Podcast Art: Solve for Gen X

For the last two weeks, I’ve been writing about podcast art I created for Muppet fan site ToughPigs.com and all the fun and opportunity projects like that specifically from ToughPigs have gone on to provide. Today, I’m talking about one of those opportunities, and how I was commissioned again by the very talented Matt Vogel. There probably aren’t many reading this blog who don’t know who he is, so here’s a quick refresher.

Matt began puppeteering for Sesame Street in 1996, and later joined The Muppets. He has inherited tons of legacy characters, mostly from the late Jerry Nelson. These include Big Bird, Count Von Count, and Mr. Johnson on Sesame Street. In 2011 he took over Uncle Deadly (also a former Jerry Nelson character) and Kermit the Frog in 2017 (initially created and performed by Jim Henson himself before Steve Whitmire puppeteered the amphibian from 1990 to 2016).

I am very honored that Matt has been a fan of my work for awhile too, and in 2020, Matt officially commissioned me to create podcast art for his first podcast, Below the Frame. I was ecstatic, so when he came a calling again earlier this year with a request for his newest podcast with cohosts Nate Starkey and Ashley Ward called Solve for Gen X, I was even more excited! Initially Matt was looking for something relatively straight forward like what I had created for Below The Frame, but as we discussed it more, I got inspired and mentioned that maybe we put aside the idea of a quickly recognizable graphic and just go for a big 1980s action movie poster. Matt loved the idea, and we started listing ideas, homages, and easter eggs that would look cool. As a Gen Xer myself, I was completely down to stuff a bunch of nostalgic references into the art as well! Matt shared the lyrics to the theme song he had written along with the actual music for inspiration and from there, I got way into the project.

For starters, Matt wanted all the hosts to represent classic John Hughes characters. For Nate, he suggested Judd Nelson from Breakfast Club and Michael Schoeffling from Sixteen Candles. I made Nate pretty much 100% "John Bender" with a fanny pack that both Nate and Matt really wanted included somehow. Ashley was meant to be a combination of Molly Ringwald from Breakfast Club and Jennifer Grey from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but the character of Jeanie felt more dynamic. Ashley also requested some jelly bracelets like Madonna used to wear to bring even more authenticity to how well these hosts know their pop culture. Matt was dressed in Emilio Estevez’s letterman jacket from Breakfast Club but instead of the wrestling tank top, he has Anthony Michael Hall’s button down shirt from Sixteen Candles. I also gave Matt some personal nods as well. While he requested the cereal box he's holding in the illustration be an homage to Count Chocula, I stylized the chocolate–loving vampire to have softer features like Count Von Count, and green skin like a certain banjo strumming frog.

Nate, Ashley, and Matt

The background is a pretty stereotypical design that people often associate with the 1980s. As someone who lived through it, I can't say it was quite as ubiquitous as it is associated with the 1980s now, although neon and rudimentary computer graphics were part of the landscape, my personal opinion is that they've come to be more representative now than they ever were during the actual decade. On top of that is a neon cityscape that is definitely more of an homage to the movie Blade Runner than anything else. However, my personal recollection from that time period was a yearning for all things tropical. Every Andrew McCarthy flick seemed to have (at the very least) a beach resort backdrop of some kind, Paul Simon's music video with Chevy Chase You Can Call Me Al felt very Caribbean vacation themed even if it was filmed entirely in a plain pink room, and Miami, Florida might as well have been the pop culture capital of the 80s! Incidentally, that's also why there are so many palm trees too.

I'm disappointed to admit that many of the background elements are stock images, but I tried to use those aesthetics as a balance of harmony to all the other elements I illustrated myself. A charged particle beam from an unlicensed nuclear accelerator shoots behind the hosts as a reference to Ghostbusters. While the planes and bombs are not period specific, they are meant to represent the fear brought on originally from the Gulf War during Operation Desert Storm

The background composition created from stock images.

The kid on the BMX bike (I illustrated him) represents both a very novel and popular mode of transportation back in the day, but its placement over an abnormally large moon is meant to evoke memories of the Steven Spielberg opus E.T. Hiding behind those bomber planes and being so immense in size, that moon may make one consider the Death Star from Star Wars more than the lunar body itself.

