maxwellatoms

[maxwellatoms]

Hey everybody! I'm helping Daria Cohen make a full-length pilot for her Vampair series. The Kickstarter is in its last few days and we're making one last push.

Whether you kickstart or not, join us today at 1pm Pacific for a livestream rewatching some of her early episodes and talkin g about the future of the show!

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Vampair Livestream!

It's happening now! Aurelio Voltaire and I should be showing up shortly...

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Summer Stuff Extravaganza

Hey everyone!

Just a few fun things happening this Summer.

Short notice on this first one, but I'll be on the big Vampair Kickstarter tomorrow (July 6th) from 9-11am PST with my old friend Aurelio Voltaire. Come say hi and see what the project is all about!

And at the end of the month, I'll be doing a digital signing with Streamily. It looks like a lot of fun, and should be a great way to get a signature without leaving your house!

Finally, at the end of August I'll be headed to Sacramento for Sacanime!

Hopefully I 'll see you there!

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What does your future hold!? Cruel Fate has dealt you these five cards. And no others!

While I would have loved to have made a full deck, these five cards were made for an early 2000s visit to Comic Con in San Diego and I'm glad I got to produce them for the event.

It was a sort of, "Hey, we need a promo to hand out before the panel." And I said, "I want to make tarot cards!" And they said, "Uhh... okay?

The full set (and a few stragglers) are up on eBay now.

I remember being excited to do Grim's "horse". It's sort of weird that I never gave him one on the series. Things to address, I suppose...

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Hi, I remember talking to you last year on Thread and I asked you if you would ever make a video game in your 2-D animation style like Trey Parker and Matt Stone did with their animation styles in the South Park games and you said you were going to try that any updates on that?

There's a project that I really want to try, and I have taken a few stabs at learning how I'd program it. I also have a couple of people I'm collaborating with on some vague game stuff. There's a show idea I'm excited about, for what it's worth. It all seems very far away, though.

Basically, I'm trapped in a desperate loop of needing money to pay my mortgage. The scramble of which has made it very difficult to look for paying work, much less take wild stabs at producing something in my own. In order to escape the loop, I'm planning to sell my house and hopefully that will buy me the time I need to figure out what's next. It costs a lot of money to move and sell a house, hence the recent eBay sales.

Please hang in there, global economy.

It really is remarkable how quickly everything starts to crumble when your industry all but disappears overnight.

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A few panels from Ecto Cooler, now on both Patreon and eBay! It was a fun board to do. I didn't do too many, and while this probably isn't the best story in the series, I had a lot of fun mashing up Lord Byron with some body horror.

I'm still shocked that they let the club foot go through. It's historically accurate, but... dang.

If anyone is interested, in addition to signed storyboard copies there are some animation cels, Chowder figures, cards, VHS tapes, and more on eBay.

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wait hang on I saw mention of a catio in one post. you have a cat? can I see the cat? are cat pics on the table? I would like to see the cat. pretty please. thank you.

Please. This is a serious Tumblr.

And this is Loki. When my dog Rinjin was sick, my friend Claudine talked me into adopting this guy. He's a mischief maker and used to have little fur "horns" which gave him his name. He and Rinjin (the dog) bonded pretty quickly. I was, like, "Sheeeit. My dog's going to die and this poor kitty will be all alone."

So when my friend Bill called and told me he'd found a kitten in the wheel well of his car, I decided to keep little Freya here. Get my cat a cat, you know?

And then I ended up marrying my friend Claudine, and I ended up with Athena here...

...and her sister Artemis. They're both litter-mates with Loki. So now we have Brady Bunch madhouse of four cats.

Thankfully, they mostly get along. Mostly.

They're all over my Instagram, if you're into that sort of thing.

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I looked on the Wikipedia page for The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy recently and found that it is set in California. I don't believe it for a second. Endsville is located wherever it wants to be just like Springfield from The Simpsons. Wouldn't you agree?

Yeah. My IMDB is a joke too. What'cha gonna do?

