JoeCartoon.com Features
Humorous Animation
View
a larger picture of the Frog Blender here
(You'll have to visit JoeCartoon.com
to try the blender out for real!)
By Patrice
Raplee
Late in the afternoon at a generic high-tech company
in Seattle, laughter emanates from behind several gray office cubicles,
while curious co-workers crane their necks to see what's so funny. An
animated frog bobbing up and down in a water-filled blender stares defiantly
from the screen of a PC. "What are you looking at, wuss," says the frog,
taunting the viewer to click on the numbered buttons that are spread
out across the bottom of the virtual blender. The Joesterizer 10-Speed
Frog Bender 2000 has a nasty fate for the mouthy frog when the viewer
is verbally provoked into clicking on the last button.
This animation is the cutting-edge Internet artwork of
Joe Sheilds, AKA, the Joecartoon Company. Shields' animations, such
as "Micro Gerbil" and "Frog In the Blender," blaze across the Internet
as soon as they're posted to his website. Toy manufacturers, as well
as commercial sponsors, were quick to realize the appeal of Shields'
cartoon site and have sent him stacks of proposals hoping to cash in
on the offbeat animations. The popularity of this artist's work is quickly
approaching the ranks of such famous cartoonists as Gary Larson and
B. Kliban.
Shields recounts his past and tells how the Joecartoon
Company was founded. Originally from Pennsylvania, Shields was the second
of five children. He had the typical hobbies of most boys who grew up
in the '60s, such as model building. Although the piecing together of
Universal Monster Models and hot-rod cars was fun, getting a hold of
his sister's dolls and slamming their heads in the refrigerator door
was equally entertaining.
Shields' brothers were not immune to his attentions either.
He remembers watching the movie Deliverance and running after his brother
screaming, "Come here boy!" which, says Shields, "totally scared the
crap out of him." Influenced by the movie, Shields would later use a
southern drawl for the voices of his cartoon characters.
From the first time a pencil was placed in his hand,
Shields was drawing on every available surface. At the age of 23, it
was clear that art was his main focus and that he could no longer "deny
his inner spirit." Sheilds moved to Boston, then on to New York where
he specialized in screen-printing. Screen-printing and designing T-shirts
earned Shields a fairly decent living; however, for every 100 designs
that he came up with, only one or two would make it onto a T-shirt.
Fed-up with the companies making all the decisions and
barely utilizing a fraction of his designs, Shields moved to Michigan
with his wife and created his own website. Initially, the site consisted
of 60 cartoon designs for T-shirts. The still cartoons were transformed
into a rough animation when Shields' next door neighbor (a computer
geek) put one still cartoon on top of another as a gif file. The neighbor
kid then presented the file to Shields and said, "Look, you're an animator."
The prospect of animation was somewhat daunting to Shields
until he started working with a Flash 3 program. With the cartoon story
conceptualized and the learning curve on Shields' animation program
complete, the first cartoon was posted on his website; (Frog in the
Blender.) The response was an immediate success!
Shields works with only one other person, "Russ, the Barbarian," his
web guy; this allows him to maintain sole authority over the direction
and content of his animations. The estimates on the number of hits to
Joecartoon.com are about a million a day and growing.
Ignoring the whimpering of maybe one out of 300 emails
that claim he is a mean guy, Shields sticks to his maxim, "If Joe thinks
it's funny, it is. If you don't you're stupid!"
Amidst the frenzy of animating, fly-fishing and drinking Miller beer,
Shields is expanding the dimensions of his enterprise. He recently signed
on with the prestigious Atom Films of Seattle so that fans could view
and download his animations. Shields chose to work with Atom Films because
he believes that the company "has great vision and respect for the artist."
Product lines of the Joecartoon characters will soon
be available at retail stores and he has a deal in the making with Plush
Toys. The discriminating Joecartoon consumer will soon have the privilege
of purchasing cartoon-decorated toilet paper. Incidentally, when Shields
told his Ivy League educated family he had cut a toilet paper deal,
their reply was, "That's great Joe, you've made it!"
Currently in the works for the Joecartoon Company are
two new animations, especially one that "your boss won't like" and "I'm
gonna do sumthin' to a chicken, sumthin' bad!"
Behind the self-proclaimed "sick and wrong humor," and
slightly ascerbic opinions, Shields exudes intelligence and is a genuinely
nice person. Out of the 100s of emails that he gets every day, he takes
the time to scan all of them and has made quite a few good friends that
he corresponds with on a regular basis.
Shields is working on his 20 minutes of fame just like
most artists and he too wants his name boldly printed on the package
of a loaf of Wonder Bread. Between the media blitz of radio interviews,
television, product lines and the Internet, this talented offbeat animator
might just get his wish.
Look for Shields' website, www.joecartoon.com.
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