I have been working on my graphic novel, Hidden Kingdom. It is a fairy tale about the struggles in the fairy kingdom that shares the world with us. You can find everything I have done on this project in my vault Visiting Tellosia, the Hidden Kingdom.
Here is Chapter Two;
And here is the page I finished yesterday;
There is still a lot of work to do on this, but I am making progress!
Filed under cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, fairies, Hidden Kingdom, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink
Last night brought second-hand victories to Mickeyworld. I am definitely NOT a Republican, but the Indiana Primary results put a smile on my face. Not, of course, because the Orangutan Man with a pocket-full of wall plans won and will probably be the GOP nominee. Rather, because the evil space lizard who wants to put an end to everything good that comes from government finally dropped out of the race for President. Yes, Ted Cruz has put his world domination ambitions on hold until some future election or military or political coup. And Trump against any candidate the Democrats put forward will probably lose… unless Americans all have lobotomies before November.
The NHL playoff game last night also yielded good news. The St. Louis Blues, after having beaten last year’s Stanley Cup champion, beat the Dallas Stars 6 goals to 1 in the third game of round two. They totally dominated the division champions and took the lead in the series in a way that makes it seem that going to roll over them.
I am certainly not fool enough to imagine the good times will last. Good things happen one day, only to evaporate into nothingness the next. But I tend to believe that I have every right to enjoy the good things while they happen. Boo-hoos for tomorrow. Yippee-kai-yays for today.
Filed under Celebration, hockey, humor, Paffooney, politics, Uncategorized
I just finished watching the last episode of the ABC dramatic television series, Lost. I watched every single episode of every single season they ever made of that show. And here’s a major spoiler. Everybody dies. Yes. No one gets through that TV series, or through life itself, without facing death at least once. And everybody has a last encounter with it where they don’t win. Except they do.
In my Paffooney above, the door straight ahead is the doorway home. This Paffooney oil painting is called Poppa Comes Home. I am hoping that is how it will be for me. I painted this picture before I had a wife and three kids. So how did I know? Or did I simply make it come true? Is that what the final doorway is all about? You make it be the doorway you want it to be? The truth is, I will probably find out before long. I retired from teaching in rather spectacularly poor health. I’m not sure I really expected to last this long. And I may live another twenty years. But probably not. The thing is, when the door is finally directly in front of me, I will fear not. I will simply open it and pass through. I am at peace. I have lived a good life. I was a teacher. I touched more than 2000 separate lives through my various classrooms over the course of 31 years. I succeeded some, I failed some, I cried some, and I laughed a lot. It all means a lot to me.
As I write this now, I have spent most of the day sealed up in my room, on my bed with my laptop, suffering quite a lot with arthritis pain. Most of my days since retirement have been very much the same. My body, especially my joints, is wearing out. But endurance brings wisdom. Overcoming pain and the depression caused by pain provides me a deep, abiding faith and confidence in myself. I don’t know if I believe in Heaven, but I am sure there is no hell. God does not punish for a life completed, no matter how badly you may have lived it. And if I die, if the human race goes extinct, if our planet is destroyed, even if our entire galaxy winks out in the never-ending darkness of eternity, we have all accomplished a miracle just by the fact of our existence. The final doorway is the door home. I have no doubt.
Filed under autobiography, Paffooney, philosophy
This is a place I explore in cartoons and daydreams. It is a little town known as Animal Town for fairly obvious reasons. It is populated by silly anthropomorphic animals who wear clothes and keep naked people as pets.
Animal Town is one of the all-time silliest places to visit in the cartoon dreamland of Fantastica.
Mandy Panda and little brother Dandy are my constant companions and guides when I tour the dangerous streets of wild Animal Town. In my cartoons, Mandy is an immigrant from the Pandalore Islands. She is also the cartoon version of my wife.
Three of the Town’s most important head monkeys.
