Being Bob Camp
| Author | Ben Vincent |
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| Published | EF Issue 2016.3 |
| Pages | 18-23 |
| Website |
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Bob Camp started drawing caricatures at Six Flags over Texas when he was 16, and looked like he was 13. After traveling around the country drawing caricatures and portraits, he began drawing for Crazy Magazine. He inked comics for Marvel Comics: G.I. Joe, The ’Nam, Conan the Barbarian Savage Tales; was a designer for the animated series ThunderCats, SilverHawks, TigerSharks and several others produced by Rankin/Bass in NYC; and was a designer on The Real Ghostbusters and Tiny Toon Adventures. Bob is probably best known as co-founder and director at Spumco for The Ren & Stimpy Show.
Article Transcript
Ben Vincent: Thanks for taking the time to visit, Bob. I’d like for you to share a bit about yourself to the ISCA community. It’s a large group of artists who love drawing caricatures and much more. I hope you can come out to a convention sometime and see it for yourself.
Bob Camp: Sure!
BV: Caricature art has changed a lot since we were drawing at Six Flags. I’d like to talk a bit about the growth of your art from caricatures at the park to comic book artist penciler, inker, storyboard artist, character designer, and director.
BC: I meet caricature artists at the Comic-Cons, and I long for the days when you and I traveled all over the country drawing from fair to fair. Occasionally, someone asks me to draw a caricature of them and I say no, that’s not what I’m doing now. If I did, I’d be drawing caricatures all day. Ha! I still occasionally draw at parties when asked, for some extra cash, like we all do. I’m a caricature artist at heart. I think caricature is at the heart of all cartooning. Most cartoonists I know draw a pretty mean caricature. It’s really what you do ― can’t separate the two.
BV: I think a lot caricature artists go into storyboarding ― feels natural making up bodies and drawing under pressure.
BC: Remember when you and I were at Six Flags, we were some of the few who thought of new body situations for each cartoon, trying to make it funnier. Most artists had a simple running body, a puff of smoke and a sign pointing toward girls or boys or a sack of money going to Vegas. You and I always tried to come up with a brand new joke on someone’s cartoon, trying to knock them out and entertain. I still feel the heart of those skills learned as an artist in the park when I’m working the crowd now at the conventions. You know, I meet a lot of artists who got their start drawing at Six Flags. After all, it’s the logical place for a 16-year-old to make money drawing. I don’t think most people take it to the extremes we did, traveling around the country living on the edge with Charlie Pico, being dead broke and stranded and having adventures.
BV: After our interesting trip with Charlie, you created a little cartoon of our adventures with Charlie Pico, which led to you doing movie parodies at Crazy Magazine. BC: The way that happened was I was drawing caricatures. Actually, that year, I was doing portraits in Provincetown on Cape Cod at Whaler’s Wharf right off of Commercial street. Next to us was a fellow doing caricatures named Gary Hallgren. He said, “You could work in comics. I’ll introduce you to my friend Larry Hama.” I went to New York, became Gary’s assistant, and the next thing I know I’m doing Crazy Magazine. The first issue or two I did while still living in Texas before moving up there.
BV: I remember that first parody. It looked like Ol’ Bob drawing street caricatures applied to a movie parody. After that, your style evolved quickly, getting better and better. BC: Yeah, that first one was Smokey and the Bandit. Gives you an idea of how long ago it was. Then I started working in Marvel offices, working in the bull pen making corrections on all the Marvel titles, and did lots of covers for issues like G.I. Joe, ’Nam, inking a lot of John Buscema. While I was there, I was picking up on all those styles and learning to draw in the professional Marvel cartoon style, picking up inking tips and drawing tips and all that. That was like getting paid to go to college, working with super-talented, world-renowned comic book artists. I was picking up stuff from all those great artists. That’s always what I’ve done, always been a sponge. If I see some cool art going on, I check it out and try to work at it and figure it out and apply it to whatever I need. Steal what I can.
BV: You have a great knack at telling a story.
BC: I really learned storytelling form working with Marvel. It was like being thrown into the lake and told to swim, I never took any lessons from anybody. I would just take a job on and have to figure it out on the fl y. That’s one of the good skills I have. I can kinda lie my way into a job and somehow pull it off. And I’ve done it a lot. My first airbrush illustration, I had no idea how to operate an airbrush, didn’t even own one, went to the art store, and they showed me how to work it, and, overnight, I did an airbrush illustration. You do what you got to do to survive, you know. I have done every kind of art job there is except probably sculpture.…Anything you can do to make a living at your art, I’ve done it. The thing that is good about that is I teach at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and I tell my students, “Take any kind of art job you can. Something you learn there can be applied to projects later in life. I think about all those times I did layout, color separations for comic books and that kind of stuff. They are great skills to have. Being able to shape-shift and work on different kinds of art projects and different kinds of mediums is a great thing to know.
