B L A C K M O C C O

2008-10-12T07:43:00.000-07:00

"This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: 'Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!'

-W.H. Murray

SO...

2008-09-20T17:54:00.000-07:00

...I am indeed not dead. Sidetracked somewhat with some pretty strange Metallica related business but slaving away on a HUGE Star Trek/Family Guy piece for Family Guy's tri-annual art show/auction thingy. Please come back...!
Oh, and 'Death Magnetic'...? Fucking rocks! Go do yourself a favour and rediscover why they're called METALLICA...!

Z O M B I E

2008-08-26T13:02:00.000-07:00

How about that? Only took me seven fucking years to figure out the far hand...! Nah, it was an oldie that I revised last week. I'll ink and paint it up as soon as I can. See? It's new!
Also, go read 'World War Z' by Max Brooks. Kickass!

'SOMETHING SOMETHING SOMETHING DARK SIDE'

2008-08-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

Design for Family Guy promo piece at San Diego Comic-Con 2008. I didn't handle the color duties, just the art up to this point. Lots of fun although I have eternal gratitude to send to my good friend Burrell, Family Guy's prop designer extraordinaire, for some help with the AT-AT walkers and the Millennium Falcon...
Here's the colour version......and the original poster it's based on...
(Family Guy property of FOX Television. Anything Star Wars property of Lucasfilm. Obviously.)

C R U S A D E R

2008-05-03T10:28:00.001-07:00

Artwork copyright Mick Cassidy 2008
This has been sitting around for a while now. I actually have a colored and rendered version of it but have to be honest, I prefer it in black and white. Please note the absence of any metal bikinis and sixteen-inch waist. Just trying to make an honestly athletic and powerful woman and avoid the usual comic book nonsense.
My confidence in drawing 'normal' sized humans has taken a bit of a knock. Everything in 'Family Guy' is basically three heads tall with ping-pong ball eyes and when you spend enough time drawing things in those proportions, it's pretty frustrating and unsettling when you sit down to draw something different.
Freelance is coming to an end so I can see some light at the end of the tunnel.

ALIVE AND KICKING...

2008-04-05T21:23:00.000-07:00

Yeah, so completely sidelined by a spate of freelance work which goes some way toward explaining why there's been no new additions of late. All apologies for those of you who might actually be interested and thanks for checking my work out. Hoping to get back to it all ASAP. What's frustrating is that, of course, my schedule is out of wack now. Still maybe five pages of script to pin down and no way to properly get to it without nagging deadlines getting in the way. Keep checking back. Might surprise you (and me!) yet!
Pretty frustrating all in all. Like everyone else, the boy's got to eat so I don't like turning work down when it comes in but it's never going to stop coming in, is it? At what point does my own work become the priority? Ahhh responsibility versus romance. The life of every artist, right...?
Goddam, lookit that. Two fuckin' months gone by...

C A N N I B A L

2008-02-09T18:58:00.001-08:00

This one's old. 2000, I think. A birthday card to The Wife. It's got some problems eight years later but ah Photoshop, my friend. You can make anything look shiny and new...

Online Portfolio update

2008-01-15T08:15:00.000-08:00

To channel my nefarious procrastination into something useful, I've added some updates to the Online Portfolio. Over there, to the right, under 'LINKS', see? There! Online Portfolio? There ya go. Just click on that to go see.
I've never been good about keeping old artwork so I was pleasantly surprised to find some work from almost seven years ago that hadn't aged too badly. I revised it and updated it and kinda like it.
(Doctor Who (c) BBC)

"Veh-ick-uls"

2007-12-27T19:03:00.000-08:00

Let's start small.
A few extremely rough concept sketches for some post-apocalyptic vehicles ("veh-hi-culs" as they might be called in certain parts of Ireland...). I quite like them and their slapped-together feel but somewhere along the way I felt they were too far gone for the story I'm trying to tell.
Blame 'Chronicles Of Riddick'. I've always felt there's as much to be learned from watching bad movies as watching good ones. A lesson in how not to do something. 'Riddick' bothered me so much because it made me realize that if you've too much going on in your story and you haven't signposted it clearly enough and then you visually overdesign every single thing, your story's not going to work. I watch quite a bit of sci-fi but found myself bored and confused within the first ten minutes. I'd actually recommend it to anyone attempting a story of this kind of scale.
I'm really enjoying the new incarnation of 'Battlestar Galactica' but what really works for me and helps ground it is use of the recognizable technology and appliances. It means you can go as fucking buckwild as you want with your otherworldly stuff as long as you have something that a reader or viewer can work from as a base.

