I’m amazed that Shrek even got made. Not that Shrek isn’t good. It’s just that this movie of a fantastic journey went on its own amazing journey to get created. First the children’s book was picked up and went through a rewrite. Then Chris Farley’s untimely death meant that his nearly completed dialog had to be scrapped and a new voice lead brought in. After completely recording his role, Mike Myers asked if he could do the reading again, this time with a Scottish accent. The result was so promising that the script went through another rewrite, improving the material. The completed audio was then sent off to the animations team. The first animation tests took a year and a half to complete and weren’t satisfactory, so that version too was discarded and a new approach looked for. This would require new software to be written for things like hair—and different codes for different kinds of hair. When Shrek was finally released, all that hard work paid off. It proved to be a strong performer in box offices all over the world. But I didn’t want to put all of that history into the strip. (And I’m saving the topic of how working on a movie is a big gamble for another strip.) I did want to touch on the fact that the humor in this movie has a slight cutting edge in places. I wanted viewers to back up and see with fresh eyes that, as in many a fairy tale, there’s a lot of really dark stuff happening in Shrek.
On Saturday, January 26th at at the Seattle Design Center, I had the great pleasure of moderating a panel of talented artists as they discussed and answered questions about graphic novels. This is the third year that the SPGA Seattle Chapter of the Graphic Artists Guild has put on this event. I'm looking forward to seeing who will be in the line up next year.
