Once I was finally able to scan pictures again, I did some scanning of old pictures that only got the camera treatment before on my blog.
But why stop a drawing at just the pen and ink, when there is potential for so much more?
So, I took the Microsoft generic paint program and my generic photo editor to not only this pen and ink of the Jungle Princess, but a few other pictures as well.
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This is what she looks like after being attacked with color by my arthritic old hands. (There was a day when I could have handled intricate details more cleverly, but that was many, many days ago.
Anyway, I have added new dimensions to Leopard Girrrl with color.
Now I need to add more complications to the basic story of the picture.
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Here is an older pen and ink.
This is Dorin Dobbs, one of the dueling plotlines’ protagonists from the novel Catch a Falling Star.
But, of course, Dorin is a more complex character than this old black and white.
So, color needs to be added.
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I had this one actually already painted in…
But in order to use it in this project, I needed to enlarge it to make it fit into the other picture.
Making this unlikely pair work together in a story is one of the challenges of doing surrealist stories. They have to be grounded in realism, but also bring jarringly different things together. Like the Jungle Princess going on an adventure with Norwall’s Lying King.
But, putting these two together is still not enough. Let’s try some other things.
The Jungle Princess together with Tomboy Dilsey Murphy is an unusual pairing.
Or what about the blue faun from Laughing Blue?
Or even Annette Funicello?
Ridiculous, I know. But don’t they look like satin sofa paintings?
Yesterday, in Part 1, I tried to convince you that, “You should never take too long a time writing a story” because I have written some twenty-plus-year-long novels that took me forever to write, and I am an unsuccessful writer. So, you should not do things the way I did. (Some might accuse me of trying to use a little too much irony, claiming I am a bit too obscure about what I am actually telling you that you should actually do… But, remember, I advised you not to take advice from Mickey. And you need irony in your diet anyway to avoid irony-poor tired blood.) Therefore I am going to advise you further that, “You should never make your characters too complex and interesting.”
After all, there are Mickian characters that are literally blue with red patches on their cheeks that absorb harmful gamma radiation and make those characters immune to radiation sickness from exposure in deep space. You don’t want to make readers so curious about a character that they waste time reading more and more closely to discover more about that character.
Junior Aero, the alien Nebulon boy in the AeroQuest stories is just one example. Not only is he a member of an alien race that are belittled as “Space Smurfs” and treated to racial bigotry based on skin color and not being able to speak English at first, but he is also gifted with mental “Psion powers” that allow him to telepathically read computer minds, even the sentient and intelligent ones.
And some of my characters are green with shark-like fins on their heads. They were born on Starships and orbiting artificial satellites like the one going around Barnard’s Star. They are like George Jetson here, named after his father, Xiar’s, favorite Earther cartoon show character from the 60’s. Not only is he a green-skinned amphibious humanoid life-form from a different star system, he learns a lot about himself in the adventure he has in the novel Stardusters and Space Lizards. He goes from being a narcissistic space-pilot wannabee into becoming a humble crash survivor and expedition leader who helps save an entire planet from ecological disaster. And he even gets a girlfriend out of the deal in Menolly his nestmate and fellow survivor.
Characters like that are far too interesting and developed to be good for your reputation as a serious producer of money-making fiction stories. And you certainly don’t want to waste time on developing the same characters in multiple books.
I used the character of Valerie Clarke in the book When the Captain Came Calling as an eleven-year-old protagonist who loses her father and has to rely on older kids and good friends to save herself from depression and the trash-pits of despair.
I used her again as a main character in Snow Babies where she befriends a mysterious stranger and also finds a runaway boy who makes her think seriously about life and young love, all in the middle of a deadly blizzard.
She’s also in the book Sing Sad Songs where she learns to negotiate love with a boy who also lost a parent, in fact, both parents and a twin sister, in a car crash that made him a lonely orphan. She not only has to face the loss of her own loved ones, but has to help somebody else to face the same thing, in fact, more than one other somebody.
She’s also a character in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius and Fools and Their Toys.
It is unthinkable to use a character that much and make her grow and change in so many different ways. She should be used only once in a simple and clear way. Like, maybe, Mark Twain’s use of Huckleberry Finn.
