Yep… Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles… Neil Armstrong placing one small step for man onto the surface of the moon… Laugh-In making “Sock-it-to-me” jokes… JFK… LBJ… Nixon going away…Viet Nam… Good gawd! I reminded myself that the 60’s happened yesterday… Yes, the 60’s happened yesterday… And I remember what happened. I was there. Four-year-old me to fourteen-year-old me… And it looked like this;
I remember Monkees from the 60’s… Lots and lots of monkeys.
And black-and-white TV… and Red Skelton on Wednesday nights… and civil rights marches… and larches… and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis… and Sherry Lewis with Lambchop… and Kukla, Fran, and Ollie… and Lawrence Welk on Saturday night… and Halloween parties with costume contests at the fire station on Main Street… And the 1957 pink-and-white Mercury of Imagination.
I know that isn’t even 200 words… but this could go on forever if I let it. I was a boy in the 60’s… and that is something not even God can take away from me.
I slept in this morning. Spent another late night doing nothing but watching monster movies. I recently got myself a DVD collection of Hammer Films monster movies from the sixties. I found it in the $5 bargain bin at Walmart, a place I regularly shop for movies.
When I was a boy, back in the 60’s, there always used to be a midnight monster movie feature called Gravesend Manor on Channel 5, WOI TV in Ames, Iowa. It started at 11:00 pm and ran til 1:00 am. I, of course, being a weird little monster-obsessed kid, would sneak downstairs in my PJ’s when everyone else was asleep and I would laugh at the antics of the goofy butler, possibly gay vampire duke, and the other guy who was supposedly made in the master’s laboratory. And when the movie started, I was often scared witless by the black-and-white monster B-movie like Scream of Fear!, or Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, or Eyes of the Gorgon. It was always the reason I could rarely get up in time for church and Sunday school the next morning without complaints and bleary-eyed stumbling through breakfast. I never knew if my parents figured it out or not, but they probably did and were just too tired to care.
It was my source for critical monster-knowledge that would aid me greatly when I grew up to be a fireman/cowboy hero. Because battling monsters was… you know, a hero prerequisite. And I intended to be the greatest one there ever was. Even better than Wyatt Earp or Sherlock Holmes or Jungle Jim.
Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, and the immortal Christopher Lee were my tutors in the ways of combating the darkness. When I started watching a really creepy monster movie, I always had to stick it out to the end to see the monster defeated and the pretty girl saved. And they didn’t always end in ways that allowed me to sleep soundly after Gravesend Manor had signed off the airways for the night. Some movies were tragedies. Sometimes the hero didn’t win. Sometimes it was really more of a romance than a monster movie, and the monster was the one you were rooting for by the end. I remember how the original Mighty Joe Young made me cry. And sometimes you had to contemplate more than tragedy. You had to face the facts of death… sometimes grisly, painful, and filled with fear. You had to walk in the shoes of that luckless victim who never looked over his shoulder at the right moment, or walked down the wrong dark alley, or opened the wrong door. The future was filled with terrifying possibilities.
Now, at the end of a long life, when I am supposed to be more mature and sensible, I find myself watching midnight monster movies again. What’s wrong with me? Am in my second childhood already? Am I just a goofy old coot with limited decision-making capabilities? Of course I am. And I intend to enjoy every horrifying moment of it.
What you may not know is that, although I have three grown children, and the oldest has found the love of his life, I have no grandchildren, and according to my children, I will not have any for years yet, if any at all.
This saddens me. Because I am old. And I have serious health issues. And I probably don’t have years yet to wait.
Ariel is three feet tall, fully jointed. Her eyes no longer close. She is made of plastic on a metal armature.
But, as with the majority of the bad things in my life, my imagination creates solutions even when there are not real problems.
My imaginary granddaughter is an entirely imaginary little girl that lives in my head. She is merely a voice. She talks to me and I talk to her. I project her personality onto Ariel, my largest doll. (I bought her from the internet, from a professional restorer of collectible dolls. She is meant to be as realistic and poseable as possible though her ankle joints don’t work. So, she’s easy to almost see as a real child. Though my mother gave me some porcelain dolls that look slightly more alive… though not poseable.)
