Category Archives: artwork

March 31, 2017 · 11:49 am

The Ultra-Mad Madness of Don Martin

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Born in 1931 and lasting in this crazy, mixed-up world until the year 2000, Don Martin was a mixy, crazed-up cartoonist for Mad Magazine who would come to be billed as “Mad Magazine’s Maddest Artist.”    His greatest work was done during his Mad years, from 1956 (the year I was born… not a coincidence, I firmly believe) until his retirement in 1988.  And I learned a lot from him by reading his trippy toons in Mad from my childhood until my early teacher-hood.

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His style is uniquely recognizable and easily identifiable.  Nobody cartoons a Foon-man like Don Martin.

The googly eyes are always popped in surprise.  The tongue is often out and twirling.  Knees and elbows always have amazingly knobbly knobs.  Feet have an extra hinge in them that God never thought of when he had Adam on the drawing board.

And then there is the way that Martin uses sound effects.  Yes, cartoons in print don’t make literal sounds, but the incredible series of squeedonks and doinks that Martin uses create a cacophony of craziness in the mind’s ear.

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And there is a certain musicality in the rhyming of the character names he uses.  Fester Bestertester was a common foil for slapstick mayhem, and Fonebone would later stand revealed by his full name, Freenbeen I. Fonebone.

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And, of course, one of his most amazingly adventurous ne’er-do-well slapstick characters was the immeasurable Captain Klutz!

Here, there, and everywhere… on the outside he wears his underwear… it’s the incredible, insteadable, and completely not edible… Captain Klutz!

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If you cannot tell it from this tribute, I deeply love the comic genius who was Don Martin, Mad Magazine’s Maddest Artist.  Like me he was obsessed with nudists and drawing anatomy.  Like me he was not above making up words with ridiculous-sounding syllables.  And like me he was also a purple-furred gorilla in a human suit… wait!  No, he wasn’t, but he did invent Gorilla-Suit Day, where people in gorilla suits might randomly attack you as you go about your daily life, or gorillas in people suits, or… keep your eye on the banana in the following cartoon.

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So, even though I told you about Bruce Timm and Wally Wood and other toon artists long before I got around to telling you about Don Martin, that doesn’t mean I love them more.  Don Martin is wacky after my own heart, and the reason I spent so much time immersed in Mad Magazine back in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.

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March 22, 2017 · 2:32 pm

DoodleFace!!!

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I drew this face as a doodle while watching an episode of Iron Fist on Netflix.   I don’t think it is anybody in the show I was watching, actor or character or comic book villain, but I can’t help but think that Doodleface is a great name for a Dick Tracy villain.

Of course, a doodle is a drawing done with only half-attention being paid.  I was not ignoring Iron Fist as I drew this.  I did not take time to plan it out with a pencil sketch.  I started drawing the right eye, thinking it w ould probably become a girl’s face.  When I tried to match the first eye with a second, it came out mismatched enough that she morphed into a villain.  Bilateral symmetry equals beauty.  Asymmetry equals comedy goofball or possibly villain.  As I framed the eyes and developed the center of the face down to the chin, the chance to make a Natasha or an Olga Badenov sort of villain dissipated to the point of masculine villainy.  That probably explains the curly hair, since the villain Bakuto in Iron Fist had curly hair.  But curiously, this drawing-while- watching-TV fellow is not Bakuto.  This guy has no beard.  And in the episode I watched, Bakuto had a beard.  And Bakuto also ended the episode with a knife sticking out of his general heart-area, not a good sign for his personal health and wellness, though in a comic book plot… well, who knows?

So, if Doodleface is a Dick Tracy villain, how did he get his name and what is his special thing?  Pruneface was pruney in the face.  Mumbles couldn’t talk so you could understand him.  Flattop had a head that was flat on the top like a table.  So Doodleface is obviously a master of disguise.  He must possess a magic pen acquired in the mysterious Orient in the 1920’s, one that clearly allows him to redraw his features at any given time so he cannot be recognized.  And hopefully, he draws well enough that coppers won’t just take one look and say, “Hey, dat guy over dere has a squiggle drawn all over his mug!  Dat must be Doodleface!!!”  (Of course it has to be three exclamation points because… well, cartoon exaggeration!!!)

And all of this is, of course, evidence that even when I am watching a fairly good show on TV (Iron Fist is not Daredevil or Luke Cage in its levels of amazing Marvel comics goodness) my mind and my drawing hand are both still busy doing their own thing as well.  Doodling is an artsy-fartsy way to kill time and fill up empty spaces.  My entire blog is basically the same in this purpose.  But I am able to use the doodle imperative to create and be creative, to learn and to grow, and possibly make up something worth keeping.

