#richard scarry inspired!

[meltypuff]

beep beep its frog town rush hour 🐸🚗💨

[camtot]

Busy busy dogs getting to work

[letjohnnysayfuck]

can someone with better graphic design skills than me PLEASEEEEEEE make a bumper sticker like this i'll literally pay you /srs

[neil-gaiman]

Hi Neil—big fan!

My daughter and I both love reading Chu’s Day. A few weeks ago I bought her a Richard Scarry book and it contains a story with lots of similarities to your story. Was this an inspiration for your Chu?

It was, but the kind of inspiration where you read it when you are five, forget about it completely, and then do your own take on it forty years later.

[the-forest-library]

So I’ve found a new favorite children’s book author and illustrator, Marianne Dubuc. I love this Richard Scarry-inspired style full of whimsical creatures, their daily lives, and peeks into their homes. So cozy and charming with so many cute things to explore.

[art]

Creator Spotlight: @scottlava

Scott Campbell has illustrated numerous children’s books, including SKULLS!, Sleepy the Goodnight Buddy, and Zombie In Love. He was author/illustrator of the much-loved HUG MACHINE. He enjoyed a long career in video games, where he art directed the critically acclaimed game Psychonauts and Brutal Legend for Double Fine Productions. Great Showdowns is his ongoing online series. Scott’s work has appeared in galleries and publications around the world. You can see more of his work at ScottC.com.

Check out our interview with Scott below!

How did you get your start in art, and more specifically, with Great Showdowns?

I went to art school in San Francisco and have been painting, making comics, and designing video games ever since with Double Fine Productions. The Great Showdowns began at the first Crazy 4 Cult exhibition at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles back in 2007, an exhibition of artwork inspired by the cult classics of cinema. The first 10 little paintings were intended to be snack-sized pieces for people to easily collect. They began with perhaps the most iconic of wild west showdowns from A Fistful of Dollars with Clint Eastwood. I pulled some of my favorite moments from films like Ghostbusters, Predator, Exorcist, and Planet of the Apes and placed them all in simple little dust-colored squares as if they were in the dirt streets of a wild west town. They began as good versus evil but grew to all kinds of showdowns between people and objects and often moments of great love between people. I started a tumblr for them a few years later, and I have been posting them ever since. We have published three Great Showdown books and have had 3 solo exhibitions along with worldwide scavenger hunts. There are over a thousand of them up on the site by now, and i do not plan on stopping any time soon.

Which 3 famous artists (dead or alive) would you invite to your dinner party?

I would like to gather Jim Henson, Walt Disney, and Richard Scarry together for dinner and chats. They have all created my favorite and most joyful worlds. I think we would have some of the most delightful chats.

What is a medium that you have always been intrigued by but would never use yourself?

I love collage, but every time I try it, I get frustrated and just quit. Someday I will get into it when my kids are old enough to really mess around with various mediums. I plan to have boxes of textiles and magazines for them to just annihilate.

What does your work set up look like?

Oh, it’s just a table with an old mug for water and an old plate for my watercolors and not much else. I share a studio with a bunch of very inspiring people who make wonderful things, from fabricated creatures to VR experiences and films. I have probably the simplest little area in the space. I do have an old oak flat file that I love to look at.

Advice you would give to an aspiring creator?

The biggest thing I would push upon everyone would be to not fret about one’s visual style. The style will grow and present itself as you experiment with mediums and expose yourself to various cultural delights. Just have fun and try all kinds of things.

What is one interaction you had from a fan of yours that has stuck with you over the years?

I gave a game design presentation many years back on a game I had art directed at the time called Brutal Legend at a game conference in Leeds. The game followed a roadie to the age of metal in the land of metal, with demons and chrome volcanoes and hot rods growing from the ground, and rivers of happy and cheering fans. After the talk, I spoke with someone whose work I had seen in earlier portfolio reviews at the conference. She was very shy but incredibly talented. She came up to me after the talk feeling pretty emotional and inspired to the point of tears and sobbing. It was probably the most extreme reaction I have ever gotten from someone, and it touched me deep down in my guts. That’s why we make things! To bring on the tears!

