Here are images from the Monster Movie collection I keep as an obsessive-compulsive hoarding disorder style of thing. I thought I would present them as a collage since I am lazy today and want to save words for my novel project.
The scary thing is that people like me obsess about such nonsense, and collect so many silly, fantastic pictures of stuff and nonsense.
Filed under artwork, collage, collecting, humor, monsters, science fiction, Uncategorized
I continue to believe bankers, health insurance companies, and corporate leaders are all pirates. The gentleman of the sea dressed all in red in this picture is Black Timothy, bombastic and barely comprehensible leader of the pirates of Fantastica.
The truth is I am a bit of a cartoonist. Don’t worry. It is not a completely horrible and detestable thing to be. Not like being a pirate… or a banker… or worse, a pirate banker. It leads me to do cartoons like you will find in my vault, here…
The Atlas of Fantastica, Chapter 1
It is a basically incurable disease, and yet… I can live with it. It will not kill me like some of my other incurable diseases eventually will.
So today’s post, keeping alive an unbroken string of daily posts that now goes back 16 months, is a picture post. I hope you like it, but if you don’t, another one will come along soon enough.
Filed under artwork, cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, Paffooney, Pirates, Uncategorized
One of my many time-wasting hobbies (a nice way of saying obsessive-compulsive black holes of life-absorption) is going to Goodwill and buying cheap junk/garbage to repaint and make into something more beautiful. I recently made another trip and purchased the thing you see in the first photo paffooney. I know that the picture doesn’t show how really bad it is. It is a good sculpture that can be turned into something with the right paint and the right skills. But it has age damage, paint splotches, stains, and moldy spots that don’t really show up in the picture. I am showing it to you now before the adventure begins, and I hope to do another post when I have it cleaned and repainted so that I can amaze you with the difference. This is a terrible time-waster that I will do because I can, and it is not meant to satisfy anybody but me.
It is not, however, the first such project. And it takes time to get to everything done. So, naturally, I have other works in progress I can show you. There are other things I have started and not yet finished.
This little beauty is actually a perfume bottle. For some reason the marketing team thought it was a good idea to put perfume into a little smiling girl who you have to twist into two pieces at the waist to get the perfume out. She was originally two separate pieces that were two solid colors. I have finished cleaning her and put yellow enamel on her hair and added white to the eyes and blouse. I know it makes her smile particularly creepy to have pure white eyes, but, hey, I’m not finished with it yet.
These schlocky little Christmas ornament angels are simply white with no ceramic glaze of any kind. They cry out for paint and color. I honestly believe I can paint them and not spoil them. In fact, I’m fairly confident that my attempt will make them better.
The owl is actually a lamp. You can tell by the cord coming out of his butt. But, of course, no bulb in there, and no way to be sure if it even works as a lamp. I am not risking a fire by plugging the thing in. But painted as an owl, it could easily become a deterrent to squirrels who want to eat apples from my wife’s two young apple trees.
Tom Sawyer here is apparently a cologne bottle, or possibly a very weird place to keep whiskey. He is very like the girl perfume bottle in that you open him up by twisting off the top of his torso, but he’s much bigger in size, suggesting they are not a Tom and Becky sort of pair. He has a hole through his right hand, top and bottom, which probably means he once had a fishing pole. His plastic top half has significant sun damage and the top of the straw hat apparently melted a bit at one point. So I can definitely do something with him to make him better and worth more than than the 50 cents he cost me.
I fully intend to re-finish all of these projects and post the results on this blog. Don’t hold your breath waiting for me to finish them… you could easily turn purple and die doing that… but I do intend to start work on these things soon.
Filed under artwork, collecting, photo paffoonies, Uncategorized
Yesterday I completed a drawing that I have been working on for 3 days. This is a background drawing of The Pirates’ Nest on the northern coast of Fantastica. It is where the pirates live and do their banker jobs and sell health insurance. You know, acts of pure evil.
I intend to use it to cheat when making cartoons. I can draw characters and then place them in the scene with photo-shop. I can put pirates like Black Timothy (seen here all in red) and his pal Scruffy Bill (with two wooden legs, two wooden arms, and a wooden head) into the scene. Or, I could insert some of the pirate leaders like Pirate King Ronny Ray-gun into the scene.
So, today’s post is one of those lazy posts where I just post something I drew and write some snarky humor-like stuff. But I am thinking I am doing something right. I have set all-time highs for views and visits on this blog in the last seven days, with two days over 100. It is possible that it is just the NSA looking at my conspiracy theory posts, or even the international banking conspiracy watching for me posting stuff like this that calls them pirates and reveals their ultimate evil. But it could also be that some of you actually like the stuff I post while pretending to be an actual author and competent writer. Who knows?
