My wife brought treasure back from the Philippines for my kids and me. She spent over a thousand Filipino pesos at a book store over there and apparently bought out the store’s entire supply of “How-to-Draw-Manga/Anime” (though the amount she spent is not so impressive when you realize the exchange rate for a Filipino peso is .025 of an American dollar). Anyway, I happen to love the Japanese anime-style cartoons. I have since I was a kid in the 60’s watching Astroboy in black and white on the old Motorola TV set. So, just as you would expect, I had to go on a drawing binge, copying ideas from the books, but putting my own spin on them.
It is not the first time I have gone on anime-drawing binges. Let me provide some proof of that from past posts;
This is an art exercise, making a drawing imitating the manga style of Rumiko Takahashi, the greatest female comics artist of all time.
This is a second shameless plagiarism and imitation of Rumiko Takahashi by Mickey the Manga Wannabee.
So, there’s my original content for today. Seven days after the 4th of July, I am celebrating one of the ways that Japan conquered the United States after World War II. Yes, manga-style cartoons have far more kids carefully copying a cartoon style with big, cute eyes than probably ever tried to draw like Walt Kelly or Al Capp.
I woke this morning in excessive amounts of arthritis pain. My left elbow has not been working well for a month. My lower back is always painful after a restless night’s sleep. Neither of my knees is willing to do the basic job required of knees in the early morning when you first wake up. So I had to work joints back and forth to loosen them up despite the pain. I had to stretch parts where muscles were knotted up in protest to stretching. And it took me a half hour of painful work to get on my feet.
I have been psychologically in pain of late as well. Being a school teacher who dedicated his life to getting young people to work together and grow up and mature, I have been deeply distressed by both the police shootings of innocent black men and the massacre of policemen here in Dallas. My publishing goals have also hit a brick wall with recent rejections and cancelling of contracts. I need to curl up in a corner and lick my wounds.
When I was a child I relied on stuffed animals to make me feel better when I was sick and in pain. I had a toy tiger that was my constant companion. I had a couple of teddy bears, one a panda, the other Smokey the Bear. And there was a terrycloth pink elephant that I shared with my sisters. Like many children, I talked to the stuffed animals. Like a strange few other children, the stuffed animals would answer back. I think that plays a large part in explaining why I am a writer of fiction stories. I medicate my mind not with drugs, but by talking things out with imaginary people.
At this moment in time, when I am on the verge of being overwhelmed, it is a good thing that my hoarding disorder has caused me to collect stuffed toys. I have more than one magical teddy bear to turn to. Everything will be all right in the end.
Since the Dallas shooting, the Nice cartoonist attack, and the Uvalde school shooting, I have been needing to rely on things that pull me up from the darkness, and shine some light once again inside my goofy old head. One thing that always seems to make things right again is looking back on trips to the Magic Kingdom. Some of the happiest times of my life revolved around family at Disneyland and Walt Disney World in Orlando.
You see, being an Iowa boy, born in the 50’s, raised in the 60’s and early 70’s, I had one of those rustic, bucolic lives that involved hard work, being frugal with money, and being around a lot of cow poop. A great deal of my life was about what the future held, imagination and possibilities, and The Wonderful World of Disney in color on Grandma Beyer’s RCA color TV every Sunday night. Those Technicolor dreams about things with no cow poop involved came true for the first time when my family went on a summer vacation to Florida and Walt Disney World when I was in high school. Oh, how I loved those E-ticket adventures with the Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, and Space Mountain! I got to see Country Bears sing and play music on empty moonshine jugs. We used C-tickets for Snow White’s Scary Adventure and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. We saw Mickey’s Cartoon Musical Review. Did you know those last three things no longer exist?
We went back to Walt Disney World when my family was young, the eldest was six, the middle child was a cranky two, and the Princess was not yet born, though already causing my wife discomfort with six months to go before she made her debut. That was the time we learned how much my mother really loved It’s a Small World. We had to take that boat ride so many times that the song still plays relentlessly in my head every time I even start to think about Disney World. We managed to go back to Disney World again when the oldest was a teenager and the other two were primed to be Disney fanatics. That time we learned how slowly the other set of grandparents walked. We also learned that you have to be a master planner to see everything that is good in 5 different theme parks that you just have to check out because, heck, you’ve already mortgaged the future to pay for it.
