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…
When I was a kid old enough to begin to see and interact with the real world in the tragic and magical 1960s, the first comic books available to me, long before my parents would allow me to pick up and buy Spiderman and Batman and (shudder) comics with monsters in them, were the kid-friendly comics of the Harvey Brothers.
Now, you have to understand that Harvey Comics had been around since the 1940s and made their money on characters licensed first from the Brookwood Publications company that Alfred Harvey bought out in 1941 to provide the building, equipment, and publishing personnel to start producing comic books.
Robert B. Harvey and Leon Harvey joined the company to help produce titles they now owned the rights too like Black Cat, the Shield, Shock Gibson, and Captain Freedom.
…………………………………………Of course, most of those characters didn’t last very long. Black Cat was the only title still being published by Harvey in the 1950s.
They would go on to license characters from Famous Studios, the animated cartoon works of Max Fleischer and his brother Dave. That’s when the kid- friendly, parent-approved comic books of Fleischer creations like Casper the Friendly Ghost opened up the world of comic books to seven-year-old Mickey circa 1963.
In spite of this cover art, Casper rarely wore clothing.
Now, it is probably obvious that there are many ways that Harvey Comics influenced me as a storyteller later in life. It goes without saying that my dedication to childish humor in stories derives from this comic-book source. The cuteness of characters is another necessity of comic storytelling gleaned from these ripe fields of baby faces. And stories advanced by magical means and absurd sidetracks also come from here. But did you ever notice that Casper and the other ghosts all perform in the nude? Yes, I think my childhood longing to be a nudist began with Casper’s naked adventures. But unlike Casper, my urges along those lines were suppressed and repressed by parents and society as a whole. So watching Casper and Spooky and Pearl (Spooky’s goilfriend) romp naked through comic book hijinks were a sublimated substitution for that childhood desire. (Sure, none of them had genitals, but it wasn’t about that.)
…………………………………………….Of course, there were many other Harvey characters to enjoy that actually did wear clothes. I was particularly fond of Hot Stuff because he made such an art out of burning things and being a bad kid and roasting the backsides of fools and hypocrites with his trident. And he only ever wore a fireproof diaper, so he was almost a nudist too.
There were many other characters licensed by Harvey as well, including Felix the Cat, Little Audrey, Baby Huey, and the characters from Walter Lance Studios like Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda, and Chilly Willy.
Dell would later take over the comic book rights to Walter Lantz Studios creations.
So, now you know the true story of how my innocent childhood was warped and woven and corrupted by the characters of Harvey Comics.
When I am as ill as I am today, it is always a good thing to have a backlog of re-postable blog posts to fill in for the day’s writing. It is even better if it turns out that I still have some non-crappy old posts to choose from.
I have discovered things about being an artist by blogging. I have discovered things by learning from other artists. I have also discovered things by trial and error. I have also discovered things by random acts of God. So let me share some of the ill-gotten picture secrets that I have added to my vast bag of useless incunabula-juice squeezed out with my arcane-secret juicer and internet blogger good luck.
#1. Save everything arty… as you see above, I have three different pictures of my Catch a Falling Star character Dorin Dobbs, all made from the same pen and ink line drawing. All the color is digital paint from my computer’s own paint program. Simple and cheap to do. Save functions multiply the pretty.
#2. Splice stuff together and make new stuff… I have the cheapest possible photo-shop program, but using its entire $7 value every time I paste with…
I am thinking with that old 13th sense again because my daughter and I are both sick with a severe cold, I am almost out of money in the middle of the month after paying doctors for flu tests that thankfully proved negative for actual flu, and I still am not well enough to drive for Uber and make any extra money. So this re-p0st should adequately explain the loopy Mickian thinking I am using in my sick, stupid old head.
I know that you are probably thinking, “What the heck are you thinking, Mickey? There are really only five senses!”
And I am probably thinking, (ignoring the fact that I should know for certain what thinking is present at least in my own stupid head), “Oh, I think you are probably wrong about that,” considering carefully that I should only think this and not say it out loud, because people get mad when you suggest that you are smarter than they are.”
Besides the five senses we all claim of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, there is also that one people often refer to as “the sixth sense”, and by that phrase they don’t necessarily mean that you “see dead people who don’t know they are dead”. Instead, that sense is kinda like a sense of intuition. A feeling that you simply know what is about to occur, or…
Here’s an old post that reveals the real reason I became a teacher. I hope you don’t send men in lab coats with nets and tranquilizers when I reveal the secret.
Idiots say, “If you can’t do something useful, teach.” In Texas, the local wisdom is that teachers are over-paid and don’t work hard enough. They have three months off every year. They have more job security than small-business owners. And all they have to do is talk to kids. Why do we put up with such parasites? Of course you realize I am not talking from my own heart. I am speaking as a despicable straw man that I am intending to knock down, if only I don’t go anthropomorphizing to the point where I associate him with the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz and then find myself unable to knock down the poor misguided man with no brain.
So why would anyone in their right mind want to be a teacher? Oh, yeah… they wouldn’t. What does that say about me? You know, I never wanted to be…
Okay, Mickey, you have said you have confidence in science to the point of not believing in God… at least not the Christian imaginary sky-friend with the white beard and bad temper. But your use of magic words then makes you a hypocrite.
What? Magic words, you say?
You heard me. You use words that give you special powers. And you believe in them like some kind of anti-science religious zealot.
Thank you, Bruce Rydberg, for giving me this useful meme.
Okay, you caught me. There are certain words that do have super powers. I know because I have used them…
You know how in movies and on TV they play a soundtrack behind the action of the show? And how, sometimes, if the movie or TV show is any good, it enhances and underscores whatever is happening to the main theme of story and the action that expresses it on the screen? Yeah, that. A complex idea that lies just under the surface of consciousness, a something that somebody sometime thought up that actually works and can work quite well. But why does it work?
Put as simply as I can say an idea that is so layered and complex, it is because that is how real life works. Yeah, there is music in the background of every life. It plays almost unnoticed until that point where you suddenly realize how it defines your very soul.
Through childhood and junior high and high school, I used to joke with my…
Here’s wishing that Christmas elves find you this day. The Santa’s elf in the Paffooney is holding up greetings from snowflake elves and storybook elves to help you feel entertained, mystified, and victimized by elfshot. This season of Tchaikovsky Nutcracker elves and Fantasia elves and jolly old Saint Nicholas is constantly trying to frizzfry your senses and make you have feelings that pierce the hard-hearted feelings of everyday usual people living life with no magic and no imagination. Nuts to that! Christmas nuts! Nuts roasted on an open fire. Jack Frost nipping at your nose. Nuts carolling in the snow outside your door hoping you have some hot cocoa to spare because they were nutty enough to go out singing on a cold night with Jack Frost in a nipping frenzy already before they even began putting their nutty noses at risk. (Okay, maybe I don’t wish Jack is one of the Christmas elves that find you. They are not all wonderful.) And that magic that elves bring is the magic of being together with family, the magic of love. So here’s wishing that elves find you on Christmas, and you’ve run out of Scroogie elf repellent just in time to feel the love the season brings, and before the mangled elf-metaphors melt in the light of reason and rationality that take hold of us all the rest of the year.
Thank you, Bruce Rydberg, for giving me this useful meme. 
Catch a Falling Star 