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March 19, 2017 · 3:04 pm

Return of the Train Man

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I was an aficionado of HO model trains as a kid.  I continued that horrendous fixation with 1/78th scale worlds long into my extended juvenile immaturity (I was an unmarried teacher of middle school students until 1995.)    Even after I was married, my wife allowed me, to a very limited degree, to continue to be a train man.

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I spent a good deal of time over the years building building plastic model kits of buildings, painting and repainting plaster model buildings, and collecting engines, rolling stock, and trackside details.  Painting little 1/78th scale people is definitely an exercise for steady hands and a zen-like, highly focused mind.

But that all reached an impasse when we moved to the Dallas area.  I had to tear down my train layout, box up my trains, and put everything on hold until I had another place to build and create my HO model-train world.  So, while it was all boxed up and transported to first, a house that we rented from my brother-in-law, and then a house that we bought, it got shifted around and stacked inappropriately, and grandma put some really heavy items on top to crush and mangle my treasures.  It also spent a night outside in the rain when my brother-in-law’s water heater had to be replaced in the garage where everything was stored.  I was not a happy camper for a while.

Now, a decade later, I am still taking the tiny items and trying to glue the pieces back together.  I have basically given up trying to get the trains to run again.  But I can use the bits and pieces of Toonerville to make pictures like these.  It makes the art-parts of my psyche and soul a little happier.

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Old number 99 had to have the front part where the headlamp is located reattached and restored.  It gave me something to do this weekend while I was down with a bad back and breathing difficulties.  It would be neat to put the train table back together and get things set up once again, but there is no space, and no unlimited funds, and less and less time.  So for now, the train man comes back to me to rebuild in photographs and in my imagination.

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March 17, 2017 · 3:40 pm

Being a Teacher at Heart

Being a teacher at heart… I want to recommend that career…even though I know full well it is a super-hard crappy job of glorified baby-sitting that pays in literal peanuts and nobody in their  right minds recommends it to smart young up-and-comers as a glamorous choice… and it is only getting worse under a new anti-education administration.

Being a teacher at heart… I can’t help remembering how it all started for me.  The last thing in the world I imagined myself being when I was in high school was a teacher.  I wanted to be a cartoonist or a comic book artist.  I wanted to write best-selling science fiction novels and maybe direct a movie.  You know, the kind of thing millionaires line up to bestow on college grads with a degree in English  and a transcript filled with mostly A’s in my art classes.

But after my remedial master’s degree gave me a provisional teaching certificate, and my one and only interview for an illustrator’s job resulted in compliments on my portfolio and best wishes for my teaching career, I headed to Texas, one of only two states actually hiring teachers in 1981.  (The other was Florida, which it turns out it was a very lucky thing my family had already moved to Texas to help me make that decision.  Have you seen the education news coming out of Florida?  I now know where Satan gets his mail.)

Turns out the only job available in 1981 was all the way South on Interstate 35 in Cotulla, Texas.  I was there to teach English to 8th graders.  Mostly Spanish-speaking 8th graders.  And the previous year the 7th grade English teacher had run out of the classroom screaming after the little darlings exploded firecrackers under her chair and put scorpions in her coffee cup.  I was given her classroom and the same students that forced her to re-think her career choice.  El Loco Gongie, El Loco Martin, Talan, El Mouse, El Boy, El Goofy (whose one and only talent was to turn his whole head purple at will), La Chula Melinda, and the Lozano Twins  were the nicknames I had to learn because practically everyone was named Jose Garcia… even the girls.  Talan and El Mouse were the first ones to threaten my life.  They picked up a fence post on the way to lunch (we had to walk four blocks to the elementary school to get lunch because the junior high building had no cafeteria).  Talan said something threatening in Spanish that I didn’t understand and added the name “Gringo Loco” menacingly to whatever he said, and El Mouse pantomimed using the metal fence post as a sword to cut me in two.  All this because I was trying to get them to keep up with the rest of the class on our little hike in the 100 degree heat.  (I think I knew then why Satan moved to Florida.)  Fortunately they must’ve decided that murdering me wasn’t worth the hours of detention they would have to spend, and dropped the post.  Class was definitely disrupted when handsome El Boy and La Chula decided to break up, or rather, El Boy decided he like brown-eyed Alexandra better after she got blue-eyed contact lenses that made her eyes look yellow-green.  Girl fights are harder to break up than boy fights because girls fight to the death over matters of the heart, and they really don’t care who dies once the fight is started.

