I like Harvey Eisenberg and Milt Gross for some traits they have in common and some that distinguish them. Their main difference is that Harvey is very conservative and Gross is very radical creatively. Harvey uses construction, Gross doesn't. But they share many other controls or the use of principles.
Harvey's compositions seem to be very carefully, logically thought out while Gross' seem more spontaneous and anarchic. They may look anarchic on the surface but they still are full of negative shapes, clear posing and the BGs are composed around the characters. They are filled with what could be considered mistakes -like tangents, but that adds to the spontaneity of his images.They both compose their characters in reaction to each other using opposing angles.



Gross uses line of action but also goes beyond the limitation, while Eisenberg pretty much sticks to the rules. Gross' poses seem much more lively than Eisenberg's. Eisenberg uses great control and the classic principles to make his images read clearly and have good artistic pleasing balance.
Gross tries to get more observation and grit into his BG scenes, and uses more interesting shapes. Eisenberg is able to draw dynamic angles but is very careful about it.


I love both these guys and they each have their place. My own style is somewhere in between the 2 approaches. I wish I was as inventive as Gross and as controlled as Eisenberg.

See the whole comics here:

http://comicrazys.com/2009/06/26/pixie-dixie-mr-jinks-lone-star-hero-artist-eisenberg/

http://comicrazys.com/2009/06/19/pete-the-pooch-hi-jinx-4-1947-milt-gross/

Conservative VS Liberal Cartoons Of The Past:

Disney's studio was extremely conservative in its content. Their characters and attitudes were wholesome and generic, never veering into the territory of the specific individual - because conservatives naturally distrust anybody that has a unique personality. Disney himself admitted it many times. He distrusted anybody that stood out from the crowd. On the other hand, the studio liberally experimented in the advancement of skills. They believed in "quality" - which in the 1930s partly meant extreme inhuman otherworldly phenomenal ability. Nobody before the mid 60s ever expected there would be a time when famous people would be average. We all took it for granted that if you were on TV, or in the movies, on radio, sold records, were a politician that you must be some amazingly gifted accomplished person. Whether you were a liberal or a conservative, you shouldn't be rich and famous unless you could do something that hardly anyone else can do.


Bill and Joe - Typical Conservatives From The "Great Generation"

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were extreme conservatives from the "great generation". They believed in skill, gloss, professionalism and - not breaking the mold. That was the general conception of a "conservative" before hippies arrived and destroyed everything good about both camps.

Bill and Joe took a couple years of mild experimentation (and politicking with management against more imaginative directors) with some different characters before they hit upon their one success - Tom and Jerry. Tom and Jerry is about as uninspired a cartoon series as was ever created. It's pure generic cartoon thinking of the time. What is a cartoon? Uh...it's where a cat chases a mouse and there is lots of hurt and noise and mayhem. It's hard to be more basic than that, so Bill and Joe didn't fix something that wasn't broken for 15 or 16 years. For that whole period they didn't even try to create new characters. As long as Tom and Jerry was popular and still winning awards, why waste brain cells thinking up something new that might fail? Now I like Bill and Joe as people and I admire their skill and professionalism and even their basic cartoony instincts, but where we depart is in this: I can't even imagine having to draw the same small handful of characters doing the same things for decades. I would go insane. Don't creative people want to create? In other words do new things? Apparently not all of them do.


WB Cartoons Much More Liberal Creativity - More inventive

Meanwhile over at Warner Bros, a lot of liberal creativity was going on - and the inventions and explorations being pioneered dragged the rest of the more conservative studios along with it. Obviously Clampett was the most "liberal" of the whole group and he himself dragged along a lot of the rest of the Looney Tunes group of cartoonists that in general were more imaginative than rest of the studios in the late 30s and throughout the 40s. Chuck was sort of half and half - he was cautious in his content yet liberal in his techniques. Friz was the most conservative of the bunch and reluctantly, half-heartedly followed behind the trends that Clampett, Avery and Jones set - grumbling about it the whole time.

Disney Animators Baffled By Looney Tunes

I've heard stories that the Disney animators would screen all the cartoons that every other studio was making just to see if they had any competition. I can just imagine them being dumbfounded when the latest rebellious individualistic new Warner Bros. or Tex Avery MGM cartoons came out. Can you see Frank and Ollie watching "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" or "Uncle Tom's Cabana"? I know that even 50 years after those cartoons changed everything and were still popular, Frank and Ollie were still dumbfounded.

