Gene Hamm's How To Caricature Is now an Online Experience at AirBnB.com  If you, or your family, friends, or co-workers are looking for a fun two hour class, animator Gene Hamm will show you how to exaggerate or bring out the features of a person in a simple cartoon.  He will make it fun and easy.  All you need is a pencil and a few sheets of copy paper.

During the online Zoom class, Gene will draw everyone and then email the drawings after the class,  And to keep it fair, you can draw as silly a caricature of Gene as you want.

Gene learned to draw caricatures down in Hollywood animation studios where the animators were always caricaturing each other.

The class makes a great birthday present, or part of a holiday party.  It also livens up some Zoom meetings.

Just click on How To Caricature.

I was sad to discover that Dan Spiegle passed away in January of this year.  There were no art classes in my town when I was a kid.  He was the person who taught me how to draw, from reading his comic books.  As a kid, I watched a lot of TV and he drew comic book versions of TV shows and movies for Dell and then for Gold Key.  He drew Maverick, Colt .45, Lawman, Shotgun Blade, The Rifleman, Johnny Ringo, Wyatt Earp, Texas John Slaughter, Sea Hunt, The Untouchables, My Favorite Martian, The Green Hornet, and The Invaders.
 
He drew adaptations of movies such as John Paul Jones, Yellowstone Kelly, Son of Flubber, Mary Poppins, Mutiny On The Bounty and Atlantis The Lost Continent.
What I loved about his comics were the accuracy.  Maverick looked like James Garner.  The Rifleman looked like Chuck Connors.  Lawman looked like John Russell.  The props looked right too.  He got the Rifleman's rifle right and Johnny RIngo's seven shooter.  The cars and Thompson submachine guns looked right in The Untouchables.  Black Beauty and the stinger looked right in The Green Hornet.  When the aliens died and immolated in a red mist, it looked just like they did in The Invaders.

Sometimes his comics were way better than the TV shows or movies he adapted to comics.  His Sea Hunt was way more exciting than Lloyd Bridges TV show.  Since he did such a good job on two of Warner Brothers TV shows:  Maverick and Lawman, I wish he could have done other Warner Brothers TV shows such as 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye and Cheyenne. (But Alex Toth and Russ Manning did a great job on 77 Sunset Strip. Toth also did a good job on Sugarfoot.  Whoever drew Cheyenne did an awful job.  It didn't look like Clint Walker).  Indirectly Spiegle got another crack at it when he illustrated Yellow Stone Kelly and did an accurate job of portraying Clint Walker and Edd Byrnes (from 77 Sunset Strip).

Rarely would Spiegle get it wrong.  In John Paul Jones, his drawings of Robert Stack looked more like James Garner, but he got it right when a few years later he drew Eliot Ness.  It looked exactly like Stack.

I learned to draw scenery from Spiegle.  I still draw hills and cliffs, trees and oceans with him in mind.

He also did comics that weren't based on TV, such as Space Family Robinson and Korak Son of Tarzan.

Unlike Marvel, who gave credit to their artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, Dell didn't let their artists sign their work for a long time.  I guess they were afraid if they got a following, they would ask for more money.  I could alwaysrecognize Speigle's style though I didn't know his name.  Later they let him sign "DS".  Still later he signed "Dan Spiegle".  Around 1971 I tried to get a job at Dell drawing comics.  I talked to Chase Craig, Spiegle's editor.  I didn't get the job, but during the interview, behind Chase Craig were original panels by Dan Spiegle of Korak Son of Tarzan.  I asked for Dan Speigle's address and Craig gave it to me.  Then I became pen pals with my hero.
 
He had an avocado ranch in Carpinteria, California, right next to Santa Barbara.  I  visited him three times.  He was always an affable friendly man who encouraged me.  And he always gave me a basket of avocados when I left.  The last time I saw him, his wife Marie served me a slice of homemade cherry pie.  Spiegle showed me his "morgue" where he had clippings of magazines of people, places and things to draw from.  That was why his comics were so accurate.  He told me when he got busy, his daughter inked his pencil drawings.  He told me when he was assigned the job to draw Maverick, there were no photographs to draw from so they brought him to the studio to draw James Garner on the set.  Garner was in the jail cell in that scene and between takes let Spiegle draw him.  He said Garner was friendly and very nice to him.
​
Dan Spiegle drew a lot more comics than I have mentioned here, (such as the marvelous Crossfire), but the ones that really influenced me were the TV and movie adaptations.  I am sorry he is gone.  But he lived a long life.  He made it to 96.  He played tennis into his 80's.  There will never be another comic artist like him.

