Yes, be warned, these are all drawings of nude people. But not porn. Innocent, nature-loving nudes. So, if that offends you, look no further.
Being a nudist does actually change the way you see things, though not merely which crayon you draw with.As an artist who is a nudist, if I picture the subject’s private parts, that is merely a detail, never the reason the picture exists.I prefer to draw nudists as only casually nude, catching them in their everyday habits.Just like a Rennaisance painter, I often use mythology as an excuse for creating nude portraits.Sometimes the purpose of the picture is not even the nude figures themselves, but rather, the mood.
The real question with a drawing like this is, “How well can you draw it, Mickey?”
It is also important to realize if you are drawing from a real-life model, especially an under-aged model, you don’t want to make it so well that the model can be identified and stalked in the real world. Though I am not a good enough portrait artist to really worry about that.
And, of course, naked is funny in comic situations.So, yeah… nudism.
I always loved this song. When I was a boy, it was the song I would sing when I was alone in the darkness. It made me feel better, able to march toward home in spite of potential spooks and brain-eating zombies. The weight of the invisible future world could not drag me down if this tune was in my head, filling it with helium and good spirit; it allowed me to fly.
And when I listened to it playing on the radio… I always paused and listened to at least a couple of verses no matter what I was doing… I never once thought of Johnny Nash as a black man. I didn’t know he was black until I first saw a picture of him. But even then I didn’t think, “Oh, he’s a black man.” I thought, “Oh, he’s a man like me.” But, I, of course, am not black. I’m not really white either. I am a kind of pale pink to mauve mottled color with dark pink psoriasis spots in random places all over me. It is the man on the inside that is like Johnny Nash, full of uplifting things, and goofy grins, and… hopefully, hope.
But when I was young it wasn’t only singing “I Can See Clearly Now…” in my goofy farmboy voice that filled my head with air and allowed me to float away from the troubles of the world. I also learned to draw Manga style, in the tradition of Osamu Tezuka’s Astroboy , filtered through hours of practice copying Walt Kelly’s Pogocharacters and various Disney cartoons.
I copied the over-large eyes and big-headed cutsieness that informed the Japanese idea of the world after the atom bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I tried to capture innocence and wonder and adventure in drawings that took my mind off the terrible things of my childhood, being sexually assaulted, the assassinations of JFK and his brother RFK, and Martin Luther King Jr, the Viet Nam War, and Nixon with Watergate. You can reclaim innocence and peace of mind, if you get the lines just right, and the proportions are good, and the character has just the right expression on their sweet little faces.
Okay, maybe not always so sweet and innocent. This is not the Dorothy I would want to mess with. This girl is cocky, sure of herself, and more than a little impish. A destroyer of wicked witches, that one.
But that’s what Manga Art is all about. You whistle away the darkness one drawing at a time. And there’s plenty of darkness to whistle away anymore, isn’t there? What with Tronald Dump taking on the NFL over the American Flag and National Anthem, Tronald Dump taking on Jim Kong Oon in an insult war backed up by ICBMs, and Congress busily trying to take away all our access to health care. (I know I misspelled some names there, but I am tired of talking about that guy that Dorothy told me I should call the “orange-faced poop sack.” No, Dorothy, I can’t call him that. Using language like that robs my head of its helium.) So, what do I do now about the state of the world? Well, here is the Manga Art I drew last night.
Catgirl and White-haired Snow White with a ping pong ball in her mouth.
We have to have a reason to keep going from day to day. Sometimes people you would never expect to give up, real balls of intellectual energy and cultural importance give up and end their own lives. Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, and Robin Williams come to mind with no mental effort..
There has to be an undeniable goodness hidden somewhere in reality that makes life worth living. The real question, then, is how we find it. And in order to find it, we need to be able to recognize goodness when we see it.
