Comics n’ Clay - Carl Paolino Interview with Jazzy Mag

Jazzy Mag is a publication that praises variety and stand-out factor. Lucky for me, today’s interviewee, artist Carl Paolino and his work have those in spades.

Carl Paolino is an animation industry veteran, having lent his talents to close to a thousand commercials, various films, music videos since the 1980s, and most famously, MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch. While his claymation work has been seen by millions, his new comic series, Spontania, is his first foray into the genre.

Spontania is a superhero story, following Elkie Eckhart, a high school gymnast gifted with Micro-Emotional Nuance Recognition Syndrome. This fictional condition allows her to predict the next move of any given person by one look at their face. In the story’s town of Tranquility, USA, she befriends classmate Martha, who helps develop a suit with her twenty-something tech wiz friends, Sherman and Melvin.

Image courtesy of Comic Book Kid Publishing, Inc., 2024

While drama strikes unexpectedly, the story tends to be light in tone and doesn’t forget to include some humor. Elkie is a naturally headstrong and perceptive character, which leads her to call out people doing wrong, sassing them in the process. While Sherman is polite, Elkie is quick to burn Melvin for his inappropriate comments and the fact they hang with high schoolers, which, to be fair, is quite odd for someone that age. Thankfully, the comic itself calls this out.

The comic touches on the problems facing teens today, and does a clever job integrating modern tech into the story narrative in a natural way. Fresh spins are put on tired tropes, as the story pokes fun at some old elements of comics. It’s a story of our current day, reflective of old ways in a sardonic light. School shootings, truth in media, healthcare, and more are all par for the course in this story!

I met Carl for the first time at his stand at Brooklyn Comic Con, 2024, where he showed his Deathmatch concept art and promoted and sold Spontania. Possibly the loudest showroom floor either of us had attended, the echo of the vaulted ceilings, the pounding of the wrestling ring, and of course, the crowd, meant competing with that to hear each other.

“For anyone who was not there, it was so loud… those last two hours were just grueling, I was just like ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do an interview right now.” Just, between the heat, and the echo, and the body slams, it was just like… it was brutal!”

All that said, we agreed Zoom would be the best way to deliver this interview, no noise obstruction!

Celebrity Deathmatch was a stop-motion animated series on MTV, featuring clay figures of celebrities fighting to the death in brutal, gruesome, over the top violent ways. Running from 1997-2002, and being revived from 2006-2007, the series took inspiration from professional wrestling and its cultural impact in the late 90s and early 2000s, and ran during its peak TV viewership. In 2018, it was announced that Ice Cube would executive produce a revival, though that never came to pass.

Paolino describes his puppet-making role on Celebrity Deathmatch as “Not a difficult part of the production, but definitely a very complicated part of the production.”

He goes on, “I basically dealt with the producer of the show, or one of the producers of the show, and the idea that he threw at me was, ‘if we can’t make as many puppets as we need, and as quickly as we need, we can’t do the show.’ So the idea was to come up with a way of creating characters that kind of look like what they were calling ‘claymation’ at the time.”

He notes that in the years after, computer programs could imitate the clay look down to the thumbprints. However, when production began, those methods weren’t available. All the same, Paolino found a way to make it work.

“We came up with a methodology in which we would create the characters from start to finish, which would mean, we would get designs from MTV. And we would sculpt them, make the armitures, make the molds, cast the puppets in foam rubber latex, and then paint them in detail, then ship ‘em back over there. They were only a few blocks away, I had a studio on 47th Street between 9th and 10th Avenue at the time. Back when Hell’s Kitchen was Hell’s Kitchen.”

This puppet, Spider-Woody, a mix of Spider-Man and Woody Allen (a request from the producers), was used on a show Carl crafted figures for called The Wrong Coast. Like Deathmatch, The Wrong Coast was a stop-motion animated sketch series, featuring parodies of celebrities and movies, framed with a news broadcast crew to present each sketch.

This method proved effective, leading to more seasons, and more puppets. Though efficient, production needed ramping up. He remarked that each puppet would take “a couple of days turnaround, but what we would do is, we had a turnaround of about 8-10 puppets at a time.”

Carl Paolino is proud of his work on the series. Remarking how fun it was to work on, he likewise believes he’s on to new ventures at this point.

“It was a great project, it was unique to its time. People keep asking me ‘Is it coming back?’ I don’t know, ya know? Producers haven’t contacted me, I don’t know if they ever will. And I don’t even know if I wanna work on it again. It’s like, what would you do? Who would you have? Ya know, I think in today’s climate, people would be like, ‘Oh! Kanye West vs Taylor Swift!’ That would be funny, right? Who’s lawyer will come after you first?”

