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.

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! 🖤🤘💀🤘🖤

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...

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

SDCC: 7/28 @ 1:45 pm

It's been a dog's age since I attended San Diego Comic Con. But I'm going this year with my friend C.H. Greenblatt to do a panel for his show "Jellystone"!

Jellystone is famous for ruining the childhoods of people who love(d) Hanna-Barbera characters. Now we're going to ruin old-school CN for everyone too.

Don't ghost us!

Hey!

#1:

The reason that most of the characters changed over time was because I updated the models to help the overseas studios (and our own internal artists) get things on-model. I'll go deeper into Billy & Mandy's history with designs in "Billy & Mandy vs. The Entertainment Industry", but I went from wanting to allow artists to have complete freedom to tightening things down as time went on. The smart play would've to develop solid models first and then explain how, when, and why you can break the rules. That's the opposite of what we did.

Jeff was a more complicated character than most, with his double-mandible, multiple eyes, and eight limbs. I suspect that what happened in this case was that the overseas studio either didn't keep or didn't share the original Jeff model with their teams, and instead only used the "special pose" model of Jeff looking gross. Like a lot of the model stuff, it was a quality control issue. Back then when everything was analog (we still had to deliver on film up through the turn of the century) it was pretty hard to change anything once it had been done. So I'd always say, "next time" and then do a clarity pass over the designs.

#2.

Same deal. In the first few seasons, we had analog color correction, where you'd go to a big suite and some guy would run picture and you'd call out anything big that was bugging you. Chances are that we either didn't notice the error, or did and just couldn't do anything about it.

All of those early Mandy smiles were put in overseas, and I wasn't allowed to fix them. It bugged me so much that I vowed to find a way to fix stuff like that myself. I eventually figured out that I could export individual frames to Photoshop, tweak them, and then give them back to the editor. That way I could actually reanimate things that really bugged me but we didn't have the budget to fix.

#3.

Nah. It's fine.

Thanks and good luck!

I've answered one or two of these before, but that's on Tumblr for being as organized as my desk drawer.

I always saw Underfist as being a series of "specials" rather than seasons. So each one would've been an hour or whatever and then you're on to the next one. I guess in modern terms, it would've been a slightly-bigger-budget-than-I'm-used-to limited series.

I always wanted the team to be malleable, with Irwin probably being the consistent central figure. I had actually planned to "kill off" Hoss at the end of the second one after healing Eris' heart. Then the third one would've had a sort of "Search for Spock" thing going on. Anything after a third seemed like too much of a pipe dream to even pipe about, but I'll bet we would've seen Ernie the Space Crab once more...

Her utter disregard for IP.

Thank you for writing!

I'll still be around on here. I think the Patreon is probably a better place to ask questions if you really want an answer, since I'll try to answer every question on there. Here, I tend to cherry-pick and I've got a bit of a backlog.

Long story short, Billy & Mandy eventually wrapped, which left me to do Underfist and develop a couple of other properties for CN. My friend C.H. Greenblatt (creator and voice of Fred Fredburger, and writer of a number of memorable episodes) got his own series, "Chowder". They were having trouble finding a board artist to fill one of the slots, so I said I'd do a board. Greenblatt and I have always helped each other out when we can over the years. Just this year we got to produce Jellystone Season Two together, and it was the best time I've had on a series in a decade.

I did another board for Season Two, and that's about when "The Great Purge" happened. And there was no escaping that for anyone, really.

C.H. Greenblatt and I had a really fun Looney Tunes pitch we sold right before the pandemic hit. Like everything else during that time, it went into Deep Freeze. Maybe one day we can get back to it.

He'll definitely be making an appearance on "Billy & Mandy vs. The Entertainment Industry". More on that soon™!

That was a direct result of having zero development time. CN told me that the pilot wouldn't be a part of the series run and that if I won the big pick, that's when we'd get into development.

To my recollection, I never got any development time that I didn't take for myself in the odd hours between eating dinner and playing Morrwind.

I've actually never started a production that has had all of its ducks in a row. There's always been a "Whoops! We accidentally gave you six too many half-hours so your story arc is dead" or a "Did we not mention that we blew half the budget before you got here?"

I'm still intensely jealous of shows like Tron: Uprising and Animaniacs that have these (relatively) cush schedules and budgets, but those types of shows are deals with devils I know I can't handle.

Still, it must be amazing to look out over the neatly organized rows of troops with the knowledge that there's a sound plan in your mind before you wake up to all of the blood and screaming.

The #1 inspiration for General Skarr was Starscream. I mean... what kind of commander keeps a lieutenant who keeps trying to kill them under permanent employ? Keep your enemies close, I guess...