A self-portrait by Wallace Wood.
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.
Filed under artwork, cartoon review, cartoons, humor, illustrations
There comes a time when a mind turns inward and begins to learn that self is as complicated and in need of exploration as any African jungle or surface of a distant planet.
The Paffoonies today all come from my sixth grade school notebook. When that school year ended I owned one book of my own, Rudyard Kipling’s First Jungle Book, the paperback version. I kept my colored pencil drawings in my school notebook, and I kept the notebook in my bedroom to continue to fill it with drawings on notebook paper.
As you can see, the notebook is age-worn and falling apart, but I still have it. It still contains my twelve-year-old artistic visions, the beginnings of who I am as a thinking, drawing, story-telling human being.
At one point I even had a package of pink notebook paper.
So I admit it. I was a dorky, weird child. And I drew a lot of weird pictures at twelve. Now you have some of the evidence.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, colored pencil, drawing, dreaming, Uncategorized
The current state of my cardboard castle is pictured above. I probably need to remind you that I am making this thing with my own hands. It is made from old Ritz Cracker boxes with a layer of cutout skin printed from the computer. It is put together with glue, tape, and a little bit of ingenuity… oh, and a lot of “insert tab A into slot B”. It is shaping up into a very Elizabethan style of castle. I originally started it to create props for use with the family Dungeons and Dragons game. But it grows into a project existing for its own sake, a piece of artwork that is made just like so many others I have done before, in many small steps, one piece at a time.
Here we are stepping back in time to what it looked like before, with fewer elements created. You can see that the essentials are already added in here… the tavern and the outhouse… can’t live without either of those.
It does, indeed, make a worthy addition and contribution to the ongoing D&D campaign currently journeying through the eastern cities of Aundair in the realm of Eberron. We are seeking the stolen dragon eggs, and have recently conquered the castle of the Duke of Evernight, freeing it from its terrible curse.
But I do truly believe that the key to this art project, in fact, the theme of this whole post, is that big, impressive things are built our of one small step following another over time. You build brick walls with a bricklayer placing one brick at a time.
Novels, too, are accomplished this way… one small step after another. As are both the marriage and the raising of children in the life of a family. Nothing worth building goes up in a flash… unless it’s built by the Flash… but he is only a character from a comic book and not real. So, I continue to build. One day soon, I shall have battlements capable of warding off goblins and orcs. And for today, I have added another brick to the walls of my blog.
Filed under artwork, humor, photo paffoonies, Uncategorized
Yesterday I used a Paffooney I had stolen to illustrate my gymnasium adventures, and in the caption I gave credit to the wonderful comic artist I shamelessly copied it from. The second imitation Takahashi that I did yesterday is now displayed next to it above. I am now compelled to explain about my goofy, sideways obsession with Anime and Manga, the cartoons from Japan. I love the art style. I have since I fell in love with Astroboy Anime as a child in Iowa. Rumiko Takahashi is almost exactly one year younger than me. As a cartoonist she is light years more successful than me. She has been crafting pen and ink masterpieces of goofy story-telling longer than I have been a teacher.
Her artwork is a primary reason I have been so overly-enamored of the Japanese Manga-cartoon style. I love the big eyes, the child-like features of even adult characters, the weird poses and still-weirder comic art conventions of this culture from practically a different planet. She has created comic series that are immensely popular in Japan, and have even put down sturdy roots in this country, especially with young adults since the 80’s. She is the world’s number one best-selling female comics artist.
Just as we Westerners have to accept numerous ridiculous things to appreciate the stories told in American comics (for instance, brawny heroes running around in tights with their underwear on the outside of their pants, nearly naked ladies with super powers diving into battle next to men encased in armored suits, and talking animals), the Manga-minded must also practice a bizarre form of the willing suspension of disbelief. In Ranma 1/2, the main character is a boy marshal artist who turns into a girl when splashed with cold water. Much of the romantic comedy of that work revolves around boys and old men finding themselves in the bath house next to naked young girls. For some reason that sort of naked surprise causes the boys to spout fountain-like nosebleeds. In Inu-Yasha the whole thing is about fighting demons with swords. Inu-Yasha himself is part demon. Apparently part-demon is a good thing to be. Japanese villains are spectacularly susceptible to fits of crying rage and tantrums. And everybody looks more like American white people than orientals. Oh, and there are talking animals.
Rumiko is a master of pen and ink. Here is a sample of of her black and white work.