And we have been to Disneyland in California a couple of times as well. We were there, in fact, when the Anaheim earthquake happened, knocking down a couple of Los Angeles buildings nearby and shutting down several rides in the park while damage checks were made. In fact, it happened during the Star Wars lightsaber battle in Tomorrowland, making us think at the start that it was just a really cool special effect. It also shut down the food vendor before our expensive hamburgers were cooked. That part was not so cool.
You can see now at least part of the reason I am such a hopeless Disneyphile. Memories of times spent at Disney parks are the exclamation points on my whole creative life. It influences my artwork and storytelling to a noticeable degree. And it takes my mind off my troubles a bit just to stop and reflect, “Once upon a time I visited the Magic Kingdom.”
One of the difficulties of being a humorist and trying to connect to people by being funny is that you have to compete for attention. Cartoonists have an advantage in that they can put something together with pictures and just a few words that you can get easily and quickly and then you laugh. So the internet is a nightmare maze of short-quick funnies with exceptional levels of weirdness. I keep track of the weirdness by keeping a weirdo file on my computer and copying things in it that make me go “Whaaaa?” and then laugh. Let me share a little of that with you.
The miracle that is Don Bluth.
So, therein lies the challenge I face daily. How do you compete with Muppet cupcakes?
I have had a practically life-long fascination with trains. Where did that come from? It came from a Methodist minister who once upon a time saved my life.
Reverend Louis Aiken (in the cowboy hat) was a lover of HO model trains, as well as country music… and, of course, God.
My best friend growing up was a PK, a preacher’s kid. And as we hung out and played games and got into imaginatively horrible trouble, we invariably wound up in the basement of the parsonage where his father kept his HO train layout. I learned lessons of life in that basement in more than one way. I have to explain all of that somewhere down line. But for now, I have to limit the topic to what I learned about trains. They are a link to our past. They are everywhere. And they do far more for us than merely make us cuss while sitting and endlessly waiting at the railroad crossing.
When visiting Dows, we absolutely had to stop and take pictures at the train station.
This is, by my best guess, an SD40 locomotive parked at the restored train station in Dows, Iowa.
Spotting trains to take pictures of, gawk at, and totally make cow-eyes over has become a way of life to me. When visiting Iowa, especially Mason City, Iowa, we always have to stop at the engine on display in East Park.
When I was a kid, this old iron horse was not fenced in to protect it from kids, weather, and other destructive forces. Now, however, it is fully restored and given its own roof. This is a 2-8-2 steam engine with two little wheels in front, eight big wheels in the middle, and two little wheels at the back (not counting wheels on the coal tender). I have ridden on trains pulled by such a behemoth. I love to watch the monkey gears grind on the sides of the wheels forcing steam power into the surge down the tracks. And I can’t help being a total train nut. Of course I don’t deny being more than one kind of nut. But being a mixed nut is another post for another day.
I was predisposed to like this movie from the outset. After all… Spielbergh… Roald Dahl… a musical score by John Williams… almost Robin Williams as the BFG! But I don’t like this movie after all. I LOVE it!!!
I am easily stunned by gorgeous settings, CGI magic, and artistically done visuals. I am easily captivated by cute and gifted young actresses like the one who plays Sophie, Ruby Barnhill. And I am especially won over by the smiling face of the BFG himself. He reminds me so clearly of my Great Grandpa Raymond (who was no less a magical being in my life than the BFG is in Sophie’s).
The fact that the BFG’s job in Giant Land is the capturing, bottling, mixing, and gifting of dreams is the most winning feature of all. And he uses it in the epic plan to overcome the bestial, cannibalistic, (and possibly Trump supporters) other, bigger giants. He is a metaphor for the story-teller himself… enduring hardships and harrowing adventures to capture, package, and deliver the stories that are so important to life and people’s ultimate happiness. It is true for Roald Dahl, the darkly silly genius who wrote the story. It is also true for Steven Spielberg, the craft-master and movie-maker who put it on film. It is true also for the magician of movie music, John Williams. I hope, someday, it will also be true for me.
So many things about this movie are the epitome of the best movie-theater experiences. I do not understand how it could’ve done so poorly in the box office. I believe it will become one of those beloved and much-watched DVDs like Spielberg’s previous fairy-tale masterpiece, Hook, did. I pray that it won’t simply become an overlooked asterisk in the history of cinema. It is too good of a movie experience for that.
No man is an island. John Donne the English poet stated that. And Ernest Hemingway quoted it… and wove it into his stories as a major theme… and proceeded to try to disprove it. We need other people. I married an island girl from the island of Luzon in the Philippines. She may have actually needed me too, though she will never admit it.
