Happy Birthday, Carl Barks
Carl Barks was born on March 27th, 1901. So, today is his 118th birthday. If you have no idea who I’m even talking about, then you were never a kid and a comic book fan in the 1960s. Carl Barks is both Uncle Scrooge’s father and Donald Duck’s stepfather.
Carl is a personal art hero of mine. I grew to adulthood on the adventures of his plucky ducks doing duck adventures in Duckburg. I have written about my devotion to Carl in this blog before. In fact, here is the link; https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2014/09/27/carl-barks-master-of-the-duck-comic/
That’s essentially true. A large part of my character as a junior high school English teacher was based on what I learned about mentoring from Scrooge McDuck and about teaching important facts from Gyro Gearloose.
Carl was not immune to criticism. Cartoonists get blow-back, a fact of life. But he overcame it with a wry sense of humor and interesting views of how you pursue goals in life. He had a firm sense of fair-play and justice. You could get actual morals to the stories in a Carl Barks’ duck cartoon.
The characters were not perfect. They all had glaring flaws, the heroes right along with the villains. Of course, the villains never learned to change their ways, while the heroes often learned to improve themselves by working on the weaknesses, and it wasn’t all about becoming a gazillionaire (a term I think Barks may have invented).
I even learned a good deal about adventure story-telling from Carl Barks’ comic books about Duck people doing ducky stuff that was really about people doing people-y stuff in the real world. Yes, people in the world around me are very Carl Barks’ ducky.
So, happy birthday, Carl. 118 years young. And he’s only been gone from our world since August of 2000. He still talks to me and teaches me through his Duck comics.
Filed under artists I admire, autobiography, comic book heroes, goofy thoughts, humor
When the Captain Came Calling… Canto 12
Canto Twelve – Mom Matters
“Honey, I’m not trying to be mean to you or anything,” Valerie’s Mom said so that Valerie was clearly meant to understand that she was about to be very mean, but she wasn’t trying to. “You have to tell us where you are going and what you are doing… and who you are doing it with.”
“Oh, Mom. I’m not a baby anymore! You need to trust me.”
“I do trust you. I just don’t trust everyone you’ve been hanging around with in town.”
“You don’t trust Mary Philips?”
“Oh, I trust Mary fine, I…”
“Is it Pidney you don’t trust? He’s a football hero, you know.”
“Pidney is fine too, I…”
“Ray Zeffer? You don’t like Ray Zeffer?”
“I’m sure he’s a fine young man, but…”
“Then you don’t like Danny? He’s practically my best friend. He ain’t a girl like Jane and Wanda, or my cousin Stacy, but I can actually talk to Danny!”
“Valerie Elaine Clarke! You are jumping to conclusions again. You need to let me talk.”
Mom looked out the kitchen window at the table in the yard where Daddy Kyle and Uncle Dash were in serious discussion. It was farm talk. But it did seem an awful lot like older brother, Dash Clarke, was seriously lecturing younger brother, Kyle Clarke, about something that was seriously upsetting to both men. Was that worry on Mom’s face? Valerie wasn’t sure whether it was worry for Valerie, or worry for Daddy Kyle. But she was sure it was worry-wart levels of worrying.
“You do realize,” Mom said, “that Conrad Doble is a lot older than you are.”
“Yes, Mom, I know.”
“And you know he was in trouble with the law? He was involved in that whole wolf-dog thing when those attack dogs killed poor old Mrs. White.”
“Yes, I know. But I don’t even like creepy old King Leer. I try to stay away from him.”
“He’s a part of that club thing that Mary Philips is stirring up again.”
“You mean the Pirates? We are a 4-H Club softball team, Mom. They want me to play second base.”
“It’s a long time before summer softball comes around. And you don’t understand what it was like before when those Pirates were making trouble in the 70’s.”
“Mom, Brent was the leader of the Pirates then.”
“Well, yes. And your cousin is a fine young man now. But the Pirates tell such weird stories and get into such weird situations.”
“Werewolves and an undead Chinese wizard, huh?”
“Now, you know I don’t believe any of those stories were true. It’s just that…”
“You know that Torrie Brownfield had that hair disease that made hair grow all over his body. He was an awful lot like a werewolf!”
“Okay, but that’s not what I’m trying to say right now. That Doble boy is not trustworthy. He is capable of some very bad things. Maybe even drugs.”
“Believe me, I know, Mom. But I can take care of myself. And Pidney and Ray have both told King Leer to leave me alone or they would beat the snot out of him.”
Valerie’s Mom gave a brief chuckle. “Pidney could do it too,” she said. “Doble would be black and blue all over. I have great respect for Pidney Breslow’s football muscles. It’s just that…”
“I know. When a girl reaches a certain age… You know I had this talk with Daddy too.”
“Yes, well…”
At that moment, Daddy Kyle and Uncle Dash came storming in to the kitchen, the screen door making a sound almost like a gunshot as it slammed closed behind Uncle Dash.
“That goddam agent lied to me, Dash!” Kyle shouted. “He promised me more time, and now he doesn’t even admit what he actually said to me before. He shook my hand on it!”