From video games, to illustrations, and children's books, you've worked on many projects. What was the most challenging, yet rewarding one?

Video games take an enormous amount of work over a long period of time and rely on the skills and talent of many like-minded people. It is sometimes difficult to corral such an effort, but it is incredibly rewarding to see it all come together to create such epic worlds. That said, though, children’s books are very enjoyable in a cozy way. It’s just me right there working on a world and all the pressure is on me. I cannot rely on all the talented people around me to make it look great.

Who on Tumblr inspires you and why?

I love perusing old fashion and film blogs and artists like Bob Jinx and Neil Sanders and collections like Its Colossal.

Thanks for stopping by, Scott! Be sure to check out the Great Showdowns over at @scottlava!

[lauren-adassovsky]

Last feast before hibernation! Eat to your heart’s content, and enjoy a last taste of autumn!

Less than 24 hours before the end of the ShortBox Comics Fair and I couldn’t resist a last homage to Richard Scarry, probably the biggest stylistic inspiration for my comic (the first homage of course being the cover itself!)

« Rabbits don’t hibernate...Do they? Every winter Gentiane opens her hotel to rabbits seeking refuge from the cold. Instead of staying at the shelter however, her young assistant Thistle heads out in the opposite direction. Where is he going? And will he be able to outrun winter? »

The comic is available in English and French and you can get it right here (but not for long 🐰)

[hellovonnie]

beep beep 🚗 i made some more little cars inspired by the richard scarry books of my childhood, i always loved their illustrations and scenes! which one is your favorite? 💨

[lonicera-caprifolium]

Your Richard Scarry inspired snek Crowley in an apple car absolutely melted my heart 🤍 Thank you for this adorable piece!! It brought back some wonderful childhood memories of reading too.

I'm so glad you like it!! 🥰💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

[himbosuplex]

Replies are open! Go for it!

I don't know when I'll actually fully fill this out, but I plan on recording at least some of them for B-roll for a video I want to do talking about Drawing inspiration from living artists, as well as tips to spot AI generated images & the problems with uncritically drawing your inspiration entirely from AI or using it as "reference" (this is a polite way to refer to insta accounts that just 1:1 copy AIGC with traditional media and then pass it off as their own original artwork that's been 'referenced' from Pinterest.)

I also want to discuss some of my thoughts on how AI could actually be useful if it was geared towards actually helping artists instead of replacing them, but how I don't know if that'll ever come to fruition in a world that revolves around corporate profit and worker exploitation.

So a bonus prompt is when you request a character (I will also accept professional wrestlers), feel free to suggest an art movement, master artist (I use that term loosely to refer to any significant professional artist, designer, or animator), or specific artist that has drawn them if it's a character from a comic or game. (example: [character] but inspired by the work of Richard Scarry; example: [character] but art nouveau)

[wyrmtunnel]

(may 10th 2022) - personal design inspired by coatimundis and richard scarry's work

[maxdrawsprettygood]

Midlife crisis

Inspired by Richard Scarry books, I doodled this salaryman cat in a roadster with verithin pencils and a ballpoint pen

[xtruss]

The Plight of the Political Satirist

How Ruben Bolling, of “Tom the Dancing Bug,” Finds the Humor in a Volatile News Cycle.