It was Mandy who introduced me to the government officials who run Animal Town. Judge Moosewinkle is the head of the Animal Town court system. He is a hanging judge, so I am very careful about littering and loitering when I am in town.
Constable Geoffrey Giraffe does all the arresting and police work. He used to work in a toy store, but quit his job there when he couldn’t get them to stop writing the R backwards on all their signs. Grammar infractions annoy him more than any other crime.
Linus the Kitten-Hearted is the mayor of Animal Town. They wanted to crown him as king, but he always says that’s only for when he’s in the jungle. In town he prefers to be a democratically elected leader. Of course, if you refuse to vote for him, he might eat you.
Most of my dreams in Animal Town are about the school there.
Yes, this is a yearbook picture from Animal Town Elementary School.
Miss Ancient’s Class of 5th graders is usually rather rowdy and difficult. You may have noticed there is a bare bear in the old buzzard’s class. The fact is, the bears in Animal Town are all naturists and refuse to wear clothes. This disturbs poor Miss
Ancient greatly, and it is therefore a real godsend that a fig leaf just happened to be drifting down through the air at the time this picture was made. Bobby Bare is not shy, but some things are better not put into a cartoon.
Yes, this is another yearbook picture. And I am in it twice, since Mr. Reluctant Rabbit is also me.
As a visitor to Animal Town, Cissy Bare took me to Mr. Rabbit’s class as her pet for show and tell. She is also a bare bear, and she also benefited from a passing leaf at picture time. You may notice students putting rabbit ears behind each other’s heads in pictures… something that human children do too in real life. But when I study this picture, I can’t help but think that maybe Mr. Rabbit started it. Now, Animal Town is located in Fantastica, a part of the Dreamlands. So that sort of explains how I ended up in school naked. My dreams are like that. You are in school in the middle of lessons before you realize that haven’t got a single stitch of clothing on.
When I am inevitably charged with public indecency for being in school naked, I can turn to Animal Town lawyer Woolbinkle Moosewinkle. He is totally incompetent and not very bright, but unlike most of the animals, he is friendly and on my side. Spot Firedog is a Dalmatian who knows how to use a newspaper. He is a reporter, publisher, and all-around good dog. He wrote an expose on me being naked in the Animal Town Elementary school.
Big Bull Beefalo runs the local hamburger emporium, which might seem like collusion to cannabalism, but Bull is a very gentle and very large soul. He is himself a vegetarian, but he is a gifted fry cook and chef. I can go to his restaurant when I get out of jail, though hopefully not as food.
So, Animal Town is a very different kind of place. It is the result of dreams and goofiness and uncontrolled spurts of cartoonist creativity. It is a cartoon sort of place where spontaneous and random humor happens.
Filed under cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, characters, comic strips, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink, Uncategorized
Okay, so on the synesthesia tests I didn’t score as a synesthete on the music/color test. But I was extremely synesthetic on the tests for color/months/days of the week. I was a little over the mark on letter/number/colors synesthesia too, but it was more a problem with manipulating the color-selector device when I don’t have a mouse to use on my laptop. The test for music did not test the way I see colors with music. They wanted me to respond to what color each individual note seemed to be, and that isn’t even close to the way I experience it. For me, the perfect description of how synesthesia works for me is Bach’s Tocata and Fugue in D minor as it is depicted in Fantasia.
I was shocked when I first saw it. The colors are wrong for this piece, but the visual experience is almost exactly how I experience music, especially wordless instrumental music. The only problem with this piece is that the overall color schemes are wrong. But this comes about because every synesthete sees the colors differently. And I have no doubt that at least one of the artists who created this had synesthesia. If there were more reds, yellows, and magenta in the opening and more indigo contrasted with silver later, this interpretation would be perfect.
Music synesthetically works in two directions for me. The picture above, called The Wings of Imagination, makes me think of La Mer by Claude Debussy.
If you listen to the piece, don’t look at the YouTube illustration, look at my picture if you want to see the music the way I do. The following song, Don’t Worry, Be Happy, is a multicolored song that I can best express with the colors in the picture I call Rainbow Peacock.