The space shuttle was my personal contribution as the Challenger disaster and Nasa in general (thanks to a trip to Kennedy Space Center as a young boy) were hugely impactful to my childhood. The arcade cabinet is a direct reference to Space Invaders and the popularity of arcades in general back in the 80s. Personally I would have preferred Rolling Thunder, but niche titles can't communicate a universal understanding quite as deliberately or quickly as the 1978 Taito classic.

While Henry Winkler as The Fonz from Happy Days and Lou Ferrigno as The Hulk occupy the screen of the TV as per Matt's request, the old, ornately designed television set is a direct homage to the one my grandmother had in her living room in Ocean Grove, New Jersey where I would very anxiously wait daily for The 700 Club to end so I could switch it over to Nickelodeon.

Matt had suggested a big old family type car that was representative of his family vacations be present as well. I used my dad's 1986 Lincoln Continental (that he eventually sold to me for a dollar) as my inspiration. While ours was a sophisticated tan, I made this one a Gremlin green like the one Matt had as a kid. The boombox is also based on the one my siblings and I used to play and record everything on back when we were kids. I wanted this to look a little more dynamic than the gray and pale blue one we had, but I went overboard and felt it almost looks like I used AI to make it. I absolutely did not use AI for this or anything else, but I didn't have the time to change it afterwards. I'm happy with how it came out but simultaneously disappointed as well with how gaudy the colors are.

I threw an explosion by the wheel well of the Lincoln to try and capture that 80s action movie feel like Die Hard, Commando, or Escape from New York. Finally, I tossed in a crowd of concert goers just so we all knew that despite any chaos happening, there's always time to party!

Matt's initial idea for the title design was more inline with the title for Back to the Future. I loved the idea, but I thought that would be a little too on the nose. Instead, once Matt had sifted through some initial concepts, I started to finagle the design to be more of an homage to the original Unsolved Mysteries television show title card. To sock it even further into the time period, I tossed a small rainbow flash over the top as a reference to the popular The More You Know series of public service announcements on NBC.

The final artwork

Thank you again Matt for such a super cool opportunity that was a ton of fun to do! And thank you to everyone else who checked out this post! Make sure you check out Solve for Gen X on YouTube and everywhere else you get your podcasts. Please follow me on Instagram, TikTok, Substack and X!

Tedious "To Do" List Lunacy

I was so bad at doing chores and keeping up with my homework as a kid that my parents got me a chore checkoff pad. If you’re old enough to do so, think of a yellow legal pad, only each tear–off page is just the same pre–printed copy of a ludicrous amount of “chores” with check off boxes categorized into different lists, and a bunch of side bar like areas with blank spaces to write in notes and even your own thoughts or special agendas. It was the early to mid 90s and this was a novelty that could only exist before computers and smartphones. Just search “To Do List” in the App Store and you’ll get dozens if not hundreds of Task Manager related hits with more features and personalization resources than a cheap scratch pad from Kmart could have ever offered back in the day.

As a Gen Xer, I’m still genetically predisposed to relying on old fashioned, handwritten or printed media as well as on modern technology in this weird dual reality, and it was that frustratingly detailed chore checkoff pad that serves as today’s inspiration. I keep multiple lists—both physical and digital—that essentially can be broken down into three categories: Things I Need To Do (long term), Things I Want To Do (goals), and Daily To Do lists (aka, “This $#!% Needs To Get Done Now!”).

I could write a lot more extensively on the benefits of these lists, how it’s satisfying to physically drag a pen over an item and cross it out resulting in that tasks completion, or how the whole process is really just a way to compartmentalize life without freaking the hell out, but instead I’m going to write about the absurdity of the second category mentioned, Things I Want To Do and its more specific subcategory, Things To Draw. Now I actually have several of these lists—some more unconventional than others—but they all serve a very specific purpose which can basically be explained as “Staying Creative Insurance.” All creative types know and struggle with creative blocks, and what’s more, they know that creative blocks will always, always be a certainty. So to preempt those blocks, creative people will have “lists” of some kind to assist breaking up those stale moments. This act may be subconscious as I’m sure any number of artists, writers, or Fashion Taxidermists reading this are thinking, “Hold on, I don’t keep lists like that!” But I can assure you that they/you do. A “creative to do list” can take the form of bookmarked content on social media, specially labeled photo albums, Pinterest Boards, bookmarks on your browser, screen captures, a specific shelf in a personal library, scrapbooks, following other artists for daily inspiration, or praying to the Norse God Bragi for guidance on a plausible excuse to post all the hotdog related art you’ve ever done (so far). A “To Do list” or “inspirational collection” then really becomes a matter of semantics.