— By Sarah Larson | August 29, 2024

Art Works Courtesy Ruben Bolling

Ruben Bolling, who has drawn and written his intricate, incisive, shape-shifting weekly cartoon “Tom the Dancing Bug” for more than three decades, works best under the pressure of a deadline. “Years ago, I decided to lean into it,” he told me recently. Monday is deadline day. On the Saturday just before the R.N.C., where Donald Trump accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for President, Bolling was working on that week’s cartoon: a riff on the Busytown illustrations by the great children’s-book author Richard Scarry, titled “A Busy, Busy Day at the Republican National Convention.” There, instead of townsfolk like Huckle Cat and the gang doing jobs labelled “carpenter,” “street cleaner,” and such, their doppelgängers were in a convention space doing other kinds of work: a fox pushing a wheelbarrow full of cash (“Supreme Court Justice briber”); a reporter (“normalizing media member”) interviewing a cat in a polo shirt and red hat (“actual Nazi”). Later that day, Bolling learned that Trump had been shot at during a rally in Pennsylvania. He took stock of the national mood for a few hours, then revised, adding an N.R.A. booth (“ask me how to get guns”), staffed by a smartly dressed pig with a friendly smile. He’s labelled “political violence preventer.”

Bolling, who has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist twice in the past five years, makes these characters “as cute as possible while they’re doing horrible things,” he said. He’s parodied Scarry before, and the results are reliably sweet and chilling—even as we catalogue the horrors of our times, via cartoon pig and rhino and cat, it’s hard not to feel buoyed by the pleasures of Scarry’s gentle world view. “It’s very typical of a lot of what I do, which is taking older, nostalgic, innocent pieces of art and defiling them by bringing them into the darkest parts of our world,” Bolling said. “I find it’s very effective. And it can be very upsetting to me.”

“Tom the Dancing Bug,” which Bolling began publishing widely in 1990, has always been free-form and vaudevillian from week to week—original characters, recurring parodies and satires, one-offs, a terrific long-running meta-funny-pages gag. His illustration style tends toward a tidy clean-line aesthetic, à la “Tintin,” but it morphs to suit whatever he’s up to: hatched and shaded portrait-style depictions of celebrities and politicians; imitations of other artists; fake ads, posters, and informational broadsides. Early on, Bolling had “Saturday Night Live,” Mad magazine, and “Mr. Show” in mind as inspirations. The strip has become more political over time, especially in recent years, though the past few weeks of U.S. election news—an assassination attempt in one party, the passing of the candidacy torch in the other—has been atypical in its intensity. Like all satirists of our era, Bolling has learned to adapt.

For a long time, he did “the old satirist’s trick of exaggerating what happens and what politicians say and what their policies are,” Bolling told me. “But that didn’t work with Trump, because he was better at it than I was. I couldn’t compete with him in creating his own satire.” Instead, Bolling tends to recontextualize Trump, putting his language into the mouths of comic-strip characters, on propaganda posters, and so on, providing the reader with a fresh jolt of amusement and alarm. In strips from 2020, Bolling, via black-and-white newsreel-style images, juxtaposes the Trumpian response to the pandemic with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in 1941. “Why should I join up just because a few thousand Americans died in Hawaii?” a potential G.I. asks. “How many Americans die every day in ironing board accidents?” F.D.R., downplaying the crisis, responds to enemy invasions of New York and California with “This is only in two states! I like those numbers! In a couple of days it will be zero!”

Bolling has published several collections of his work; his latest, “ ‘It’s the Great Storm, Tom the Dancing Bug!,’ ” which includes strips published from 2020 to 2023, came out this month. The cover—the U.S. Capitol, a pumpkin patch, silhouettes of rioters under a night sky—references his series “Q-Nuts,” which plays on “Peanuts” and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” Bolling tries to resist being cruel to beloved childhood characters, “but my favorite, Linus, I turned into a QAnon nut,” he said. “And that hurt.” In “Peanuts,” Linus faithfully waits each Halloween for the Great Pumpkin, a mythical, unseen figure who delivers candy to believers. “It never happens,” Bolling said. “And he always makes excuses. I realized that’s QAnon.” It was one of his most popular cartoons ever. So was the series “Donald and John: A Boy President and His Imaginary Publicist,” with boy Trump as Calvin and John Barron, the imaginary publicist, as Hobbes. Bill Watterson’s original characters—Calvin, enthusiastic young fantasist and joyful megalomaniac, and Hobbes, slightly more reasonable sidekick—fit beautifully into Bolling’s satirical framework. (In a recent entry, a giant Calvin, outfitted with toy crown, stomps around a ravaged D.C., exclaiming, “It’s good to have immunity!”) Coming up with ideas can be gruelling work, Bolling said, but when he did a daily “Donald and John” online, in 2016, it “was like walking down the path picking blueberries. Every day I was, like, ‘Oh, that’s like when he pretends he’s a dinosaur.’ Everything fell into place.”

