They’re all gone, baby! I sold them all on eBay a year ago.

I do have a segment now on Patreon about the art of Dead Meat, so you can still visit them there. But you can’t put your hand inside Patreon, as far as I know.

Good morning. Are we having the same morning!?

Hey, me too! A couple of weeks ago I decided it might not be a bad idea to buy one of those “complete series” pirate DVDs, because without that I risk never seeing it again. And I’ll probably want to at some point in my life.

I wish I had good news (or any news) regarding a DVD set, but I’d probably be the last to know.

I actually haven’t watched many of the shows in a long, long time now. It might be interesting to do a rewatch and put it up on YouTube as a commentary or something.

🤔

In semi-unrelated news, I just put the pitch bible for the “sequel series” that never happened up on my Patreon. It had the gang in space… with Dracula!

Your question isn’t stupid. The system is stupid!

If I made a Kickstarter for something “Billy & Mandy”, it would go over the same as if I made a Kickstarter to tell a “Star Wars” story. I’d get a cease and desist letter and probably Kickstarter would shut the page down. I don’t own the property and Cartoon Network (or whoever now owns WB) does.

I’ve made it clear to CN in the past that I’d be happy to do a storyboard and animatic of the whole thing gratis just to sell the idea, because I believe in it. They insisted that they wanted to reboot their most popular series first and told me that might open the door for more B&M, but they never made those reboots and now the channel is essentially gone. I don’t know where that leaves the property. My allies, executives, and contacts are all gone now.

If whoever ends up owning CN’s intellectual properties wants to do something with B&M, I’m there and I’m boiling over with fun ideas. Unless it’s Paramount, who can suck it.

TL;DR - Corporations are very protective of their IPs, even if they never plan to do anything with them again.

A lot of shows I’ve pitched are on my Patreon. I’ll see if I can find the one I had in development during Fish Hooks!

Hey!

I think you might have written me a couple of other messages about prop design over the last couple of months. Or maybe it was just someone with the same name. Anonymous is a pretty popular name these days.

Anyway, the best way to learn to draw anything is just to draw it! Trace stuff if you want. It helps, and you’re just learning so there’s nothing wrong with that. Once you’ve got a feel for the style of the show you’re trying out for, challenge yourself to draw different objects, ranging from simple to complex.

Try an axe. A stick of gum. A box of cereal with a cartoon mascot on it. A car. A catapult. A ray gun. A pile of clothing. An uprooted tree. A candlestick with a melting candle. Just pick stuff from around your house (or alternate dwelling).

When you’re doing prop design, you’re usually drawing “anything that’s not a character”, but if you can draw the characters, then that can lead to more opportunities later on. Sometimes a character will appear on, say, the front of a magazine. Drawing the shape of a magazine might be easy, but you’ll need to either draw the character or at least a mock-up for placement. You might even have to hand-letter the magazine’s font.

Also (as in the case of the uprooted tree), you may have to refer to the backgrounds and be able to draw in that style. And sometimes backgrounds are a completely different style than the rest of the show.

Doing prop design well isn’t as easy as it looks. It’s definitely an underappreciated skill. When I was doing “Happy Halloween Scooby Doo!”, we had an artist completely dedicated to vehicle design. I hate drawing cars, but this guy had dedicated himself to the craft and carved out a niche of his own. Pretty cool.

Now git drawrin’!

The time limit certainly placed some hard constraints on the episodes. Thankfully we had a bit of “play”, where we could have one segment be, say, thirteen minutes and the other be nine. We would often do that when one segment was exquisitely good or exquisitely bad.

Every now and then I’d get frustrated that some certain story was just too big for the timeframe allowed, but I generally think that limitations are helpful.

Cartoon Network no permitía el uso del diablo. Recibieron críticas negativas de sus padres después de Vaca y Gallina y Las Superniñas, así que rápidamente nos alejamos de esa idea.

Boy I hope that made sense!