The two crossed over, as Carl created Stone Cold Steve Austin’s clay figure, one of the few celebrities to voice themselves (others being Mills Lane, Ozzy Osbourne, and Marilyn Manson). Stone Cold Steve Austin is possibly the most notable figure from that era of wrestling, taking his feud with Mr. McMahon to an episode of Deathmatch.

While Paolino never got to meet the man, he does have a story of one star encounter via the show. Word got around that Leonardo DiCaprio was a fan of the show, and had a meeting with some of Paolino’s friends and coworkers. Eager to accept, he was requested to bring the show’s puppet. Problem was, this was Paramount’s property, held in their possession. Without time to make a new puppet, Paolino adapted quickly.

“I said ‘The meeting’s tomorrow, I can’t make a whole puppet! I can make his head based on the design.’ And [my friend] said ‘Oh! Do that!’ So I made a little DiCaprio head based on the character in the show, put it on a little pedestal. And when I met him, like, you don’t know what reaction he’s gonna have, right? And it was just like, ‘Oh, this is the guy who made the puppet,’ and I had it with me and I went ‘Here!’ And he just loved it! He just had such a good time. It’s like ‘Oh my God! Jack Nicholson, he killed me!’ He got a kick out of it in the right way.”

Some celebrities, however, were not such fans. A Star Trek: The Next Generation episode of Deathmatch was halted mid-production by Paramount, its own network, due to the dismay of unidentified Trek cast members. With both being Paramount productions, Paolino mentions political manuevering and legal bureaucracy meant the team getting hit with a cease and desist order, and had to turn over all props used in production.

“It turned out some of the people who were on the Star Trek TV series, which was very popular, had a problem with it. So there’s that legal issue coming at you again, ya know.”

Paolino then floats the idea that there may be Deathmatch lost media! Lost media is, as its name implies, a piece of media that is lost and has not been recovered through easily searchable means. The Lost Media Wiki is the most comprehensive archive online, which often leads to the pieces turning up.

“That never got made to my knowledge. I mean, they might have shot something, and now it’s in… it’s on somebody’s hard drive somewhere. Maybe the producers, I don’t know, maybe the directors, I have no idea. But once we made those puppets and we sent them off, we were like ‘Ugh, aw man!’ Those are the ones that we wish we, ya know… I kept the molds, nah, I had to turn over everything.”

Any lost media slueths out there, eat your heart out!

Moving onto Spontania, the project came from Paolino’s lifelong love of comics. As he puts it, they were his introduction to visual storytelling.

“Comics are probably what set me on the road for visual storytelling. Being interested in animation, being interested in film, it was something I always wanted to do. And then in the last, I’m gonna say, five-six years… I mean how long can you work on one thing creatively before you’re ready for something else?”

The “horse and pony show,” as it’s called, in a pitch meeting is meant to show the potential for the series' marketability. In his many years of pitching animated series and being on creative teams, he found success by creating what he calls a “maquette,” a statue of the character pitched. Just as well, he found the comic format made for easier pitching than a series bible. 

Image courtesy of Comic Book Kid Publishing, Inc., 2024

The maquette produced here was used in the pitch from a Canadian series he produced, though could not recall the name of the series at the time.

“I was still producing what we call a ‘bible.’ So it would have character designs, everything about the characters, the bio, my bio, people working on it. You’d map out the story arcs, all the complexity of the characters, and I looked at this pile of stuff, and I was like, ‘It’s still not gonna do it.’ But if I took it, and I turned it into [a comic book], I can physically mail it to them… they can look at it, they can scan it as you’re talking about it.”

Spontania’s suit design was inspired by her gymnastic ability, Paolino’s favorite colors, and modern tech motif. Most of all he wanted something “that had not been seen.”

Image courtesy of Comic Book Kid Publishing, Inc., 2024

“I came up with the DNA logo design on her costume on the front and back, the double helix. And the idea of covering her entire body, because the suit is bulletproof. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t get hurt, it just means it’s bulletproof. And that was the beginning of the idea. And my favorite color is blue, orange, white… The visor, ya know, give it some tech updates, and that really is most of it. And that the main character is a gymnast, so it has to be skin tight so she has a lot of mobility, and she can do a lot of these things, so that’s where that came from.”

Sadly, we ran out of time on the Zoom recording before we could get more into Spontania, so give it a look for yourself! It’ll hit you when needed most.

Spontania is available on Amazon or on Paolino’s website, comicbookkidpub.com!

You can catch Carl and his work at his next shows at the Collingswood Book Festival in Collingswood, NJ on October 5th, or at Hot Flips Collectibles Show in Long Island October 6th!