BV: I have heard Vincent Waller talk admiringly about how your storyboards are some of the best he has seen at capturing the story humor and action. Of course, you have also been a director and writer of the stories. How did you make those transitions?
BC: You know what…like I said, I was stuck doing a job, and I had to figure it out. I don’t remember anyone sitting me down, saying here is how you do a layout. I did learn some stuff from Eddie Fitzgerald about storyboard framing, I learned mostly by just watching what he did. I, of course, learned some stuff from John K., not all of it good ― ha! The good thing about working in a studio situation, you are surrounded by talent, especially the big movie studios. Everybody around you is world class. You’re working at the top of the field, and you’ve got to be good, and you’ve got to be funny, and you’ve got to tell a story, and you’re basically directing. I really like working in a situation like that because every day is a challenge.
There is a high you get working with talented people. There is a high you get brainstorming an idea. Everyone is pitching in. You feel the excitement build in the room. … Everyone is going like YEAH YEAH YEAH. I know then he does this and then this happens to him. Everybody goes yeah yeah, then people are grabbing pencil and paper, drawing like crazy. It is like a cartoon feeding frenzy. Everybody gets excited about an idea. It feels right. You know when you are working on a project and you think, “This is actually OK. I don’t suck today.” It feels really good, especially when collaborating with other people who are all so talented and fun to work with. It’s the best thing in the world. I feel really lucky we were able to work on Ren & Stimpy because we were the badasses of animation. We really were. Churning out one incredibly funny cartoon after another. Those were wild times. I got spoiled. We got away with so much. The next thing you know, you are working on Bubble Guppies. Don’t get me wrong, that was a cool show to work on, just not the same.
BV: One thing about Ren & Stimpy was it seemed like such perfect fit for you to express yourself. Of all the shows you worked on and characters you designed, it was a chance for Bob to be Bob, of all the characters you worked on or created. You know what I mean? BC: We were really lucky. We had a lot of freedom. Some people like to say Nickelodeon is terrible to work for and that they were unreasonable, and cut out the jokes, and say we hate Nickelodeon and all that stuff. They were terrific to work for and tolerant of us because we were a bunch of funny a-holes, not the easiest guys to work with or particularly well mannered. We were like those rock bands that would throw the TV sets into the pool. We were like that. They put up with a lot from us. You look at the cartoons and you say, “Wow, they got to do all that?” It wasn’t because we snuck all of it through. Some of it we did. Nickelodeon knew they had a hit and that the edginess is what made it really popular. BV: Did you ever pitch any other cartoons before Ren & Stimpy?
BC: Me, no, not personally. I worked on a lot and pitched a lot since. Pitching shows and selling them is like winning the lottery. Everybody is still trying to make the next Sponge Bob. They haven’t figured out that copying Sponge Bob is not going to make it a success. Networks like Nickelodeon are struggling now because they don’t have control over the market anymore and lots of people are turning to their iPhones and stuff for their media. So the business wasn’t hard enough before; now it is more global than it ever was, splattered all over the planet. When we started Ren & Stimpy, there was just one way to make a cartoon, the same process people have been using for years and years, on film, hand-painted on cells. Now, there are a thousand different ways to make a cartoon and a hundred different ways to view it. And the market, there used to be three networks to sell your cartoon to. Now there are a million networks, and it’s not as easy to make money doing it anymore. I’m sure as artists you run into this all the time. You’ve got this experience and knowledge behind you, and you’re not making any more money than you did 20 years ago. In the comic book business, the people aren’t making any more money. Now, the page rate is what it was in the late ’80s or ’90s. So many people are working for practically free. It’s as if it is OK to take advantage of artist’s good nature and rip them off. The artist does all this work, and they are the first people who go, on any kind of project. It’s like, “We got all the art. We can let the artists go now.” The rest of us can work year-around and get pensions. The artists can starve.
BV: Most of my other work is in advertising, and I get that all the time. It’s just a job, nothing personal. I do a fair amount of storyboards for commercials ― mostly stationary shot key frame storyboards, stand and shoot. I love to look at and work on storyboards done for animation and movies.