The full range of primary colors together in one picture, or one song, always means completeness, fullness, and happiness to me. If there is absence of one or more of the basic colors from the color wheel, the mood and emotion present in the song or picture is altered to something other than happiness. The Firebird Suite by Igor Stravinsky goes from the indigo and navy blue of fear and confusion to instances of angry red and feverish orange. It would look something like this in the theater of my imagination;
And one of my favorite instrumental pieces of all times, Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun by Claude Debussy, is full of melancholy and sexual tension, deeply felt vibrations in the depths of my stomach, and would look like my picture Sleeping Beauty with its teal and blue melancholia juxtaposed with candle-lit yellows and wood brown mixed feelings of joy and anxiety.
Now, if you have waded through all of this goofy color-and-music analysis from a source whose sanity is questionable at best, you probably have no earthly idea what any of it has to do with anything. But if you have that aha!-moment and see it all clearly too, then I suspect you probably are a synesthete too. Poor you. It is not a treatable condition. But it is also not a burden. Learn to enjoy it. It resonates in your very soul.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, Uncategorized
My first novel-length piece of writing was attempted in college. I finished it in four years. It was a pirate tale about a young man, a pirate named Graff the Changeling. You see him in this illustration I created in 1980 with his two young sons, Rene and Emery. Because their mother was a fairy, the boys have pointed ears and horns. It was an attempt at serious fantasy adventure fiction that was so awful, it became a comedy before it was through. I called it The Graff Tales, and I still have it. But I promise you, I will never, ever try to publish the horrible thing. My sisters served as my beta readers for this story. They both liked the oral stories I told, and they eagerly awaited something like they remembered from our shared childhood. They both were a bit disappointed by my first prose attempt. There was a knight called Sir Rosewall in the story. He was a hapless knighted fool who lived in poverty and swore to reclaim his honor with great deeds, but as he goes to sea as a kidnapped sailor, all he manages to do is fall down a lot and bump his large head frequently. In the first scene when he enters the story, long about chapter four, he exits a cottage and has to punt a piglet to get out without falling down. This pig-punting thing was repeated more than once with this character. My sisters joked that the “pig-in-the-doorway” motif would be my lasting contribution to literature. Fortunately for me, it was not. I am probably the only one who even remembers there was such a novel.
But my biggest failing with writing and storytelling was always that I could be too creative. The story featured a flying pirate ship that was raised from the bottom of the ocean by fairy magic. The crew were re-animated skeletons. The gorilla who lived on the island where the ship’s survivors had been marooned would also join the crew. His name was Hairy Arnold. One villain was the pirate captain Horner, a man with a silver nose-piece because he had lost his real nose to a cannon shot. Another was a red-bearded dandy named Captain Dangerous. But the biggest villain of all was the Heretic, who turned out to be a demon in human guise. It was all about escaping from pirates who wanted to kill you and hitting soldiers with fish in the fish market. There were crocodile-headed men and little child-like fairies called Peris that lived in the city where Graff was trapped and transformed into a monster by the Heretic.
My plot was too convoluted and my characters too wildly diverse and unlikely. The result was something far too bizarre to be serious fiction. The only way it could actually be interpreted was as a piece of comedy. There-in lay the solution to my identity problem as a writer. I had to stop trying to be serious. My imagination too often bent the rules of physics and reality. So I had to stop trying for realism and believability.
In the end all the main characters die. All except for young Rene who becomes a pirate hunter. Of course, I follow Graff and Emery through to heaven because, well, it was a first person narrative and the narrator died. So, I vowed to myself that I would never let this horrible piece of nonsense see the light of day. I would never try to publish it, rewrite it, or even tell anyone about it. And so to this very day I… oopsie.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, illustrations, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, Uncategorized
My last post was about the movie Jungle Book and how happy I was at the beauty of that movie which fulfilled my childhood love affair with that story. But I failed to share my own Paffoonies created from the story of the boy raised by wolves in the Seonee Hills.
