Mark Stokes by Dan McMahan
My pal, Dan McMahan drew me recently and I wanted to share it with you guys. Dan is a caricature artist’s caricature artist, his work is instantly recognizable and he’s one of the fastest drawers on the planet! You can follow Dan on Twitter. Thanks, Dan!
Self-doubt and anxiety are common denominators among creative people. Seems these things go hand in hand. In the end I think the only thing that matters is what we accomplish, not what we could or should have done if only those little doubts and fears hadn’t crept up. It’s very heroic of us to smite those fears down not only to do the work, but to share it with others. Creating is a process, and for me, overcoming those feelings is part of that process. Few of us ever look at something creative we really admire and think: “I wonder what the creator had to overcome to put this work together? Did they doubt themselves? Were they paralyzed by their own insecurities?” Did Michelangelo ever have “one of those days”? After all is said and done, none of those things matter much, do they? It’s the work that says it all.
Here’s a short animated clip from a cartoon I created featuring Bippo, a mascot character created for Krashpow Studios. This short film was an homage to those bouncy cartoons from the early 30s from studios like Disney, Ub Irwerks, and Warner Bros. Bubble-headed Bippo has that rubbery appeal of characters like Bosky, Oswald the Rabbit and Flip the Frog. This short was inked and painted onto cels, complete with a hand painted background, and it was shot on a 35mm camera stand. Unfortunately, the actual film itself has been lost, and all I have now is a low res digital transfer. Still, it’s fun to watch!
Click on art to enlarge
I found this unused art for a t-shirt design I created around the time of my last Zombie Boy comic book series. The shirts were never printed but I thought this design would be fun to share. As you can see, Zombie Boy was quite a bit different back then!
In the fall of 1977, I approached my home town newspaper, The Milton Press Gazette, about the possibility of publishing a comic strip. For a year or so I had been creating editorial illustrations for them and I was pleasantly surprised when they gave me the opportunity for my first comic strip to see print.
McTavish premiered on December 8, 1977 and it ran for a few months. McTavish is a broken tooth walrus with a wife and a young son and a group of arctic pals, including a polar bear, and an annoying group of Kittiwakes. The jokes came courtesy of one of my father’s ventriloquist joke books (he was a ventriloquist for many years), so they were about as corny as they get.
Here are several McTavish strips that I clipped from the newspaper (the originals are long gone). Don’t be too harsh on my teenaged cartooning skills!