Bolling’s Strip Began Publishing in newspapers in the nineties, growing in syndication during the heyday of alt-weekly comics, alongside strips by artists such as Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, and Tony Millionaire. He still publishes in print, though his main readership is now online, and he maintains a robust Patreon community called the Inner Hive.

“Tom the Dancing Bug” originated, somewhat startlingly, in 1986, at Harvard Law School. Bolling had grown up in Short Hills, New Jersey, with his two brothers and his parents. “There was a lot of competing for attention,” he said. He was a stutterer, and wasn’t comfortable telling jokes, but he started drawing comics, filling spiral notebooks with them. He didn’t publish any until after college, when he was attending Harvard Law, and he saw a “cartoonist wanted” ad for the law-school paper. Without that, he said, “I don’t know if I’d be a cartoonist today. The first comic I did was basically exactly what I do now. It was ‘Tom the Dancing Bug.’ I somehow cracked the code immediately.” He collected the strips in a booklet, which he photocopied, stapled, and sold at the Harvard Coop. “They would sell out,” he said. “I kept on going to the copy store and making more. That was gratifying.” He sold his first comic to National Lampoon, whose cartoon editor was Sam Gross, the late and beloved longtime New Yorker cartoonist. (“Sam called me into his office, and he starts yelling at me: ‘What are you doing? There’s three ideas in this comic. Go home, make it three different comics, and I’ll buy all three.’ ”) While working as an attorney, Bolling began self-syndicating the comic, and a few years later, by then working in financial services, he signed a deal with Andrews McMeel, which has syndicated the strip ever since. For many years, he had a double life as a white-collar professional and a cartoonist. (He also has two names: his cartooning pen name and his real name, Ken Fisher.) He lives in Manhattan with his wife, they have three grown children, and, these days, he is just a cartoonist.

In the nineties, “Tom the Dancing Bug” felt like a quietly thrilling revelation, beloved by many but never a household name. Bolling seemed to tease all of pop culture, much of human nature, and comics history at once, always with sensitivity and an eye for the subtly absurd. (See Shluff, the giant, fuzzy alien who visits Earth to nap.) Alongside recurring characters like God-Man, the Superhero with Omnipotent Powers, and Louis Maltby, boy introvert, there was “The Adventures of Sam Roland, the Detective Who Dies,” in which our trenchcoated private eye would get an exciting assignment, like “The Case of the Fuchsia Parrot,” run into trouble, such as a scheming butler (“In one minute, water will come flowing into this chamber, drowning you like a rat!”), try to make a heroic escape (“If I can just loosen these ropes!”), fail, and die. (“Another case left unsolved by Sam Roland, the Detective Who Dies!”) The endlessly brilliant and enjoyable “Super Fun-Pak Comix,” then and now, parodies specific genres (“Marital Mirth,” “Beltway Banalities”), genre conventions (“Too Many Panels Comics”), and whatever else Bolling feels like laughing about (“Tom Cruise & Xenu,” “Percival Dunwoody, Idiot Time Traveler from 1909”).

Bolling says that 9/11 was a turning point for the strip. “It was almost, like, ‘Can anything ever be funny ever again? Is this real?’ ” He landed on the idea of a “Super Fun-Pak Comix” in which each punch line, no matter the jokey setup, was “Terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, killing thousands.” “I was crying when I was drawing it,” Bolling said. In the long march of grim news that followed, Bolling’s work continued to reflect political reality, and found humor and pathos everywhere. Nate the Neoconservative came along, as did Lucky Ducky, “the Poor Little Duck Who’s Rich in Luck,” who enrages his wealthy nemesis by being poor and getting all the breaks, and Chagrin Falls, where life is getting a little worse each day for the average American. Bolling’s Scarry cartoons, though, in their perfect blend of innocence, humor, and pain—see “Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy 21st Century Classroom”—may hit the hardest. “I still get very affected by this,” Bolling said. “My job is to appear cavalier and above it, but when I’m writing and I’m drawing, I’m definitely not. It’s very difficult.”

