DRAW!: —you always want to see what everybody else is doing so you can see what’s going on—your boards always had such great pose-to-pose arcs and rhythms in the poses. JT: Yeah, actually. I was lucky in that I was in an area where I was able to learn from the ground up. Meaning I was in Chicago, and there was a studio called StarToons, and they had just gotten a contract to do, like, ten episodes of Animaniacs. I had literally just moved to Chicago from Tennessee. I was an art director at a T-shirt company, miserable. “I just need to get out of Tennessee.” So I ended up in Chicago, and at the time there was Comics Scene magazine, and they had an article on—it wasn’t Animaniacs, it must have been TazMania. They did an article about Taz-Mania, and it had one little paragraph that said, “Additional animation will be done in Chicago, Illinois, at StarToons.” DRAW!: And so you started packing your bags? JT: Well, no, actually I had already decided to move. I was in mid-move when I read that, so I was already going to Chicago, and I said, “Well, I think I should just call them up. Why not?” And I called them up. I mean, this story is not the typical story by any means. It was way too easy. They said, “Sure, come in.” I didn’t have a portfolio, so I had to draw one that night, before the interview. Literally just do— DRAW!: The freshest portfolio ever, right? [laughs]
Plastic Man finally made it to the screen in Brave and the Bold after an aborted series of his own.
22
PLASTIC MAN ™ AND ©2009 DC COMICS
DRAW! • FALL 2009
JT: Well, it worked. “Okay, they said ‘figure drawings,’” so I made up some figure drawings. And then I said, “Well, it’s a cartoony show,” so I made up a character that I thought would fit in Taz-Mania. It was a Tasmanian Devil cartoon called Taz-Mania. It was pretty awful. But I just went for it and I showed up. And if I had known that they were accepting pretty much anyone who could hold a pencil, I wouldn’t have sweated over it so bad. But, anyway, they gave me a shot.