ALL NIGHT

My job at ABELS was almost over as soon as it began.

My first job was as a dishwasher at a Chinese Restaurant. Paul Butterfield's East-West and MY GENERATION were out at the same time. I made $150, bought my first Fender; a mint Telecaster in it's original case, and set out to play like Mike Bloomfield and Pete Townshend at the same time.

My first career however, was as a Technical Illustrator; where my inking skills and my understanding of multi-layered Vu-Graphs threatened to earn an honest living for me. You could fill up a gas tank for $2.50 and there were always jobs under "T" in the classifieds, until they disappeared. By that time I was working with a Stat Camera and back-painting film-positives as gifts.

Enter ABELS and back-lit.

I took to peg bars and animation cels like I'd never worked with anything else.

Inspired more than humbled, I was due for punishment by the Gods.

After inking everything from logos to slit-scan grids, Richard Taylor finally called me down to his office and laid the "LET US BE THE ONE" campaign on me. Stunned by the fact that someone had drawn how to reveal every dot in every letter of the Pachinko typeface, I took the stack of priceless animation bond upstairs determined to figure it all out.

FIRST THING I DID WAS TO CHANGE THE LAYOUT OF THE WORDS.

I was used to taking scribbles from engineers with notes like "make fit", or "make look good", and I considered improving what was handed me part of the job. It never occurred to me that I'd NEVER had to improve anything at ABELS.

Richard just looked at the result of my herculean effort and said: "...time to bite the bullet. All these cels have to be redone."

I spent the rest of the night doing just that. I had very little feeling in my fingertips from all that black tape, and there were a few light leaks that ended up as spurious (Con's favorite word) star-filtered bursts on several frames, but Richard trusted from then on.

I do remember blobbing a lot of cels for Deena and Gibson for the next few weeks though.

Coming Soon: WJXT*

*31 years later, I meet at the Solamar DOA Reunion. It is at his request, and in support of his efforts to document and share the stories that still conjure the ABEL magic, that I offer ALL NIGHT - in the hopes that others whose stories may be better than mine - will do the same.

Special thanks to Tom Beattie (who would have fit right in at ABELS) for hosting herofx.com

He was there at the beginning (CO) and I think he'll be there at the end.