One of the great benefits of the cross-pollination between comic artists and animation artists is that each brings new ideas to the other— new approaches to design, storytelling, and subject matter.
One of comics’ recent gifts to animation is Ron Wimberly, who was a character designer for Adult Swim’s Black Dynamite. Hopefully, that was just the first of many animation projects for Ron. His comics, from a reimagining of Romeo and Juliet set in 1980’s Brooklyn, to an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked this Way Comes and an autobiography of rapper M.F. Grimm, are each different from each other and feel like something that hasn’t been done before.
All too often, animation suffers from retreading the same ground. We really benefit when artists like Ron bring something new to the medium. It would be great to see him have the opportunity to go beyond just doing design for animation, and help push animation into new places with story and subject matter.
