Sometimes the only thing you really want out of life is just to get by. You get tired of always having to climb the danged highest mountain. You get tired of trying to swim the danged deepest sea.
Sometimes all you want to do is doodle-bop!… To draw in pen and ink and post your derfiest doofenwacky doodles so you can just make your way through another danged day.
You aim a lot for different, and undeniably original… because no one thinks like you… certainly no one who is real and has a real brain. You are gifted with an “other-ness”, a sing-songy simpering something that makes you want to doodle and do what no man has done before. (Does that sentence exist anywhere else in all of literature? Even if there is some alternate dimension with infinite monkeys typing on infinite typewriters? What’s a typewriter, you say? Danged millennials!)
I really can’t help it, you know. I was a middle school teacher for 24 years. That sort of thing has mental health consequences. And if you wring the sponges in your stupid old brain hard enough and long enough… doodle-bop! comes out.
Turtle boy’s magic iron of irony!!!
And you have to wonder why some of the stuff that is in your stupid old head is even in there. Why is it that sometimes the words “Argyle socks are filled with rocks” are drifting through the vast empty spaces in the logic centers of your brain? There has to be a reason for everything, doesn’t there?
I do believe I have made myself chuckle at least a dozen chuck-tacular times in the chuck-a-tational crafting of this cheddar-cheesy post. But it only really counts if I can make you girlishly giggle or guy-like guffaw with my word-munching and cartoony paffoonies.
The terror-filled cartoon car chase that is life as usual.
You may have noticed that everything is black and white, even though it doesn’t have to be. Good versus evil, hot versus cold, everything can be divided up simplistically… but the really profound part of simplicity is vibrating reverberations of complexity that lie just underneath. Words have meaning, even though they are just a bunch of crooked squiggles marked on a page. (Yes, I know… “or typed on a computer screen”. Danged millennials!)
And so, this is my doodle-bop! Probably not the doodliest or the boppiest doodle-bop! I could have bopped… but there it is. I have made it through another sorta creative post without losing my mind… Honest! I did not lose it. It is merely temporarily misplaced for a moment. It will be back in its proper place tomorrow… probably.
Catch a Falling Star 
Mickey Makes Manga Art
I always loved this song. When I was a boy, it was the song I would sing when I was alone in the darkness. It made me feel better, able to march toward home in spite of potential spooks and brain-eating zombies. The weight of the invisible future world could not drag me down if this tune was in my head, filling it with helium and good spirit; it allowed me to fly.
And when I listened to it playing on the radio… I always paused and listened to at least a couple of verses no matter what I was doing… I never once thought of Johnny Nash as a black man. I didn’t know he was black until I first saw a picture of him. But even then I didn’t think, “Oh, he’s a black man.” I thought, “Oh, he’s a man like me.” But, I, of course, am not black. I’m not really white either. I am a kind of pale pink to mauve mottled color with dark pink psoriasis spots in random places all over me. It is the man on the inside that is like Johnny Nash, full of uplifting things, and goofy grins, and… hopefully, hope.
But when I was young it wasn’t only singing “I Can See Clearly Now…” in my goofy farmboy voice that filled my head with air and allowed me to float away from the troubles of the world. I also learned to draw Manga style, in the tradition of Osamu Tezuka’s Astroboy , filtered through hours of practice copying Walt Kelly’s Pogo characters and various Disney cartoons.
I copied the over-large eyes and big-headed cutsieness that informed the Japanese idea of the world after the atom bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I tried to capture innocence and wonder and adventure in drawings that took my mind off the terrible things of my childhood, being sexually assaulted, the assassinations of JFK and his brother RFK, and Martin Luther King Jr, the Viet Nam War, and Nixon with Watergate. You can reclaim innocence and peace of mind, if you get the lines just right, and the proportions are good, and the character has just the right expression on their sweet little faces.
Okay, maybe not always so sweet and innocent. This is not the Dorothy I would want to mess with. This girl is cocky, sure of herself, and more than a little impish. A destroyer of wicked witches, that one.
But that’s what Manga Art is all about. You whistle away the darkness one drawing at a time. And there’s plenty of darkness to whistle away anymore, isn’t there? What with Tronald Dump taking on the NFL over the American Flag and National Anthem, Tronald Dump taking on Jim Kong Oon in an insult war backed up by ICBMs, and Congress busily trying to take away all our access to health care. (I know I misspelled some names there, but I am tired of talking about that guy that Dorothy told me I should call the “orange-faced poop sack.” No, Dorothy, I can’t call him that. Using language like that robs my head of its helium.) So, what do I do now about the state of the world? Well, here is the Manga Art I drew last night.
Catgirl and White-haired Snow White with a ping pong ball in her mouth.
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Filed under artists I admire, artwork, autobiography, cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, commentary, goofiness, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as manga-style art, Osamu Tezuka, Walt Kelly