Huck, as a character was only used in the books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer, Detective… and… never mind. Forget I even said anything about Huck Finn. In fact, maybe this whole post is so ironic it’s making my story-teller gears all rusty. Never-the-less, let me threaten you with a possible part three.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Yes, the universe was not formed in a big bang. It hatched from an egg. And God is the Ultimate Mallard.
Anatidaephobia (pronounced anna-tidy-phobia) is a pervasive and irrational fear that you are being watched by a duck. A person with this rare phobia fears that somehow, somewhere a duck is watching their every move.
This phobia about being watched by a duck may seem like a strange basis for forming a new religion. But I may have had an epiphany as a child when a goose at Deer Farm Zoo stuck his neck, head, and beak of retribution out through a hole in his chicken-wire cage and nearly nipped me in my five-year-old neck. That epiphany led to recurring nightmares about being chased by a duck with large white teeth that looked like he had bad human dentures in his bill.
This I tended to interpret as a sign that I was facing a big decision about what I would attempt to do with my young life, and would do it wrong.
Ducks in the farmyard, you see, are temperamental, often impulsive, and randomly violent. They will punish you for sins you did not know you were committing.
So, in this Quackatoon faith in judgmental ducks who are constantly watching our every move, thought, and deed, we should be taking Saint Donald Duck as our role-model and guide. When we see sin and wrongness in the world we are watching, we must dissolve in incoherent rage. Point your finger. Shout things that no one understands. Get the world’s attention. Confuse them completely. And get them to wonder what they did to make you so rage-filled and dangerously aggravated.
Then, hopefully, they will realize their sin and immediately mend their ways. Or at least, rearrange their feathers.
Or we can rely on the incompetent vengeful wrath of Saint Daffy Duck to see the unrighteousness in the rabbits of the world around us, posting Rabbit Season signs everywhere, and getting his duckbill blown off via the shotgun of a nearby Elmer who has been tricked into thinking ducks are rabbits.
Well, that might not be the most efficient prosecution of God’s will on Earth. But at least it will leave us laughing. And who can sin who is laughing that hard?
At this point in trying to establish this new religion, I should probably be talking about financial matters. Where you can send donations to the Church of Perpetual Quackers? Will there be t-shirts with religious slogans like, “You’re Driving Me Quackers!?” Do we still bring deviled eggs to church socials?
But I can’t talk about that right now… a duck is probably watching.
If you’ve read any of the crap that Mickey wrote about before in this goofy blog, you probably already suspect that Mickey’s mind does not work like a normal mind. The road map above is just one indicator of the weirdness of the wiring that propels Mickey on the yellow brick road to Oz and back. He just isn’t a normal thinker.
But having a few bats in the old belfry doesn’t prevent the man from having a plan. If you read all of Mickey’s hometown novels, you will discover he hasn’t written them in time order. Main characters in my 2016 novel weren’t even born yet in my 2017 books. If you look at them in chronological order rather than the order written, you will see characters growing and changing over time. A shy kid in one novel grows into a werewolf hunter in the next. A girl who loses her father to suicide in a novel not yet completed, learns how to love again in another novel.
Multiple Mickian stories are totally infected with fairies. The magic little buggers are harder to get rid of than mosquitoes and are far and away more dangerous. And there are disturbing levels of science-fiction-ness radiating through all of the stories. How dare he think like that? In undulating spirals instead of straight lines! He doesn’t even use complete sentences all the time. And they used to let that odd bird teach English to middle school kids.
But there is a method to his utter madness. He started with the simpler stories of growing up and learning about the terrors of kissing girls when you are only twelve. And then he moved on into the darker realms of dealing with death and loss of love, the tragedy of finding true love and losing it again almost as soon as you recognize its reality. Simple moves on to complex. Order is restored with imagination, only to be broken down again and then restored yet again,.
And, of course, we always listen to Mr. Gaiman. He is a powerful wizard after all. The Sandman and creator of good dreams. So Mickey will completely ignore the fact that nobody reads his books no matter what he does or says. And he will write another story.
