004 Harpies Outbreak

This strip came from a Greek mythology story. In the story of Jason and the Argonauts, Zeus punished the blind prophet Phineas by putting him on an island with a whole feast as well as a couple of Harpies. Everytime Phineas approached the food, Harpies would attack him, snatching his food forcing poor Phineas to starve. Eventually Jason killed the Harpies and saved the day.

In this strip of Prophet Buddy, the mouse refers to the seagulls as harpies as they steal his half of the sandwich. The cat, bothered while eating his half, swats at those pesky birds and 'accidentally' hits his buddy, scaring the seagulls away. What a hero!

Speaking of something, the cat is wearing a 1984 Olympic watch. These watches were so cool, everyone I knew had one, or two, or three. I never had one, but have always wanted one. I tried finding the actual image of the watch online for reference but had no luck. It's amazing, in 1984 they were all over the place, now it's like they were erased from existance.

Thanks to everyone with the emails, comments, myspace bulletins... for all of the wonderful response. I'm glad you all like Prophet Buddy so far, it really means a lot to me. If you keep watching em, I'll keep making em! Also thanks to Jasminsaurus for maintaining the myspace page and spamming everyone. If you haven't already, add Prophet Buddy to your myspace friends and drop Jasminsaurus & the Prophet Buddies a line. T-Shirts are on the way!

003 Slight Chance Of Showers

The weather has been really weird this Summer, in Los Angeles anyway. We've gone from 115 degree heat waves to flash floods in the same week. It's crazy! This strip is about that kind of craziness.

Here's the script:

Here's some of my favorite parts from this strip:

I love animating shrink takes!

This is the first strip that needed mouth poses for lipsync, I couldn't decide if I should make full mouth charts or limited anime style mouth charts. I ended up making both. Here's a frame by frame of "The" lipsynced:

It looks more like he's saying "LAAA". I dunno, some cats might actually look like they're saying "laaaa" when really saying "the". If you really wanted to get philosophic, cats can't really talk so it's all wrong.

I animated this strip while watching Limelight, I dunno what this has to do with anything, some people find these things interesting.

002 True Love

Thanks everyone for all of the great response, I was sure there were going to be some haters since the first strip IS pretty goofy. You all made it much easier for me to post the second strip. My test group says the strips get better and better, so if you liked the first one you'll like the rest. The second strip is kind of about Chinese food and finding love. For me it's mostly about inconsistency. Part of my dayjob is to catch all of the inconsistencies between scenes and pose hook ups which can sometimes get ridiculous. This strip is my outlet where I allowed myself to not care about consistencies (you probably wouldn't have noticed if I didn't point them out).

Between the first and third shot the Chinese food goes missing.

Not an inconsistency, just some digital drybrush.

This expression doesn't hook up.

Notice how I didn't bother with lipsync, I'm lazy!

Thanks to Shawn for building the Prophet Buddy site for me, you should go check out his new site, it's pretty silly. Also, thanks to Aaron and Cold Hard Flash for the launch post.

The Origin

Hi, welcome to the Prophet Buddy production blog or the Prophet Bloggy. I plan to use this blog to post production pics, tell stories about my processes in making Prophet Buddy, also to explain jokes that I would only find funny.


I thought it would be appropriate to start the blog explaining the origin of Prophet Buddy. A few months ago while sitting in a boring production meeting, I started making doodles as usual. I was thinking of Anna Chamber's stuffed animals at the time and was trying to draw something in a similar style. I drew a cat and a mouse sitting together on a wall. A wall because Charlie Brown and Linus always hang out at a wall, I figure that would be the best place for two good friends to hang out. Above the cat and mouse I drew them thinking about a corndog and a bottle of mustard. I love corndogs, and I love mustard even more.

During the meeting I was making a story up in my head about the cat and mouse communicating to each other telepathically using images, my story was called "You Bring the Corndog, I'll Bring the Mustard." That doodle sat on my desk for months, but I never really had any plans for it.


One day at work, I was giving back retakes to the animators. I had just finished giving back retakes to one guy, before I could call the next animator in to my office, that very animator I was going to call came in and asked for his retakes. I told him he was like a prophet or something, and then I called him my prophet buddy. Right as I said prophet buddy, I had looked down at the doodle sitting on my desk and it all clicked. That day I made a quick storyboard (now the pilot), keeping a similar corndog and mustard joke as in the original doodle. The storyboard was only four panels long so I figured I could animate the whole thing in an hour, so I began designing it in the computer.

When picking the colors of the characters, I wanted to make the cat and mouse an homage to Tom & Jerry, one of my favorite cartoons, so I used the same color scheme; blue cat and brown/orange mouse.


That night I had come up with a few more episodes and decided that I was finally ready to do my own stuff again; the first time since Warner Bros. bought Go! Go! Moba Boy and shelved it forever. I was really excited to just do something that makes me happy without the snags. I didn't want to develop and jump through hundreds of hoops for the next several years, only to get nothing out of it again.

The next day I purchased the domain and storyboarded more episodes. The episodes are all really short, basically one gag, that's why I refer to Prophet Buddy as a comic rather than a cartoon. People will probably expect more if I call it a cartoon, therefore I'll save myself the criticism, Prophet Buddy is an internet comic that happens to be animated.


Several days later I asked Eric Bauza if he could do the voices for the characters and he agreed. I didn't really know what I wanted them to sound like; I sent Bauza an image of the characters and told him to come up with something. Bauza had said that he's always wanted to use the Mike Fontanelli impression that he uses at all of his auditions but always gets rejected. I'm really easy to persuade, so the Fontanelli impression it was for the cat, which made Bauza excited. But who for the mouse would complement the Fontanelli voice? I was racking my brain over it. One night, I started thinking about when I was working at Spumco and seeing Fontanelli around thinking about his voice and his conversations with the people around the office, then I was thinking of who worked there that had a really unique and distinct voice... our boss, Kevin Kolde. The next day I told Bauza via instant messenger, his response was "LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL." Thus, I had found the mouse's voice. The next week I got together with Bauza at Matt Danner's house to record the audio. Bauza suggested that Danner should do the voice for the mouse since he does a much better Kolde. Me + easily persuaded = Danner plays the mouse.


The night I began official animation production I heard noises outside of my house. The noises turned out to be a little brown mouse... was this a sign of good luck, or was my exterminator just not doing his job? It's probably neither, I have some dirty neighbors!

main title boards:

That's just a little tid bit of the origin, come back regularly for more behind the scenes of Prophet Buddy.