Nothing beats depressive funks and emotional breakdowns like a great animated series. In this case, I revisited a Canadian animated series The Raccoons recently after coming across an episode randomly on YouTube. It definitely helped, laughing at Bert's crazy antics and fondly remembering these episodes I've enjoyed before.

I first discovered this series on YouTube back in 2008 and have been a fan since then. It's just a good show that manages a good set of characters, varied and wonderful plotlines, character development (especially of its main antagonist, the crotchety pink aarvark tycoon Cyril Sneer), and internal relationships. It has been wonderful revisiting this series.

So as a kind of thanks, I suppose, I decided to MS Paint some long overdue Raccoons fanart (intended to many times before but never got around to it). For now though, I'm mostly practicing basic Paint recreations of the three main raccoon characters (the hyperactive Bert, the sensible Melissa, and her also sensible husband Ralph you see here)-they are deceptively hard to illustrate due to peculiar sizes, angles, shades of color and how their hands are very frequently nondescript unless they're using them. I'm planning on other Raccoons pieces once I settle some other art-based issues.

For those unfamiliar, one major running element of the series is a newspaper called The Evergreen Standard that is managed by most of the protagonists with Ralph as editor and Melissa as photographer. While watching an episode (I think it was "Gold Rush!"), I saw this bit of animation where Ralph was holding a coffee cup as if he was in some advert. The logic pretty much goes with the whole "morning coffee and newspaper" trope you see in stuff. The "Setting the Standard Since 1986" is a reference to Ralph's attempted slogan "The Standard Sets the Standard". Ha, ha, in-joke.

So here's to a great animated series. And maybe more fanart of it.

Ralph Raccoon © Kevin Gillis