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Do you think were any kind of specific aspects of the culture, industry, economy, etc that made making cartoons in 90s / 2000s better or worse than trying to make them today?

They're literally different worlds.

As a 22 year old neurodivergent, I was able to pitch show ideas directly to executives. Part of that was because TV Animation wasn't a glamorous profession (quite yet), so the higher-ups were genuinely passionate about the medium. I earned good money for the time and was generally trusted to run my show and tend to the crew. I would periodically be handed portfolios, which I would personally review and pass on to other show runners. For the networks it was always corporate, cutthroat, and ultimately about the money, but as an artist you could still have a voice and make art while being paid a living wage.

The pay for a freelance storyboard in 2005 is almost exactly what it is today, but now you're likely to have less time and be required to do an animatic on top of it. Portfolios are online, and (beyond metrics) you'll probably never know if anyone looks at it or not.

Animation got big. Too big. The executives got "glamorous", then the talent got "glamorous". By then you probably wouldn't get a pitch meeting unless you were a celebrity or knew one willing to be connected to your project. Animation eventually got so big that it popped. And that's where we are now.

Most of the people I know from Kid's TV Animation are currently unemployed. I have been off Jellystone for over a year, and I'm starting to get genuinely worried. Like, "move away to save money" worried. Most of the employed artists I do know are on long-running legacy series, and they're concerned about their futures when/if those series end. Right now is not a fantastic time for "animation as a money-making profession". The "glamorous" part popped years ago.

That being said, there are still opportunities out there. If you're just starting out, apparently there's a planned surge in adult and pre-school animation. It's also a great time (as long as YouTube remains sane) to be crafting your own content. But I think that the time of Big Studio Patronage is over for most of the industry. It's up to the individual artist now more than ever, not only to make but to promote their own content.

Back at the height of Billy & Mandy, we mostly pulled fours and fives in the Neilsen ratings, but we occasionally got a seven. For reference, E.R. consistently got eights. It's difficult to say exactly how many people that actually was due to how those ratings work, but it was a big deal for the time. Millions. Enough people that if I had a dollar for each person that just watched that one episode, I would have been set for life. Now, nobody gets a seven. A four is huge. Back then there were maybe fifteen or twenty channels of programmed content as opposed to the streaming smorgasbord we were all just enjoying (and which now also seems to have popped). Point being, even though I wasn't paid-per-view, I was able to use those views as justification for an eventual raise. In modern times, streaming numbers are seemingly deliberately kept secret. You'll never really know how well your show was doing until it's over. Or maybe never.

In modern times, a million views on YouTube is enough to get you noticed online. It's a lower bar for entry in a way, but you've got to get there all by yourself. Once you're there (hello Hazbin) a network may indeed come and scoop you up. Even if they don't, you can probably make a decent living with numbers like that if you're savvy and willing to take the time.

I feel like I could go on all day, shaking my fist at the sky, gray-ass beard blowing in the wind. Was it better or easier making cartoons in the past? It seemed that way to me, but that was a world I knew. There was no AI to sell you out to, and the media was more of a "Wild West" than it is today. I do think that AI is going to continue to displace artists (and soon others), making it even more difficult to get anyone's eyes on anything at all.

Culturally, we lack the common touchpoints that bonded our society in the 20th Century. I suspect that the media landscape will continue to become more "bubbly" and disjointed unless some powerful force swoops in to mandate a common viewpoint. Those are two very divergent, uniquely tiring futures, each presenting a different challenge for an artist's survival.

Outside of whatever our modern world is, animation was made for a century by photographing drawings. If Émile Cohl could do it in 1908, you can do it now. It's a lot of labor, but maybe that's part of what makes it special.

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Just got word that Billy & Mandy will be leaving MAX at the end of the year. If anyone's interested in grabbing some physical media, I'm putting up the last of my DVDs on eBay this week. Who knows what will happen in the future, but the series has never had a full DVD set made, so discs like these may soon be the only way to see the show.

