I fell in love with the cartoon medium at an early age, and began drawing cartoons in earnest during my elementary school years, and improved steadily to a near-professional level by my senior high school year. I realized, though, that for cartoons to be popular with the larger teenage and adult audiences, the cartoons must contain ideas that are relevant to their interests (and my own interests, as I reached their age). I have since worked in the Hollywood animation industry for over two decades, mostly as an animator, director and producer, and am now working full time as an independent to create the kinds of cartoon movies — starting with sexy, erotic cartoons — that I have long wished Hollywood would produce (but rarely has).
My current web comic strip, of Viagri Ampleten, is actually a collection of my recently completed layout drawings (the stage between storyboard and animation) for an intended 12-minute fully animated cartoon movie, of a sexy gal who moves in a sexy, provocative way. What male cartoon fan has not wanted to see that? Cartoon history has had symbols of sexy gals, from Betty Boop to Jessica Rabbit and Stripperella, but so far never a character who is genuinely erotic in how she moves in animation. Viagri is poised to be the first.
My personal preference in art is the area where fine illustration and cartoons overlap, creating a hybrid of beautifully drawn cartoons that caricature our own human existence. My taste in humor, though, leans toward the zany. Consequently, my favorite cartoons from animation’s Golden Age — from the 1930s to the early 1950s — are the 1940s Warner cartoons directed by Bob Clampett, with their consistently beautiful drawing, elegant animation (movement) and zany humor. Particularly noteworthy, relative to my own goals with Viagri, are Clampett’s “Russian Rhapsody” (1944), “Book Revue” (1946), and “Coal Black” (1943), plus his wartime Snafu and Hook cartoons. But I also love the surrealism in Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop as “Snow White” (1933), the visual poetry of Disney’s “Fantasia” (1940), and the absurdist gags in Tex Avery’s Red Hot Riding Hood sequel, “Little Rural Riding Hood” (1949).