French illustrator, designer and 2D animator Quentin Tavernier (aka Kant-1) has a cool new website worth checking out. It’s as much fun to navigate as his drawings and animations are to look at. He’s also a guitarist for a rock band, Ace Out. Good stuff.

The “Unholy Marriage of Art and Comics” is back!

Craig Yoe has redesigned his Arf Lovers blog with new features like an rss feed, perma-links, comments and lots of new links. Yoe’s posts are often hilarious and eye opening - and certainly of interest to Brew readers. Yoe’s new Arf book, Arf Forum is now at the printer and can be pre-ordered at a discount price on Amazon. Based on his previous two Arf collections we highly recommend the latest edition sight unseen.

Craig is also compiling a book full of Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings, raunchy comics and cartoons by cartoonists known for their
mainstream wholesome stuff (Milton Caniff, Rube Goldberg, Will Eisner, Joe Shuster, Bob Kane, Mort Walker, Dr. Seuss, etc.). Previews of this book and Arf Forum will be posted regularly on Yoe’s blog.

There have been many cartoon characters based upon… uhh, shall we say, doo-doo.

From Spumco’s Nutty, the Friendly Dump to South Park’s Mr. Hankey, and not forgetting doodie.com, Burgerlog and Winnie the Pooh (Winnie is a doo-doo, take my word for it).

Now Manny Galan (who in real life is Director of Animation for Nickelodeon’s on-air promotions) has just created Dookie-Poo, and it’s a real contender for biggest brown lump of the year. (I mean that in a good way). Galan says:

This whole endeavor is just my way of keeping as much control over one of my own creations as possible. And doing something outside of the NICKELODEON system.

His characters are charming and the website is a lot of good clean fun. There’s a CG music video by upstate NY studio Virtual Persuasion, a cool Theatre section filled with small animations and short films, an interactive fun page and of course, a blog. Give it a look.

I’m often critical of the contemporary animation industry, but my criticisms are nothing compared to this new blog called Anibation Fantasy [site was taken down on 2/27/07]. The author of the blog has decided to remain anonymous, though he says he’s an Annie Award-winning artist who’s been in the industry for over twenty-five years. The writing on the blog certainly sounds like that of a grizzled industry veteran who’s seen it all. It’s hard to go wrong with a blog that has the tagline “I work in animation. I am in hell.” and offers post titles like “WHY THE ANIMATION INDUSTRY IS DOOMED,” “THE ANNIE AWARDS ARE A JOKE,” “HORRIBLE CARTOONS THAT EVERYBODY LOVES,” and “ANGRY WOMEN ARE RUINING ANIMATION.”

Worth 1000.com held a Photoshop contest this weekend where contestants had to incorporate animated cartoon characters into classic paintings. I’m not sure who won, but you can judge for yourself here.

Meet Doctor Finklestar: Space Urologist. Sophisticated humor this is not, but it does deliver the funny. It’s from C.H. Greenblatt, creator of the upcoming CN series CHOWDER which looks rather promising.