Now you may think my account of my first horrible year as a teacher must be exaggerated and expanded with lies because you know I am a humorist and that I went on to teach for many more years.  But I swear, only the names have been changed.  The nicknames and the incidents all are real.  (Yes, he really could contort his face in a way that turned his entire head purple.  It was freaky and made the girls scream.)    As I reached the spring of the year that year and had to decide whether or not to sign my contract for the next year, I really was planning to get out of teaching all together.  But I was standing on the playground one day that spring glaring at the vatos locos to prevent fights from breaking out again when Ruben came up to stand beside me and talk to me.  Ruben was one of the brightest and physically smallest of all my kids that year.  But he had such a charm about him that the bullies left him alone (except for the time he got in trouble for forging El Boy’s mother’s signature on a failing report card).  He said to me, “I want you to know, you are my favorite teacher.  I learned a lot from you this year.”  I had to bite my lower lip to keep from crying right there and then.  It was the moment when I decided I had to be a teacher.  They were not going to make me run away in defeat.  I was going to work at it until I knew how to do it right.  For Ruben.  And for all the other boys and girls like Ruben who liked me as a teacher… and laughed at my jokes… even the really corny ones… and needed me.  That made all the hard stuff worth it.

Being a teacher at heart… I recognize now that there was never anything else I was going to be.  It was what God chose me to be.  And my only regret about my choice is that I had to retire and can’t do it any more for health reasons.  I still miss it.

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March 15, 2017 · 3:21 pm

Cartoonists Trying to Save the World

Back in the 1870’s (you remember it as well as I do, don’t you?) a cartoonist named Thomas Nast basically invented the political cartoon.  Back then, a bloated New York politician and his gang of criminals were busy getting wealthy through corrupt business and government relationships.  Nast used his gift for scribbly-art satire to lampoon the buffoons and make the public laugh at the evil he exposed.  Of course, they knew about the corruption of Boss Tweed before they laughed at the cartoons, but the focus on the problem created by Nast’s magnifying glass focusing the rays of sunlight on the problem is often credited with helping to burn up the scandal.

Cartoonists had power back then.  Power over public opinion.  The power to help fairly uncomplicated (and sometimes stupid) folk to recognize the absurdity of the situation and the need for changing it.

So why haven’t cartoonists fried the Make-America-Great-Again orangutan running the country now with his brand of corpulent corruption already?  Believe me, they are trying.

They have already highlighted the way the Bozo Administration manipulates the focus of the mainstream media.  Every time media coverage begins to converge on one scandal, he creates another big, smelly media poop of a controversy to redirect their focus.

And while he is doing his big shoe dance on the tables in the spotlight, congress is doing his rich friends’ evil will in the back rooms.

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The end result of this malevolent dog-and-pony show is patently obvious.

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Unfortunately, in the 1870’s, the stupid people that Thomas Nast was enlightening had not yet achieved the profound levels of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot stupidity that Trump supporters have now mastered.  Poor and middle-class Republicans, Texans, and other dim folk continue to take the Great Pumpkinhead at his word and believe every utterance of his mouth to be sacred gospel truth.  I have had conservative friends arguing themselves into pretzel-knots to defend his policies and dastardly deeds.

But if cartoonists can’t succeed in shining sunlight on the bloodsucking vampiric old moneybags and kill him soon, his reign will become immortal and we are all gonna die.

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Seriously.  We stand at the end of a long chain of greedy b*st*rds raping and pillaging the environment for profit and not caring about the impact of their actions.  We are dooming the planet to environmental collapse because the orange-faced name-stamper cares more about short-term profits for himself and his friends than he does about whether or no his own grandchildren will have water to drink, air to breath, and a place to live cool enough that metal doesn’t melt in the sunshine.

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So, I hate to be a double-trouble downer about the whole thing, but the truth is if we are depending on cartoonists and humorists to save the world, we are in trouble.  It is not working the way it did in Nast’s day.  Cartoonists are doing their lampooning and doing it well.  But more is needed.  And if we don’t get that something more soon, then (to incorrectly paraphrase and misquote T.S. Eliot), “This is the way the world ends… Not with a whimper but a bang!”

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March 12, 2017 · 3:48 pm

Surviving Death and Taxes

Life is filled with impossible things.  Doing my taxes is definitely one of them.

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I once owned a copy of this Will Eisner comic and got a good barrel of laughs out of it back in the day when I was young and full of life and the grim reaper wasn’t standing just outside the kitchen door like he is now.