HELL TOUPEE, my graphic novel, is now available as an iBook on iTunes. Click here to download HELL TOUPEE. When the world's first genetically engineered living toupees escape from the lab on an island off the U.S. coast and go on a murderous rampage, the only person who can save the world is Rose Thorne, the local barber.  She makes Sweeney Todd seem like Floyd the Barber.  HELL TOUPEE is a slam bang action/horror story with satire of corporate and government corruption and baby boomers' vain attempt to recapture their youth.  During the course of this big adventure, Rose is full of quotable wisecracks.  Readers have called HELL TOUPEE "Scooby Doo on acid." (Personally, I think I was more influenced by Jonny Quest than Scooby Doo).

As an animator, I set out to do a graphic novel a little differently.  It always bothered me readers of a comic book page could always skip to the bottom and ruin the suspense or ruin a gag.  To keep that from happening and to keep the pages turning, I wanted to only show one panel per page.  I was allowed to do that with iBooks.  It came out like a slideshow, or a storyboard.  I also hope to turn it into an animated feature sometime in the near future.

It is $10.99 on iTunes.  I think that is a bargain since it is 867 panels.  Sometime soon, I will have a serialized version of HELL TOUPEE on iTunes in three parts.  Each part will be $5.99.

With iTunes and iBook Author, I was able to have it come out the way I wanted it.  I hope you enjoy it.  If you like it, please recommend it to your friends.  If you hate it, please recommend it to your enemies.  Either way, I make a sale and can keep making more graphic novels.

Soon Hell Toupee will be available in ePub format that can be read on iPads and mobile phones.  It will be available as a complete ebook and serialized in three parts.  As you can see from the covers above Part Two has two killer toupees and Part Three has three killer toupees.  It visually implies the way they multiply.
Keep looking here and on my Facebook page for updates on availability.

I once designed a conceptual art piece called "Using The Proper Tools Blues".  Onstage was a grand piano and a huge block of granite about as high as the piano.  Two musicians dressed in tails would come onstage.  One sat down on the piano bench and one sat on a chair behind the block of granite.  The musician at the piano pulled out a paintbrush with no paint on it.  The musician at the block of granite pulled out a violin bow.  When the conductor gave the downbeat, the musician at the piano began to paint the piano keys and the musician at the block of granite began running the violin bow across the block of granite.  Despite the furious activity, neither musician was making a sound.  Hence the name "Using The Proper Tools Blues".

 Marshall McLuhan who first studied how media affected us said that when new technology is introduced, it includes the old technology.  Television was a combination of radio and film.  Computers are now a fact of life in the arts and in filmmaking, but when they were first introduced, they mimicked the old technology. Digital software is virtual and is not subject to the laws of the physical world such as gravity and fiction.  To attract users of the old technology, programmers had to build in some of those remnants of the physical world.

If a tool makes a job easier, it is the proper tool.  If it makes the job harder, it is the wrong tool.

Final Cut Pro was one of the first editing programs designed to replace the physical cutting of film.  Before computers came along, cutting film was a long and tedious process.  You had to have bins where you could hang pieces of film so it stayed off the dirty floor.  Then you could grab those pieces and splice them together with the other pieces of film.  In the digital virtual world, you didn't have to hang pieces of film anymore.  But Final Cut Pro made virtual bins anyway.  They built in the inconvenience of film, even though the inconvenience was obsolete in the virtual world.

To create a cross dissolve in film, you had to gradually decrease the exposure of one piece of film down from 100% to 0% while increasing a second piece of film from 0% to 100%.  This film had to be sent to a film lab where it double exposed the the two pieces of film onto a third piece of film.  A real pain in the ass.  In the virtual world of Final Cut Pro, this long process was no longer necessary.  You could just drag and drop the cross dissolve in between clips and instantly see it like in Apple's iMovie.  But in Final Cut Pro, after dragging and dropping a cross dissolve between shots, you had to wait for it to render before you could see if you liked the cross dissolve or not.  They had to build in the pain is the ass to make people familiar with the old technology comfortable in their misery.

iMovie was simple and straight forward.  You just dragged and dropped a transition and could immediately play it without rendering to see if you liked it.  Before iMovie, desktop publishing was possible on computers.  After iMovie, desktop movie making and editing was possible.  iMovie was what made me switch from the Amiga to the Mac.