Nicole is two and quarter feet tall. But she is not poseable.
The thing that makes Ariel the usual repository for my imaginary granddaughter is that Mona Lisa smile of hers. Sometimes it is a subtle smile. Sometimes it is a pout. And sometimes she looks like she is about to cry. Of course, that’s all in my stupid head.
I constantly listen as my imaginary granddaughter tells me what I am doing wrong, how I should do things better, and how I should be happy when I follow her advice and make a good choice in life. She tends to be very prudish and conservative when she tells me what to think. But the things she tells me are usually the things I need to hear. She keeps me on the right path.
And I know what you are probably thinking. She’s my Jiminy Cricket to my own Pinocchio. She’s my conscience, and I’m her wooden-headed, lying boy. Well, I guess that can work too.
By telling you about this secret mental problem I have, I am demonstrating more of what I call naked thinking. As a nudist, I am showing you more than merely what’s under my underwear. I am showing you some of the crazy gears, wind-up springs, and clockworks of my goofy old mind. You can’t really get more naked than that.
Life is filled with impossible things. Doing my taxes is definitely one of them.
I once owned a copy of this Will Eisner comic and got a good barrel of laughs out of it back in the day when I was young and full of life and the grim reaper wasn’t standing just outside the kitchen door like he is now.
It had a bunch of useful suggestions on what to do in the face of the two most unavoidable things in life. I wish I could find it once again, but I fear it disappeared when my parents moved from Texas back to the farm in Iowa in the 1990’s. It was probably stolen by someone who wanted to learn the valuable secrets it contained. I accuse Donald Trump. Surely that would explain all those years he paid zero dollars in taxes. And I believe I spotted something with pale orange hair lurking behind the trash bin when my parents were loading the moving van. Of course, it may have been only a dried out tumble weed.
Now, I am not saying that I don’t want to pay my taxes. I have always felt that it was an important part of being a citizen to pay my fair share. And if you want the benefits of government services like schools, fire departments, police forces, court systems, garbage collection, and all those other things we really can’t do without… well, somebody has to pay for them.
But it often seems to me that the whole matter could become considerably more equitable if those people to whom life and the economy have been more generous could see their way clear to pay a little of that good fortune towards common goals. And I am not referring to the Koch brothers spending a billion dollars on elections, either. That’s a transaction where they come out ahead, making more money back than they put in. After all, they got the whole State of Kansas to pour their State funds directly into Koch Industries pocketbooks via tax breaks, effectively allowing them to rob all of Kansas’s public school children of their textbooks and lunch money. How is that equitable and fair?
And paying taxes this year means probably paying far more than my fair share. I recently completed a debt-reduction program to get out from under two decades worth of maxed-out credit cards at 25% to 29% interest rates. And as a further punishment for trying to get free of the burden, credit card banks get to report the forgiven debt as income for me to the IRS. And all of the banks decided this was the year for me to pay that off. Well, except for Bank of America who are petulantly suing me for more money than I owe them. I will probably end up mired back in credit card debt in order to survive the IRS. So how does that square with Mitt Romney paying less than 15%? Or Donald Trump paying nothing?
The only out for me, it seems, is to shake hands and make a deal with old Grimmy. He has patiently waited for me for sixty years, through times when my six incurable diseases definitely gave him hope. The only way to really escape the tax man is to take the really long dirt nap. But I shall scrape funds together and give it one more try. I just wish I could find that book.
(Note *** All the illustrations in this essay except for Mr. Flagg’s Uncle Sam were provided by the late great Will Eisner, the cartoonist so grand that the highest award for cartoonists is named after him. But I am not paying any royalties for these images since I owe my soul to the IRS.)
I was an aficionado of HO model trains as a kid. I continued that horrendous fixation with 1/78th scale worlds long into my extended juvenile immaturity (I was an unmarried teacher of middle school students until 1995.) Even after I was married, my wife allowed me, to a very limited degree, to continue to be a train man.