All artwork copyright Mick Cassidy 2007

I found myself looking at tons of images of old steam locomotives. Big and bulky...

All artwork copyright Mick Cassidy 2007

All artwork copyright Mick Cassidy 2007

I tried to make them somewhat functional as well as quirky and entertaining to look at. I assumed people wandering through nuclear wastelands are going to have to sustain themselves and the elements may not lend themselves to that so they should have some sort of hydroponics or botanical facilities on hand to grow food:

All artwork copyright Mick Cassidy 2007

These last two are like futuristic pieced together helicopter stand-ins. Once again though, they're too far ahead of what I think will work.

All artwork copyright Mick Cassidy 2007

All artwork copyright Mick Cassidy 2007

I don't usually feel particularly comfortable or adept at designing any sort of vehicles but these ones don't bother me too much. They still look a little too 'organic', I guess.

"I know you won't break the rules. There aren't any!"

2007-12-23T08:30:00.000-08:00

Some basic ground rules. A template, if you will:

ONE - NO NINETY POUND CHICKS IN METAL BIKINIS
Kinda hard to argue comics aren't created by and read by forty year old men who've never had girlfriends when confronted with the likes of this:

...or this...

...or this...

Pretty self-explanatory. Look, I'm all for good looking chicks gracing the pages of comics but really? This is the best that can be done?
Frank Cho's Shanna might be utterly fucking ridiculous but hey, at least he had the good sense to make the rest of her look like she could safely beat seven shades of shite outta you...

...and still leave you begging for more!
Don't think it's just the gals either. Most of the guys in these rags sport musculature that looks like a plastic sack stuffed with rocks.

TWO - MOST MODERN COMICS ARE STUPID

Look, I'm not a dry shite. I'm not humourless by any stretch but this is why no-one fucking reads comics anymore: BECAUSE THEY'RE FUCKING STUPID!
For every work of genius like 100 Bullets or League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen quietly redefining their roots and trying to show you that there's no limit to what you could do with this unique artform once there's some soul and heart and no ambitions to make the leap to the big screen, there's two hundred other titles with guys in tights and women in leather swimsuits flying around spouting the most odious dialogue imaginable trying to appear relevant.
Maybe I'm just missing the point. Am I just looking past what's painfully obvious? I understand and appreciate that most of the art and entertainment I enjoy is steeped in sci-fi and fantasy but somewhere the people who create most of this drivel have lost sight of the golden rule of storytelling in anything outside of the ordinary: suspension of disbelief.
An example? Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong, okay? I can get past the fact there's some mysterious undiscovered island with a giant ape on it. I welcome the idea there's still living dinosaurs, creepy crawlies, giant bat/pterodactyl thingys and primitive natives on it. I'm all about Kong falling in love with his prisoner and ending up splattered all over New York after toppling from the Empire State Building.
What I can't get past is twenty men running alongside a stampede of terrified sauropods completely unharmed, t-rexes swinging in vines like some shitty cirque de soleil, a man and woman jumping onto a bat/pterodactyl thingy's legs from a mile high cliff as an escape plan. I understand it's supposed to be thrilling, an adventure, but with those examples above the movie pushes my suspension of disbelief too far. Even in an unbelievable setting, the characters and world have to have some grounding or you end up feeling no concern, no empathy for them. It's just like watching a crummy video game.
(For what it's worth, as my wife and I walked out of the movie and I voiced this thought to her, she just looked blankly at me for a moment and said: "They were the things that bothered you about the movie? Howzabout starting with Naomi Watts' shitty wig...?")
To summarize: I'm not going to have anything witty to quip if confronted with a twenty-story alien transforming robot. I'll be too busy emptying my bowels all over the street.
And so will any characters I create...

The State Of The Union...