“But he’s a government man, Kyle! You should’ve known better than to trust the goddam FHA like that. They wanted a chance to foreclose from the very start!”
Mom’s eyes were large and frightened as she looked at Daddy Kyle for answers, and Valerie was sure her own eyes were also.
“Kyle?” Mom sputtered, “Is something wrong?”
“Oh, it’s the goddam FHA… er,” Kyle looked at both Mom and Valerie and appeared to finally register the big scared eyes. “Um, it is something we should discuss later. Not in front of the Princess.”
Uncle Dash suddenly quieted himself as well. “Yeah, um… we’re not done yet, Kyle. But I promised Dad I would look after all of it before he died. I am not going to go back on my word. We’ll find a way. I just wish you hadn’t accepted those last two loans.”
“It takes money to farm, Dash. You know I didn’t plan on the hail or the combine breaking down so soon.”
“Hell, I know you didn’t, Kyle. We will find a way.”
Uncle Dash looked grim. Daddy Kyle looked sad. Valerie walked up to him and hugged him around the middle. She didn’t know why, but she knew it was a very important thing to do just then. And Mom was looking at her and nodding ever so slightly. Not everything Valerie did was wrong.
Filed under daughters, farming, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Random Sunday Ruminations
Sometimes I simply have to stop and think hard about what I am thinking about. You can probably tell by today’s first Paffooney that I am thinking in Biblical proportions today. The picture is called “David Plays for Saul”. In the Bible story, the survival of Israel is definitely in question. King Saul, the anointed ruler, is under intense pressure from governing a kingdom that chose him rather than giving him a chance to choose for himself. He is surrounded by enemies with significant military power. He goes a bit loony over the matter, consulting astrologers and witches, even though God has told him through prophets, “Saulie, don’t do that, boy!” The prophet Samuel even goes so far as to find a new candidate for an anointed king, David the Shepherd, Son of Jesse. Saul uses his irrational mind to come up with a solution to the problem. “I know!” he says to himself. “I’ll murder the boy in front of God and everybody.” (Sort of a Trumpian solution, right?)
And then David plays his harp and sings. That decides the matter. Saul is calmed in his murderous mind and abandons murder plans just long enough to eventually lose his crown along with his head in battle against the Philistines. (No danger of Trump copying Saul there.)
So, as I sit and chew my cud and ruminate like a mooncalf, I am thinking we need a King David to replace the King Pumpkinhead we have now. And then he or she must fight harder than the Biblical David to overcome what has happened to us. If Israel represents the world, then Israel may soon be destroyed without a wise king. Climate change, dictators with nukes, and Republican kowtowing to billionaires are real problems not solvable through astrology.
Too often, it seems, I am the mooncalf, the monstrously malformed creature created by a lifetime of hard experience, loss, and fear of the future. But in many ways I am a self-made man. I know this because I sewed on my new right hand, implanted new eyeballs, and did numerous brain-enhancement surgeries on myself. (I do hope you realize I mean that figuratively, not literally. No, really! You can put away the torches and pitchforks!) I feel like a monster when I look at myself critically and end up not liking what I see.
Still, the world is full of beauty and wonder, for now, at least. And we must enjoy it while we have it, living the best life we can before it all too soon comes to its end.
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Hidden Kingdom (Chapter 2 adding page 17)
The weekly update of Hidden Kingdom.
If you would like to see the complete Chapter 1, it can be found at this link; https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2018/11/24/hidden-kingdom-chapter-1-complete/
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Peach Pie
Whether we are talking Syrians or Hondurans or even relatives from Florida, everybody could stand a slice.
In the 1960’s back in Iowa, family reunions started happening around this time of year. We would make long treks to distant parts like Spencer, Iowa or Coralville, Iowa to meet with cousins by the dozens, with Great Aunts and their great families… people we looked somewhat like and were actually related to, but usually didn’t see more than twice in any given year. And there were some who lived in far off Cleveland, Ohio that you only saw twice in the entire decade. And it isn’t real easy to play with the kids you are related to but don’t see every day. Squabbles happen more often than not. What was the solution to that kind of warfare? According to Great Aunt Marie, the solution was a nice piece of peach pie. The offending cousin and I would each get a slice of the solution to eat side by side…
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On the Highway (a quick poem about going faster)
I am a truly awful poet. And I know it. But my feet don’t show it. They are not Longfellow’s.
I painted this oil painting looking West on Highway 3. My home town in Iowa is just beyond the next hill.
On The Highway
Leave dirt roads behind…
On the highway you go faster.
Pavement gives you ease to speed.
In fact, why use that two-lane road?
The Interstate is faster.
Limited access off and on…
The legal limit goes up to 70…
Or even 75…
85 with no cops around.
Straight over the horizon…
Into the mist-blue distance…
You are not really going anywhere…
But you will get there faster!
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Double Portrait in the Nude
I did a double-duty pen and ink illustration of two nude girls in a PG-13 sort of mode. It is not intended to be pornography. It is also not intended to draw viewers to my blog just because I happened to notice an uptick in views whenever I put a nude in an art post. I wouldn’t do that… would I? At least, not in a way that you could prove that was my intent.