Another pioneering art program was Photoshop which mimicked traditional painting tools.  In Photoshop, you couldn’t just hit the ground running with a brush.  You had to “configure” the brush.  This consisted of going through several menus and sub’menus, choosing the taper of the brush, the wetness of the brush, the fall off of the brush, the shape of the brush.  By the time you had gone through all these choices, you forgot why you originally wanted to use the brush.

ArtRage is a very powerful painting tool with a very simple user interface.  You choose a brush.  If it is not exactly what you want, a slider goes from 0% to 100% to tweak it.  Less headache and way less price.

When the movie Roger Rabbit came out, the Amiga computer was popular and Eric Daniels, who had animated on Roger, was hired to animate a Roger Rabbit game for the Amiga.  So he could animate in the traditional way, the programmer wrote code for an in-house animation tool.  It allowed Eric to draw extremes and then inbetween them for smooth animation.  As luck would have it, though, the Roger Rabbit game wasn't a big success.  But the programmer sold the animation program to Disney who renamed it The Disney Animation Studio and successfully marketed it.

In the old technology, an animator for film drew on a light table.  If, for example, the animator was drawing a pitcher throwing a baseball, drawing number one would be the beginning of the action with the arm pulled back.  Then with the light on, the animator would lay another sheet of paper over drawing number one and draw number three, which would be the end of the throw where the pitching arm is extended forward.  Then the animator lays a third sheet of paper over the other two and draws the in-between, which is drawing number two.  In this drawing, the arm follows an arc and is positioned somewhere between the beginning pose and the ending pose.  The drawings are out of order (2, 3, 1), so the animator has to take them off the peg bars and put them in the proper order (1, 2, 3) to see it move correctly as they flip it.

The Disney Animation Studio literally transposed that process to the digital world, so you drew number one, then drew number three, and then number two.  If you pressed play, it would be out of order and not move correctly.  To see it move correctly, you had to trade the drawings around from what was onscreen to a buffer and then go back to the buffer to retrieve the drawings in the proper order before you could hit play and see it move correctly.  While it was offscreen and invisible to the naked eye, you could easily lose a drawing if you weren't paying attention.  So the tedious process of the old technology was built into the new technology to keep it cumbersome.

Along comes Deluxe Paint III from Electronic Arts.  They took advantage of the digital technology and before you drew anything, it had a template of image sequence called P and N.  First you drew a frame.  When you added a frame, it made the previous frame P (P for Previous). When you jumped back to the previous frame, the next frame was N (N for Next).  You could jump back and forth between P and N with the left and right arrow keys and see the basic movement. When you were on P, you could add a blank frame by hitting the pluse key.  With the light box on, you could see the Previous frame and the Next frame and in-between it.  Then just hit spacebar and you could see the animation loop.  The drawings never got out of order.  It took advantage of digital reality to make the process of drawn animation easier.

The programs I mentioned in this blog were at the transition from old technology to new technology.  As computers are now a big part of our lives, software designers are creating better user interfaces that make the process of creating art and film easier.  They don't have to build in extra tedious  steps to make the process the chore it used to be.  With some of the newer software, it leaves you freer to let the imagination loose.

Julie Newmar, fresh from the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con, (she reunited with Batman co-stars Adam West and Burt Ward to announce the November release of the complete TV series on DVD) will be recording the narration for my documentary  CREATED EQUAL, about how special needs artists see themselves and the world differently than the world sees them.  It is a labor of love for Julie, whose son John has Down's Syndrome.  John just celebrated his 33rd birthday and Julie had a big celebration in his honor.  Gary Strobel shot two hours of footage of the birthday which I edited down to about a minute and a half.

The documentary CREATED EQUAL is in the rough edit stage, just awaiting Julie's voiceover to complete it.