I get a lot of questions about Herr Star from Preacher. I still haven't read the comics, and the show came out long after I was done on B&M. There IS some DNA from Bullwinkle's Fearless Leader.

Other than that, he was just designed to be a sort of generic fascist who was always so embroiled in his own machinations that he couldn't possibly succeed.

My casting director Kris Zimmerman Salter was the one who came to me with Armin Shimerman. And since I loved him as Quark on Deep Space Nine and could see an analog between Quark and Skarr, he seemed like a natural fit.

Armin is an actor's actor, and even though I think he sometimes felt out of his element in the booth, it was so fun to watch him step in and just absolutely chew scenery. The Evil Con Carne ensemble records were generally a blast.

Skarr did get a blip of a redemption arc in Underfist, but if it had continued he would have continued to ride the line as the most anti of the team's antiheroes.

This is the original marker comp done for the opening shot of the main titles. These sorts of things are done for important shots (or any time you've got time to give something a bit more love). I remember that Art Director Rae McCarson also made a more purple version and a red/orange. I like that this one looked like a bit of a punk rock eyesore, so I went with that.

I always felt that the Grim & Evil titles were obnoxious in the WRONG way, and I wanted to make sure that the Billy & Mandy titles were CORRECTLY obnoxious.

It was a fun title sequence, with the exception of the fact that we had three days and zero extra dollars to put it together. Once we had the art assets, I took a weekend with my roommate La and girlfriend (all of whom worked on the show) and shot a bunch of extra stuff. We threw water balloons full of paint at poster board (which would later be used as mattes for the "splatter" transitions. We filmed smoke swirling in a tube and that can be seen swirling around the edges of the whole sequence. We did dumb little drawings of sharp-toothed Billys and Mandys. Many of those made it in as film scratches or pops. Most of it (like the infamous names on the tombstones) is really hard to see in SD.

Nice we had all of the stuff, editor Bobby Gibis and I spent a couple of days mashing it all together with the music.

My biggest regret is that we weren't given the time or budget for any actual animation, as I'd really wanted Billy & Mandy's sketelons to drop down followed by organs and skin as in the pilot. Instead we just had to use "electricity magic". Still, considering the resources we had... I'm pretty proud of what we were able to accomplish.

This piece (and many others) are on eBay right now under username: gr1mb0t.

I'll be putting more stuff up through the next couple of months, so keep an eye out if you're interested!

Songs are fun, but they definitely make things more complicated.

The musical bits are definitely all a collaboration between myself, the board artists, the musicians, and my casting director.

The first one I did was "Brains", and that was a bit different because I just gave Aurelio Voltaire my outline and told him to go crazy, then did the storyboard myself.

There are a lot of great professional singers who are also voice actors. Grey DeLisle-Griffin (voice of Mandy) is actually also a country singer! I threw in a little country-inspired tune for her in my Scooby-Doo Halloween movie. If you want instant, awesome hair metal you get Jess Harnell. Voiceover artists often have one or two really specific specialties and it's always fun to watch those performances.

The Fool!

This was made for the 2005 Comic Con Tarot Card gifts. There were only ever six cards, so it was never a real full set. I would have loved to have done that, though.

I ended up liking the cards, and we incorporated them into the new end title sequence we did that year.

The first ones are (I think) unused Mandys from the Big Boogey cover. The second are from the Midway game. I used to try to draw the characters "fresh" each time without tracing them back, so there's always be a bit of variety.

CN hard a hard rule for a while that you got 52 half-hours of a show and that was it. Donezo. The idea was that after 52 half-hours, a kid would outgrow any show so there was no reason to make more. Or the accountants said it wasn't worth it. Who knows. Either way, it was 52 and you're out.

Somewhere along the way,. they decided to make more Dexters and that broke the dam. After that, it was 76 half-hours. I think we ended B&M at 78 or so, including specials. We held the record, if only for a moment.

That was long after Cow & Chicken and I.M. Weasel had stopped production, though. By that time, David Feiss was on to Open Season. I'm not sure if he ever talked to CN about anything else.

Those are reactor cooling towers, but I understand why you'd think they're volcanoes. That's my bad.

Endsville was supposed to be the Everytown of your average Crapsack World. I've always been fascinated by urban decay and I'd just come from art school in Philly, which at the time was a wreck South of City Hall. And Northeast of City Hall. And if you went far enough West, it was also sort of shit. And if you went East you'd hit New Jersey. At the time it was just an all-around no win situation, and a big inspiration for Endsville.

Philly also had a generic brand with the classic blue and white labeling, which I thought was hilarious. I'd seen the same thing in Repo Man, but I didn't know it was a real thing. The generic brand inspired the color-scheme for Billy & Mandy's school and school uniforms in the later seasons.