I have always had very vivid dreams. This picture was inspired by one. I dreamed of being a seventh-grader going to school in lizard-person school on a dinosaur planet. And throughout the dream my classmates were threatening to eat me. Oh, and the clothes they are wearing in the picture were the school uniforms.
Of course, naked-in-school dreams are a common one. This picture is more of a naked-on-Main-Street dream.
The title of this post is a Shakespearian Hamlet phrase. The picture above is a detail from a dream about Shakespeare’s The Tempest dream.
That particular nightmare had Caliban in it.
Fairy tale dreams are much nicer. In this Sleeping Beauty dream, the monsters are tiny.
I also admit to having animated-cartoon-type dreams. The turtle-boy in front is from the actual dream. The rest of it is made up to fill in the background of the picture.
This dream was obviously inspired by a trip to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. I have both good dreams and nightmares. And all of it provides fodder to fuel pictures and stories, but not always in that order.
You may have looked at the name of my website here on WordPress and wondered, “Why in the heck has that fool Mickey called this thing he writes Catch a Falling Star?”
The answer is, he named it after the first good published novel he wrote at the insistence of the I-Universe Publishing’s marketing adviser. Very poor reason for doing anything, that.
But, the secondary reason is because of where that title came from. Look at the first stanza of this poem by John Donne.
So, now, you are justified in asking, “What nonsense is this? That doesn’t have any coherent meaning, does it?”
And you would be right. These are impossible things that I am being ordered to do by a very religious cleric in the Anglican Church who was originally a Catholic, but, in the time of Henry VIII Catholicism was made illegal, and he wrote this poem about not being able to find an honest woman in his drunken, wasted youth anyway. He is ordering me here to not only “catch a falling star” (and catching a meteorite with your bare hands has rather hot consequences), but also to have sex with a semi-poisonous plant, explain why we can’t go backwards in time, determine whether and why God might’ve given Satan goat feet, listen to probably-nonexistent humanoid creatures singing, find a way to avoid anybody ever looking at me with envy and then doing something to me because of it, and, most importantly, find a place where the wind blows in a way that fills your head with facts that actually makes you smarter.
Challenge accepted!
It is exactly what I wanted to write about. Impossible things actually being accomplished. Finding the meaning behind alien beings from outer space developing an intense love of I Love Lucy television broadcasts and Mickey Mouse Club music. Discovering why intensely shy people need to embrace social nudity. Defining who is actually a werewolf and who is not, uncovering who and what real monsters are. Singing songs so sad that it magically makes people fall in love with you. Talking to clowns in your dreams and getting real answers to the meaning of life, love, and laughter.
Catching falling stars is the stupid idea that this wacky, idiotic little blog is about. It is what I write about constantly. You have to kill me to get me to stop. So, there is your fair warning. Read on at your own peril.
Born on January 23rd, 1939 Greg and Tim Hildebrandt were twin brothers who both had considerable painting skills. Much like Mickey claims to be, they originally wanted to be Disney animators, but, failing that, decided on a professional art career strongly influenced by Disney, Norman Rockwell, and Maxfield Parrish. They both turned pro in 1959 and began painting fantasy art in oil, working on projects together.
Their styles were very similar.
The picture above is done by Tim without help from Greg.This Lord of the Rings painting of Eowyn and the Nazgul was a solo effort by Greg.
This illustration for Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara series was a collaboration, showing how seamlessly the brothers worked together.
Their first truly big break came with the popularity in the 1970’s of their Lord of the Rings Calendars.
And then, of course, in 1977 they were asked by 20th Century Fox to rework the poster concept done by Tom Jung for the movie Star Wars. It was done on a very tight schedule with the brothers working in shifts to complete it in only 36 hours. It resulted in the well-known image that began this post.
Here follows a few more of my favorite works of the Brothers Hildebrandt.
This one by Greg Hildebrandt was my favorite poster in college.
Pinocchio and the Blue Fairy
The Mad Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland
Islands in the Sky 1999
Sadly, Tim passed away in 2006 at the age of 67. But here you see Greg still painting at age 82,
Yes, it is very possible that my imagination was galvanized in childhood by TV.
It seems to me that NBC had even more power over me than the other two networks. We could get CBS and ABC on our black-and-white TV. But the only NBC affiliate in Iowa was not able to be received in our little town. We had to go to Grandma’s house in Mason City where Grandma had a color TV.
