hulk and Star Trek issues in one those 50 Cent bins, all signed by writer Peter David. David is one of my favorite writers and I actually go out of my way to meet him at Hall of Fame Comicon a couple of years ago. I can’t for the life of me understand why these are in the discount boxes, but I wasn’t complaining. I grabbed as many as I could find and came home with a stack of new stuff to read.

I spent the last two hours of the show back in the Skeksis outfit. I hadn’t realized how much muscle it would take to carry around the staff. It’s not that it was heavy, just that used muscles in my forearm that I’m not used to flexing all the time! About an hour before the costume contest, I saw a familiar costume style walk in, a cosplayer I’d seen around Michigan a few times – he’d spent most of the day in a diffrent costume, but now was in his new hydra suit which managed to place during the costume contest. Backstage and waiting for the contest to proceed, I had fun fooling around with some of the other contestants – hypnotizing one of them with my staff and joking with some of the others. This time with the other cosplayers is consistently my favorite part about doing costume contests – it’s not about whether you win or lose, it’s about who you get to know!

As the show drew to a close, I slunk out quickly and quietly- exhausted and ready to hit the nearest McDonald’s for some hydration on the way home. Still, despite my fatigue, I had fun and can’t wait to come back.

Great Lakes Comic Con 2020 I’ll say this for Great Lakes Comic Con, I never fail to have a good time there – it’s always been a good show all the way back to…