When I was a young junior high school teacher in the early eighties, they called me Mr. Gilligan. My classroom was known as Gilligan’s Island. This came about because a goofball student in the very first class on the very first day said, “You look like Gilligan’s Island!” By which he meant I reminded him of Bob Denver, the actor that played Gilligan. But as he said it, he was actually accusing me of being an island. And no man is an island. Thank you, Fabian, you were sorta dumb, but I loved you for it.
You see, being Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island was not a bad thing to be. It was who I was as a teacher. Nerdy, awkward, telling stories about when I was young, and my doofy friends like Skinny Mulligan. Being a teacher gave me an identity. And Gilligan was stranded on the Island with two beautiful single women, Mary Ann and Ginger. Not a bad thing to be. And I loved teaching and telling stories to kids who would later be the doofy students in new stories.
But we go through life searching for who we are and why we are here. Now that I am retired, and no longer a teacher… who am I now? We never really find the answer. Answers change over time. And so do I.
As Catch a Falling Star was a science-fictiony sort of comedy, one of the questions that I have pursued in internet research is the one I have presented here in the title of this picture-and-Paffooney-filled post. Seriously, the image search of Google’s answer to that question is enough to make you snort milk through the old nostrils as you sort through them while stupidly drinking a glass of milk. The milky nose-snorts are the reason I have not sited picture sources on this post. Cleaning the computer screen took too long. I have merely randomly snatched and pirated pictures. The only picture of a Martian presented here created by me are these two;
I admit to being surprised by my actual research into the whole question of whether or not we have ever been visited by intelligent life from the stars beyond the sky. While I have not found proof that aliens exist, I have discovered there is actual proof that the government, and NASA in particular, have covered something up. And it goes beyond Area 51 defense research. But now that I have got the attention of the NSA and the Men in Black, this post is only filled with a collage of the unreal, made-up, and mostly silly.
Malevolent Martians;
Martians Who Make the Mistake of Liking Us;
Inexplicably Goofy Martians;
Cartoon alien rendered on white background. 3D model licensed from DAZ3D.
So, I am probably the last stupid goomer who should be writing this post. But I do have a lot to say on the subject that will more than fill a 500-word essay.
At my age and level of poor health, I think about ghosts a lot because I may soon be one. In fact, my 2014 novel, Snow Babies has ghosts in it. And some of the characters in it freeze to death and become snow ghosts. But it doesn’t work like that in real-world science. My ghosts are all basically metaphorical and really are more about people and people’s perception of life, love, and each other.
Ghosts really only live in the mind. They are merely memories, un-expectedly recalled people, pains, and moments of pandemonium.
I have recently been watching the new Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House. It creeps me out because it latches on to the idea that ghosts haunt us through the revisitation in our minds of old trauma, old mistakes, old regrets… We are never truly safe from ghosts, no matter how far under the covers we go in our beds, deep in the dark and haunted night. Ghosts are always right there with us because they only live inside us.
I am haunted by ghosts of my own. Besides the ghost dog that mysteriously wanders about our house at night and is seen only out of the corners of our eyes, there is the ghost of the sexual assault I endured at the age of ten by a fifteen-year-old neighbor. That ghost haunts me still, though my attacker has died. I still can’t name him. Not because I fear he can rise up out of the grave to hurt me again, but because of what revealing what he did, and how it would injure his innocent family members who are still alive and still known to my family, will cause more hurt than healing. That is a ghost who will never go away. And he infects my fiction to the point that he is the secret villain of the novel I am now working on. In fact, the next four novels in a row are influenced by him.
But my ghost stories are not horror stories.
I write humorous stories that use ghosts as metaphors, to represent ideas, not to scare the reader. In a true horror story, there has to be that lurking feeling of foreboding, that sense that, no matter what you do, or what the main character you identify with does, things probably won’t turn out all right. Stephen King is a master of that. H.P. Lovecraft is even better.
But as for me, I firmly believe in the power of laughter, and that love can settle all old ghosts back in their graves. I have forgiven the man who sexually tortured me and nearly destroyed me as a child. And I have vowed never to reveal his name to protect those he loved as well as those I love. If he hurt anyone else, they have remained silent for a lifetime too. And I have never been afraid of the ghost dog in our house. He has made me jump in the night more than once, but I don’t fear him. If he were real, he would be the ghost of a beloved pet and a former protector of the house. And besides, he is probably all in my stupid old head thanks to nearly blind eyes when I do not have my glasses on.