Wow! Color!
Of course, it used to be referred to as the “Boob Tube” because psychologists and people who mattered kept saying that TV makes you stupid. Which, naturally, has a grain of truth to it because you don’t watch TV actively. You sit there and passively let the stories, commercials, and propaganda about sugary breakfast cereals flow in one ear, poison your brain, and then flow out the other ear leaving only water-logged thinking-muscles behind them.
The Saturday Matinees on CBS provided my youthful imagination with science fiction, fantasy, and heroes of all kinds.
I taught myself to draw cartoon characters based on the animated shows I watched on TV. I not only copied Mickey, for obvious reasons, but also Donald and Daffy Ducks, Space Ghost, Jonny Quest, Yogi Bear, and the Herculoids.
And Batman! With Adam West and Burt Ward and Cesar Romero as the Joker. Bam! Boff! Sock! Pow! Bright colors, goofy Riddler plots, and really bad jokes that were so bad they made you laugh.
And I loved monster movies. Not horror movies really. I never loved Freddy Krueger or Jason. But the Wolfman? Frankenstein’s Monster? Bela Lugosi’s Dracula? The Creature from the Black Lagoon? My inspirations!
And, of course, Disney on Sunday nights. The Wonderful World of Disney in living color.
We, each one, have a certain RESPONSIBILITY if we are born alive into human life.
The root of the word is RESPOND. And that means we have developed a complexity of mind and beo havior that allows us to RESPOND to situations and problems that you haven’t encountered before.
Because we can RESPOND, we must RESPOND. That is how we come to acquire RESPONSIBILITY.f
When I got out of Iowa State University, I had to RESPOND to the situation where I was educated and legally an adult, and I had to somehow support myself in life. I suppose I could have chosen to live in my parents’ basement and done nothing with my life but draw and paint and eventually get fat. That is a way to RESPOND to that situation. And I had a RESPONSIBILITY to RESPOND.
But, choosing between a job doing artwork for the print shop in Belmond, or going to Grad School at the University of Iowa to get a teaching certificate, I took note of the fact that I liked younger kids a lot and got along with them quite well. So, I decided to RESPOND with a bit of teachering.
It turns out that this was a much wiser course of action in that, by the time I got out of the University of Iowa with a Master’s Degree in Education, my parents had to move to Texas in order to fulfill my father’s RESPONSIBILITY to the Lords of Accountancy and continue to wrestle with the evils of business numbers for the good of all mankind.
I would not have been able to continue to live in my parents’ basement, and being homeless in Iowa in the winter is a rather cold and lonely situation.
I had a RESPONSIBILITY to choose a life path.
I was fortunate enough to choose a good one. One that fit nicely into where my talents lay, and what I was able to do well.
I became RESPONSIBLE for lives, well-being, and intellectual development of kids (young human beings, not goats.)
I turns out that, with practice, I was eventually quite good at teachering. I got through to a lot of kids (even some of whom really were goats underneath it all.)
I feel like, in the long run, I artfully handled my RESPONSIBILITY to life, the universe, and everything. But now that I am teachering no more, I am RESPONSIBLE for doing something further with my life. This blog post is part of the becoming an artist and a writer RESPONCE.
The younger me with a favorite student expressing his deep respect for me with the War on Ignorance going on all around us.
It’s not easy being green…. the color of so many ordinary things…
Especially as you grow older.
Because green is the color of growth and youth and life. But those things seem beyond the grasp of your outstretched fingers on your spotty and wrinkled old hand.
I am definitely no longer green like Littlebit, the Oceanian ship’s boy from the seas of Talislanta and the pirate ship, Black Dragon.
And, yes, an Iowa boy living as far away from an ocean as you can get in the United States, in all directions, you are bound to dream of pirate ships and the high seas, especially when you’re twelve and your favorite book is Treasure Island.
But now that you are old, green is more often your color because you don’t feel well… again… every day….
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But there is still bright green in dreams.
You can still go there and be a child again in memories and your imagination.
It’s just that now the green is written down in sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and cantos.
And talking to your kids about movies, art and artists, stories and writers of stories…
Did you know the favorite color of all three of my children is green?