A problem arises, though, when we realize that even the worst villains in history see themselves as the good guys, the heroes of their own stories in the annals of history. ,
There are many things in life that are seen generally as bad or evil that can, over time and with factual input come to be seen as a general good. I was more or less taught as a boy that if you masturbate, you are doomed to go to hell when you die. I was taught this after I had already been sexually assaulted and tortured. I tried really hard to completely resist the urge, going so far as to burn myself whenever I felt a desire to do the deed. But when the Methodist minister told our confirmation group the actual facts of life, he also taught us that masturbation is a natural function for both boys and girls. And that it was necessary to learn how your body actually works. And how to approach it with maturity and the realization that in later life you will probably need that practice to maintain a healthy love life based on mutual love, respect, and desire. And as an adult, I would actually reach an understanding that that particular practice was a useful thing for maintaining prostate health, avoiding depression, and helping both your immune system and your sense of satisfaction with life. It is a good thing that is hard to recognize.
I would also learn in my role as a teacher, especially when I taught middle school kids in their “Wonder Years,” that there really are no bad kids or evil kids. When they act out in class, being defiant, disobedient, unruly, inappropriate, and every other kind of stinky behavior that kids do, you can’t just throw them on a trash pile and get rid of them. That only leads to more of the same and a trash pile of monumental size. Rather, every instance of misbehavior has a root cause. And if you take the opportunity to talk to the juvenile offender, you can get down to those root causes where you can solve problems, extinguish bad behaviors, and instill good behaviors. You get to know the kid for who they really are. And I have to admit, by the sixth grade, some kids are so damaged by life there is literally nothing within your power to heal what’s wrong. You can still work with those kids, though, and benefit them in the long run. I had some amazing accomplishments with some kids that other teachers had on their trash piles. There is startling good in some of them, if only you are willing to search for it.
So, what is my reason, as the insufferable know-it-all who is giving you this unasked-for advice about life, for getting up and going on every single day?
Well, I am a pessimist by philosophical habit, and yet, I find more really good and worthwhile things to pursue in this life than bad things to avoid or arm myself against. In fact, I can focus on the good things and ignore the bad (at least until I have a bad week like last week where multiple terrible things happen all at once and screw up everything. I fear that may have been what happened to Robin Williams.)
I can see good coming from all the things the former orange-skinned leader of our government is doing or has done that are basically evil. (There is real evil in the world.) He is busily leading all the evil lemmings in the Republican Party off a cliff that will go a long way towards cleaning up corruption in Washington.
I am still fundamentally a pessimist, but I do recognize;
It is far better to live in the sunlight where you can see what is good and what is evil than to try to hide yourself in the darkness and hope the wolves that are hunting you simply never sniff you out.
Tiki Astro, the robot boy, sat at the control console of the Ancient Red Dragon Space Craft. As a synthetic, computerized being, he was really the only one who could take over the monitoring of the Dragon’s travels when Junior Aero slept. Tiki didn’t have the Psionic ability to read mechanized minds that Junior had, but his computing powers in his psychotronic brain were almost the equal of Junior’s Psion ability to read computer minds via telepathy.
The panel in front of Tiki was a complex sea of buttons, lights, levers and a myriad of labels and warnings written in an indecipherable Ancient script that nobody alive in the present universe could read. Tiki was trying to decipher it in the back of his computerized brain, as he had for a month now. While doing so, he could also look out through the Dragon’s eyes, the bridge of the space craft actually being inside the head of the Dragon, and see the passing stars as the Dragon leaped through jump space into the interior of the Imperium.
“So, Metal Head, how’s it going?” asked Phoenix as he walked onto the bridge.
“My head is not made mostly of metal. Synthetic flesh is composed of elements like…”
“Save the lecture, Tiki. I know what you are. You are the robot trying to be a real boy.”
“Unlike the other boys on this ship, I am only a little over two years old. Three if you count the day my head was activated as my original birthday.”
“Yeah. We are all very different on this flight crew. It makes it all the harder to figure things out.”
“What things?” Tiki asked the flame-haired boy.
“Well, a lot of things are on my mind. I mean, who among us Disciples of the White Spider should be the leader after Sensei Ged Aero?”
“I always assumed it was between Junior Aero and Sara Smith. They are the first two students of the Dojo.” Tiki looked at Phoenix with expressionless eyes.
“Don’t look at me like that. I know it is wrong to be jealous of anyone. But…”
“But you were a leader rather than a follower when you were a student of the Black Spider.”
“Well, yeah… I mean, I was trained by them to be a tactical leader and the commander during combat.”
