Untitled Document

MICHAEL PARASKEVAS: Imagination Overbrimming
By Baylis Greene

"Look at this," Michael Paraskevas said excitedly, pulling a toy Buck Rogers spaceship off a shelf. It was tin, it was colorful, and it obviously predated the Second World War. "Isn't it great? It's been collecting dust in some guy's attic all this time. Straight off of eBay."
Mr. Paraskevas was standing in a room upstairs in his house on a hill in Tuckahoe, or as he calls it, "the golf course district." Behind him, the shelves full of toys - Japanese robots, monsters, comic book characters - covered an entire wall. Opposite, antique miniature soldiers, some French Foreign Legion, some fearsome Sikhs, marched toward an imagined battle.

This is where Mr. Paraskevas, primarily an illustrator, works, but there are so many fun things around, it's amazing he ever gets anything done.

He is somehow productive, however, even prolific, as is revealed with a step into a second, adjacent work space, this one without a bed in it. Along two walls are stacks of children's books, sketchbooks, videotapes of children's TV shows, all the products of his overbrimming imagination. Colorful animation cells of aliens and robots decorate one of the walls. The toys, clearly, are inspiration, not distraction.

Never mind the three television shows in syndication, the 18 children's books, the weekly comic strip, the line of dolls. "This," Mr. Paraskevas said of his nascent animation efforts Saturday, "is the fun stuff. Development work."

There is his "Space Diner" concept - "The Cartoon Network is looking at it" - as well as a host of evocatively named creatures that could soon come to cartoon life: Whacky Shellhammer, for instance, or Leo Spats, Ratcatcher. And Junior Kroll, the precocious and nattily dressed boy he created with his mother, Betty Paraskevas, who writes all of their children's books, could host a National Geographic travel show for kids.

The mother-and-son team has become adept at the fine art of the Hollywood pitch, and equally assured at easing projects into production while maintaining their integrity, as they occasionally have had to defend their creations against misguided thinking. Ms. Paraskevas said that one producer asked of Junior Kroll, "Can we get him out of the suit?" Which is like saying of Bugs Bunny, "Can we make him an aardvark?" This was followed by, "How about giving him a Hispanic nanny?"

Over all, though, Mr. Paraskevas said of the production companies he and his mother have dealt with, "they've listened to us. If you know your work, you can talk to them. You can't just say, 'You're an idiot.' You say, 'This doesn't work because,' or 'This is what we were trying to do with this character.'"

It helps, too, to have a lot of ideas. "You can't go out there with only one thing," Mr. Paraskevas said. "If we went out there with only Junior Kroll, nothing would've happened."

But a lot has happened, the latest being a Paramount Studios agreement to make a movie out of the Paraskevases' collaborative comic strip, "Green Monkeys." A regular in Dan's Papers over the last four years, the strip features two small simians, Spider and Flytrap, and their adventures in New York City.

"They're green, a very rare species," Ms. Paraskevas said. "But they're also greenhorns. . . . They're not stupid, but naive. If you say it's raining cats and dogs, they expect to see them." She went on to describe an episode in which the monkeys are sold the Brooklyn Bridge, but instead of simply getting snookered, Spider and Flytrap lovingly tend to the vast structure, heedlessly blocking outraged drivers.

"There's some depth to them," Mr. Paraskevas said. "It's not your everyday comic strip. People who read it say there's a charm to it." "Green Monkeys" is planned as a live-action movie overlaid with computer-generated images of the monkeys.

The animated TV shows inspired by Paraskevas books include "Maggie and the Ferocious Beast" on Nickelodeon and "Marvin the Tap Dancing Horse" on PBS. "But the book business is so strange," Mr. Paraskevas said of the latter. "We got the TV show on the air before the book people got off their duffs to put the book out."

"Kids From Room 402" was developed for Fox and is now airing in Europe and Canada, and "The Tangerine Bear" was a hit ABC special. "They've sold about 850,000 tapes of that show," he said. "It should air again on PAX over the holidays." The story involves a teddy bear, neglected because his smile was sewn on upside down, who finds a home with other misfit toys.

As he surveyed his recent string of Hollywood successes, Mr. Paraskevas admitted that "There's a certain amount of luck involved," quickly adding, "but you have to have talent to take advantage of the opportunity."

