Today, feeling quite lazy, I decided to revisit Hidden Kingdom. It will add to what I already have in the vault at this link;
I will pick it up with the last two panels that appeared a little too fuzzy for my taste. I will edit them in to the vault.
So now you know what a cartoonist does after writing a thousand words yesterday and feeling quite lazy today. He cheats and ducks responsibility. What are the going to do about it anyway? Turn me into a bird?
Filed under cartoons, Hidden Kingdom, humor
Like a lazy idiot I have been posting stuff I’ve already created to Mickey’s House of Fiction and pretending that it means I am actually getting writing work done. Today’s cartoon story, Expelling Evil, the Series, attempts to exploit my constant playing with dolls to make a humorous adventure cartoon strip. I realize that it is still incomplete and most probably a spectacular failure (at least, as much of a failure as is possible without destroying the internet or making your computer explode). But it makes me laugh, and I have been wanting to put it all together in one place. So, here is the link;
https://authormbeyer.wordpress.com/2015/05/23/expelling-evil-the-series/
Here is a photo Paffooney from the story to help you remember how much you want to avoid reading it all again.
I do promise to add on to the end of it in Mickey’s House of Fiction every time I bore you with another episode and nearly make your head implode from reading it. The purpose of that plan being to allow to find all of it in one place and thoroughly ignore everything in one go.
Filed under action figures, cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, my vault
In the novel I recently entered in the Chanticleer Reviews YA Novel-Writing contest, I used the fairy kingdom of Tellosia to be the land of the little people integrated into hometown Iowa. As part of my cartoon stories page, I intend to take up the tale of The Hidden Kingdom once again and expand and complete it. I will post it as a web comic on Word Press. I know I can’t make money giving it away for free… but I hope to have my stories and cartoons read a little bit more through the buzz I hope this generates. And perhaps Petit Zam can come up with some fairy magic that will help… so I can cast a spell on you.
Here is installment one of The Hidden Kingdom;
Here is a page for collected stories that I mean to build on and expand. It is my intention to file cartoons here and edit them and add more pages via posts. So for a first attempt let me use an old cartoon that was rejected once by Heavy Metal magazine in the early 1980’s and rejected a second time by a cartoon magazine that no longer exists and I can’t even remember the name of… I am thinking they had very poor taste in cartoon art anyway.
Now, of course, this a finished four-page one-shot. It was intended for a magazine that sought this kind of full-color art and had an over-all science fiction and horror fantasy theme. I was too light and colorful with this short for their needs. Disney characters on the PJ’s might have been a legal problem too. So I am left with an unsaleable example of my best colored-pencil art, done when I was still pretty much a clueless kid and not yet a teacher. It was worth doing, but will never make me a single dime.
When last we left the Captain Action Hero Team, they were busy trying to rescue Mickey’s beloved X-Box with the EA Sports Baseball ’04 game that Mickey loves. The Evil Doctor Evil had taken over the library and turned it into an evil lair for his evil minions of Evil. But Captain Carl Action had led his team into the fray and clobbered the Agent in Red with a kiss and the Grammar Nazis with bad grammar. Dr. Evil was feeling foiled.
The pretty Barbie doll (whose name was really City-Style Christie) was captured and at the mercy of Evil Doctor Evil.
Dr. Mindbender had an evil talent for bending minds. He possessed considerable talents of ESP (which here stands for Extremely Stupid Puddlebrains). The poor captive doll was bent to Dr. Evil’s evil will.
Suddenly Mickey’s blog stood on the verge of losing its PG rating (which was already on shaky ground anyway). Then, faithful Max Steele pulled an answer out of his… thin air… urm, yes, that was what I intended to say.
The day appeared to be saved by a good old bop on the bean. It was Captain Carl’s favorite problem-solving solution, as it is for practically all action heroes… definitely the ones with the hollow plastic heads in Mickey’s Action Figure Collection. But one important task still remained un-done.
Tune in next time for the only “Fight of the Century” in which Manny Pacquiao can’t possibly disappoint you!
Filed under cartoons, doll collecting, humor
There is a place in the cartoon part of my brain where the dream-stories of Fantastica take place. I am trying to get my goofiness all lined up to produce a more finished cartoon saga using all the goof-gas and whooey that I have stored up in that squirrel-den I call my mind. I prepared a setting already… a single set that already showed you what Animal Town looks like, where all the people are anthropomorphized animals. Here it is again to refresh your memory.
Animal Town is just one place in the larger Toon World of my silly imaginings. There are many more. I intend to draw these toons in what I call “Clown Noir”… that is, the drawings will be in pen and ink, filmed in black and white and red… especially red for noses. Got the idea? I hope I haven’t spoiled the joke already. Spoiled jokes are kinda like spoiled milk; they make you want to put a clothespin on your nose (and that kinda hurts, so it becomes harder to laugh.)
I also wanted to introduce a few of the denizens of Fantastica. (That’s denizens, not Dennis’ sons, because I used to think all the people that lived in one place somehow became the children of Dennis, but then Dennis told me that just ain’t so!)
Rugs Rabbity is a class of cartoon character I like to call a hero. I know what it looks like. I probably did steal the character from Warner Brothers, but filtered through my dreams Rugs becomes something else other than pure Bugs. He is, after all, a parody of a parody, and when that turns all parrot-y then we are looking at un-punny puns. Makes you want to put another clothespin on your nose, doesn’t it?”
And here are two more parrots that I hope you will recognize and copyright lawyers will not. They are much more insane and destructive than their counterparts from Mr. Prizney.
But cartoon dreams are not all animalized, and not all borrowed from elsewhere. I am capable of making up my own characters too that don’t satirize and plagiarize and turn me into a toon-thief. If you visit Crumpwell’s Wild West Ranch, there are one-of-a-kind characters that you might meet there too.
Flash Crumpwell is a hero character also. But unlike Rugs, he is a little dim in the light-bulb-lighting department.
Handsome Harry has always got his face covered somehow, because, after all, if you are so good-looking that women always faint at your feet and men always shoot you on sight, life can become a little too interesting. All in all, as a villain, he would rather just blow stuff up!
Princess Doe-Eyes is the real ruler of the Bignose Tribe, because, after all, she has a tiny nose, and her father is chief because his nose is the biggest in the tribe, but he can’t really see over it or around it… and when you’re in charge, that can kinda get in the way. Davy Crickett is an Indian fighter from the old days, but he cannot bring himself to fight with the Princess or her Bignose Tribe. He much prefers to play with her.
And we must certainly not forget the clowns. Here are a couple of Clown villains (as if we need more reasons to be afraid of clowns!)
The Messmaster is a Clown who loves a good pie fight. He will whirl and hurl and get you in the face with a strawberry or blueberry or Ray Bradbury pie (those Sci-Fi pies can get particularly messy and smelly… Clothespin number three… and it is getting hard to breathe.)
Badnose is an even more evil Clown bad-guy. I can’t begin to explain why his nose is so bad.
Lastly, let me share a scene with you from the rough draft of The Clown Town Caper, a detective story starring Detective Squiggy and Little Mickey (my dream-self).
Filed under action figures, cartoons, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink
This is Wildcat Street in AnimalTown. It is a cartoon setting where some of my stranger dreamy-time cartoon stories take place. One of my magical tomes is a self-created cartoon dreamworld where the plot is my life story told through the cartoon interpretations of my dreams. AnimalTown is only one of the many settings from that long and graphically goofy tale. There is also ClownTown, the Pirates’ Nest, Monster Mansion, Toon City, Crumpwell’s Wild West Ranch, and the Toonworld Space Port, along with other weird and wacky corners of my imagination’s geography. I am thinking of expanding my blog to include web cartoons in story form… and if I do, I have a few wowser-oonie stories to share set here in AnimalTown. It is a place run mostly by the prominent Moosewinkle family, headed by Mayor Moosewinkle, Judge Roy Moosewinkle, and prominent and incompetent attorney Woolbinkle J. Moosewinkle. (There is obviously no connection what-so-ever with the cartoons I watched as a kid. Surely those could not affect my dreams.) The various stores and businesses in downtown AnimalTown all have to try to stay in business with stiff competition from Walrusmart, which is rumored to be secretly controlled by pirates.
Here is AnimalTown resident and sometime teenage know-it-all, Mandy Panda the panda-girl with panda-child Henry Panda, they are both immigrants from the distant Pandalore Islands where they originally spoke the Pandalog language.
I actually teach here in AnimalTown (in my dreams, I mean), and I do it in my rabbit incarnation, Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.
So here is a classroom scene with me doing my wonderful teaching with my gigantic magical pencil. (I sometimes refer to the magical pencil as Larry… but everybody knows only crazy people name their pencils.)
So, let us see what happens when a crazy person dreams cartoon dreams and draws them down to blog on his blog with repetitive repetition of the same tired jokes and jolly paffoonery.
In Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Trolley comics there is one old flivver-driving fool named Grandpa Futty. He is the slowest driver on the road. Rarely does he go over the breakneck speed of two miles per hour. He is so overly cautious, that if there are two lanes going his way, he takes the middle of the road and effectively moseys along in his putter-banger taking up both lanes. What is that you say, young whipper-snapper? You don’t know what a putter-banger is? Great galloping goat galoshes! It’s a car, dang it! You see them all over the metroplex. They are so ancient that when you start it up with the hand crank, the engine coughs and the muffler falls off in back. They were purchased as a used car two decades ago. The only thing more miraculous than the fact that the car still runs is the fact that the old goat driving it is still alive (though the local police routinely have to stop him to check and see if his heart is actually still beating. If it isn’t they have to fight with him about dropping him off at the nearest funeral home.)
So, if you haven’t guessed already, this post is about the generically named drivers I refer to as a Grampa Futty, and they are the exact opposite of the Texas Killer Grandmas I wrote about yesterday. Believe it or not, I think I have graduated into the Grandpa Futty class of driver. I can still see more than three feet in front of my car, but I do have a dumpy-lumpy body that hobbles around with a cane, and I do smell like Ben Gay Ointment and Vick’s Vapo-rub. (…And no, you can’t say Ben Queer Ointment and have it mean the same thing, young whipper-snapper! That joke is nearly as old as I am!) I am not entirely in that category of driver, though, because I still curse them with gusto and interjections like “dang it!” whenever I am behind one of that breed. And besides, the last time the cop stopped me to check my heartbeat, it was going strong.
Grandpa Futtys are a real road hazard in the obstacle-filled world of Texas city driving… if it were a video game like Super Mario Brothers, they would not be Bowser, but rather that annoying Koopa Troopa that you just can’t bounce on hard enough to get past. They are in the way, endearingly cute in an ugly-old-fart sort of manner, and potentially deadly as they put you in line for the easy kill by the nearest Texas Killer Granny. So I am seriously studying now how to avoid Grandpa Futty on the road next time I see him, and I am definitely studying how not to become him.
I have been a cartoon nut for a long, long time. I think it goes back to a time before I really have memories. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know who Cat in the Hat was, or that Pogo was a possum and Albert was an alligator, or that Daisy Mae constantly had to chase Lil’ Abner afore they could git hitched. And I have always known that cartoons and comic strip characters weren’t real. But there were a few times in life when comic strips made me cry. Am I really that much of pansy that I wilt in the face of cartoon tragedy? Yes. Whole-heartedly!
Take for instance Tom Batiuk’s long-running spoof of teenagers and life in high school, Funky Winkerbean. One of the first things that makes this comic special is that the characters have lives that expand into the deepening depths behind the daily gag and four-panel strip. They grow and age. Les Moore (the geeky kid with the dark hair and nerd glasses, the character I most identified with) grew up to become an English teacher in the same high school where he had to deal with the issue of teen pregnancy. Lisa, the girl he liked, was pregnant. Les helped her go through the pregnancy and give the child up for adoption, and then eventually married Lisa. Les would go on to raise his daughter with Lisa and then have to live with the fact that the child Lisa gave away wanted to find his real mother.
The strip added layer after layer to the over-all story, making me feel like I knew these people. Funky turned his after-school job at Montoni’s Pizza into a partnership and a career as a restaurateur. Les would. like me, become a teacher and a writer. Crazy would go on to be a postman and… well, Crazy. And then the story added more layers by not always being funny. I cried when Wally Winkerbean stepped on the mine in Afghanistan and I thought he was dead. I cried again when Wally’s wife, Becky, moved on and married again. And then, there was what happened with Lisa…
The artist himself had a bout with cancer. He. like me, was turned into a cancer survivor. It chills the bones and changes you on the inside to have a doctor tell you that you have cancer and it is malignant. And it became a part of the story. Lisa became first a breast cancer survivor, and then… sadly… a victim. She died of cancer. Her husband, Les, took up the cause and started the Lisa’s Legacy Walk for the Cure which he pursued religiously every October. And Tom Batiuk made it real. You can donate real money to the real Lisa’s Legacy Fund. It is a cancer fund and fund-raising event that honors the struggle and death of a fictional character. It makes me cry again at this moment. They are real people to me, too, Tom.
…And it doesn’t end with Funky Winkerbean. Today’s re-blog of Stories From Around the World’s post does an absolutely wonderful job of encapsulating the essence of Lynn Johnston’s family comedy strip For Better or for Worse. This engaging story of a family who also grows up, changes, and shifts from one generation to the next also tore my heart out with the un-funny episode where the dog, Farley, saves youngest daughter April from drowning and then expires from the effort, dying a hero’s death. Another memory that causes me tears even today.
I do not regret reading comic strips. My life is richer for all the second-hand and third-hand experiences they have given me. Not just Popeye and Pogo and Beetle Baily making me laugh, but comic strips that make me weep as well.
Filed under cartoons, comic strips, humor
There is an old saying… “What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.”
I have an addendum to add… “If what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, then I must be Superman!”
Lying here now in pain after having surgery this morning, that is exactly what I have been telling myself. No more Kryptonite today, thank you.
I may have mentioned before on this blog that I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor since 1983. (If I haven’t mentioned it before, then it was only because I mistook complaining loudly and relentlessly about it for mentioning.) I have arthritis, diabetes, COPD, hypertension, psoriasis, and benign prostatic hyperplasia. Two of those diseases ganged up on me recently. I had a sebaceous cyst on my lower back that had gotten infected because psoriasis had flaked skin off the top of it until there was an ulcerated infected hole there and it caused me enough pain to prevent sleeping. (I know you didn’t really want to know about that… but. then, neither did I).
I got the thing surgically excised (whacked off with scalpel and scissors) and had the hole sewn back together with a few butterfly Band Aids slapped on the top. I had been given a topical anesthetic that deadened the nerves while I was being carved up, but wears off shortly after and then all the pain that has been saved up comes rushing back to fill the void. The doctor said I could take aspirin, but I have a big bottle of Aleve next to the bed for arthritis, and my body is so used to the medicine that I might just as easily have taken a sugar pill for the same effect. (Of course then my diabetes would come knocking on my brain.) So, I am in pain.
But less than an hour after surgery, I had to go in to the counselor’s office at school and discuss for 45 minutes the life-and-death future consequences of the schooling of one of three kids. It is no kind of chicken barbecue or country fair to have to explain to a school official everything you have been doing to solve the life-or-death problem for the kiddo while pain medication is wearing off and anesthetic is wearing off and patience is wearing off and mental acuity is disappearing faster than a rabbit-man can teach irony to middle-schoolers…. wait, what? Perhaps I should rest now and let the medicine do its work.
Naw, can’t do that. I’m Superman.
But, wait… wasn’t I Popeye just yesterday? Who the heck am I really? A goofy old writer-guy, most likely.
Catch a Falling Star 