“And you don’t want to turn over leadership to telepaths and healers?”
“It isn’t just Junior and Sara. I acknowledge that they are my equals in many ways. But there is also the Gaijinese boy, Shu Kwai. He knows how to lead from the front. And his telekinesis is almost as powerful as my pyrokinesis. And when it comes to telepathy, no one among us can keep Hassan Parker out of our heads if he wants to take over our minds. How am I supposed to handle that?”
“What kind of answer are you asking me for?”
“If it came to a fight over who’s in command, would you, as a rational robot, be on my side?”
“Sensei Ged Aero is in charge of this mission.”
“But if something were to happen to him…”
“If it did, we would be in serious trouble already. I would follow the leader with the best plan for whatever the situation is. Maybe you. But also, maybe not you.”
“That’s the kind of answer I expected, Metal Head. But if it came down to it, and the mission was on the line, I would certainly pay attention to who you choose to follow. I know you calculate the odds better than anyone else can.”
“That’s what happens when you make a pocket computer like me into an almost-real boy.”
The conversation ended there, but Phoenix continued studying the stars ahead as he continued to stand behind Tiki and look out the Dragon’s eyes at what was coming into view.
The thing I find to be most witlessly true about both poetry and life is that things can be funny, and make you laugh, and at the same time make you cry on the inside. Humor is hard to write because it can be both happy and sad at the same exact moment. How do you define that quality? The bitter-sweet nature of nature? That’s saying it in a way that is both contradictory and odd. It can give you a wry smile at the same moment it both confounds and confuses you. So better just to shrug your shoulders and tell yourself you know it when you see it… and this either is or isn’t it. Sorry if I made you think too hard, cause I know that sometimes thinking hurts.
Mickey at the Wishing Well of Souls
I found a country well, and I thought I had a quarter,
But I fished in pockets hard, and found nothing for the warter,
And since I had to warp a line to make the poem rhyme,
I figured I would just look in, because I had the time.
I looked into the warty water which sat there still and deep,
And could not see the bottom, and I began to weep.
The water was clear and dark and black,
And the only thing I saw… was Mickey looking back.
And nothing of the wishing well, its magic could I see,
For only there just staring back, the secret thing was me.
I apologize for inflicting poetry on you when you probably came here looking for goofy stuff to laugh at. But my poetry is just like all my word-mangling and picture-crayoning. It tends to be goofy and weird and walking a tightrope over a shark tank between chuckle-inducing and tear-jerking. You probably can’t even tell which is the poetry and which are the burbled brain-farts of commentary that pad this thing out to five hundred words. Four hundred and ninety six, actually.
Life is a slapstick comedy. And when it’s me on the stage, I always seem to be the slappee, not the slapper.
I have had an excitingly terrible week. On Tuesday my car broke down. It had been showing a check-engine light on the dash off and on for over a week. Probably caused by a construction pothole that I hit really hard in mid-August. It was running okay until last weekend when it started coughing and kicking and letting me know in no uncertain terms that it might be dying. We chugged into the Five-Star-Ford service center where it may have breathed its last. The service supervisor told me that they are booked solid until October, so it will be sitting in their overflow lot until then.
But while my wife is still in the Philippines attending her sister’s wedding celebration, we still had her car to use, right? But then we found out that our number two son, who bought that car from my wife, is finishing his Air-Force MOS training and will need that car in Florida to do his first assignment. So, we go from a two-car family to a no-car family by Thursday. Then on Friday, that car also breaks down. I call Triple-A for a tow truck, but they send a battery specialist instead. (Well, I did tell the computer voice that my car wouldn’t start before I talked to a real person, so, my fault.)
But when the battery specialist arrived, he talked me into letting him check the battery. Sure enough, the battery was among the evil dead. And he had a battery with him to give us for free as AAA members. Aha! We temporarily have a car again.
And it was a good thing we had a car on Saturday. My daughter woke up with so much pain in the kidney area of her back that we had to go to Primacare to see a weekend doctor. But she has brand new health insurance. And Primacare couldn’t take that. So, they sent us to the Baylor Hospital Emergency Room. We were headed to a very expensive place with possibly no insurance coverage.
