Well, ..uh..I’ve been Sick!
Sorry for the long absence from the old blog. I caught pneumonia in San Clemente, perhaps from a bad vegi-burger. After I ate it, my stomach was very upset and a day or so later I started feeling sick, really violent chills just from air conditioning. I thought I had stomach flu, but all that really developed was a cough, and a fever that jumped from 99 to 103 degrees back and forth. I also have great shortness of breath, I can hardly walk two blocks without breathing really hard. I miss my two mile walks very much. I am now on antibiotics, which has tamed the fever, but my lungs are pretty full. The worst is when I get into a coughing jag, is I start choking because I can’t get a breath! It can be pretty scary! So please, all my readers, don’t eat any bad vegi-burgers!
    Have you visited my friend Pat Ventura’s new blog? It’s at www.patcartoons.blogspot.com. Kind of an odd address, no “@” sign! You will see many of Pat’s drawings of characters we worked on for the “What A Cartoon!” series of shorts produced by Fred Seibert at the old Hanna-Barbera studio. We, meaning myself, Julian Chaney, Robert Ramirez and many more, really loved making layouts for Pat’s cartoons. Sledgehammer O’Possum, Yucky Duck, his version of George and Junior, what happy memories! I remember I was continually ill from the air-conditioning system in the old plant. My supervisor, Larry Huber, was not happy that I made so many layouts for some of the scenes. I just couldn’t help it, Pat’s designs were so much fun to draw that I wanted to animate ’em! What matters now is, we had fun making them, a few people enjoyed watching them. Now we’re all unemployed and broke. Sometimes you pay for your fun in this business, big studios don’t like independent thinkers. Pat Ventura really thinks for himself, he’s been dreaming up cartoon stories with his own characters since he was a little kid. Go over to his site and maybe drop a comment, he’d love to hear from you.
I’m not too energetic this time, so I will just post my usual strips without much comment.
Krazy from 12-9 to 12-14-1940.
Felix is from 1-28 to 2-3-1935.
Patrick is from 10-6 to approximately 10-10-1966.  You will note that the 10-10 (?) is in black and white. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch was on strike at that time, and the color engraving department was closed, so all the dailies were printed in black and white for awhile. The Post was always prone to strikes, back when workers had the backbone to demand better wages and conditions. Too weak to write more, see you again soon, I hope.
Paul Christoforos says:
Hi, it’s me, Paul and I am a huge fan of your animation work to say the least. And your sickness, yikes, I say!
Mark, please make sure you don’t eat anymore bad food even if you already know that.
Oh, almost forgot, I went to Pat ventura’s blog and I say that the drawings he did are amazing. I wish I could get to work on something like that (even though I haven’t set foot in the buisness). It’s not your supervisor’s fault that he won’t let you artists do what you want, it’s just that Seibert kept wasting money on executives and department heads so that departments won’t communicate with each other. I was refering to some of Pat’s cartoons for What a Cartoon!
Mark says:
Hi Paul,
Thanks for commenting. Fred Seibert in the 1990s was quite a personable, friendly guy. You may be right that he was wasting our prod. budgets on the top end, but we never suspected it. Fred is still one of the nicest rich guys I know, it was fun to work with him. In the early days of “What A Cartoon!” we were laid off about every two or three weeks. We were expected to be weeks without pay waiting for a call back for the next cartoon to start. After this happened a few times, all us cartoonists sent a protest letter and the management listened! Thereafter we were kept on between pictures. I won’t tell you the hours of “free” overtime that went into those cartoons, but it was considerable. Never enough time was scheduled to do a really good job, and we all wanted the best from ourselves. I hope you don’t get into the “business”, nothing ever works out right in it for the artists.
Best to you, Mark
James Tim walker says:
Hey Kaus….get of the vegi-burgers and have a hunk of hide!!! Glad your on your way to recovery.I had a check up 2weeks ago doc says disease is progressing but very slowly,he says I’m doing great. Glad your back pal….best. T W
Martin Juneau says:
Geez! I’m very sorry for your stomach flu. I think that’s happen to everyone to eat bad foods even without that intention. I wish you the best luck to be cured.
Ah yeah, i hearing a lot this week of Pat Ventura’s Blog and i like your backstory about Fried Siegbert. Did he’s still at the animation job today? We never having those cartoons in Canada until we can see free online but now i can understand you having real funs to do those cartoons.
Charles Brubaker says:
Sounds awful. Hope you’ll fully recover.
I enjoyed looking through Pat’s blog. I knew you worked on these cartoons so it was nice to hear your insights. You said you did alot of drawings in your layouts. Do you know if the studio in Philippines just painted your scenes onto cels and photographed it as is, with or without inbetweens?
I’ve been working on my own short cartoon this summer. We’ll see if that will lead me anywhere once its done. You can see a sample cel setup and the 16mm camera stand I build on my blog. If you want to see the (incredibly roughly-drawn) storyboards let me know and I’ll email you the link.