I spent a good deal of time over the years building building plastic model kits of buildings, painting and repainting plaster model buildings, and collecting engines, rolling stock, and trackside details. Painting little 1/78th scale people is definitely an exercise for steady hands and a zen-like, highly focused mind.
But that all reached an impasse when we moved to the Dallas area. I had to tear down my train layout, box up my trains, and put everything on hold until I had another place to build and create my HO model-train world. So, while it was all boxed up and transported to first, a house that we rented from my brother-in-law, and then a house that we bought, it got shifted around and stacked inappropriately, and grandma put some really heavy items on top to crush and mangle my treasures. It also spent a night outside in the rain when my brother-in-law’s water heater had to be replaced in the garage where everything was stored. I was not a happy camper for a while.
Now, a decade later, I am still taking the tiny items and trying to glue the pieces back together. I have basically given up trying to get the trains to run again. But I can use the bits and pieces of Toonerville to make pictures like these. It makes the art-parts of my psyche and soul a little happier.
Old number 99 had to have the front part where the headlamp is located reattached and restored. It gave me something to do this weekend while I was down with a bad back and breathing difficulties. It would be neat to put the train table back together and get things set up once again, but there is no space, and no unlimited funds, and less and less time. So for now, the train man comes back to me to rebuild in photographs and in my imagination.
I have just finished a novel project that I worked on for a year, from Spring of 2016 to Spring of 2017. And part of my personal project procedure involves using drawings to help me visualize the characters in the story and begin to view them as real people, even when they most certainly aren’t real. I even have this derfy Mickian idea that Paffoonies (those picture ideas that are inseparably fused to words) are essential to Mickian fiction. (Mickian fiction= another frighteningly goofy idea that needs to go unexplained.)
The book, Recipes for Gingerbread Children is about an old woman, a German immigrant and Holocaust survivor, who comes to a small Iowa town with a gift for story-telling and a gift for baking things, especially gingerbread cookies.
Grandma Gretel Stein, seen in the Paffooney on the left, is the main character of the story. She tells stories, mostly fairy tales, that have lessons about being true and faithful even in the face of great evil. The fairy in her hand is General Tuffaney Swift, an immortal Storybook fairy who leads the army of the local fairy kingdom called Tellosia. Gretel believes he is real Honestly, she gets so into story-telling that her fairy friends seem absolutely real to her. And who is to say that there aren’t little magical people living in a hidden kingdom among the cornfields in Iowa? Gretel convinced me that they were real. She even has a hand in making new fairies by the baking of gingerbread. She gets a magical recipe from the fairy Erlking, a wise and magical being, and uses it to create living gingerbread boys and gingerbread girls.
The gingerbread girl on the right is Anneliese, named after Gretel’s own daughter and decorated with frosting, food coloring, and gumdrops by the favorite story listener who constantly listens to Gretel’s stories and helps bake Gretel’s gingerbread, Sherry Cobble.
Sherry is a beautiful young eighth grade girl who reminds Gretel of her long-lost daughter. Sherry has a twin sister named Shelly and they are identical twins, but Sherry not only looks like Anneliese once did, she acts like her with the same confidence and enthusiasm for life that Anneliese once had before the war.
Sherry and Shelly are both part of the Cobble family, who have a reputation locally as wacky-pants loonies because they believe firmly in being nudists and engaging in nature completely naked while not actually wearing any wacky pants. I haven’t done any actual pictures of Sherry in the nude, but if you look carefully at the first picture of her above and see clothing, then you are seeing things that are not there. Yep, the girl bakes and decorates gingerbread men in the buff, wearing her pale pink birthday suit, even when the weather outside in Iowa makes that nonsensical.
So by now you can probably draw several conclusions about me as both a novelist and an illustrator. #1, There is definitely something a little bit off about me. #2, I haven’t said anything yet about this book having dead Nazis and a werewolf in it, even though I rarely talk about this book without throwing those things in somewhere. #3, Number 2 is actually taken care of in a backhanded way if you are reading this whole list carefully. #4, This story is probably about things that really aren’t just gingerbread recipes. #5, You should congratulate yourself if you read this far in this post. You have unusual amounts of patience and curiosity, and an extremely high tolerance for levels of goofy that put actual Goofy to shame.
