Inspector McCloud Part 1: A sweet gig?

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In the summer of 2007, I was contacted by a fellow who worked for the City of Laredo, Texas. Besides lending its name to both a sad country song and a sporty Jeep model, Laredo is a Border Town with the honor of being the largest inland port into the mainland US.

The Laredo man, whom I will call John, had scored a modest grant to produce a short video that would teach kids about Stormwater runoff and how it affects their main source of water, the Rio Grande. The story was to be named after its hero, Inspector McCloud.

This being a government project, it would be under-funded, paperwork laden, and slow to develop (it would take a full year to get through the review, application & approval process – I kid you not), but I managed to get them to agree to 2 very important conditions: 1. A very flexible delivery schedule and 2. Creative control. Not only would this give me the ability to earn income on other projects and carefully manage costs, it would allow me to make the cartoon I wanted to make and try something brand new with story and character development (which I will get into in a later post).

By the time we got the green light on the project, the economy was well into its death spiral, and the phone had, for the most part, stopped ringing. I sort of saw this coming, and planned Inspector McCloud as something I could work on by myself if I had to, keeping costs low and extending the life support of the company (cue the stubborn heartbeat).

Folks, this job turned out to be a blessing.

Some while back, the City of Laredo had commissioned some music and a comic book featuring these characters, and had fully expected that we would use the designs as they were. These are the designs he was talking about.

My first act was to create some new designs. It was a tough sell, but not that tough (I will elaborate on this as well in a later blog). Problem is, I'm not really a great character designer. I struggled with the task for a while, but finally gave birth to this:

There are a lot of influences from various sources, including Jay Ward, Time Squad and Clone High… but ultimately, this style has become a natural (slightly cleaner) extension of my own sloppy, improvised drawing style. Here are the villains:

Once I figured out this style, I found myself really looking forward to the process. Despite the minuscule budget, this has turned out to be a really cool project with a lot of facets to it, including travel (which I will cover in the next posting).

Stay tooned for that!

T