The other night at the Cartoon Art Museum event where I read my entire graphic novel HELL TOUPEE accompanied by a slideshow, a couple people asked me where the idea came from.  I gave them brief answers.  I would like to elaborate here.  (I love interview programs such as Fresh Air on NPR or Charlie Rose on PBS where artists describe their thought process).  So here goes:

I love old sci-fi movies from the 50's.  The germ of the idea of HELL TOUPEE came from two Universal movies:  It Came From Outer Space and Tarantula.  In both were a scene where two desert rats were either possessed or eaten by the monster.  HELL TOUPEE was originally a short story I wrote in the early 70's.  In it, a couple of prospectors in the desert one night are bemoaning that their mine isn't producing any gold.  Just then a meteor hits the ground just over the hill.  The prospectors decide to try to take photos of the meteor before news crews get there and sell the photos to the news.  They drive their jeep over the hill.  One prospector walks to the crater to get a closer look.  Smoke envelopes him and he can't see.  He falls in the crater and lands on a ledge, knocking him out.  He is awakened to find a snakelike tendril of hair looking him in the eye.  It strikes like a cobra.  Back at the jeep, the other prospector sees his friend emerge from the smoke.  His friend was bald.  Now he has a full head of hair.  When he asks his friend about it, his friend shoots him dead.  In the next scene, the possessed friend bursts into a barbershop screaming "I need a haircut!  It's a matter of life and death!"  When the barber tells him to wait, he shoots everybody in the barbershop and runs out.  In the alley a spooky voice tells the possessed prospector, "Don't try that again.  You will do as we say.  We will one by one take over people until we take over the world."  With that, the hair color changes and adds a beard.  The prospector walks out of the alley past the sheriff who is investigating the shooting.  That was the end of the story.

I expanded on this short story and changed the setting so it was on an island much like Catalina.  I wrote it as a script that was pitched to the Sci-Fi Channel when I had an agent.  She almost had it sold, but the head of the TV movie department quit to start a production company for children's films.  This was not a story for kids.  In the original script, the barber was a female senior citizen.  My agent thought I should make the protagonists younger because the sci-fi audience was younger.  After the Sci-fi Channel deal fell through, my agent suggested I turn it into a graphic novel.  (She left the business to get married and raise a family).

I decided I didn't want the toupees to come from space.  Space aliens were a 50's idea that came from the Cold War fear of Communism.  In our present day, I think the biggest villains are huge mega-corporations.  So I made the main villain a Donald Trump-like figure.  The killer toupees (the original title was ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOUPEES) were scary, but the real evil came from corporate greed, just like JAWS was scary, but the Mayor was scarier for trying to cover it up.

I was told by my agent that you must grab people in the first ten pages of the script.  The final script started with Sterling Silver coming to the island to ask the City Council for permission to build a research laboratory and factory on the island.  But it took too many pages to get to the first shock, the Mildred Potter skin tightening scene.  So I decided to back it up and start it when Sterling Silver kills Spike Thorne, prior to the meeting.  But his murder still wasn't a big enough grabber to keep an audience turning pages.  The story really didn't get going until Act Two.

I happened to be watching a TV series THE HUMAN TARGET.  They always started the show with an edge-of-your-seat cliffhanger and then a title would pop up reading "36 hours ago" and jump back to see how we arrived at this moment.  I thought that was a good solution.  So I switched Act One and Act Two.  What used to be the beginning of the story became a flashback.  Now the story began with the scene of the mysterious man bursting into the barbershop and screaming  "I need a haircut!  It's a matter of life and death!"  He shoots the customer in the chair and the barber zaps him with a taser (which foreshadows a couple scenes later in the story).

So now the story hit the ground running.  The audience knew WHAT was happening.  They would stick around to find out WHY.  That was revealed in the middle of the story and Act Three is about how they will kill the monsters.

I still had one more problem with my story.  The toupees were too easily killed.  She hacked them with straight razors and electric razors, burned them, froze them and shattered them with a fire extinguisher.  The toupees were real wimps.  Suddenly it occurred to me to have them regenerate and multiply anytime they were killed, so they exponentially became a bigger threat.  Then she found there was only ONE way to kill them and it wouldn't be easy.  In order to keep an audience caring about characters, the stakes must be raised.

So that is the evolution of HELL TOUPEE.  You can buy it in paperback or for Kindle at Amazon, or you can buy autographed copies at The Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.  If you want it as an e-book and don't have a Kindle, you can send me $3.00 through PayPal and I will send you back a PDF file via wetransfer.com.

