MooBeard: The Cow Pirate

This week’s fanart comes from Juan Caminador (though I know him better as Leandro) from Argentina. Cool, ain’t it?

Well, I just got back from the auditions for the three MooBeard leads! I won’t mention any specific names at this point, though I did audition for MooBeard myself… and I’m not as sure that I’m going to play him myself as I was when I walked in! For those of you who are just tuning in, I’m very new to all this, so to hear some of my favorite actors saying these rediculous lines I wrote, really makes this whole thing start to feel very real! It’s gonna be tough, though, and you can’t go soft on anyone just because you’re a fan! I’m going to have to turn away some of my favorite voice actors because they didn’t match the part (even though everyone put in fantastic, hilarious performances today). [Read more…]

While doing my character turnarounds for Sailor Bird, I found myself having a little bit of trouble drawing her in profile. I decided to call upon the help of David Alvarez, an awesome Puerto Rican cartoonist who has been an artist for DC’s Looney Tunes comic books for years. He drew the above for me, and it’s been smooth sailing since! David is currently working on his own Oh Yeah pitch, so keep on the lookout! Do yourself a big favor and check out his comic strip, Yenny

A few months before I designed MooBeard, I doodled a little ninja ducky on a grey sheet of paper. I didn’t have any plans for it, so I just set it aside. Later, when Andrew Dickman and I was planning on making a MooBeard pilot on our own to shop around, I thought it’d be cool if there was a hoarde of these little duckies and a big leader ducky. Well, after bringing the idea to Oh Yeah Cartoons and several storyboard revisions were made, I was left with only the leader ducky, Dark Blade of Fire.

Dark Blade’s design is very much an homage to Doug TenNapel who I’ve been a fan of for years. Doug has several characters with large bodies and cylindrical heads like Earthworm Jim and Klayman, so I thought I’d give something like that a try. Unlike those designs, I made Dark Blade’s body thinner in order to [Read more…]

Here’s some more fun from the archives. At one point, I considered doing MooBeard as a comic book. This little sample panel is all I did. It was going to be an intro story about Sailor Bird meeting MooBeard on his last day working at Lady Bovine’s Snorgg Burgers and Krogg just before he buys the pirate tugboat and starts his life of piracy. They were going to hold pirate tryouts to get the rest of the crew. It’s still a story I’d like to tell someday.

Oops! Almost forgot this week’s fanart!

This one is from Kaitlyn “BoneDaddE” Ritter from… somewhere in the US. It looks like MooBeard has a few cards up his sleeves as he plays (for cash!) with Sailor Bird and Quill (who won’t be in this short). Thanks, Kaitlyn!

So here’s part 2 of the continuing series of posts where I talk about how I arrived at the character designs for MooBeard.

Today, I’ll talk about what went into the design of MooBeard’s best friend and the ship’s navigator, Sailor Bird. I got the idea for Sailor Bird while contemplating the stereotypical Japanese school girl uniform you see in anime like Inu Yasha and Sailor Moon. I thought “people call it a sailor uniform, but would anybody be caught dead on a sailing vessel in this thing? So I drew up the first Sailor Bird in March 2003 (same week as the first MooBeard).

Sailor Bird’s design was subconsciously inspired by a lot of things. Like a lot of bird characters I draw, she was in part inspired by Booker from Jim Davis’s other comic strip, U.S. Acres, more specifically the way he was drawn around the time Jim’s assistant Brett [Read more…]

Well, since the public demands it (I.E. Ben keeps asking) I’m going to start talking about developing the characters’ designs.

I’ll start predictably with Captain MooBeard. The fun thing about designing MooBeard is that he’s inspired by a very broad range of influences. When I came up with his eyes, I had Del tha Funkee Homosapien from Gorillaz in mind. It’s also reminiscent of an early Barney Rubble design and, as Larry Huber pointed out to me this morning Little Orphan Annie. His eyebrows were inspired by Jay from the Clerks cartoon… who always reminded me of the vegetables in Super Mario Bros 2… but I digress. MooBeard’s teeth were inspired by Max from Sam & Max: Freelance Police, but MooBeard’s are more rounded off.

When I first settled on a design for MooBeard, he had way too many details As you can see there, he’s not nearly as streamlined as he is now. It’s important for [Read more…]