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It's no secret, my real name is Frazer Diamond. My Tax Return
identifies
me as a freelance cartoonist and writer operating out
of Elgin, in the wilds of
North-East Scotland, but in reality, I seem to have
donned the mantle of
Unpaid Cartoon Researcher on the Great WWW.

Now that there "Star Wars" piccy, above left, isn't
just a gratuitous inclusion to
boost my search engine ranking. It's a picture of me
and my brother Warwick
with C-3PO Anthony Daniels. See, we both played Jawas
in "A New Hope"
back in 1976. Just a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance
inside the Jawas'
Sandcrawler (well Elstree Stage Eight, anyway) but it
was one hell of a
Claim to Fame for a seven year old, I can tell you.
It's all been down hill from there. I've an interesting
CV, which has in turn
generated an underdeveloped career. When I finished
school I spent a short
spell working as a trainee puppeteer on "Who Framed
Roger Rabbit" before
moving on to be a runner for Disney on the film. I was then
employed in various
production capacities by The Monty Python team, Jim Henson,
and others.
I even featured on screen again in the Henson series "Storyteller:
Greek Myths".
Well, I say "featured" but the brevity of
my appearance surpassed even
"Star Wars". I played Perseus in silhouette,
in "Persues and the Gorgon"
throwing a rather lethal discus towards the head of
my unwitting father.
And that's a screen grab, above right, with Frazer the Frisbee
Killer
winding up for action.
Off screen, I spent eighteen crazy months working in the
stills department
of Elstree Studios whilst Brent Walker's wrecking balls demolished
the
sound stages around us. I also went to Cannes with The British
Pavillion,
and a year later, with Majestic Films Intl. That second visit
I found myself
stumbling blindly into the offices of New York's "unique"
independent studio
Troma, Inc. I blagged myself a twelve month contract as their
Director of
London Operations, which sounds very impressive, but
in reality meant
running up and down Dean St. in London dressed as a Radioactive
Mutant
Squirrel. And worse.
I'm always writing spec scripts, and in the mid-90s
I formed a creative
partnership with an industry friend, Mike Key. Together we
packaged and
presented various film and tv projects for commission
left, right and center.
Our piratical adventure series "Smollett"
had a cast and crew on board and
got within a whisker of a greenlight. So too did our documentary
series
"Hollywood, Herts." all about Elstree's various
film studios. That one had a
sizeable amount of industry support and indeed, had its whisker
twitched
twice by The Powers That Be. Sadly, though, Mike died suddenly
and
with him, the energy to keep these projects alive.
For a year-or-so I contributed unpaid animation reviews
and articles to
"Movie Collector Magazine". I was also paid
to write two scripts and contribute
several storylines to a German cartoon series from Hahnfilm
called "Renaade!"
Then there was "Up into the Apple Tree", a
French screenplay which I was
hired to rewrite and which subsequently received funding
from MEDIA and
was attached to Norma Heyman Productions for a while.
In and around all of the above I was always cartooning.
Just bits and pieces
on a freelance basis, here and there. I've drawn toons
for tv's "You Bet!" and
"Scofield's Quest". My toons got me down to
Cannes for a third time when I
was employed as official cartoonist for "Moving Pictures
Intl." Wilbur P Dogsbody
appeared in all the Cannes Dailies and, upon my return, inspired
a new toon
creation called Flick, who's still
with me today. Indeed, in 1998 I self-published
my first volume of Flick Cartoons called "When Films
Collide", which sold
rather nicely thank you, albeit through a limited few venues
like the now
sadly defunct film memorabillia store "Flashbacks"
in which, in true
Tarantinio-style, I spent a fair few years working part-time
to supplement
my shrinking income.
In July 1999 I married Claire and three months later
we fled the rot and grime
of London for the delights of a north-east Scottish city
which thinks it's a
market town. And nowadays you're most likely to find
me ensconced in the
attic of our 250yr old semi by Elgin's ruined cathedral.
We have two new
additions to the houshold, too, in the form of Ollie
and Stan, our Springer
Spaniels. And eight years after moving in, we're still crawling
through an
expensive and substantial renovation. It'll be worth it in
the end, I'm sure.
Toonhound was born in January 2000. It started as a
bit of fun, really, filling
a gap on the web for information on British cartoons. Now
it's a 700+ page
behemoth with 800+ links to keep updated, and new stuff bloating
the work
load, week-in, week-out. It's been self-built using Dreamweaver,
but I don't
profess to having any professional computer skills. I'm sure
if you try validating
the HTML you find the source code is all over the shop, but
the site loads and
works okay in the browsers I've tested it on, so that'll
do for me. And when
it first launched, it was well-received by the PC Press.

Internet
Monthly
.net magazine Web
User
Our friends at Amazon and Google supplement the site
with ads and links,
which in turn generate the cash to cover the running costs.
And Toonhound
has earned me a few gigs too. I've been a talking head
on a DVD release,
I've written for the
BBC and am often contacted by the media for cartoon
comments and info. Even so, there's always a
wolf at the door, hungry for
money, and I've taken up a series of additional shift
jobs over the last
couple of years to keep those snapping jaws at bay.
But the desire for a commission burns bright within
me still. I always seem to
have a dozen projects on the go, as I pursue that ellusive
"greenlight". Most
recently, I've been focusing on my interstellar comic strip
BLIP, and I've been
blogging on its development here.
Then there's "Brimstone" and "Stormboy"
and far too many other projects to identify here. Someday, somehow,
one
of these will set the world alight, I'm sure.
If anyone's interested, you can catch up with my current
creative endeavours
on that
ol' blog of mine. Meanwhile, if anyone wants to talk toons with me,
just drop me
a line . And needless to say, if anyone wants to tap into my
cartoon mind for ideas, scripts and storylines, I'm primed
and ready
for deployment...
Stay tooned!
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