The other tiny tidbit you should know about these lists—in whatever form they take—are how unique and personal they are to their creator. They will almost always only be decipherable to their author (mostly, but I’ll expand on that more in a bit). We all have our own little idiosyncrasies with everything we do, but when it comes to something more personal like a list of things to do created expressly by and for the only person in the universe designated to see them, those itemized collections can be downright hysterical even if their context is relatively clear (which often it is not). For example, to this day I am haunted by a very old to do list of things to draw with one item simply listed as “Date.” The confidence I must have had when I wrote that is staggering! Was it in reference to an outing I had with a girl? A specific holiday? Did I think there was something to add to Salla’s quote in the monkey death scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark? What’s even wilder is I actually remember the physical act of writing that down, but not the context as to why. If that wasn’t infuriating enough, I kept that drawing prompt idea on said list for years in fear that if I did remove it, I may lose whatever inspiration it ever possessed! It was important enough to write down for some reason.

Case in point, I’m at a place in my life now where even if I suddenly had unlimited time and motivation, all my to do lists would perpetually exist in the same state as my Netflix queue; I’m not going to get to most of it, but I’ll never clear either out as both stand as monuments to my interests if not as one to my goals.

For the purposes of this post however, I’ll be sticking to two “lists” of mine in relation to wanting to draw something very specific. The first is what I’ll call my “Definitely Draw This!” List which is literally a collection of pictures, and screenshots I collect and add to regularly. Incidentally, when I think of my actual “Things To Draw” list, it’s this collection of images I consider as the main one. It’s on a small thumb drive in a folder simply labeled •To Do. The bullet point ensures that no matter what else I save to that thumb drive, that particular folder always remains at the top. A quick browse through it shows mostly images of dynamic poses, facial expressions, architecture, and design styles I want to illustrate. Many of them I already have too, but like my Netflix queue, I don’t remove them after I’ve accomplished what I wanted to. In most cases it’s because those images continue to serve the inspirational purpose as well.

But like my “Date” prompt I mentioned earlier, there are a few pieces that make me wonder why on earth they’re in this folder. Some may take a minute to get (Did I screen cap this book title because I wanted to read it? No, it’s the typography… yeah, that’s it!) Honing in on features, hairstyles, fashion choices, or even specific style choices usually helps, but occasionally I’m at a complete loss.

My second list is more of the scraping–the–bottom–of–the–barrel variety. I love, love, love to write; but art is visual and it’s easier to save a picture with a clear mental note (e.g. “mimic this line art style”) than an overly detailed and usually tedious written direction. If I have an idea that I don’t yet have a visual idea for, I write it down as thorough as I feel I need to in my Notes app. In some cases, this can be relatively short as the prompt in and of itself carries those personal idiosyncrasies I mentioned earlier. For the most part, these have invisible, secondary ideas attached to them like a password or riddle that I and only I would understand. It doesn’t always work as in the “Date” scenario, but usually it does. For example, the prompt “Updated Hamilton” might make most people think I want to do my own take on Lin–Manuel Miranda’s musical, but in actuality it’s an idea to resurrect my own stab at comic writing where one of the antagonists from my strip Lazy Comics is named Hamilton. More detailed prompts like, “Italian/Greek girl, prominent bigger nose, hair in bun on head almost like Egon Spangler” give a pretty clear description of who to draw but offers no context as to why. I know however that this specific caricature was supposed to be part of a series of colorful real life people I observed down the shore when I went to the beach. I certainly won’t take pictures of complete strangers without their permission, and I also know (that in this particular case) I’ve already created a specific style and look, so descriptive written features will allow me to more boldly caricature someone without directly capturing their specific likeness. As for “Fist for a nose”? That’s a “Date” reference again.

What type of lists, prompts, pictures, or collections get you to stave off creative blocks, bring you inspiration, or help remind you to cancel that YouTube Premium free trial? Let me know here or @ me on Twitter and Instagram!