Mr. Paraskevas pronounced himself most satisfied with the translation of "Maggie and the Ferocious Beast" to the small screen, "because Betty wrote the scripts. But whatever you're working on now is what you're happy with."

To complete the labor-intensive work of frame-by-frame animation on these shows, "the artists mimic me," he said, "and they do a pretty good job."

Mr. Paraskevas was in fact trained as a magazine illustrator, and is that rare creature who earned major assignments while still a student. He was getting his master of fine arts degree at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan when he dropped off his portfolio at The New York Times. The next day he was working on a cover for its Sunday magazine.

He went on to have work published in Sports Illustrated, Time, Esquire, and Town and Country. Sports Illustrated liked his submissions for a long story on the racehorse Secretariat so much they paid him twice, the second time so they could hang his art in their corporate offices.

Often, Mr. Paraskevas's magazine work, as with his early 1990s illustrations for Town and Country, entailed what he calls sketchbook journalism, which he considers himself well suited to because he works quickly.

"But the magazine business has really changed," he said. "They used to spend a lot of money on illustrators. The 1960s and '70s especially were a golden age. Playboy and Penthouse really did a lot for artists. Sports Illustrated, too. Time used to pay a painter every week for a cover, whether they used it or not."

By the mid-1980s Mr. Paraskevas had found his way to Southampton, and he has contributed his whimsical cartoons to Dan's Papers since 1988. He has also painted more posters for the Hampton Classic Horse Show than anyone else - three since 1987. Done with acrylic on paper, they stand in light and airy contrast to the usual heavy oils of equestrian painting.

Also in the '80s, Mr. Paraskevas developed a following for his large beach paintings, which show broad swatches of sky, sand, and water, often punctuated with a bright beach ball. He has many repeat buyers for these works, he said, and sells most of his paintings out of the Westhampton Beach gallery he opened 10 years ago.

Despite their popularity, he took a break from the beach paintings in recent years, but is getting back to them, as evidenced by the two huge ones in the works upstairs, and the stack of five smaller beach scenes painted directly on wood (these he likes - no canvas to stretch). "I paint fast enough to not get bored with a particular subject," he said.

When it comes to influence, Mr. Paraskevas cited Marshall Arisman, the head of the School of Visual Arts, and said he admired Robert Weaver's portraits. Otherwise, he said, "I still get a kick out of Toulouse-Lautrec. And I think David Hockney will go down as one of the greats. I'm not a big fan of abstract expressionism. I like to be shown something. That's why I like Hockney. He tries to get at something."

It is obvious, however, that he's most interested in popular culture and the products of the "low" arts that many consider Americans to be best at: cartoons, comic books, film noir, the inspired industrial design that gave fins to cars.

With boyish enthusiasm Mr. Paraskevas opened a book of Depression-era "Skippy" comic strips by Percy Crosby and pointed to the deceptively simple drawings. "He inked with a brush, and this is why I ink with a brush. This was the 'Peanuts' of its day," he said, referring to another of his major influences - with Warner Brothers cartoons, his biggest.

In hoping to carry on the tradition of children's entertainment that's got humor an adult can appreciate, Mr. Paraskevas's latest idea is to produce a puppet show at Wainscott's WVVH studios to air locally. Mr. Paraskevas shot a pilot, "The Cheap Show," last year in his house - "We almost burned the place down overloading the outlets" - and edited it on his Mac. The puppets, socks outfitted with bulging eyes and outlandish ears, make life comically difficult for each other in a diner - a simple set fashioned by the artist.

"I'd like to make this here and be able to hire people I know and like," he said. "The Canadians wanted to buy it, but we want to bring the work here."

Looking to the future, Mr. Paraskevas wants to get "Green Monkeys" into daily syndication. In one of his upstairs rooms he's got a stack of 60 or so dailies he produced in a scant two weeks. He considers this goal paradoxical because he sees this part of his career as having gone backwards: the dolls and TV shows leading to a less flashy comic strip, with every day a deadline.

"At first I didn't want a daily strip," he said. "Now I'd like to do it. I'm not even sure why." Probably, as Mr. Paraskevas would be the first to tell you, because it's fun.