I went to a celebration and screening of classic cartoons in the 80s in L.A. and a lot of old timers were there. When Disney cartoons were run, there was polite silence throughout the packed audience. When they played Chuck Jones' "Pest In The House" the whole audience erupted in laughter and hysteria. They also ran a classic Tex Avery (I forget which one) and the same thing happened.

During an intermission, Frank and Ollie came onstage to be interviewed (by Leonard Maltin?). They right away admitted their astonishment that the Jones and Avery cartoons were received with such joy and hysteria - and then they explained it away. I'll try to paraphrase (if you were at this show and remember more details, please comment). It was something like "Well yes those cartoons certainly had energy and they got a lot of laughs. I remember when we first screened such brash cartoons at Disney's that we were worried that maybe our own cartoons would be too sedate and old-fashioned by comparison, but then when we saw the same cartoons played in the midwest where most decent Americans live, nobody understood the jokes. So these are good for sophisticated urban crowds on the coasts, but our more conservative wholesome cartoons were much more popular overall." Now that's conservatism. Warner Bros. characters cartoons have outlasted Disney's popularity by decades, Frank and Ollie witnessed it with their very own eyes, and still had the audacity to deny it.

Old Conservativism Different than Modern Conservatism

Boy do I miss the old kind of conservative - because at least they had a tendency to preserve some of the good things that the previous generations of liberals pioneered.

Forcing Conservatives To Break Habits

In hard times, conservatives are sometimes forced to be creative. When the cartoon studios collapsed in the mid 50s, Bill and Joe - after making the same 2 characters in cartoons for the last 15 years, were all of a sudden on the street. The times had changed and so had the conditions of production. There was no more big-budget slow moving theatrical cartoon production where you could spend decades polishing up the same tired old ideas. Now the only way to survive was to get into television and pump out tons of product for bargain basement prices. You couldn't just make one set of characters and expect to survive (not till the 90s).

So now Bill and Joe scrambled and were forced to find new ideas and characters. Being the pragmatic conservatives that they were, they jumped at the task and created more characters in a year than they had in their whole previous career. They also had no choice but to change drawing styles to keep up with the market. Now they had to write dialogue - they had never had to do this for Tom and Jerry. This resulted in way more interesting characters than a generic silent cat and mouse. Not as interesting as the best Looney Tunes characters, but quite an advance for Bill and Joe. They never had to create characters with personality before. So how did they do it all at once?

Conservatives Copy Successful Liberal Inventions

They basically copied a bunch of other more creative people's ideas and characters. Huckleberry Hound is the voice and personality of Tex Avery's southern wolf - but he has Droopy's design. The Flinstones are the Honeymooners living in cave times. Quick Draw McGraw is a watered down Red Skelton. Yogi's voice and outfit is patterned after Norton from the Honeymooners. Etc.

What made their cartoons seem fresh and unique were the individual star talents that created the style. Ed Benedict's character designs (after Joe had told him nobody liked that "UPA" crap) were striking and appealing and modern. Daws Butler's beautiful voice and rhythms and versatility gave the voice patterns he mimicked from already established radio and TV stars a new sound. A sound so appealing that it made you think the characters were actually brand new.

The other innovations in the first HB cartoons came from the fact that they were being churned out so fast, that Bill and Joe had to use a ton of cartoonists, painters and other talents that all had different styles and personalities. The haphazard mixing and matching of all these talents - unsupervised by the conservatives who wished they had the time to force everyone into a formula - created a freshness and collection of a lot of lucky accidents. The first 3 years of Bill and Joe's new life showed much raw promise for a very creative future - had they not been so conservative that they couldn't pick up on the lucky accidents.

Formula Sets In

As soon as they became established and successful and began to get a studio in system in place, they got more control over the whole effort and everything became a complete depressing formula. These cheaper formulaic cartoons allowed them to survive for decades, but they also ruined their chances for respect from their peers. With every year, the cartoons got less imaginative, less cartoony, less fun - but the networks would still buy 'em like that so - why fix something that ain't broken? Most of them got cancelled after the first year, and yet the networks would buy the latest batch of Godawful cartoons. There was no incentive to do anything even professional - let alone creative. Had they been more liberal thinkers, they could have taken the lucky accidents that happened in the first couple years of their TV careers (gifts from God!) and built upon then - while throwing out the parts that were boring or didn't work. Instead, being extreme conservatives, they threw out the fresh lucky innovations and built upon the formula.