I have known it since they were small and I could sing to them songs by Kermit the Frog, like “Rainbow Connections” and “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”
And with paint, you make green by combining the blue of sadness with the yellow of sunshine and happiness.
I am a bit of a cartoonist for a reason. I started drawing cartoons at the age of five. I read everything in the Sunday funny pages, not just for the jokes. I poured over the drawings and copied some. I drew Dagwood Bumstead and Blondie. I drew Lil’ Abner and Charlie Brown and Pogo. Cartoonists were heroes to me.
But my parents wanted to protect me from the evils of comic books. Superheroes were off limits most of the time. Things that are associated with evil were out of the question. So Daredevil was beyond reach. And Mad Magazine was full of socialist ideas and led kids down the dark path of satire. So the truth is, I didn’t discover Wally Wood until I was in college. His corrupting influence didn’t take hold of me until I was older and full of hormones. Ah, youth and the propensity for sin! Wally taught me that cartoons could be real.
Wally Wood was one of the original artists working for EC comics who formed Mad Magazine with it’s spoofs and irreverent humor. Wood worked together with the Great Will Eisner on the Spirit. He went on to work for Marvel on the comic book Daredevil where he innovated the red suit and double-D logo, as well as doing the primary story-telling that brought that comic book from the bottom of the Marvel stack to almost the very top. His work on Daredevil resonates even until today where there is now a big controversy that the popular show on Netflix does not list Wood among the creators of Daredevil in their credits. I must remember to complain about that later.
But the thing that drew me to Wood more than anything was the realistic style that he brought to the unreal realm of cartoons. The man could draw! He did marvelous detail work and was a leader in the development of dynamic composition in an artistic industry that tolerated and even often encouraged really poor-quality drawing. He took the comic book from the age of the glorified stick figure to an age of cinematic scope and know-how. Here it is revealed in his classic break-down of innovative comic-book panels;
But it is also important to realize that the more power you put into art, the more it can blow up and hurt people. Wood had a dark side that went a bit darker as he went along. He had an issue with the kind of false front comics had to throw up in front after the anti-comics crusade of psychologist Fredric Wertham’s book Seduction of Innocents. He is probably the artist behind the cartoon poster The Disneyland Memorial Orgy. He started his own cartoon studio that produced increasingly erotic and pornographic comics like Sally Forth, Cannon, and Gangbang. He became increasingly ill, lost the sight in one eye, suffered severe headaches, and eventually committed suicide in 1981. With great power comes great responsibility, and we are not all superheroes in the end. But I will always admire and emulate the work of this great artist… and selfishly wish he could’ve lived to create more of the wonderful art he gave us.
Yesterday, I went to the NASCAR race track at Petty Place in Fort Worth. There I was one of several thousand to sit in our cars in long lines and receive a dose of the Pfizer vaccine. And today I feel really punked out (not referring to the music, of course, because today I can’t sing.) So, I reached back in time for this Saturday Art Day post. All of these pictures have not been posted in a long time.
Today’s post is a look at artwork from various times in my life.
I will try to find some of my work in the media library for this blog that is even older than this first one. But I am combing the archive randomly, so that I need to date each one.
The first one is from around 1979, possibly ’78 or “80.
This was from before I became a teacher, but just after my arthritis helped me decide not to pursue cartooning as a career.
I was still in my 20’s when I drew this.
This next one is helpfully dated 1983. It is a portrait of my favorite kid in the first year I taught. He was in my class in the 1981-82 school year.
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This one is from 1977, my junior year at Iowa State University, You can see that I was overly relying on profile views for faces on cartoon characters. An odd little weakness.
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This one is from about 1992 when Jorge and his brothers, some real working caballeros, were in my classes.
This came from 1984.
This one 1978.
This picture was submitted to the adult division of the Art Contest at the Wright County Fair in 1978. I drew it on the front porch of the old house in Rowan, Iowa. It won the purple ribbon.
This was drawn in the Winter of 1980 when I had to read David Copperfield as one of the works responded to on the 1981 English Masters’ Ecam.
If I searched longer I could probably find the pictures I previously posted on this blog from when I was twelve years old. Those are about the oldest artworks I still possess. But what would it show anyway? You can see my work got a little better over time, but not much, and lately arthritis took away some of my skills.
Catch a Falling Star 