There is an actual plan for using this drawing. It could work as an illustration for one or two or even three of my novels. You could argue that these are the twin-sister nudists, Sherry and Shelly Cobble from the book Recipes for Gingerbread Children. Here is the link if you want to read it to prove me wrong; https://www.amazon.com/Recipes-Gingerbread-Children-Michael-Beyer-ebook/dp/B07KQTMN7R/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=154752An0896&sr=8-1&keywords=michael+beyer+books+recipes+for+gingerbread+children
Notice, you can get it for one dollar on Kindle, or free with Amazon Prime membership.
They could also be used as an illustration for one of the fairy stories, representing the two nude Storybook fairies, Gretel and Anneliese. They also appear in Recipes, as well as potential appearances in future fairy stories.
Anyway, I have already gone and done it, posting this picture I drew today, to give you a good look at either Shelly or Anneliese’s shapely behind. I won’t make the mistake of posting it on Facebook.
The Unquiet Teacher Brain
I still think like a teacher at five years retired, so I present this blog post as proof that I don’t take my own writing advice when I write.
Yesterday, as I was reviewing a movie that is almost as old as I am (in December, 1961 I was 5), I couldn’t help but think like a teacher. If I were going to teach this movie as a piece of literature (and movies ARE literature! Don’t argue with me!!!), I would start with an anticipation guide… or I could call it a lesson focus. I would tell the students a little bit about why this movie is important to me. I would give the background information about how Walt Disney wanted to make a musical picture like The Wizard of Oz, and even bought the rights to Oz books by Frank L. Baum to make it happen. It was supposed to be a starring vehicle for his popular Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeers, and ended up starring Annette Funicello (and I would never mention anything about my childhood desire…
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Catch a Falling Star 
Being a Child for More Than 60 Years
Yes, in some ways, I have Peter Pan syndrome. I have never truly grown up. But not in the ways that really matter in life.
As a writer of fiction, I put all my effort into writing young adult novels. My main characters are mostly children from roughly around eight years old to teens who are almost adults.
But it is not as G-rated as Nancy Drew. I have issues that creep in to become the monster under the bed. My childhood was not all naked innocence and sunshine.
Don’t get me wrong. I had wonderful parents. And wonderful grandparents. And the little town of Rowan, Iowa becomes the town of Norwall in all my Earthbound fiction. It was a very magical, if boring, place to grow up. I lived in town, but my uncles and grandparents lived on working farms. I knew farm life. I knew how you fed animals, trained animals, and helped them reproduce. I knew that farm animals die. And, sometimes, people die too. Even people who are important to you and you depend on.
And at the ripe old age of ten, I was sexually assaulted by an older boy. It is hard to talk about that even now, 52 years later. It wasn’t so much a sex act that I was forced to commit. It was more of a sexual-torture thing. He took his pleasure from twisting my private parts, making me hurt intensely, telling me all the while not to scream or call out for help. I think I even passed out at one point. There was no pleasure in it for me in any way. In fact, once he let me go with more threats, I promptly turned it into a repressed memory for twelve years. It turned me from an outgoing, leader-of-the-gang type kid into a miserable wallflower. It made me contemplate suicide as a teen. It led to some self harm that my parents never actually figured out, burning my lower back against the heater grate and making small burn scars on my arms and legs. It kept me from falling in love with a girl until my thirties. And it made me turn myself inside out through drawings, cartoons, and story-telling.
Some of the key stories I have turned into novels were created because of what happened to me, the horror at the center of my childhood. The monster in my novel, The Baby Werewolf, and the serial killer in Fools and Their Toys were both inspired by him, were both a reaction to what he did to me.
And do you know what he means to me now? I have forgiven him. He passed away a few years ago of a heart condition. I avoided him and his family from when it happened until now. I never told anyone what he did to me. I never sought any kind of revenge or justice for his act. To this day I still haven’t revealed his name to anyone, though I have been able to talk about it in this blog since he died. He has paid his price. The scales are balanced. I am healed. That is enough.
What he gave me, though, was a gift of purpose and an ability to fight the darkness with a strategy of sharing every tactic I have learned about defending myself from predators, depression, and crippling self-loathing in novel form. I shared those tactics as well during my years as a teacher and mentor to kids who had problems like mine for which my solutions sometimes also served as answers. I was able to put into thematic form the positive answers to the question every kid asks themselves somewhere along the road to adulthood, “Am I a monster because of what I have done and what has happened to me?”
The answer, of course, is, “No, I am not a monster.” But kids like me desperately need someone to tell them that and give them reasons why it is true. Fiction can do that. At least, I believe that it can.
And so, I write YA novels, novels for kids trying to become adults. And what good does that do if nobody ever reads my books? Or even this blog post which some of you who actually read my blog posts have probably given up on as too hard to read several paragraphs ago? It keeps me young. At 62 I still think like a twelve-year-old. Admittedly a wise-beyond-his-years twelve-year-old. I have never grown up in my mind where it counts. And maybe it even makes me able to fly like Peter Pan. But no jumping off roofs to find out for sure.
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Tagged as surviving sexual assault