It is called Sing Sad Songs, and it is the most complex and difficult story that Mickey has ever written. And it will be glorious. It also rips Mickey’s heart out. And I will put that ripped-out heart back in place and make Mickey keep writing it, no matter how many times I have to wash, rinse, and repeat. The continued work is called Fools and Their Toys. It solves the murder mystery begun in Sing Sad Songs. This re-post of an updated statement of goals is the very spell that will make that magic happen. So, weird little head-map in hand, here we go on the writer’s journey once again and further along the trail.
You probably guessed it just from the title. I started this post without any idea at all what I was going to write about. And so I had to rummage around in the back rooms of my silly old brain looking for stuff to put out there that wasn’t too moldy, but definitely had been thoroughly cooked and stored away for a while.
So here is something I know… If you want to make someone pay attention to you, make a joke. You can do that by surprising people with something that they immediately recognize and realize that it is totally backwards to what they saw before. In other words, when I say or write things that make people wrinkle their noses at me, I am not merely being weird. I am being a humorist.
Here is something else I know… If you want to have an idea that is worth having, you need to look at things from a totally different angle. If I want to know myself better, I need to reflect on how Charles Schultz would draw me. I would be half Linus and half Charlie Brown because I am most profound when I have my blanket to comfort me, but things constantly go wrong for me and I see myself as a loser… but I have people who love me, and a dog that battles the Red Baron.
Another thing I know… If you want to make something, you have to follow the rules, and only occasionally break them. This post began with a simple enough rule. It had to have simple statements of things I have learned over the course of my life, and the pictures all had to come from a randomly selected picture file on my laptop. I save all kinds of weirdly chosen and goofy things in my art and memes files. So how dangerous can that rule be? Of course, I also want to put up a bit of my own artwork, and this file that I chose doesn’t seem to have any in it. So, I have to break the rule… but only this one last time.
Now, I know you will probably look at this and think to yourself, “What the hell is wrong with you, Mickey?” Or maybe you will say it out loud in your most disgusted voice. But I do know this… If you are old and you have lived long enough to have learned a thing or two… or possibly three, you can simply start writing and the ideas will be there. And it might turn out to be something you will be glad you wrote and shared. This is simply a thing that I know.
Venus Flytrap, my Monster High doll decorated with carniverous flowers, is the perfect pandemic mascot, as she guards the Vapo-Rub.
Stuck in the house all day with no outside activities to distract me, and limited socialization with the other denizens imprisoned in the house with me is more-or-less the perfect thing for a fiction writer with cancer of the imagination glands.
I have plenty of people to talk to, since , in this situation, imaginary people count too. And there is no end to the things I can talk about since ideas keep welling up in my head, even if many of them are totally silly ideas, and the rest are probably evil.
It helps to have a talking dog. Though my kids would argue that Jade isn’t really talking, that I am, instead, merely interpreting things I think she should be saying as if it were real speech. She does talk an awful lot about different kinds of meat and the moral imperatives of allowing your dog to eat people food. But I think it is only proper to commit to writing those things she says when we’re alone together, because, after all… a possible talking dog?
Everybody has a purple dragonette on the doll shelf that loves to play with dolls, don’t they?
But imagination is one of those things that sets people… I mean, human people, apart from all other life forms that we know. Imagination makes the man. What would we have made of ourselves and our world if we didn’t have it? Would we have invented the wheel? Fire? Term life insurance? I think not.
Peter Pan offers Alice a ride in his Skull-and-Bones Lowrider as ninjas attack Main Street Toonerville.
I may, in fact, be going a little stir crazy in the old hovel while trying like heck to avoid death by Coronavirus. I am easily as frayed around the edges as any hopeless hobo, with even my beard-trimming growing wildly erratic. Soon I may have to tell the imaginary people who surround me and question everything about me that it is not a beard any more. Rather, it is either a crocheted hippie neck-warmer rather than a beard, or maybe it has become a furred, frilly collar on my shirt like Shakespeare probably wore for the premiere of King Lear.
No, I am not going stir-crazy, or even a little bit insane. I am just letting the words unwind as they fill me up and demand to be unreeled in order to prevent an explosion in the brain.