BC: That’s something that, if you are interested in doing it, then you just have to do it. People often ask me how to get in this business, and I say you don’t want to get in this business. It’s a terrible business and it ruins people, makes people into miserable hacks or angry burnouts. You got people who have a lot to offer and are really talented and are living check to check, struggling, and no one cares. I tell my animation students, “Look, unless this is something you absolutely have to do, something you are driven to do, something you always have wanted to do, something you are going to do whether you take this class or not, something you are truly driven to do. Unless you have that kind of drive and that kind of desire, then don’t even bother, because it’s real hard, and it never gets easy, and I’ve been doing it for 30 years, and it’s still really hard. It’s a struggle. So many times, you work on shows that you don’t really care about, and the writing is terrible, and you can’t make it any better because it’s not your job to make it better, and you have to storyboard stuff that blows, you know? And you’re not going to bother to watch it. I was working on a movie a few years back, and it occurred to me I was really unhappy working on it, storyboarding scenes I knew were going to be cut. I knew they were going to be cut out because they shouldn’t be in the movie to begin with.…And they did. I said if these are going to be cut, I shouldn’t have to board these up. They thought I was being “bad” because I said that...
The realization I came to was that I have so many creative moments in my life to do something beautiful and worthwhile. How many of those days am I going to devote to other people’s crap and tired-ass ideas? … I’m one hell of a turd polisher. I’m pretty good at taking stuff and making it work. Sometimes it is appreciated, and sometimes you piss people off because you change their ideas, and they don’t want their ideas changed. A lot of it comes from the fact that I am a director and I look at stuff like a director would look at it and I see big problems. Like they say storyboard this page, with them going into a cave, and I ask why are they going to the cave, and who is this character? And why don’t I care about them if they die? You start asking questions and it just pisses people off. So I’ve come to the realization I need to start focusing more on my own projects. That’s what I’m doing now. Doing fewer storyboards on other people’s projects. Here at Bob Lab, we are focusing more on putting projects into production, service work on a creative scale, focusing on development, character creation, concept creation, intellectual property development, that kind of stuff and character designs. The part of animation I have always enjoyed the best was development. During my time working at Blue Sky, I was really happy doing that, being creative. Not everything is written in stone yet. That’s something I enjoy and something I think more of, my focus now. My friend Mark Greenbaum and I worked with a Canadian group doing a mobile game a few years back, Tanks of Fury. I have some animation projects, comic book projects, focusing on my own stuff.
It’s funny. I always felt like being a story artist is like being a ditch digger. You are down in the ditch, and you make your living off every shovelful.…So the pencil is the shovel. As long as you have the shovel in your hand, you’re going to dig. You can only make so much money drawing, and you can only draw so many minutes in a day, and you can only do so many drawings in a day. The people making money are those looking down telling you where to dig. So why work on other people’s stuff when I can work on my own stuff? That’s what we are doing now ― developing, pitching and consultant stuff, I like doing that. Last year, I was at Blue Sky studio with the storyboard crew, talking about drawing funny. And I have been teaching storyboarding for animation at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and I kind of dig it. I started out with absolutely no idea what to do, just thrown into the lake and told to swim. After three years of doing it, I kind of have it down. Did you ever see the movie “Exit Through the Gift Shop”?
BV: No.
BC: You know Banksy, right, the famous graffiti artist? He did this movie about this guy, Mr. Brainwash, who followed the guys around the city doing graffiti. He got Banksy’s trust and hung out with him, to see his process and do video. So this guy Mr. Brainwash creates this persona of an Andy Warhol character, and he hires these artists to do the art for him. Long story short, he does a big opening and he is an instant millionaire. A huge hit.…They are putting their Warhols in the closet so they can put up Mr. Brainwashes.…Everyone should watch this. This movie made me think. I love it when movies make me think. What is it about this guy that is any different than Andy Warhol? Warhol did the same thing. He was like a business genius who was also an artist. The conclusion I came to is that the difference between this guy and other artists is that he is dishonest. And that made me think a lot about honesty and art. I always struggled with the idea of what makes someone an artist. It’s the person, it’s the message. This guy, to my reckoning, is dishonest, and that is why the real graffit artists hate him. Because he is a fraud. Even though he has people create art for him and other people buy it, that doesn’t mean he is an artist. As artists, it is absolutely essential that we always be honest. I tell my students this: You have a superpower. You have the ability to tell stories with pictures, and you can communicate with people on a subconscious level that they are completely unaware of. You can elicit an emotional response, you can make them cry, or be joyous with your artwork. I tell my students that they must always be honest, and whatever they communicate, it should come from their heart and mean something to them. It can’t be a lie, and can’t be for motives other than communicating. It’s my new thing. I talk about it all the time. You have to be honest and you have to tell the truth with your art and come from the heart.…The other thing I tell them is that all artists are your brothers and sisters. They are all as important as your real family. Be there for them when they need you, and you must pass what you have learned on to young artists. You can’t just do you.
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Bob invites everyone to visit his Blog and Facebook page, BobLab Studio. You can keep up with his visits to the comic-conventions, view current projects or purchase a sketch or commission.
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