“So, somebody’s going to pay you for all of this?” Maria asked in the car before they reached the toy store.
“The Merriweathers want their boy Mark back. They are going to pay me the standard investigation fee for every day it takes to find him. Of course, I have to find him to earn the money,” Stan answered while turning the corner in his run-down little Ford Fiesta.
“What about Rogelio’s parents?”
“The cops told them that he’s a probable runaway. They didn’t seem interested in paying to get him back. The dad says that if Rogelio ran away to be with Yesenia, then he’s following his heart. And if he’s been murdered, they are not anxious to find that out. Of course, no body has turned up for either of the missing kids.”
“And the little black girl?”
“To be honest, I got a real bad vibe from that stepfather. They call him Poppa Dark, but his real name’s DeAndre Rork. He doesn’t like answering questions. And he’s probably the killer, if my instincts are right.”
Maria shivered as they turned into the parking lot near the toy store.
“Two dollars for the rest of the day,” said the attendant.
Stan grumbled something about wishing for an empty parking meter as he fumbled in his pocket for change. Then he handed it to the attendant.
“Park in F13.”
Stan and Maria parked and went into the toy store.
The man behind the counter looked to be old… the indeterminate age sort of old. He had white hair, a wrinkled white face, and glasses that made his eyes look huge, a magnifying effect.
“Eule Gheist?” Stan asked.
“Yes. I’m still me.”
“We need to ask you a few questions.”
“The young lady still owes me a few hours of cleaning.”
“I finished picking up the mess I made that day, trying to open that door, I mean,” Maria said defensively.
“How about dusting the shelves where the wood goods sit? That could count as another of your hours.”
Maria gave Geist a pouty-lip look, took the feather duster from him, and headed for the wood goods.
“So, Eule, how many toys did you sell today?”
“None.”
“And how many have you sold this week?”
“None.”
“This month?”
“Again, none.”
“Not a very profitable business, it seems.”
“Mr. Mephisto is a collector of rare antique toys. We are not in business to sell toys. He is a billionaire, and he uses this business as a tax-write-off.”
“Hmm. How much do you make working here, if I may ask.”
“I make nothing.”
“Then how do you live?”
“Quite well for a barn owl that was made human by magic.”
”That’s just a tale you tell kids, right?”
“If that’s what you choose to believe.”
“A barn owl?”
“What the Latinos call a Lechuza.”
“Sure they do. Did the police ask you about a boy named Mark Merriweather? Or a girl named Shandra -Johnson-Rork?”
“Yes. They were in here, apparently right before they decided to disappear.”
“Did you see where they went?”
“Not where, exactly, but I know they left with a dark gentleman.”
“Did you tell the police that?
“Yes. It seemed to be exactly what they wanted to hear.”
“Wait a minute… did you say a black man?”
“Of course not. He was dark of personality, not skin color.”
“Did the police verify that too?”
“Of course not. They heard dark and accepted that as what they wanted to hear.”
“So, what do you mean by dark?”
“Like the devil is dark.”
“Are you saying the devil took them?”
“Something like that.”
As Stan was pondering that, Maria came back to the front of the store with a decorated paper skull like the one she had told him about before..
“This is the one Rogelio was talking to,” she said, showing him the decorative thing.
“Eule? What do you know about that?”
“It’s cursed. It’s also a family heirloom.”
“Can we borrow it to study it?”
“Help yourself. But don’t damage it in any way.”
“Because it’s valuable?”
“No. Because it’s cursed. And it can take revenge.”
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.
I have been working at illustration and drawing for the majority of my life, but it took computer technology and digital photography to allow me to maximize the use of my abilities. Let me go through a couple of case in points.
The Red-Haired Girl picture is a good example of what I can do. I originally drew the picture to illustrate a Charlie Brown poem. Here is the poem if you don’t remember it. (A convenient excuse to re-post something and fill this post with words already written.)
