Yesterday I touched on the fact that John K values a shiny-looking product over actual content. He seems permanently stuck in the 50’s and 60’s, touting Huckleberry Hound and other Hanna-Barbera cartoons as the pinnacle of cartooning mastery. Hey, I like The Jetsons as much as the next person (which is to say mildly) but I hardly think static, painted backgrounds are the end-all, be-all of artistry. He seems to totally miss the point that it’s the core characters and story of the show that made these programs great for their time, and I would submit that Yogi Bear would’ve been just as popular if done as stills cut out of construction paper. South Park comes to mind. But K can’t be bothered with logic when there’s so much vicious bile to spew all over creation.
Also, he’s kind of a racist. Recently he did a post on color scheme. One of his complaints was the colors in Shrek, though he doesn’t really say why or what, if anything is wrong with it. No, instead John points to Anime as an example of good color schemes and suggests that, “if you are a painter and are stuck for color ideas, just steal a pile of these!” All artists steal from each other, so that’s no big deal, but the more I read the more uncomfortable I get because John talks like your benign but racist grandfather who casually trots out the word “nigger” and offhandedly states that Jews are good at hoarding money. For example:“Thank God our pals the Japs are keeping visual pleasure alive. Let's pay
attention!”
“Fred is coming out of a bag with tiny down syndrome eyes…”
“It's a tad bit on the cold side for me, but then the Japanese are a cold race. We westerners on the other hand are naturally emotional and warm and inventive, yet our stupid-ass corporate franchise controlled society is stopping us from what we could easily do-beat the crap out of cold cultures that are still imitating what we did from the 1930s to the 1950s!”
Wow. Just…uh, wow. Ignorant stereotyping aside, John seems to miss the irony that he had one hit show and since then has just been imitating his own work from a decade ago and is blissfully ignorant as to why nobody wants to hire him. Gee, I dunno, should we hire a young, new animator who actually uses tools invented in the past forty years, or the crotchety old lunatic has-been who screams like a deranged two-year-old anytime someone mentions The Simpsons?
Some of K’s posts seem less about artwork and more about how he hates everything that has happened in the world since 1970. Really. In one drooling, deranged post on what I guess is supposed to be form and structure in artwork, K just stream-of-consciousness rambles for about 10 paragraphs about how “hippies destroyed the western world in the late 60s” and how toy makers must secretly loathe children these days. After lurching around the page in buggy-eyed madness for awhile, K states that
“these toys are just one example of the horrible thing that has happened in all walks of modern (post 1970) life. Nothing has form anymore. Music is rambling non melodic nonsense.” Shortly thereafter he seems to come out of his rage-haze and kind of tacks…something about how this relates to art onto the end of the post.Yes, our friendly, neighborhood ass-clown seems to think that if it happened before Vietnam, it must have been good. K kind of comes off sounding like that crotchety old bastard who lives on the corner and shouts at kids to keep off his lawn and about how much a loaf of bread costs now. Nostalgia and paying homage have their place, but believing that Looney Tunes from 1957 was the last time anything of value was created is just fucking stupid.
“Mel Blanc read the dialogue with verve and rhythm and a huge variety of
contrasts and accents. (no one does this any more)”
Yep; hit the nail on the head there, K. Mel Blanc was phenomenal, no doubt about it, but I’m a little dubious with his assertion that nobody doing cartoon voice work nowadays has any skill. That’s probably the most insulting, idiotic thing I’ve heard since…well since the last thing I read on his page, actually. I forget, how many voices and accents does Hank Azaria do? Oh, right, he’s on that dreaded Simpsons show and everything involved in modern cartoons sucks, right. (Incidentally, Azaria does Chief Wiggum, Apu, Moe, Comic Book Guy, Cletus, Professor Frink and others.)
I do agree with K that Jack Kirby was an astounding comic book art visionary, but he wasn’t art perfection. K seems to totally gloss-over the fact that anatomically some of his compositions are just fucking bizarre. John K is terminally lost in nostalgia and his objectivity is completely clouded by it.He’s not shy about extolling the godlike talent that is “K”, either. Here’s a little gem where K claims that anyone who was doing innovative cartooning in the 90’s was ripping him off:
“Of all the innovations that came from that show this is the biggest one and the
one that wasn’t carried on by anyone else. People would copy certain specific
Stimpy expressions and use them out of context in their own cartoons, but I’ve
yet to see anyone make their characters have an inner life…”
What a penis drip. I could probably spend the rest of my life happily criticizing John K’s crazy douchebagery, but I think I’ve gone on long enough. Thank you for your kind attention, ladies and gentlemen. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
John K’s ass-blog link – Click if you dare!
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