October :: 2006

Up in the mountains of Colorado Springs, resides Matt Jolly, or Krinkels as he is affectionately known on the intraweb. I have him in my little interogation room for another episode of Artist-of-the-Month. So the first question is fairly cliche but you are known for the Madness series, what in the heck got that whole ball rolling? Any traumatic event as a child or newsworthy tidbit?

Not really, no. I played no more video games than your average kid. I just got lazy and drew these little pawn looking people in my sketchbook, and at the same time I was struggling to learn Flash. I then thought that I could try the simple character design in a flash toon, and out came Marshmellow Madness. Madness Combat naturally followed because, hey, who doesn't like watching a good ol' fashion brawl, right?

Naturally. So after so many episodes under your belt now, I notice that you are introducing new characters that are less and less 'Madness-flavored' like that big flame demon, are you sensitive to people who are annoyed by the fact that you are straying from the all Madness presentation?

I am not annoyed. I expect some people will get annoyed no matter what I do. But I feel for the series to remain alive and fresh new things need to be introduced. And the further the series goes, the more dramatic the changes will get. So far, the new characters are working well with in the cartoon, so hopefully they will go over well as the other changes have been. I mean, the main character has been rolling through design changes every episode. Madness 6 will be nodifferent in the sense that it will be much different from it's predecessor. The new characters, for start, and I'm playing with more camera angles.



Yeah I think one would get bored sticking to the same recipe anyway. What do you like to do when you arent thinking up ways to keep Hank busy?


I try to be active, because between the time I sit working on Flash, playing on my Xbox360/Wii, and the World Beer Tour at Old Chicago, I've got some lazyness to hammer out. I go snowboarding weekly, attend my boxing class thrice weekly, and hit the weights nearly every day. I also have a thing for collecting firearms, and I go to thee range maybe once or twice a month.

What is your favorite firearm, why, and have you featured all the firearms in your collection at some point in the series?



Favourite gun ever? Well, the m1911 of course! It was featured at the end of Madness Apotheosis, when he shot his way through the crowd of zombies. But no, not all my guns have shown up in madness, I have a rifle that is far too large to be thrown into the mix. I don't know, though, I never really felt a need to toss my collection in when I can go to google.com and ask it for super expensive, zazzy guns to use. Like G-36 rifles, Desert Eagles, Steyr Augs, and what not.

Which of the episodes of Madness was your favorite one to animate, and what attracts you to it so much?

It's hard to play favorites when they each ate up months of my life. I want to say episode 3, Avenger. That's when things got nice and weird. Plot points lying about, improbable things occuring, the clown doing lots of stuff, and lots of jesus. I was also working on it for the first time knowing that people were expecting it, it was kind of, strange.

Cool. On to the last question. What is in store for 2007, are you looking to do anything unrelated to Madness, or are you someone who doesnt that think beyond tommorrow?

yeah, I'm kind of single minded. But other than Madness 7, I have Tricky Madness 2 in the works. But it's hard to stay motivated on it when I'm so knee deep and enthusiastic about Madness 7. I have gotten 2900 frames done in two months, which is rather fast for me. So I should have that out by Feburary, maybe March. I hope to get the series all the way up to Madness 10 before killing it, though. And by then, I want to have all the ambiguity missing and all the plot points picked up and tidy.

You sure keep a full plate of animating on your schedule. I look forward to your new episodes as I'm sure so do your e-stalkers. Later!

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