Well, we lucked out again. The hospital did, apparently, take her insurance. They did bloodwork and an MRI to determine it was a urinary tract infection easily treated with generic antibiotics, and no kidney stones showed up on the MRI. So, now, on Sunday night, she is comfortably recuperating in her own bed.
And I will have to solve the car problem by buying myself a new car, something I can actually afford to do since I paid off my bankruptcy debts last year.
If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.
But the question remains, why does this ping-pong game of endless crisis management always seem to happen to me?
First of all, the older I get, and the more my arthritis and my diabetes slow me down and make me clumsy, the more I find Physics, and Gravity, in particular, are now my enemies. I have to walk with a cane everywhere to prevent falling down. And, of course, I fall down anyway. I run into things when I try to move around them. Acceleration, impacts, collisions, and other actions that Physics applies to my locomotive powers erratically are a constant source of ill luck, worry, and pain.
If Statistics evens things out like the Statistics professors say it should, I have enough good luck coming to me to win the lottery three times and then live to a hundred and ten years of age to balance the scales of good and bad luck.
The cartoon portrait exaggerates and calls attention to things that are not ordinarily something to be proud of. MAGA Man’s defiance, Doofy Fuddbugg’s toothless grin, or Dorothy’s threatening presence can all make us laugh and enjoy the funny thing that no one else can give us.
Evil EddyThis portrait has two faces. Which one is the girl’s real persona?And which of the two faces is really the persona of the boy?I can do me funny too.Some people are just naturally part Mr. Bean.He is so bald for a smart man.
Sometimes it seems the stars are simply set against us. But the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars.
It was in a pothole in Scott Mill Road, actually. We hit it at thirty miles an hour near the roped-off road construction as we were going to the CVS to pick up my glaucoma eye drops. I immediately thought we had probably popped a tire, as we did on monster-canyon in a Dallas street a few years ago. But no warning lights were on. And later inspection showed no visible damage.
Still, the next week saw a check-engine light coming on and then going off again… And a few days later the engine began coughing and spitting like a fat man having a heart attack. I had to wait for Monday for the Five Star Ford service department to be open. But Monday I got ill during the weather change and the onset of intermittent rain. So, Tuesday, I barely got the car started, and we limped down to the service center, the car chugging and farting all the way.
So, we get there and immediately find out that the service department was already booked well into October. And the car was too dead to get it anywhere else.
Dang! What lovely bad luck!
And I am going to absolutely need a car at the very least a half-dozen times in the next week. The Princess has to get to the junior college campus in Richardson a couple of times. We need to get to the store and back enough not to starve. And my wife gets back from a wedding in the Philippines on September 12th. She will then need a car of her own too.
I can’t get by for two months without a vehicle of some kind. And getting a new car before the old one can even be looked at is tricky at best.
But I have navigated worse setbacks in my 65+ years on this planet. I don’t actually remember how it was on the planet before this one. I am fairly certain, though, that there is a way to get across this crevice in the rugged path of life.
Smoky Hardretter was adding the final touches to the image on the 3-D display of a Mechanoid-control device. It was essential that they get things right. If they were going to establish control over the planet Mingo, Smoky and his ally Raylond King, two thirds of the ruling triumvirate of the local star cluster, would have to develop a stronger Mechanoid army than the one already controlled by the third triumvir, Evil Emperor Mong the Maniacal.
“Ray, what are we going to do if we can’t overcome Mong’s superior control mechanisms?”
The handsome young Raylond and his beautiful young wife, Tara Salongi, stepped in from the nursery.
“We just got little Amanda to sleep, Smoky. You have to discuss quietly.” Tara’s stern look gave him no room to raise his voice in protest.
“Mong is such a weak-willed ruler. There has to be a way to overcome his advantage.” Ray’s jaw was set in a grim line.
“You haven’t really taken him on directly, Ray. He’s tougher in conflict than he seems when he’s drinking coffee or participating in the mechanical-dance ritual. And he was the one out of the three of us responsible for the defenses of the entire star cluster.”
“Oh, I am aware of that. And it only got worse when we tried to force him to join the New Star League with us. He went directly to Sir Saurol to report us and get Admiral Tang to replace and recall us.”