Hippies Deliver The Final Blow To Any Kind Of Creativity

Once the hippies came along, Bill and Joe - like everyone else - threw out even the good part of the formula - and any pretense at all of skill and professionalism. Scooby Doo was born and a whole new age of the worst, ugliest, unimaginative and amateurish cartoons burst through the dam and we've never recovered.
The worst things about 70s cartoons still influence even the most expensive "quality" feature animation today. People much more conservative and less creative than Bill and Joe jumped on the bandwagon and took over the whole business. Filmation, Dic, Nelvana eventually influenced Disney in turn, then led straight to Dreamworks, the uber-conservative animation studio.

Bill and Joe Reap Their Sour Seed

The sad thing about this is that in their old age, both Bill and Joe admitted to me that they hated their later cartoons and really didn't enjoy the creative reputation they had earned as the guys who ruined cartoons. I felt for them, but they sure asked for it.


Modern Conservatism Doesn't Even Value Skill Or Preservation Of Tradition

Today's conservative animation leaders are very different than not only liberal creators like Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones and Tex Avery but even their conservative counterparts of the past - Bill, Joe and Walt.

Today's conservatism fears and distrust everything, not just NEW ideas, but even just barely honest HUMAN ideas. The moguls have zero respect for anyone creative - whether they are liberally creative or conservatively creative. They are so afraid of individual initiative and talent that they have to use closed distribution systems to keep out any competition.

Today's creative leaders may label themselves "liberals", may have voted for Obama, but the last thing they want is anything to shake up their safe system. "Change" and "Individuality" are curse words for this new type of ultra conservative thinking yet poltically affiliated liberal.

Christopher sent me one of his studies.He's got the right idea. He's drawing using construction. And some perspective too - which is missing from a lot of people's studies. The sketch has a nice feeling too. My only criticism is the proportions have been evened out. Porky's cranium to muzzle ratio is more exaggerated in the original. His head should be bigger in proportion to his body too.


Here's some good stuff to copy - if you copy it the right way, you can absorb a lot.

Dennis the Menace is very well structured at the top level, with the odd bit of cartoon license and style thrown in to offset it. But you can totally see how the stylish details still wrap around the basic forms. If you copy it, don't start by drawing Turkey lumps, start with the solid forms underneath, and then level by level break the big forms into the next set of sub-forms and look for the patterns and forms within each sub form.

These probably are drawn by Ketcham's "ghosts" a team he trained to draw in his style - his apprentices. They had to be able to draw well in the first place in order to then take on such a unique and thoughtful style.There is an apparent looseness to the finish of these drawings, but don't be fooled by it. The drawings are very well planned at the top level and the final linework has much artistic flair - they aren't sloppy. When you get to the point where you are so confident in your knowledge and skill and style, you then can be looser with your approach and wander off into your own style - but that takes a long time. This knowledgeable looseness can be full of license and lucky accidents if you have a natural flair as some rare cartoonists achieve.

Here are some nice Woody Woodpecker comics - less obviously stylized but still very stylish in a softer way.


These 2 pictures are gorgeous - great skill, and great style and very fun to look at.

This one's getting a bit too stylish, wandering into slight abstraction, but still a good drawing.Just for contrasts' sake here is a later bland version of Woody where everyone is made out of simple flat ovals and circles - a lot stiffer and unnatural and lifeless. I've never been able to figure out why cartooning got so conservative by the 50s.

How could people who actually had all that knowledge just a few short years earlier, willingly abandon it in favor of boring, unfunny, lifeless ultra-conservative blandness? It was downhill even from here.

Cute generic Disney design VS cute specific Jones design
This Disney style is the culmination of their search for perfect mathematical design balance, inoffensive cuteness and lack of specificity. Once they found this balance, they stuck with it until it eventually deteriorated with the passage of time.
Pete sent me this email and his theory: (I added the headings)

Hi John,

I have a theory. (See, not only Eddie has them.) The more I read of your thoughts on "Specific" vs. "Generic" characters and the examples you use to illustrate each type, it seems like there's a pattern developing here. Most of the characters that you seem to respond to more viscerally as "Specific" types in terms of both personality and visual design, also tend to be rather ungainly in their design (with some notable exceptions.)

For instance, you love the work of print cartoonists like Milt Gross, Basil Wolverton and Don Martin for their skewering of human types and ability to make truly funny drawings. You've also recently been lauding, as you so aptly described it, the "Rat Pack" brand of humour that you see in "BC" and "The Wizard of Id", where there's less politeness and a more rugged, freewheeling approach to being funny.

Yet one thing that all of these print cartoonists seem to have in common is a flair for creating humour out of designs that are actually rather ungainly. Even your favourite animated cartoon character,"Popeye", who of course originated in the newspaper funnies, has an unusual appeal in that he looks like he's been Frankensteined out of various spare parts!