Little Red-Haired Girl
You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown
That little red-haired girl, so cute, so nice
You only looked and looked from afar
You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown
You could’ve held her hand
You could’ve walked her home from school
You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown
She never got your Valentine
At least, you forgot to sign your name
You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown
No hope of marriage now, nor children for old age
Happily ever after has now long gone
You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown
Now every love poem is a sad poem
And the world is blue and down
You never told her that you loved her…
You never told her that you loved her…
You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown.
You may not see what I did without looking at the two pictures very closely. The better, more brightly-lit photo is not the answer. I originally created the Red-Haired Girl as a Charley-Brown-y creation complete with a bigger than natural head, a Charley-Brown head.
I have ulterior motives for my evil cartoon manipulations. I like this image I have created very much, in fact, one might say that I have fallen in love with it just a bit… Pygmalion-like. I wanted to use the image to illustrate Anita Jones, a character from my book Superchicken. Anita is the fictional re-imagining of a girl that I had a deep and abiding crush on (possibly still existing today, though she is now a grandmother in real life.) She is literally my little red-haired girl. So what did I do? Look closely. I lovingly shrank her head. Yes, like the headhunters of old, I used the paint program on my computer to shrink it, re-attach it, and make it more human-like. Realistic proportions, though only a very slight change by actual percentages, make a realistic difference in how real the viewer perceives her to be.
I know you probably think I am full of goofy-gas to make such claims. If you don’t see the difference in the first example, perhaps you will see it here. Compare these two David Copperfield pictures carefully. Look at Little Emily’s head.
You don’t have to believe me, but it does make a difference.
I am fascinated by the darker alleyways in the city of human thought. I love monster movies, those love-story tragedies where the monster is us with one or more of our basic flaws pumped up to the absolute maximum. We are all capable of becoming a monster. There are consequences to every hurtful thing we have ever thought or ever said to other people, especially the people we love.
The monster movies I love most are the old black and whites from Universal Studios. But I can also seriously enjoy the monsters of Hammer Films, and even the more recent remakes of Frankenstein, The Mummy, and their silly sequels. I am fascinated by the Creature from the Black Lagoon because it is the story of a total outsider who is so different he can’t really communicate with the others he meets. All he can do is grab the one that attracts him and strike out at those who cause him pain. It occurs to me that I am him when having an argument with my wife. Sometimes I am too intelligent and culturally different to talk to her and be understood. She gets mad at me and lashes out at me because when I am trying to make peace she thinks I am somehow making fun of her. How do you convince someone of anything if they always think your heartfelt apology is actually sarcasm? How do you share what’s in your heart if they are always looking for double meaning in everything you say?
But other people can change into monsters too. I am not the only one. People who are bitter about how their life seems to have turned out can strike out at others like the Mummy. Wrapped in restrictive wrappings of what they think should have been, and denied the eternal rest of satisfaction over the way the past treated them, they attack with intent to injure, even just with hurtful words, because their past sins have animated them with a need to change the past, though the time is long past when they should’ve let their bitterness simply die away.
And we might all of us fall into the trap of Victor Frankenstein’s monster, who never asked to be made. He finds life to be an unmanageable nightmare with others constantly assaulting him with the pitchforks and torches of their fear and rejection.
But the thing about monster movies… at least the good ones, is that you can watch it to the end and see the monster defeated. We realize in the end that the monster never really wins. He can defeat the monstrous qualities within himself and stop himself. Or the antidote to what ails him is discovered (as Luke did with Darth Vader). Or we can see him put to his justifiable end and remember that if we should see those qualities within ourselves, we should do something about it so that we do not suffer the same fate. Or, better yet, we can learn to laugh at the monstrosity that is every-day life. Humor is a panacea for most of life’s ills.
But the thing about monster movies… at least the good ones, is that you can watch it to the end and see the monster defeated. We realize in the end that the monster never really wins. He can defeat the monstrous qualities within himself and stop himself. Or the antidote to what ails him is discovered (as Luke did with Darth Vader). Or we can see him put to his justifiable end and remember that if we should see those qualities within ourselves, we should do something about it so that we do not suffer the same fate. Or, better yet, we can learn to laugh at the monstrosity that is every-day life. Humor is a panacea for most of life’s ills.
Catch a Falling Star 