Category: News

You can now shop for Comic books such as Earthworm Jim The Comic, Nnewts, Gear, Creature Tech etc. at the Doug TenNapel Comic Book Library.

There is original art, stickers and other unique things available!

For over twenty years I’ve been making graphic novels, but none brought quite the kind of joy as my first one called GEAR. It was originally published by my pal Rob Schrab’s Fireman Press but later got picked up by Image comics, where we hammered together some colors for it. Now, after twenty years, we got a chance to tidy up some of the art and colors (Some of the pages were so abstract that readers couldn’t follow the story) and it’s coming out well thanks to my colorist, Katherine Garner! Here’s one of the newly recolored pages in all its glory:

Some of you may not know it, but pre-orders of books deeply effects the overall sales. Amazon has some of the best pre-order tracking and they market accordingly, so if you’re a fan of my work, or are curious to own a spanking new copy of GEAR, head over to my Amazon page and preorder the new copy before it comes out this July:

https://www.amazon.com/Doug-TenNapel/e/B001K7Z214

One of the long term problems with being an artist and an “inside boy” is that my body just withers into nothing. As I get older, I’ve had to exercise regularly to maintain my energy at the art table. It’s like life told me I couldn’t just be in the studio forever or I would wilt. So I started going to the gym regularly, and even the gym is pretty abstract when you think about it. We don’t generally do hard labor, but we want our bodies to look like we’ve done hard labor so we go to the gym and do hard labor, we don’t go outside and dig ditches.

To counter this, I give myself big outdoor projects to sculpt my backyard into a paradise for the Beloved Mrs. TenNapel. This month, I started building a koi pond which at first broke my back, but now my strength is catching up and I’m digging ditches with a purpose! I’m trying to post regular updates on my work and you can follow along by joining the live feeds from my facebook channel here:
https://www.facebook.com/dougtennapel/

While some of you have followed my youtube channel, I also started a Vimeo channel which has quite a few tutorials you might like. Subscribing helps, but no pressure… I just want the little movies I make to be seen. I try to keep the information tight and easy to watch in under five minutes:

https://vimeo.com/dougtennapel

Finally, if you want to learn more about my entertainment career outside of comics, you can look here:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0855066/

In case you haven’t seen it, check out my Kickstarter. I know, I know, you usually ignore these Kickstarter requests. I don’t need your donation as we’re overfunded! But I do want to show of some of my watercolor work!

I remember first seeing cartoons and marveling at what I saw. I knew how to draw but I didn’t know how to make my drawings come alive. I was naturally drawn to animation and probably had the most fun doing little flip books in the corners of my school textbooks. I set a goal to one day be an animator.

What I know now, but didn’t know then, is that animation is easy enough on flip books, or even in my high school puppet animation, but to get good enough to be a professional animator was above my skill set for how undisciplined I was with drawing. You see, I’ve always drawn because I enjoyed it. I didn’t do it because I was good at it, though I got better simply because I drew so much. But merely loving to draw isn’t enough to become a great animator, you have to be psycho about it.

So while I made it to professional animation status for animated television and for video games, I couldn’t cut it for feature animation. I don’t know for certain I couldn’t do it, I just tried once at a feature submission and quickly gave up. I was far more turned on to story-telling, and I mean telling the whole story, not just animating a few scenes of a movie.

Over the years, I’ve told hundreds of stories, some as director, some as storyboard artist, even some as a video game developer. Here’s a list of some of my work that made it to IMDB, though this is not a complete list of my 25 years of work:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0855066/

One thing I’ve learned is that my career has ups and downs, and battle-worn creators learn to get a thick skin when the money truck doesn’t back up every day to your house. My art is a commitment, and where my career has failed me every so often, my love for art and story-telling has not.

My daughter is now 6’3″ at sixteen years old. While she spent this weekend in Atlanta playing in a volleyball tournament, I’ll always think of her as the person who has changed me the most. The thought of having kids before one has kids is an intimidating thing. I didn’t feel adequate or complete as a person, I didn’t know if I would be glad that I had kids, I didn’t know if I would rise up and be the kind of great parent I had. All of that disappeared once my daughter came along.

It’s like a little switch is flipped inside your person. You have a baby, and life quickly (perhaps, instantly) prioritizes itself. Going from being single to married is a big shift, but even when we get married, we’re dealing with an adult mind, a peer, a partner. But a baby is none of those things. A baby changes you into someone who is bigger because you have to be bigger, is selfless because you have to be selfless.

But the thing I like most about being a parent are the little moments humor that kids create just by being kids, like when they blow their loose tooth in and out like it was a rickety shutter unhinged from a dilapidated house.

“Doug TenNapel can pitch.” I’ve heard this phrase more than a handful of times and while I don’t take compliments well, I get a little charge every time I hear it, not because I doubt my ability to pitch, but because I know where I came from.

I have two qualities that conflict in that I’m both an introvert and a class clown. I see this dual-attribute in many kids we see putting on a show in front of people, my son included. I suspect that people who perform for others or draw attention to themselves are seeking some form of social validation. In many ways, we all want that. Most people like the sound of their own name spoken by another. That’s something deep in us where we enter into a relationship any time someone is addressing us. Given I believe that loneliness is one of the most gnawing form of torment one can experience, we must get relief when we get attention.

Which came first? The clown or the introvert? In my case, I can remember being shy or uncomfortable around others before I started doing and saying things that got attention. So I assume the shyness or introversion came first. Most public speakers didn’t become comfortable until they regularly spoke in public. So we’re all naturally shy or uncomfortable when addressing an audience. Like any skill, speaking in public takes some more practice to gain the skills than others.

But one thing happened that kept me from being a wallflower forever. There was a time when I could get away from being noticed, when I could turn off the performance switch and disappear when I really wanted. Then in tenth grade I great to a height of 6’8″. My life of disappearing was gone forever. Ever see video footage of criminals in ski masks holding up a mini-market? They’re never 6’8″ because they’d be pretty easy to find in a line up of suspects. One can’t height when one sticks out more than just about anyone else.

When I went to college, being an art major was a natural choice. Part of my studies included not just painting and creating abstract art, but having to defend it during a critique of my peers. I had to present cogent reasons why the art was legit, and that too helped me become a better public speaker. Little did I know that step-by-step my life experiences were training me to be comfortable with speaking to a room that would be the key to the greatest successes in my career.

By the time I got my first video game job I was frustrated with not being able to work on my own ideas. I knew there wasn’t anything in the natural course of events that would lead a video game company to just magically make one of my ideas so I had to make it happen. I pitched game ideas at every company that hired me to animate. I’ve long believed that nearly everything we do is a form of pitch from marriage proposals to job interviews to explaining yourself to the cop who just pulled you over. You have an idea and you pitch it. It amazed me how successful I was with my earliest pitches and it was largely due to desperate love of a gaming idea I believed in not my own comfort with public speaking that drove me.

When asking why Carl Sagan was so passionate about science he said, “When you’re in love you want to tell the world.” That’s how I feel about the things I pitch, I love the idea so much that I have to tell someone about it, and many times the pitch is the only way those ideas are expressed, because so many of my pitches are turned down before any one of them is picked up.

Here’s a pic of me pitching a Nickelodeon short back in 2007.

I was born in the heat of American turmoil, war protests, The Beatles and the recent deaths of both JFK, Huxley and C.S. Lewis. My dad and mom don’t have a clear idea of how they came to name me Doug other than they liked the sound of the name.