2007-12-22T20:27:00.000-08:00

I'm not reading a whole lot of comics these days. Funnily enough, I don't see this as any disadvantage whatsoever in terms of creating my own. I go to the comic store maybe once a week and leave it just fucking pissed off. It's not that there isn't good stuff to be found but as it sits alongside shelf upon shelf of at best average, at worst just fucking shite, it's hard to leave in any way inspired or excited.
Look, there's something wrong with comics nowadays. Somewhere along the way comics and Hollywood crossed paths and the effect was catastrophic in a number of ways, none more than every two-bit writer thinking he's writing a movie script and every two-bit artist thinking he's storyboarding it. To the layperson, comics and storyboards look the same but really there's few similarities. Storyboards have the luxury of adding as many panels to the same shot as necessary to get the point, acting, action, emotion, plot, information, etc across to the viewer but comics don't or at least in my opinion, shouldn't have that luxury. It takes real skill and craft and talent, a true gift, to relay all the above information in one single panel on a page of artwork. There's few people among all that fucking bilge on the shelves who can pull that off. Everyone else is playing movies in their head, no doubt hoping the studios will come calling after noticing their talents with a million dollar movie deal.
The true craft of creating comics hasn't been passed on to the people who should know it.
Personally I blame Simon Bisley. An extraordinary artist? Yeah, I'll give him that much but a weak storyteller who sadly influenced every up-and-coming artist and illustrator around for the last fifteen years or so resulting in style over substance and artists more interested in cool imagery than serving the needs of the script.
So what am I saying? I have something better here than what's making up 90% of your local comic store's inventory...? My artwork's going to look better than The Biz? Not a chance! I can't draw a fucking lick as well as he can and I can't paint for shit. I haven't gone to college to learn how to write and to be honest, this script is the first thing I've ever seriously sat down to write. Nonetheless, I feel really good. Perhaps I'm deluded. I don't happen to think so. (Although if I was, that's probably what I'd say in any case...)
I just feel like I'm marching to a different beat...

B E G I N N I N G S . . .

2007-12-11T22:50:00.001-08:00

I remember the very day I was exposed to my first issue (or 'prog') of 2000 AD. I was a mere ten years old and completely impressionable. Maurice Foley across the street had been reading it and the cover just enthralled me. How could it not? I mean, look at this:

Really: How could you be ten years old and not buy this comic...?

I sprinted to the local store, bought my own copy, sprinted home and read it. Over and over and over again. Even the shitty letters page with the crap alien editor Tharg! My older brother had brought the comic into the house when I'd been a good bit younger but obviously I'd been too young to appreciate what was really going on here. At that point in my life I was pretty much dinosaur crazy. Dinosaurs everywhere! Every chance I got I was drawing dinosaurs and if 'One Million Years BC' came on the TV (as it inevitably did probably once a year on BBC 1), I wasn't watching it for the ample delights of Raquel Welch in a furry bikini (Rest assured, that came later...!). I loved that movie so much that I actually used to pray at night that it would be on the next day! Look, please understand how sad this obsession was: If I found a vaguely round rock or stone I was convinced it must be a dinosaur egg with a dinosaur inside so it became no srange sight to the neighbours to see 'that Cassidy child' slamming rocks against the ground in an insane attempt to have my own baby dinosaur.
So anyways, 2000 AD had a strip called 'Flesh' which was essentially time travelling cowboys going back to the Cretaceous Period and harvesting dinos for meat-hungry folk in the 23rd century and that's all I was interested in reading. The artwork doesn't really hold up so well looking at it as an adult but what still strikes me now is just how violent the strip was. I can still remember some unfortunate half-chewed victim gored onto a tyrannosaur's tooth begging for help. This was class stuff for a six year old to be reading!
Back to four years later and the above cover. I'd grown up on Star Trek and Space:1999 and, who the fuck knows why, preferred Battlestar Galactica to Star Wars, worshipped the Logan's Run TV show(!!) and Six Million Dollar Man and while all that stuff was great it was hardly what you'd call gritty.
2000 AD was totally different.
For those unaware, 2000 AD was a weekly British comic with a sci-fi theme and five to six stories that ran alongside each other but existed separately both in settings and concepts and most certainly in art styles. It was mostly in black and white except for two lousy pages in the middle. It also gave the comic world Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, Grant Morrison, Kevin O'Neill, Dave Gibbons and Garth Ennis among others.
As anyone who's ever seen Eastenders knows, the Brits aren't particularly interested in portraying uplifting or positive visions of the world in their entertainment and naturally, that goes for their portrayals of the future. Strontium Dog's about a mutant bounty hunter in the 22nd century who can see through walls and has a giant blaster with a 'flesh' setting! Nemesis was this spear-headed alien freedom-fighter beating the shit out of the humans and Judge Dredd's a cop in a nightmarish, overcrowded crime-ridden metropolis of the 22nd century who dispenses justice on the spot, usually with a big gun. Lest all this sounds like nonsense, it's important to remember that 2000 AD dealt with topics not usually found in young boys comic books. Strontium Dog dealt pretty regularly with bigotry and racism, Nemesis turned the whole 'evil alien' concept on its head by portraying the humans as intergalactic puritanical ethnic cleansers with the aliens as innocents and as much as Judge Dredd was the guy you're supposed to be rooting for, it's usually only because the gallery of villains he had to contend with were so horrifying you'd have to cut him some slack. Truthfully, and the strip had no qualms about exploring this theme, Dredd was a bully and a thug upholding a fascistic police-state where the law itself had somehow become more important than any citizen's rights.
Depressing and bleak? Well, not really as it turns out. 2000 AD also came armed with violent black humour and satire, something the American comics I was reading at the time just couldn't compete with. Truly, this was the greatest thing I'd ever seen and right from that point on, drawing dinosaurs went out the window!!
It doesn't end there. Two years later, in what could only be described as a somewhat questionable choice in supervision, our summer camp decided it was okay to let us twelve year olds watch whatever the hell we wanted on the camp's VCR unsupervised. Even better, they would ask us what we wanted to watch and they'd rent it for us!!
In any case, that's when I first saw this guy:

Mad Max II / The Road Warrior's hardly the greatest movie ever made but it certainly has an impact when you're watching it for the first time. Like 2000 AD it's extremely violent but undercut with ridiculousness and black humour and bizarre completely pointless but cool-as-fuck costumes and post-apocalyptically minded decked-out cars and machines.
It's also pretty pure. There's no backstory beyond a brief prologue, no morals, no themes, no lessons. It's just a story and it throws you right in and expects you to fill in the blanks yourself without having to stop and smash you over the head with contrived exposition and yawn-powered character development. The characters define the action and vice-versa. (David Mamet, writer of Glengarry Glen Ross and the shamefully overlooked The Edge with Anthony Hopkins, has a great and short book on writing and directing where he ridicules Hollywood's obsession with filling in the blanks for the viewer. He believes that backstory and exposition are just there so the studio heads can understand the script they're reading. It's hard to disagree with him once you read his take on it. For me, trying to seriously write and burying myself in Syd Field's 'Screenplay' book (a book studio execs tend to treat like a template for good movie scripts, according to Mamet) and the like, it was a pretty revolutionary rant...
Some other good advice...?
- If you're not sure it belongs, then it probably doesn't belong
- Always start your scenes in the middle
and from none other than horrormeister Stephen King and his excellent book 'On Writing':
- lose all the words that end in '-ly'. "The dog snarled angrily", "She intentionally inquired" etc)
The final act of the movie involves Max driving a giant fortress of a petrol tanker as a decoy to this gang of leather-clad yahoos while the good guys try to run for their lives. Many reviews and analyses of the movie paint the picture of Max regaining his humanity by performing this heroic act but it's just never worked that way for me. Max drives the tanker because he has no other choice, that's all. His definition as a 'hero', like Dredd, is a little ambiguous to me and to be honest, I kinda prefer it that way. It's character by circumstance. Yes, these characters are essentially the 'good guys' but only because of the situation they've happened upon by the time we get to this story. Who knows what's happened before or what will happen after we leave them...? I just love that kind of storytelling.
Okay, there is a point to all this babbling. I just wanted to point to some of the influences, some of the inspiration, some of the things that excite me. There's far more obviously (We haven't even touched animal porn...!) but despite this lengthy first post, I vowed this document wasn't going to descend into 'just another guy's blog' and it's not. I promise! It's just that ever since that first issue of 2000 AD and furthermore, after experiencing Road Warrior, I knew what kind of stories I wanted to tell and thought it might be relevant to this.
Anyways, enough for now...