I honestly hope you are not reading this blog to find advice on life, the universe, writing, or anything. That sounds more like something I myself might do, and I am goofy enough to think this purple paisley prosy thing is a humor blog. I don’t really give advice, good or otherwise.
Even as a teacher I didn’t tell students how to do things in a do-this, then-do-this, and then-do-this lecture format. If anything, I advised by showing them how I did things, leading by example. I taught skills and concepts by setting up tasks that let kids do things for themselves. Most people learn by doing.
This idea applies no matter what the learning goal is. If you want to do magic, you have to cast some spells for yourself. Roger Bacon’s students in the 13th Century learned to do alchemy and eventually chemistry by blowing up the laboratory repeatedly. If I am capable of any sort of artistical or literarical magic, I have achieved it only by trying to do it, trying to be creativical, and getting readers’ and viewers’ attention by being marketableical and somewhat ironical in my blogging with over-use of artificial -ical endings.
So, I treat this blog as way to generate ludicrous ideas and goofy content in order to fascinate readers and sometimes even make them laugh. And I have nothing more to write about than myself and my own experiences. It is obsessively self-inflicted observations about myself. Kinda like standing naked in front of the mirror and learning to laugh at warts and wrinkles. I believe in taking the clothes off of my life experiences and finding the naked truths that were previously hidden. And, no, that doesn’t really explain why it seems I like drawing naked people so much. It’s a metaphor, dang it!
Gilligan never realized how good he had it as the only realistically eligible bachelor on that island.
So, that’s what this blog is all about. I am explaining what this blog is all about. I am looking at my own experience of life, the embarrassments, the sad truths, the disappointments, the triumphs, all the most personal, private, and public stuff. And I am laughing loud and long. Because that’s what life is. Mastering that fundamental skill. Learning to laugh at life.
Here’s a brief summary of the only good advice you can possibly find by reading this blog. If you want to write well, start writing and teach yourself how to do it. And if you want to learn to laugh, look for what’s funny and laugh loud and long and clear.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Way Mickey’s Mind Works
If you’ve read any of the crap that Mickey wrote about before in this goofy blog, you probably already suspect that Mickey’s mind does not work like a normal mind. The road map above is just one indicator of the weirdness of the wiring that propels Mickey on the yellow brick road to Oz and back. He just isn’t a normal thinker.
But having a few bats in the old belfry doesn’t prevent the man from having a plan. If you read all of Mickey’s hometown novels, you will discover he hasn’t written them in time order. Main characters in my 2016 novel weren’t even born yet in my 2017 books. If you look at them in chronological order rather than the order written, you will see characters growing and changing over time. A shy kid in one novel grows into a werewolf hunter in the next. A girl who loses her father to suicide in a novel not yet completed, learns how to love again in another novel.
Multiple Mickian stories are totally infected with fairies. The magic little buggers are harder to get rid of than mosquitoes and are far and away more dangerous. And there are disturbing levels of science-fiction-ness radiating through all of the stories. How dare he think like that? In undulating spirals instead of straight lines! He doesn’t even use complete sentences all the time. And they used to let that odd bird teach English to middle school kids.
But there is a method to his utter madness. He started with the simpler stories of growing up and learning about the terrors of kissing girls when you are only twelve. And then he moved on into the darker realms of dealing with death and loss of love, the tragedy of finding true love and losing it again almost as soon as you recognize its reality. Simple moves on to complex. Order is restored with imagination, only to be broken down again and then restored yet again,.
And, of course, we always listen to Mr. Gaiman. He is a powerful wizard after all. The Sandman and creator of good dreams. So Mickey will completely ignore the fact that nobody reads his books no matter what he does or says. And he will write another story.
It is called Sing Sad Songs, and it is the most complex and difficult story that Mickey has ever written. And it will be glorious. It also rips Mickey’s heart out. And I will put that ripped-out heart back in place and make Mickey keep writing it, no matter how many times I have to wash, rinse, and repeat. The continued work is called Fools and Their Toys. It solves the murder mystery begun in Sing Sad Songs. This re-post of an updated statement of goals is the very spell that will make that magic happen. So, weird little head-map in hand, here we go on the writer’s journey once again and further along the trail.
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Tagged as Sing Sad Songs