It had a bunch of useful suggestions on what to do in the face of the two most unavoidable things in life.  I wish I could find it once again, but I fear it disappeared when my parents moved from Texas back to the farm in Iowa in the 1990’s.  It was probably stolen by someone who wanted to learn the valuable secrets it contained.  I accuse Donald Trump.  Surely that would explain all those years he paid zero dollars in taxes.  And I believe I spotted something with pale orange hair lurking behind the trash bin when my parents were loading the moving van.   Of course, it may have been only a dried out tumble weed.

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Now, I am not saying that I don’t want to pay my taxes.  I have always felt that it was an important part of being a citizen to pay my fair share.  And if you want the benefits of government services like schools, fire departments, police forces, court systems, garbage collection, and all those other things we really can’t do without… well, somebody has to pay for them.scan0017

But it often seems to me that the whole matter could become considerably more equitable if those people to whom life and the economy have been more generous could see their way clear to pay a little of that good fortune towards common goals.  And I am not referring to the Koch brothers spending a billion dollars on elections, either.  That’s a transaction where they come out ahead, making more money back than they put in.  After all, they got the whole State of Kansas to pour their State funds directly into Koch Industries pocketbooks via tax breaks, effectively allowing them to rob all of Kansas’s public school children of their textbooks and lunch money.  How is that equitable and fair?

And paying taxes this year means probably paying far more than my fair share.  I recently completed a debt-reduction program to get out from under two decades worth of maxed-out credit cards at 25% to 29% interest rates.  And as a further punishment for trying to get free of the burden, credit card banks get to report the forgiven debt as income for me to the IRS.  And all of the banks decided this was the year for me to pay that off.  Well, except for Bank of America who are petulantly suing me for more money than I owe them.  I will probably end up mired back in credit card debt in order to survive the IRS.  So how does that square with Mitt Romney paying less than 15%?  Or Donald Trump paying nothing?

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The only out for me, it seems, is to shake hands and make a deal with old Grimmy.  He has patiently waited for me for sixty years, through times when my six incurable diseases definitely gave him hope.  The only way to really escape the tax man is to take the really long dirt nap.  But I shall scrape funds together and give it one more try.  I just wish I could find that book.

(Note *** All the illustrations in this essay except for Mr. Flagg’s Uncle Sam were provided by the late great Will Eisner, the cartoonist so grand that the highest award for cartoonists is named after him.  But I am not paying any royalties for these images since I owe my soul to the IRS.)

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March 8, 2017 · 4:15 pm

The Centaur

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The centaur… Kentaur, Κένταυρος, Centaurus, Sagittary… human from the waist up,horse body from the waist down… I hate to break it to you, but the damned things are only imaginary.  There are no real ones anywhere.  Not even in Thessaly.    The half-horse children of Ixion and Nephele are totally made up by goofy story-tellers in the distant past.

And yet, what they actually represent in poems, plays, stories, and myths is a very real part of what it means to be human and what it means to be alive.

There are many centaurs in literature, going all the way back to the Greeks.  But my favorite depictions of the man-horses of literature occur in what are basically children’s books.  In the Chronicles of Narnia C. S. Lewis portrays centaurs as wise and noble, gifted at star-gazing, prophecy, healing,and warfare.  Aslan the Lion, the Christ-figure of the tales, relies on their steadfast faithfulness in his battles against evil and the White Witch.  In the Harry Potter books of J.K. Rowling, the centaurs live in the Forbidden Forest just outside of the Hogwarts grounds, always in hiding from the human world and shy, at least until Firenze comes Chiron-like to join the faculty, aid in the teaching of magic, and help in the struggle against the evil of Voldemort.  In the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, Chiron himself of Greek myth teaches the young heroes, though the rest of the centaurs you meet in the stories are very Dionysian and basically a bunch of drunken party boys… err… party horses… err… horseboys.

So essentially the centaur has a dual nature.  On the one hand they are cultured and learned and wise.  On the other hand, they are directly connected to the earth and the natural world, liking the sensual half of the human experience.  And it might be important to note… centaurs never wear pants… in fact, could never wear pants.

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In Greek mythology, the Centauromachy, or war between the centaurs and the Lapiths, represents a central struggle in the human psyche.  The centaurs are pictured as being as wild as untamed horses.  They are sensual and willful and try to disrupt the wedding of Hippodamia to Pirithous, King of Lapithae by kidnapping Hippodamia and all the other Lapith women and girls.  It turns out badly for the centaurs because they represent unbridled sensuality without rules while the Lapiths (who are directly related to the centaurs as cousins) represent rules and rationality.  We all know how that is expected to play out in human society… so of course that is what happens in the myth.  The rational always rules in the end.