So here they are… although they are late;
This last one is a picture from a page in my wizardly tome of picture magic. The poem is called “Nobody Knows Why” and is interpreted here in case you can’t read the Mickian script in the Paffooney. Here is the text of the poem;
Nobody Knows Why
The world turns
And I must die
And ‘morrow comes
And Russians spy
And Doo-dahs Doo-dah
And Blueberry pie
And Monkeys shake
When they hear a Lie!
The mysteries in the meaning of this poem is supposed to remain a mystery. It is from a magical tome that belongs to a wizard. So, for all I know, it could be a very dangerous incantation. So don’t you dare try to figure it out. You don’t want to be a Monkey, do you?
Filed under humor, illustrations, Paffooney, poetry
If you do art, then you also doodle. Really! No matter how hard you may try to keep it a secret, you doodle, and people all know it. So, since the secret is out… Here are some of my doodles. This jester-sort-of-half-white-clown was a doodle yesterday while watching TV… something I do with my hands while my mind is doing something else.
Here’s another doodle… same day, different piece of paper, different TV show.
But not all doodles are meandering swirls and girls. I have a whole book of home-made cartoons that start with a blank page and end up with a page that furthers whatever curious cartoon story I am trying to make. Here are a few examples of that.
Now, I know your doodles probably look nothing like mine. My doodles are seriously demented. I have doodled enough that I have seriously worry about going blind. And my doodles are influenced by a lifetime of bad arty-habits. But they do give me practice. They also help me think. They relieve stress. And they make an easy and somewhat racy post.
Sometimes everything goes wrong. That, of course, is something that happens more often than the times when everything goes right. Lately I have had the fortune to experience the more common of those two sometimes.
My most recent publisher, the one that was supposed to publish Snow Babies, underwent a reduction in capacity and financial difficulties. They had to reorganize and reduce their commitments. That meant they could no longer publish any of my other novels. It apparently also means that they will no longer fulfill the publishing contract on Snow Babies. Bummer.
My new car, a Ford Fiesta that I bought from Enterprise Rental Car to replace my old Ford Fiesta that was unceremoniously killed by a passing motorist as it sat in front of my house, is now in the shop with it’s own hoof and mouth disease. While picking up kids from school, I hit a pothole on a Dallas street. Not just any pothole, but a huge camouflaged cavern of a pothole capable of taking a huge bite out of the right front wheel. I was not speeding. I did not do anything wrong but drive in place I have driven a hundred times previously… though this time it was after torrential rain and a bit of nasty hail that I had no way of knowing made potholes bigger and angrier and more horrible. I am surprised that it didn’t eat any other cars in the moderate traffic I was surrounded by. But I initially thought that once a passing motorist, younger and more pothole savvy than me, did the good Samaritan act of helping me change the tire, that I would only have to get the tire fixed or replaced and would be happily on my way again. No such luck. Not only was the tire ruined, but also the rim it was mounted on, and possibly the undercarriage of the car. It was going to cost at least the $500 deductible from my insurance company, unless something even worse happened that they couldn’t see without looking at their bank books a little harder. And I had to get another rental car in the mean time. But, of course, the recent hail storm not only had most of the rental cars rented, but the rental companies had lost cars to hail damage as well. I was stuck with a rather expensive Dodge Challenger that the car insurance can’t completely pay for. And I have no place to park it if the hail decides to revisit us this week. Double bummer.
And, of course, it doesn’t end there. Having kids in school is a challenge, especially this time of year with high-stakes testing going on. I can’t give you particulars because some things have to remain private, but even really bright kids like mine, the children of two teachers, can be subject to test-anxiety and failure and the resulting depression which can prove fatal if not taken seriously enough. Triple damn ding-dang bummer!
