2016 is going to be my year of tribute. I'm going to share my homages to the pop culture icons of my youth with you, my fellow groovies.
One of the great tragedies of contemporary media is the death of Saturday morning cartoons. I used to schedule my Saturday morning based on the 2-page illustrated ads in my favorite Bronze Age comics--making notes in my Han Solo/Chewbacca spiral-bound notebook as to precisely what time to switch from ABC to NBC to CBS in an effort to watch ALL my favorite cartoons! I went through phases--sometimes it was Hanna Barbera's funny animals (from Yogi Bear to Scooby Doo to the Wacky Races to the Laff-A-Lympics); other times it was action/adventure (Just wait 'til you see my homages to Filmation's Tarzan and Flash Gordon).
I've been doodling Jabberjaw, The Hair Bear Bunch, and Speed Buggy, and will post as I finish! My goal is to make an homage map, of sorts--I'll draw all the characters in detail, but the backgrounds will be really abstract for each one. Once I have anywhere from 20-100 characters done (I think of additional inspiration each day), I'll composite them into a single large poster scene. I don't really know why I'm doing it, since I can't really publicly sell licensed characters--but I'm getting a lot of joy out of it. I draw stuff that makes me giggle, and I'm giggling my butt off doing this!
Is there something you'd like to see? Let me know, and I'll perhaps work it into my schedule. I've decided to stop short at the Smurfs, Transformers, He-Man, GI Joe era--I don't have as much of a connection to that stuff. I guess I was too cool for school for a decade or so, and didn't come back to Saturday morning cartoons until Batman, the Animated Series began.