And she does color well too.
The little people are a special style of Manga character called a Chibi, and all regular Manga characters can turn into one at any moment.
And, of course, to read actual Manga you have to master reading backwards. Americans read left to right. The Japanese read right to left. You have to open a Japanese book in a manner that seems both backwards and upside down.
This illustration shows how American publishers flip Japanese comics to make them more accessible to American audiences.
So now, by uncovering the fact that I am addicted to and seriously affected by Japanese cartoons, you have one more bit of evidence to present to a jury in case you decide Mickey needs to be locked up and medicated for a while. Japanese comics are a world of great beauty, but also a world unto themselves. It is an acquired taste that has to be considered carefully. And of all the many marvelous Manga makers, Rumiko Takahashi is the one I love the best.
Yesterday, before the big game, I watched the DVD I bought of Tim Burton’s Golden Globe Award movie, Big Eyes. It is the true-story bio-pic of an artist I loved as a kid, Margaret Keane… though I knew her as Walter Keane.
This movie is the bizarre real-life tale of an artist whose art was stolen from her by a man she loved, and supposedly loved her back. I have to wonder how you deal with a thing like that as an artist? I live in obscurity as an artist. My art has been published in several venues, but I have never been paid a dime for it. All I have ever gotten is publication in return for “exposure”, and limited exposure at that. But my art always brought vigor, joy, and light to my career as a school teacher. My art was always my own, and had either my own name on it, or the name Mickey on it. I shared my drawing skill in ways that directly impacted the lives of other people. It enriched my “teacher life”.
Mrs. Keane’s hauntingly beautiful big-eyed children appealed to the cartoonist in me. They expressed such deeply-felt character and emotion, that I was obsessed with imitating them. In fact, the “big-eye-ness” of them can still be detected in some of my work. I remember wondering how these children, mostly girls, could be drawn by a grown man. What was his obsession with little girls? But the true story reveals that he was a man so desperate to have art talent and notoriety that he put his name on his wife’s work, made her paint in secret, and eventually convinced himself that it was actually his. He had a real genius for marketing art, and he invented many of the art-market ploys that would later inform the careers of homely artists like Paul Detlafsen and Thomas Kinkaid. One wonders if Mrs. Keane could’ve ever become famous and popular without him.
The movie itself is a Tim Burton masterpiece that reveals the artist that lives within the filmmaker himself. I love Burton’s movies for their visual mastery and artistic atmosphere. They are all very different in look and feel. Batman was very dark and Gothic, inventing an entirely new way of seeing Batman that differed remarkably from the 60’s TV series. Edward Scissorhands was full of muted, pastel colors and gentle humor. Alice in Wonderland was full of bright colors and oddly distorted fantasy characters. Dark Shadows was Gothic melodrama in 70’s pop-art style. This movie was true to the paintings that inspired it and visually saturate it. It is beautiful and colorful, while also serious and somber. It makes you contemplate the tears in the eyes of the big-eyed waifs in so many of the pictures. It is a movie “I love with a love that is more than a love in this kingdom by the sea”… if I may get all obsessive like Edgar Allen Poe.
So, there you have it. Not so much a movie review as an effusion of love and admiration for an artist’s entire life and work. I am captivated… fascinated… addicted… all the things I always feel about works of great art.
Filed under art my Grandpa loved, artists I admire, artwork, movie review
Catch a Falling Star 
Gray Morrow
Comic book artwork grabs me constantly and makes me wonder about the lives behind the pen and ink. Artists basically draw themselves. Whether you are drawing Tarzan, Buck Rogers, or Flash Gordon… when you draw them, you are drawing yourself. My first encounter with Gray Morrow was when he drew Orion in Heavy Metal Magazine (the English version of the French Metal Hurlant).
He was capable of drawing both the grotesque and the beautiful. Violent action juxtaposed with soft and romantic moments filled with subtle colors and complex emotion. I began thinking that Gray Morrow must be a complex and interesting human being. I was soon to discover his other selves. He was the artist behind the Buck Rogers strip starting in 1979. He and Marvel writer Roy Thomas co-created the muck monster Man-Thing.
He also worked on Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and The Illustrated Roger Zelazny. Unfortunately he died in 2001 at age 67. Luckily an artist puts himself into his work, and for that reason we still have Gray Morrow with us. It is a kind of immortality.
This cover from Monsters Unleashed gives you an idea of how well Gray Morrow could draw.
3 Comments
Filed under artwork, comic strips, commentary
Tagged as Buck Rogers, comic art, Flash Gordon, Gray Morrow, Tarzan