“Um, guys…” Tara indicated the man-shaped thing listening to their conversation while leaning against the door post.
“Interesting… I seem to be here at just the right time to hear exactly what I needed to hear.”
“Who are you? And what do you want?” Smoky asked.
“He’s the synthezoid robot known as Sorcerer. He’s a bad guy, and you need to shoot him in the head before he can do his robot thing.” Tara was glaring commandingly again.
“Wait! I’m not the early model. I’m Sorcerer 27. New and improved. And I’m the solution to the problem you were just talking about.”
“You want to help us revolt against the Imperium?” asked Raylond.
“I’m tired of being shot in the head before I can perform my miraculous functions. I need to be on the winning side for a change.”
“What can you do for us?” asked Tara suspiciously.
“I possess access to Syn Corporation AI control systems. I can turn your Rot Warrior Zombie Soldiers into reanimated beings who can think creatively and independently, even as well as they did when they were living beings.”
“Why would you help us?” asked Smoky.
“You will reward me with sole control of the planet Zadukar that orbits the Lonely Star in the far corner of the cluster.”
“That miserable hot rock with methane for an atmosphere?” asked Raylond.
“You have a deal!” declared Smoky.
“Yes, but the prince is probably long dead. And, besides, Slythinus himself was probably killed on Stanley,” said Sorcerer.
“Why do you want it?” asked Raylond.
“I just want to be a ruler among the good guys for once,” he said with an evil robotic smile.
Catch a Falling Star 
Mickey Makes Manga Art
I always loved this song. When I was a boy, it was the song I would sing when I was alone in the darkness. It made me feel better, able to march toward home in spite of potential spooks and brain-eating zombies. The weight of the invisible future world could not drag me down if this tune was in my head, filling it with helium and good spirit; it allowed me to fly.
And when I listened to it playing on the radio… I always paused and listened to at least a couple of verses no matter what I was doing… I never once thought of Johnny Nash as a black man. I didn’t know he was black until I first saw a picture of him. But even then I didn’t think, “Oh, he’s a black man.” I thought, “Oh, he’s a man like me.” But, I, of course, am not black. I’m not really white either. I am a kind of pale pink to mauve mottled color with dark pink psoriasis spots in random places all over me. It is the man on the inside that is like Johnny Nash, full of uplifting things, and goofy grins, and… hopefully, hope.
But when I was young it wasn’t only singing “I Can See Clearly Now…” in my goofy farmboy voice that filled my head with air and allowed me to float away from the troubles of the world. I also learned to draw Manga style, in the tradition of Osamu Tezuka’s Astroboy , filtered through hours of practice copying Walt Kelly’s Pogo characters and various Disney cartoons.
I copied the over-large eyes and big-headed cutsieness that informed the Japanese idea of the world after the atom bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I tried to capture innocence and wonder and adventure in drawings that took my mind off the terrible things of my childhood, being sexually assaulted, the assassinations of JFK and his brother RFK, and Martin Luther King Jr, the Viet Nam War, and Nixon with Watergate. You can reclaim innocence and peace of mind, if you get the lines just right, and the proportions are good, and the character has just the right expression on their sweet little faces.
Okay, maybe not always so sweet and innocent. This is not the Dorothy I would want to mess with. This girl is cocky, sure of herself, and more than a little impish. A destroyer of wicked witches, that one.
But that’s what Manga Art is all about. You whistle away the darkness one drawing at a time. And there’s plenty of darkness to whistle away anymore, isn’t there? What with Tronald Dump taking on the NFL over the American Flag and National Anthem, Tronald Dump taking on Jim Kong Oon in an insult war backed up by ICBMs, and Congress busily trying to take away all our access to health care. (I know I misspelled some names there, but I am tired of talking about that guy that Dorothy told me I should call the “orange-faced poop sack.” No, Dorothy, I can’t call him that. Using language like that robs my head of its helium.) So, what do I do now about the state of the world? Well, here is the Manga Art I drew last night.
Catgirl and White-haired Snow White with a ping pong ball in her mouth.
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Filed under artists I admire, artwork, autobiography, cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, commentary, goofiness, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as manga-style art, Osamu Tezuka, Walt Kelly