But we can’t let bad luck be the end-all of the story. I am a pessimist by nature. Nothing has happened to me recently that took me by surprise. I am always expecting the worst to happen, and life rarely disappoints me on that score. So I am not floored by these randomly-occurring sucker punches. Rather, I am given that shot of anger and adrenaline needed to pick myself up and start fighting back.
I have my novel Magical Miss Morgan almost ready to submit to another publisher that I found through a friend, with a couple of backup publishers to send it to after it is rejected the first time. I have researched three possibilities so far.
I talked to the insurance agent today to stop the hemorrhaging of money down the drain of car repairs, and though I have taken a pretty good-sized cannon shot in this battle, it will not sink my little pirate ship.
And a conference with principal and teacher and student and parent solved a lot of the other problem. It can be an advantage to a kid to have a teacher as a parent. We tend to know how everything works, and we speak the secret language of Edjumacation to help get things actually done.
So, no worries, man. Even though all my luck is bad luck, I am still lucky… since there is a lot of it.
Filed under angry rant, battling depression, education, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, pessimism, publishing, Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 
Stuff That Works
What makes people visit your blog and maybe even click “like”? I should tell you up front, I have no idea how best to navigate the crazy internet. I want to. I have a book to promote. I have ideas and experiences to share. I am a writer and I would like to make something more than excessive heartache out of being one. But how you actually go about it is still a mystery.
I know what I surf the internet for. I like artwork, especially original artwork. That is why I try to post as much of my own stuff as I can. I am an amateur artist, self-taught with a little bit of college art classes, contact with real artists, and a lot of TV Bob Ross. I surf to find other artists whose stuff catches my eye. I post about artists like Loish, Maxfield Parrish, Paul Detlafsen, and Norman Rockwell. I go to sites like DeviantArt (Example at this link) and follow artists like James Brown and Shannon Maer on Facebook. I help promote their work by sharing as often as I can. Do I worry about copyright violation with my artwork? No. I am long past the point of making a profitable career as an artist. I like having people see my work and if someone decides to claim they are the artist instead of me, I have the real originals and even some pictures of work in progress. The Big Eyes thing will not happen to me.
So sharing pictures seems to matter. I got lots of hits from the monster picture post because I used a lot of monster-movie images that people normally search for on the internet. Pictures of pretty girls work too. It doesn’t seem to matter if I drew them or if they are a picture of a relative, those pictures pull people in too.
Pictures of photogenic nieces aid my blogging popularity in a rather noticeable way.
Yes, I do believe I have just intimated that Minnie Mouse is my niece, a daughter of my sister-in-law. Lying is part of blogging. You have to put spin on things and make people understand the things they want to understand more than you need them to see what is really true in the empirical sense.
Being able to put the words “nude” or “naked” in titles or in the tags brings in more views too. Those words get lots of hits on search engines and some of the people who visit my blog looking for that actually read what’s posted. Just because an idea is a little bit naughty, it doesn’t mean only perverts and bad people respond to it.
This is a picture of Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. It is NOT a picture of me.
And it doesn’t hurt to be a little funny now and then. Humor is something I look for in the posts of others. I try to be funny in my posts too… though whether they are hah-hah funny or merely eeuw! funny is debatable. Much of my humor is only intended to raise a smirk or half a smile. I am most satisfied when I make you think, “heh, that’s right, isn’t it.”
This is Millis, not me. He was an actual rabbit that was turned humanoid by a scientist’s experiment with alien technology.
So why is this post called Stuff That Works if, as I am claiming, I really don’t know anything about how blogging works? I may have been a little less than truthful when I made claims. Or maybe I was claiming with a little bit of “tongue in cheek”? I hope I have demonstrated that I do know how. The thing I have yet to wrestle with is WHY. So now I have to get busy and work on that.
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Filed under artwork, autobiography, blog posting, commentary, humor, nudes, Paffooney, surrealism
Tagged as artwork, blogging, goofiness, humor, nudes, paffooney, philosophy