I'm in "Holiday Blowout Mode", so not only are there DVDs and original production art, but posters, crew gifts, and rare merch from shows like Chowder, KND, Samurai Jack, etc.

A lot of people have seemed sad for me that I'm selling off all of this old art. Honestly, most of it has sat in boxes for nearly 25 years. If I didn't sell it, I'd probably pull it out once every couple of decades while looking for a tape measure. At least this way, ideally somebody who wants it ends up with it and can enjoy it more than I would. I'm super-thankful to everyone who's bid so far!

Right now, I'm really just trying to buy myself time. Time for the animation industry to "bounce back", if that is indeed its destiny. Or just time to figure out What's Next.

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is it alright to ask what was your inspiration for lord pain, i love him but he felt somewhat like a specific reference i never get, was he a reference to something or is he just an idea that sounded funny

He was mostly just a D&D-style "death priest". The original idea was that he was some nerd who became a "Cleric of Death" under the condition that he worshiped Grim. CN woudn't let us say words like "worship", so instead he just became a "really big fan".

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We're nearing the end of this last eBay journey. Which may indeed be the last! There's not much left.

This was a fight scene from the Evil Con Carne episode No-No Nanook. I remember groaning after assigning myself this model, because who wants to draw a big fight scene on top of your regular workload?

Short answer: Me. It turned out to be a lot of fun. I don't remember this being the best ECC episode, but I do remember it being chaotic and model-heavy. There was an even bigger shot too, I remember, where the characters are basically moving like a wave because there are so many of them.

I've probably blocked out the trauma. Haha.

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I won't take them seriously until Mandy shows up!

@maxwellatoms Your legacy alive and well on the 405.

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Here are a couple of pics from the original Billy & Mandy Bible that I found. The whole thing (including roughs) is on my Patreon. The original outline is up there too.

Eris was there the whole time! :o

I'm also still selling B&M (and other) stuff on eBay. There are original concept pieces, character art, comic pages, cels, VHS, DVDs, and other fancy stuff.

Support flesh and bone artists! 🖤🤘💀🤘🖤

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As requested!

Milkman was a bad idea for a show. He was a superhero who had photos of missing kids appear on the back of his head. It's a weird joke for anyone under 45, and it turns out that networks aren't too keen on kidnappings.

Professor Death Ray Eyes would later appear (in a different form) on Evil Con Carne. And Billy & Mandy would continue to devolve as we got closer to the pilot for B&M.

I don't remember much about Marty. I know he fell to earth and was adopted by two parents with a cat, and there was a rivalry with the cat. Maybe I've still got it around here somewhere...

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A long time ago, in a studio far, far away...

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For the interested and curious, I’ll once again be putting some original Billy & Mandy and Evil Con Carne production artwork on eBay– probably the last of it! Starting this coming weekend (the 28th or 29th), I’ll first be posting auctions for some non-B&M stuff, like Dead Meat props and collectibles from other animated shows I didn’t work on. Then it’s on to the Grimmiverse. The goal is to drum up enough money to cover my mortgage for a few months while I try to outlast the studio drought.

It’s been… a year. I lost my job to studio cuts (but am still cool enough to get scraped by MidJourney), had a flood requiring expensive repairs, some cat emergencies, a small fire, and a dash of skin cancer. It’s all been a bit excessive, if you ask me. I’m not a person who spends much, but this has definitely been one of the more expensive years of my life. And all without an income! It’s amazing how fast things start to come apart when there’s no money holding it together.

Anyway, this is probably your best (and maybe final?) shot at getting your hands on some Billy & Mandy production artwork, some other original hand-drawn animation art, some fun cartoon collectibles, a few hand-crafter post apocalyptic movie props, and SUNDRIES!

Everyone loves a sundry.

When I’m going through this stuff, I end up taking a lot of photos of the art and memorabilia. Those end up on my Instagram, so check ‘em out there too. I’ll also be posting some new Halloweeny artwork there during October!

If you want the deep dive on all of the artwork (I’ll be posting some full storyboards soon) please check out the Patreon.

Demurely yours,

Maxwell