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So I identify strongly with the idea of the centaur.  The rational man-part guiding the sensual horse-part.  The whole teacher-y Chiron thing…  and getting to walk around naked… on four legs.  The centaur is a thing to draw and a thing to tell stories with and a thing to invade your dreams.  Part man, part horse, and totally unreal.

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March 3, 2017 · 3:13 pm

Antonín Dvořák – HUMORESQUES FOR PIANO

These eight short piano pieces represent work from Czech composer Antonin Dvorak’s “sketchbook”.  He composed these in his time as director of the Conservatory in New York from 1892 to 1895.  They represent a foreign-born composer’s take on being in America.  It is important to note that there is a very un-serious quality to the “sketches” in this portfolio.  His most famous piece from this set, the Seventh Humoresque in G Major would become the theme song of Slappy Squirrel in Steven Spielberg’s popular television cartoon show, Anamaniacs.  It also became well known as the tune behind the “train toilet song” where passengers began singing aloud the directions for toilet flushing in passenger cars beginning with the phrase “Passengers will please refrain from flushing while the train is in the station…”

So what more perfect background music could there be for a look at some of the junk in my computerized version of a sketchbook?  These images all come from my Work in Progress folder.  I hope you will listen to the music while looking at these incomplete horrors and humoresques.

That is definitely a load of humoresques.  But like other forms of it, you spread it on your garden and it will help the flowers grow.

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February 23, 2017 · 12:06 pm

Now You See Me… Now You Don’t

How does an artist know himself?  Now there’s a difficult question.  I spend all my time looking at the world with the eyes of imagination.  I don’t even seem to be able to take photographs in the normal way other people do.  Maybe I should consider this self-think through the medium of pictures I have made with captions added to them?

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Mickey is not actually me.  He is my “other” me, my pen name, my goofier self.

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                                                      I was born in a blizzard in Mason City, Iowa in the 1950’s.

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I have learned about dog poop five times a day since 2011 when we found Jade, our dog.

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                                                                                                                      I was a middle school teacher for 24 of my 31 years of teaching.  I love/hate 7th Graders.

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When things go wrong, I tend to make a joke about it.

I like to draw students as I saw them, not as they really were.

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I always see myself as the one with the BIG pencil.

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If there is goofiness around here, it is all my fault.

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                                                                                           In spite of the title, I don’t know how to disappear.

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I love everything Disney.

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I tend not to be very much like other people.  I don’t think like they do.

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                                                                                                                         In grade school, I was deeply in love with Alicia Stewart, though I never told her that, and that is not her real name.

My high school art teacher told me that when an artist draws someone, he always ends up making it look a little bit like himself.  That is because, I suppose, an artist can only draw what he knows and he really only knows himself.  That being said, this post should really look just like me.

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February 22, 2017 · 12:06 pm

Doodlefox

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While watching Netflix yesterday afternoon, a retirement activity that becomes the majority of my social life when the diabetes demons are eating me, I started doodling a fox.  It was a pencil doodle at first.  And I was not drawing from life.  I was drawing the fox in my head.  I suspect it was the fox from Antoine de Saint Exupery’s masterwork, The Little Prince.

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Yes, that fox.  The wise one that knows about taming little princes, and loving them, and being reminded of them in the color of wheat fields.  I began to need that fox as my doodle pen uncovered him on the blank page.  There he was.  Surprised to see me.  Either he was leaping towards me in the picture, or falling down on me from the sky above.  I don’t know which.  But I realized I had to tame him by drawing him and making him as real as ever an imaginary fox could ever be.  You will notice he does not look like a real fox.  I did not draw him from a photograph, but from the cartoon eye in my mind where all Paffoonies come from.  And this was to be a profound Paffooney… a buffoony cartoony looney Paffooney.  It simply had to be, because that is precisely what I always doodle-do.

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And so he was a fox.  He was my doodlefox.  I had tamed him.  And then I had to give him color.  And, of course, the color had to be orange-red.

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And so, there is my fox.  Like the Little Prince’s fox he could tell me, “What is essential is invisible to the eye.  It is only with the heart that we can see rightly.”  And I put him in a post with lyrical and somewhat goofy words to give you a sense of what he means to me, in the same way one might explain what the thrill of the heart feels like when a butterfly’s wing brushes against the back of your hand.  Yes, to share the unknowable knowledge and the unfeelable feeling of a doodlefox.  A demonstration of precisely what a Paffooney is.

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