There was a time when Tarzan was one of the ruling heroes of my boyhood fantasies of power and self-fulfillment. And, while Tarzan was a cartoon show on Saturday morning, comics by Burne Hogarth, movies in the theater in color with Mike Henry, or a weekly series on TV with Ron Ely, he was always Johnny Weissmuller to me. Weissmuller who played both Tarzan and Jungle Jim in the Saturday afternoon black-and-white movies.
I have to admit, I didn’t identify with the character of Tarzan as much as I thought of myself like the character “Boy”, played by Johnny Sheffield in movies like “Tarzan Finds a Son”. It was a significant part of my boyhood to imagine myself being like Boy, free from practically all restraints, able to gad about the dangerous jungle nearly naked with monkey pals and no fear. If I got into trouble by believing my skills were greater than they really were, I would save myself with ingenuity, and, barring that, Tarzan would rescue me. And, believe it or not, sometimes there were fixes that Tarzan got into that he needed me and Cheetah to be creative and get him out of. I knew in my heart that one day real life would be like that, especially once I grew into Tarzan and stopped being just Boy. That idea was in my head so loudly that several times I went to Bingham Park Woods, stripped down, and played Boy in the Jungle.
As in the previous essay about Heroes of Yesteryear, I learned important things from Johnny Weissmuller on Saturday TV. He taught me that all you really needed, even in the darkest jungles of Africa, was confidence and courage. You could stand up to any deadly danger without the protection of any armor, practically naked, in fact, if only you had that heroic goodness of heart. The little boy I was then still believes that whole-heartedly even in the aging body of an old man.
So, Tarzan continues to live in my memory, a part of me, an essential part of my education. He is me and I am he. But only in my mind. Me in a loincloth, swinging on a vine now… and probably going splat like an overripe melon on the jungle floor… well, that is too ridiculous to even imagine being real anymore. Yet he lives on in me. And he battles the metaphorical leopard-people of modern life through me. Unarmored. Confident. And unafraid.
Catch a Falling Star 
Ghostly Reflections
So, I am probably the last stupid goomer who should be writing this post. But I do have a lot to say on the subject that will more than fill a 500-word essay.
At my age and level of poor health, I think about ghosts a lot because I may soon be one. In fact, my 2014 novel, Snow Babies has ghosts in it. And some of the characters in it freeze to death and become snow ghosts. But it doesn’t work like that in real-world science. My ghosts are all basically metaphorical and really are more about people and people’s perception of life, love, and each other.
Ghosts really only live in the mind. They are merely memories, un-expectedly recalled people, pains, and moments of pandemonium.
I have recently been watching the new Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House. It creeps me out because it latches on to the idea that ghosts haunt us through the revisitation in our minds of old trauma, old mistakes, old regrets… We are never truly safe from ghosts, no matter how far under the covers we go in our beds, deep in the dark and haunted night. Ghosts are always right there with us because they only live inside us.
I am haunted by ghosts of my own. Besides the ghost dog that mysteriously wanders about our house at night and is seen only out of the corners of our eyes, there is the ghost of the sexual assault I endured at the age of ten by a fifteen-year-old neighbor. That ghost haunts me still, though my attacker has died. I still can’t name him. Not because I fear he can rise up out of the grave to hurt me again, but because of what revealing what he did, and how it would injure his innocent family members who are still alive and still known to my family, will cause more hurt than healing. That is a ghost who will never go away. And he infects my fiction to the point that he is the secret villain of the novel I am now working on. In fact, the next four novels in a row are influenced by him.
But my ghost stories are not horror stories.
I write humorous stories that use ghosts as metaphors, to represent ideas, not to scare the reader. In a true horror story, there has to be that lurking feeling of foreboding, that sense that, no matter what you do, or what the main character you identify with does, things probably won’t turn out all right. Stephen King is a master of that. H.P. Lovecraft is even better.
But as for me, I firmly believe in the power of laughter, and that love can settle all old ghosts back in their graves. I have forgiven the man who sexually tortured me and nearly destroyed me as a child. And I have vowed never to reveal his name to protect those he loved as well as those I love. If he hurt anyone else, they have remained silent for a lifetime too. And I have never been afraid of the ghost dog in our house. He has made me jump in the night more than once, but I don’t fear him. If he were real, he would be the ghost of a beloved pet and a former protector of the house. And besides, he is probably all in my stupid old head thanks to nearly blind eyes when I do not have my glasses on.
I don’t believe in ghosts.
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