Eric Wiese

(click on image to enlarge)

I was looking through some old files this morning and I stumbled upon this image. This was an illustration done for Wizard Magazine sometime back in 2000. At this time in my life I was single, working every hour of every day at a small independent design studio. It was a busy time for me. All I did was work............(all work and no play make ME a very dull boy). I got a call from Wizard Magazine and they asked if I could do this illustration for their article on the top 100 cartoons of that year. They wanted me to use the very famous "Superman vs. Muhammad Ali" cover by Neal Adams as reference.



(click on image to enlarge)

Wizard had this huge list of characters that they wanted included in the illustration. This was a rather ambitious job for me because there were a few of the characters that I had drawn before, but most of them I had never even drawn and a few I have never heard of. It was going to be a difficult task for me and I was given a very short deadline to get it finished.......... Being worried that I would not be able to make the deadline and that I did not want to turn in something that was half assed, I thought I would call my buddy Eric Wiese and get some help on this thing.

Eric and I go pretty far back. He worked with me at "Digital Hellfire", a coloring house that colored a lot of titles for DC Comics and Harris Publications in 1995. After things went sour for me there, I had started my own coloring studio "Color Monkey" and eventually got Eric over there to work for me. Much more than a friend, Eric was the perfect employee. He worked hard, he was good at coloring and the best thing of all, he was very fast. I think that Eric enjoyed the work but deep in his heart he wanted to make pictures move and children smile. Eventually Eric would leave me behind and go on to directing and animating cute little characters for movies, television and video games. It was a very sad day for me when he moved on to the bigger and brighter opportunities.

5 years pass........

Eric just happened to have moved back to Denver from L.A. after a couple year stint on the "Rugrats go to Paris" movie when I got this illustration job. I got a hold of Eric asked if he had some time to help me knock out this illustration with the 90+ characters. I also wanted to give Eric a chance to draw the Rugrats again because I know he missed them so much and I wanted Eric to get some of his work showcased in Wizard Magazine. We met on a Saturday and I went over what I wanted to do. We broke the illustration into 4 parts. Eric would draw Homer Simpson and all the characters on the left side, I would draw Bugs Bunny and all of the characters on the right. It took us most of the day to get all of the reference together and try and find good images of all of the characters. After a couple of days, we had all of the drawing done. I think we drew this at 4X the size it was going to be printed. It took some piecing together and assembling in Photoshop to get it ready to color. Then I had some stuff come up at work and I got behind on the coloring.... So again, I had to call Eric to save me so I could get this to Wizard the next morning. The most amazing part of all of this was that Eric did all of the work for FREE. Absolutely amazing. You don't see that anymore in this business.

I was very happy that we would eventually collaborate together again on his Spaceboy Slim short. You can check out Eric's stuff if you go to the links on the right side of this page.

Thank you Eric for being there for me as an awesome artist, friend, co-worker and all around nice guy.


Jack