I asked Bolling why the comic is called “Tom the Dancing Bug.” One day in class at law school, he said, “my friend had gotten a bug on his pen, and he was swivelling the pen. The bug was moving its legs to stay on top, back and forth. And I said, ‘That’s Tom the Dancing Bug.’ ” That night, he submitted his first strip to the paper. A purist, he didn’t want it to have a title—it would be wholly different each week—but the paper insisted. “So I thought of the stupidest name I could think of, and I named it ‘Tom the Dancing Bug,’ in retaliation,” he said. “But I remember riding my bike home afterward thinking, I actually like that.”

“This is horrible, but I feel like we’re all kind of Tom the Dancing Bug, trying to stay on the pen when some unseen force is trying to shake us off,” I said.

“An existentialist way of looking at it,” he said. “I didn’t think that deeply.” He’d seen himself as the bug: “trying my hardest and sweating, dancing for your amusement.” ♦

[patofrango]

Hi! Say, did you play back in the day one of the greatest MMORPGs among kids to ever exist? Of course, I’m talking about Club Penguin. It was a huge part of my childhood, and I’ve always had the dream of making my own virtual world and tell my own story. Years later of studying and practicing, I’ve finally decided to start building this project!

I’m Pato, and I’m a solo developer working on Quacker, a new web-based virtual world surrounding ducks living in their live and peaceful countryside town. Or is it…?

I’ve been working on the game for almost 2 years now, and a great majority of the codebase is already built. Artists is what I’m missing the most, since it’s hard to find people with a passion for online worlds and art.

I’m looking to preserve the charm and values that the classic Flash games had, but add my own little twist and create a brand new universe with lots of stories to tell and adventures to take on.

Apart from Club Penguin, my inspiration also comes from online games like Pandanda and Farmerama, and also comics/cartoons like The Smurfs, Peanuts, The Busy World of Richard Scarry, among others.

Let me know if this sounds fun to you, if you have any questions I’ll be happy to answer them. If you'd like to hop on the hype train, join Quacker's Discord server!

[studentkeep]

hello hello! sorry if youve already answered this- but are there any shows, movies, books, etc that inspired studentkeep? also, do you have voice claims for anyone?

hello ! lets see ... lets start with the basics for inspo ! sesame street ... muppets ... dhmis ... these are the most obvious i think OH OH AND PEEWEES PLAYHOUSE ... to be more specific though ! elmo goes to the doctor is one thats stuck with me ... i think if studentkeep had flash games theyd be like this & starfall ...

then there is storybooks ... like richard scarry and those chunky lined cliparts : ) ... and toys ( like that phone with the face ! and pipe cleaner cats ) i actually have a pintrest board dedicated to studentkeep ... not showing that though

in general though i try to keep a 70s ( yet timeless ) kind of energy : ) ... also specific characters have their own inspirations ... like lila being very much inspired by " the ballad of jane doe " in ride the cyclone

i actually intended to make a voiceclaim video but i never got around to it ... and i doubt i will ... so ! here is a quick list

some of these are just the voice ... some of these are the entire thing ... but it is up to you to interpret

[8-rock]

Some images from my new picture book, WHAT DO BROTHAS DO ALL DAY?, which is out tomorrow! 📚 https://bit.ly/Brothaspb WHAT DO BROTHAS DO ALL DAY? was inspired by a classic. I first encountered Richard Scarry’s WHAT DO PEOPLE DO ALL DAY? in the early 1970s when I was about six years old. The world of adults, with its grocery lists, PTA meetings, shopping trips, and dinner parties, seemed both tantalizingly exotic and impossibly complex. Today, those same descriptors can be applied to the ways that many people of all ages perceive Black men.