Now don't misunderstand what I'm saying here, as I'm not suggesting that any of these designs are amateurish or unappealing, but I do find that there is a spontaneity and visual clunkiness to them that maybe allows better for that broader type of belly-laugh humour that you enjoy.

I guess I kind of find it ironic in that, for all of your high regard for good solid construction in animation design, it is really these characters that don't seem to slavishly follow those rules that really get a gut response from you. I'm actually wondering if all of the animated film characters that you praise for having good solid construction, yet also tend to dismiss as being "Generic" (likely because of their solid construction whether you realize it or not,) are maybe fighting a losing battle in trying to appeal to the John K sensibilities.

Even the Warners characters that, on the surface may seem to disprove my theory, perhaps appeal to you because of the rather ungainly poses and expressions they take which requires the cartoonist to radically cheat the rules of construction to pull off effectively. Am I making sense? Maybe not, but read on...

You see, the way I see it is that print cartoonists have a huge advantage generally over those in the animation biz, in that they don't have to be nearly so accountable with their drawings. You can read a comic strip like "BC" or anything Milt Gross drew and not have to see whether or not all of the details are matching up perfectly from panel to panel. Nobody cares how Wiley's face goes from a front view to a profile or whether he's got exactly the same number of facial hairs on his ugly mug as he turns. The mind's eye fills in the missing movement and doesn't notice any inconsistencies like that. Because of this freedom from absolute consistency of design, print cartoonists can be extremely spontaneous in their drawings, potentially creating wilder, broader character personalities and actions if they so choose to.

This struck me the other day when a friend had lent me the latest book of political caricatures by British cartoonist, Gerald Scarfe. As I was looking through it and admiring his audacity, it also occurred to me that one probably couldn't successfully translate that type of drawing to consistently drawn animated characters. I'm not even referring to just the sheer amount of pen strokes (which would be impossible), but rather, the overall approach that Scarfe takes in his design. Frankly, I'm not so sure that Don Martin or Johnny Hart would fare much better either.

As you know, I happen to also share your admiration for Ed Benedict's designs for the earlier Hanna-Barbera characters. Yet I wonder if it's precisely because of the limited animation and more graphic, shape-based designs that allowed the animators to do cartoons that maybe had more in common with the work of print cartoonists than their predecessors in the theatrical animated shorts. Because of all of the visual cheats they could get away with by not having to adhere to the rules of full animation, I suspect this also allowed the H-B cartoonists to pull off broader humour in their drawings, as well as create what you yourself seem to consider more "Specific" visual designs and personality types.

I must admit, even in my own work, I was happier doing my own natural style of cartooning prior to when I first went to work for Disney. For all of the training and honing my craft through working for Disney, I suspect that something was also sacrificed in the bargain. For when I look back at the stuff I used to do in "The Ottawa Citizen" circa 1978 to 1984, there was a gutsier, more spontaneous quality to my cartooning, most likely due to the lesser emphasis on polished construction that I seem to strive for in my post-Disney efforts. The resulting images were, in my opinion, funnier because of their rawness and spontaneity. Heck, I might even post some up on my blog just so people can see how I started out.

Anyway, just some food for thought there for you. You can shoot down my theory now, ya' rascal.... :)



Hi Pete

very clever thoughts...

I have been wanting to do a post on this very thing for the longest time: the difference between perfectly balanced mathematical design (like Bambi) VS slightly awkward out of balance, more natural design - like Clampett. Friz on the other hand is afraid of contrasts in his work, so evens everything out like Disney - except without the gloss.


Both approaches share the same fundamental knowledge and skills, but the result I like better is the one that takes nature into consideration. Nature has an ideal plan for everything, but no part in nature fits the plan perfectly and that's what makes things interesting. The variety and deviations from the perfect plan.

Disney has no variety or humanity. It aims for a Platonic ideal of attainable perfection and the result is stagnation. It's all just a simple formula that can never make a funny face or stand out from the purely ordinary. It all has to obey their limited design and motion rules. Disney artists are entirely too afraid (and unimaginative) to do anything nearly as interesting as what surrounds them in real life. Great cartoonists draw from real life and then bend what they observe with unafraid bold imagination.

Real live humans are constructed, but they have much more variety, caricature, natural imbalance and pliability than any Disney character - so there I disagree with you. You don't have to draw flat to draw interesting as you seem to infer is my theory. Look at your favorite old time stars (and mine) and how interesting and unbalanced they are. What is remotely polite about Frank Sinatra? He is much more like Clampett than Disney.

As a caricaturist yourself, I would think that you especially would be repulsed by anything generic and evenly proportioned or middle of the road.

Your pal,

John