Here is the press release for the Cartoon Art Museum event:San Francisco, CA: Put on your favorite wig and join the Cartoon Art Museum in welcoming Gene Hamm and his graphic novel Hell Toupee. July’s Third Thursday will be a celebration of the monstrous and weird. Come out to meet Gene Hamm, as he reads his graphic novel. Dress up in one of our wigs for a photo and create your own monstrous toupee at the Cartoon Art Museum. This event is free and open to the public.
In Gene Hamm’s Hell Toupee, when the world’s first genetically engineered living toupees escape from the lab on an island resort, can the local barber save the world from their homicidal rampage? Full of laughs, horror, twists and turns, this graphic novel takes a savage and satirical look at vanity. To view a trailer of Hell Toupee, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfrWiM6x3cY <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfrWiM6x3cY> 
About Gene Hamm: Animator Gene Hamm worked on Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord Of The Rings; Hanna-Barbera’s Smurfs and Super Friends; Art Clokey’s Gumby; Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond The Stars; MTV’s Liquid Television; Sega’s Dick Tracy game; and Living Books’ Arthur’s Birthday Party, Tortoise And The Hare, and Berenstain Bears Get In A Fight. 

His own projects include the animated feature The Dream Hat; Cook For Your Life; Cartooning Shortcuts, Formulas And Cheap Tricks; The Professional Cartoonist Kit; and the book How To Get A Job In Animation And Keep It. He just finished the graphic novel Hell Toupee, which he hopes to animate.

Hamm has taught animation at Academy of Art University in San Francisco. His other business is HammCam Caricatures (www.hammcamcaricatures.com) where he can do caricatures at your party or event on site, or remotely via Skype. You can see three pages of his animation and films on his YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/genehamm2). 
Hamm also does standup comedy. He has appeared at San Francisco and East Bay venues such as OMG, Brainwash, The Continental Club, Neck of the Woods, and The Alameda Theater. 

About Third Thursdays: Third Thursdays occurs every month of the year in the Yerba Buena neighborhood of San Francisco, involving galleries and museums extending their hours throughout the neighborhood to create a lively atmosphere of arts and interaction. For more information:www.thirdthursdaysf.wordpress.com <http://www.thirdthursdaysf.wordpress.com/>

Here is the press release from Escapist Comics:
Hell Toupee read by Gene Hamm
Sunday, July 13, 4pm

Animator Gene Hamm reads from his comic HELL TOUPEE to projected images. When the world’s first genetically engineered living toupees escape from the lab on an island resort, can the local barber save the world from their homicidal rampage? Full of laughs, horror, twists and turns, this graphic novel takes a savage and satirical look at vanity.

Gene Hamm worked on Ralph Bakshi's Lord Of The Rings,Hanna-Barbera's murfs and Superfriends, Art Clokey's Gumby,Roger Corman's Battle Beyond The Stars, MTV' Liquid Television, Sega's Dick Tracy game, and Living Books' Arthur's Birthday Party,Tortoise And The Hare, and Behrenstain Bears Get In A Fight. His own projects include the animated feature The Dream Hat, Cook For Your Life, Cartooning Shortcuts, Formulas And Cheap Tricks, The Professional Cartoonist Kit and the book How To Get A Job In Animation And Keep It. He has taught animation at Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Through his business HammCam Caricatures he does caricatures at your party or event on site, or remotely via Skype. He also does standup comedy. He has appeared at San Francisco and East Bay venues such as OMG, Brainwash, The Continental Club, Neck of The Woods, and The Alameda Theater.

Gene Hamm will be reading his entire HELL TOUPEE graphic novel live at two events in July.  HIs reading will accompany a slide show of the graphic novel.  Copies of the book will be for sale in paperback and Kindle at the event.
These should be pretty entertaining events

Escapist Comics in Berkeley will host the event on Sunday July 13 at 5:00pm.  Escapist Comics are at:
3090 Claremont Ave, Berkeley, CA 94705
(510) 652-6642

The Cartoon Art Museum will host the event on Friday July 17 at 5:00pm.
The Cartoon Art Museum is at:

655 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94105
(415) 227-8666

"Hell Toupee" my graphic novel is now for sale right here.  Get a PDF for just $2.99 while the sale lasts.  After the sale, the price goes back up to $4.99  But at 434 pages with 868 drawings, either price is a bargain. Just click on the "buy" button and it will be emailed to you through WeTransfer.com.