Imagination is always the place I go in times of trouble. I have a part of my silly old brain devoted to dancing the cartoon dance of the dundering doofus. It has to be there that I flee to and hide because problems and mistakes and guilt and pessimism are constantly building un-funny tiger-traps of gloom for me to rot at the bottom of. You combat the darkness with bright light. You combat hatred with love. You combat unhappiness with silly cartoonish imaginings. Well… maybe you don’t. But I do.
When reading the Sunday funnies in the newspaper on lazy Sunday afternoons, I spent years admiring Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes for its artistry and imaginative humor, believing it was about a kid who actually had a pet talking tiger. I didn’t get the notion that Hobbes was actually a toy tiger for the longest time. That’s because it was basically the story of my own boyhood. I had a stuffed tiger when I was small. He talked. He went on adventures with me. And he talked me into breaking stuff and getting into trouble with Mom and Dad. It was absolutely realistic to me.
I have always lived in my imagination. Few people see the world the way I view it. I have at least four imaginary children to go along with the three that everybody insists are real. There’s Radasha, the boy faun, my novel characters Tim Kellogg and Valerie Clarke, and the ghost dog that lurks around the house, especially at night. That plus Dorin, Henry, and the Princess (the three fake names that I use in this blog for my three real children).
Have you noticed how Watterson’s water-color backgrounds fade into white nothingness the way daydreams do? Calvin and Hobbes were always a cartoon about turning the unreal into the real, turning ideas upside down and looking at them through the filter-glasses of Spaceman Spiff.
Unique and wonderful solutions to life’s problems can come about that way. I mean, I can’t actually use a bloggular raygun to vaporize city pool inspectors, but I can put ideas together in unusual ways to overcome challenges. I almost got the pool running again by problem-solving and repairing cracks myself.
So, I am now facing the tasks of working out a chapter 13 bankruptcy and having a swimming pool removed. The Princess will need to be driven to and from school each day. I will need to help Henry find another after-school job. And the cool thing is, my imaginary friends will all be along for the ride. Thank you, Calvin. Thank you, Hobbes. You made it all possible. So, please, keep dancing the dance of the dundering doofus.
Catch a Falling Star 
Winsor McCay
One work of comic strip art stands alone as having earned the artist, Winsor McCay, a full-fledged exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Little Nemo in Slumberland is a one-of-a-kind achievement in fantasy art.
Winsor McCay lived from his birth in Michigan in 1869 to his finale in Brooklyn in 1934. In that time he created volumes full of his fine-art pages of full-page color newspaper cartoons, most in the four-color process.
As a boy, he pursued art from very early on, before he was twenty creating paintings turned into advertising and circus posters. He spent his early manhood doing amazingly detailed half-page political cartoons built around the editorials of Arthur Brisbane, He then became a staff artist for the Cincinnati Times Star Newspaper, illustrating fires, accidents, meetings, and notable events. He worked in the newspaper business with American artists like Winslow Homer and Frederick Remington who also developed their art skills through newspaper illustration. He moved into newspaper comics with numerous series strips that included Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland. And he followed that massive amount of work up by becoming the “Father of the Animated Cartoon” with Gertie the Dinosaur, with whom he toured the US giving public performances as illustrated in the silent film below;
The truly amazing thing about his great volume of work was the intricate detail of every single panel and page. It represents a fantastic amount of work hours poured into the creation of art with an intense love of drawing. You can see in the many pages of Little Nemo how great he was as a draftsman, doing architectural renderings that rivaled any gifted architect. His fantasy artwork rendered the totally unbelievable and the creatively absurd in ways that made them completely believable.
I bought my copy of Nostalgia Press’s Little Nemo collection in the middle 70’s and have studied it more than the Bible in the intervening years. Winsor McCay taught me many art tricks and design flourishes that I still copy and steal to this very day.
No amount of negative criticism could ever change my faith in the talents of McCay. But since I have never seen a harsh word written against him, I have to think that problem will never come up.
My only regret is that the wonders of Winsor McCay, being over a hundred years old, will not be appreciated by a more modern generation to whom these glorious cartoon artworks are not generally available.
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Tagged as Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay