March 20, 2016 · 4:26 pm

Milt Caniff

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My 1967 Captain Action Steve Canyon action figure.

I have always been a deeply devoted fan of the Sunday funnies.  And one of the reasons I read the comics religiously was the work of Milt Caniff.  His comic strips, Terry and the Pirates, Male Call, and Steve Canyon set a standard for the age of action comics and adventure strips.

I read his comics in the 1960’s and 1970’s and always it was Steve Canyon.  But this, of course, was not his first strip.  I would discover in my college years the wonders of Terry and the Pirates.  When Caniff started the strip before World War II, he set it in China, but actually knew nothing about China.  So he did research.  He learned about people who became oriental hereditary pirate families and organizations.  He learned to draw authentic Chinese settings.  His comedy relief characters, Connie and the Big Stoop, were rather racist parodies of Chinamen and were among the reasons that the original strip had to mature into his later work in Steve Canyon.  But perhaps the most enduring character from the strip was the mysterious pirate leader known as the Dragon Lady.

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Steve Canyon is a fascinating study in the comic arts.  When he left the Terry and the Pirates strip in 1946, it went on without him.  It was owned by the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News distribution syndicate, not Caniff himself.  Steve Canyon would change that.  He created it and owned it himself, making Caniff one of only two or three comics artists who actually owned their own creations.  Canyon started out as a civilian pilot, but enlisted in the Air Force for the Korean War and would remain in the Air Force for the remainder of the strip.  Some of the characters in the strip were based on real people.  His long-time friend Charlie Russhon, a former photographer and Lieutenant in the Air Force who went on to be a technical adviser for James Bond films was the model for the character Charlie Vanilla, the man with the ice cream cone.  Madame Lynx was based on the femme fatale spy character played by Illona Massey in the 1949 Marx Brothers’ movie Love Happy.  Caniff designed Pipper the Piper after John Kennedy and Miss Mizzou after Marilyn Monroe.

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I am not the only cartoonist who was taken with the work of Milt Caniff.  The effects of his ground-breaking work can be seen to influence the works of comic artists like Jack Kirby, Bob Kane, John Romita Sr., and Doug Wildey.  If you are anything like the comic book nut I am, than you are impressed by that list, even more so if I listed everyone he influenced.  Milt Caniff was a cartoonists’ cartoonist.  He was one of the founders of the National Cartoonists’ Society and served two terms as its president in 1948 and 1949.  He is also a member of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.

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March 19, 2016 · 3:55 pm

Elmer Mater Does Good!

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I am a graduate of both Iowa State University, where I earned my Bachelor’s Degree in English, and the University of Iowa where I got my remedial master’s degree so I could teach English.  It sometimes makes rooting for college sports difficult due to divided loyalties.  But not yesterday.  Yesterday we rocked the NCAA basketball tournament.  The Iowa Hawkeyes beat tenth-seeded Temple 72 to 70.  The Iowa State Cyclones beat Iona 94 to 81.  And my little sister’s team, the UNI Panthers, even stunned the tournament by beating Texas with a last second shot 75 to 72.  All three Iowa teams in the tournament advanced to the second round.  It was the first time ever.  And Iowa State is looking especially good as an advancing number 4 seed.  I rarely get such a chance to gloat over Elmer Mater’s success.  (I do realize it is supposed to be Alma Mater, but we are Iowa country folk… Elmer sounds more likely.)

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NCAA Basketball Tournament - First Round - Northern Iowa v Texas

OKLAHOMA CITY, OK – MARCH 18: Paul Jesperson #4 of the Northern Iowa Panthers celebrates with his teammates after hitting a half court three pointer at the buzzer to defeat the Texas Longhorns with a score of 75 to 72 during the first round of the 2016 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament at Chesapeake Energy Arena on March 18, 2016 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)

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March 18, 2016 · 3:06 pm

Mickey Draws Mickey

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I learned to draw comics by copying the comics.  So how many times has Mickey actually drawn Mickey?  More than I can count.  I hate throwing a drawing away, even if I did it when I was ten.  But I cannot find all the drawings I have done of Mickey Mouse.  I know some have been given away, some have gotten lost, and some may have even gone up in flames in the garbage barrel out back of the house in the 1960’s.  I have posted pictures of Mickey before.  Remember this one?

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But I can basically do Mickey without looking at any references.  I can do him well enough that people often say, “You didn’t really draw that, did you?”  That’s why I included the simple pen and ink stage of today’s Mickey.  You can see it is really me drawing it.  But the absolute truth is, I draw Mickey because in so many ways I am Mickey.  Yes, I’m a talking mouse that drives a car and owns a dog.  And even though Disney sues right and left for any imagined copyright infringement, I can safely post this here because it is fan art… and I don’t get paid anything for this goofy blog anyway.  It is homage, not theft of intellectual property.

So, here is the final product, drawn this morning, the day after St. Patrick’s day 2016.

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March 17, 2016 · 3:52 pm

Collecting Disney Princesses

 

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Collecting dolls and action figures can overwhelm someone like me with hoarding disorder (and a Grandmother and Great Aunt who hardly had room to walk around their homes because of piles of collected stuff that they simply could not part with).  There have to be rules and limits to save me from myself.  I try hard to keep Disney Princesses from flooding my home and drowning me in a sea of plastic.  The toymakers are constantly updating and modifying their designs to entice fools like me to keep buying.

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A round of new designs with glittered-up clothes and new faces. Can I resist buying them all? Well, not the first four times.

I have to stop and take stock of where I’m at.  I rounded up all the Disney dolls I have that are not mint in boxes for collecting purposes and potential resale in the collectibles market.  Here they are;

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There are several ways that I can go about trying to limit and prune this massive obsession.  First and foremost, I can break this gigantic feeding frenzy up into smaller bites and pick and choose how long I chew.  This part of my collection, is based on the Tinkerbell movies and is limited to only one edition of these dolls.  It took over a year to buy all four;

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There are just four dolls in this set.  I chose only the size consistent with the 12-inch figures I always choose.  No little ones.  No second editions.  No doll costing more than $20.

Some of the dolls are rescue dolls, either bought naked at Goodwill or another thrift store, taken home to be cleaned, repaired, restored, and dressed (like the Ariel doll I posted first in this post).  These are probably my most valuable acquisitions, because they are previously loved and played with.  (The Jasmine doll in the middle belonged to my daughter, who had a tendency to mangle and experiment on dolls as well as strip them permanently naked.  This doll’s survival is a minor miracle.)

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The rescued dolls include two Snow Whites, a Jasmine that belonged to my daughter, and Mulan… mostly dressed in Barbie clothes.

The remainder of these collected dolls are recent edition Disney Princesses that I waited for some time to acquire so that they would come down in price.  A couple of these, like Tiana and Repunzel, and all the Frozen Dolls are not also represented in my collection by mint in box dolls.  I do have Belle and Aurora and even Tarzan’s Jane, but boxed only, so they are not pictured here.

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So you can see what a trippy-type trial it has become to keep a collection like this from taking over the house.  I have to impose limits on myself so I don’t become a weird old man living in cardboard box under a bridge with hundreds of dolls and action figures.

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March 16, 2016 · 3:12 pm

The Pirates’ Nest

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Yesterday I completed a drawing that I have been working on for 3 days.  This is a background drawing of The Pirates’ Nest on the northern coast of Fantastica.  It is where the pirates live and do their banker jobs and sell health insurance.  You know, acts of pure evil.

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I intend to use it to cheat when making cartoons.  I can draw characters and then place them in the scene with photo-shop.  I can put pirates like Black Timothy (seen here all in red) and his pal Scruffy Bill (with two wooden legs, two wooden arms, and a wooden head) into the scene.  Or, I could insert some of the pirate leaders like Pirate King Ronny Ray-gun into the scene.

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So, today’s post is one of those lazy posts where I just post something I drew and write some snarky humor-like stuff.  But I am thinking I am doing something right.  I have set all-time highs for views and visits on this blog in the last seven days, with two days over 100.  It is possible that it is just the NSA looking at my conspiracy theory posts, or even the international banking conspiracy watching for me posting stuff like this that calls them pirates and reveals their ultimate evil.  But it could also be that some of you actually like the stuff I post while pretending to be an actual author and competent writer.  Who knows?

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March 15, 2016 · 3:23 pm

Amazing Days

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One never knows how things are going to turn out.  My car, which was nearly paid off, gets destroyed by a passing motorist as it was parked in front of my house.  I endured two weeks of driving the rented Chibi Clown Car from Enterprise, I endured a financial set-back for an accident that was completely not my fault, but it resulted in being able to buy an updated version of the same make and model from Enterprise, lowering my monthly car payments and now owning a car that is superior to the one I lost.  Of course, I got a letter in the mail yesterday from a bank that is denying me credit for buying a car.  Every wave is followed by a trough and then another wave.  That is just how life works.

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I pitched a no-hitter yesterday in EA Sports Baseball ’04 on my X-box.   Of course this game and game machine are more than 12 years old, so I have had time to practice, a lot!  And the game is still set on rookie level.  But, what the heck, I deserve a little bit of easy victory now and then.

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My writing goals took a few shots in the last two months.  My publisher has experienced a financial hardship and slow-down before my novel actually gets into print.  My novel sales for Catch a Falling Star have tanked and I have the publicist from that publisher calling me, asking me to invest lots of money in a new publicity campaign.  Like I want to invest $4,000 in a campaign that may only yield another 16 dollars in a year’s time.  But I found a much cheaper way to get reviewed and promoted by Serious Reading ( http://seriousreading.com/ ).   They promise the same or better results for $3,950 less.  And I also learned from my publisher that they are making a come-back.  So, it is even possible that I can get further novels published through PDMI.

I remain a pessimist.  I will never be disappointed by unrealistic expectations.  I anticipate nothing but disaster and misfortune.  But as long as the house is still standing and Armaggedon is not happening as fast as the Jehovah’s Witnesses anticipate, there are still good things to be found and to have happen.  And since I wasn’t expecting any good things, they are all pleasant surprises.

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March 14, 2016 · 3:33 pm

Wally Wood

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A self-portrait by Wallace Wood.

I am a bit of a cartoonist for a reason.  I started drawing cartoons at the age of five.  I read everything in the Sunday funny pages, not just for the jokes.  I poured over the drawings and copied some.  I drew Dagwood Bumstead and Blondie.  I drew Lil’ Abner and Charlie Brown and Pogo.  Cartoonists were heroes to me.

But my parents wanted to protect me from the evils of comic books.  Superheroes were off limits most of the time.  Things that are associated with evil were out of the question.  So Daredevil was beyond reach.  And Mad Magazine was full of socialist ideas and led kids down the dark path of satire.  So the truth is, I didn’t discover Wally Wood until I was in college.  His corrupting influence didn’t take hold of me until I was older and full of hormones.  Ah, youth and the propensity for sin!  Wally taught me that cartoons could be real.

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Wally Wood was one of the original artists working for EC comics who formed Mad Magazine with it’s spoofs and irreverent humor.  Wood worked together with the Great Will Eisner on the Spirit.  He went on to work for Marvel on the comic book Daredevil where he innovated the red suit and double-D logo, as well as doing the primary story-telling that brought that comic book from the bottom of the Marvel stack to almost the very top.  His work on Daredevil resonates even until today where there is now a big controversy that the popular show on Netflix does not list Wood among the creators of Daredevil in their credits.  I must remember to complain about that later.

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But the thing that drew me to Wood more than anything was the realistic style that he brought to the unreal realm of cartoons.  The man could draw!  He did marvelous detail work and was a leader in the development of dynamic composition in an artistic industry that tolerated and even often encouraged really poor-quality drawing.  He took the comic book from the age of the glorified stick figure to an age of cinematic scope and know-how.  Here it is revealed in his classic break-down of innovative comic-book panels;

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But it is also important to realize that the more power you put into art, the more it can blow up and hurt people.  Wood had a dark side that went a bit darker as he went along.  He had an issue with the kind of false front comics had to throw up in front after the anti-comics crusade of psychologist Fredric Wertham’s book Seduction of Innocents.  He is probably the artist behind the cartoon poster The Disneyland Memorial Orgy.  He started his own cartoon studio that produced increasingly erotic and pornographic comics like Sally Forth, Cannon, and Gangbang.  He became increasingly ill, lost the sight in one eye, suffered severe headaches, and eventually committed suicide in 1981.  With great power comes great responsibility, and we are not all superheroes in the end.  But I will always admire and emulate the work of this great artist… and selfishly wish he could’ve lived to create more of the wonderful art he gave us.

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March 13, 2016 · 4:04 pm

World Building

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As a novelist I am very aware of the importance of setting.  It is an essential part of of telling a story, to be able to set the stage upon which the characters will act out the plot.  The setting pictured here is one created for my family’s on-going D&D Role-playing set in the campaign world of Eberron, here on the continent of Xendrick which was long ago ruled by magical giants.  It is built around details.  There are in this picture three elements that are actually aquarium decorations (the two jewel-eyed skulls and the Egyptian ruin construct in the background).  The silver skull and the Princess Jasmine figure come from gumball vending machines (Jasmine comes from a vending machine in the hotel lobby in Anaheim when we took the kids to Disneyland).  The thatch-roofed house in the background is from my manic urge to create cardboard castles.  The skeleton-faced statue came out of a box of cheap plastic toys from Dollar Tree that Grandpa bought for my eldest son back in 1998.  If there is any kind of point to this paragraph, it is that this detail-rich setting photo is created with unusual parts, parts that lots of people would not think to include in the world-building process.

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If I have any claim at all to a talent for creating a good setting, it comes from my creative juxtaposition of widely disparate objects.  (In English, it means I like to stick weird stuff together in the same place.)  That, of course, is the very definition of surrealism.  Making the bizarre seem natural and right.  It is how you create a science fiction setting, a fantasy novel setting, and even a setting for a hometown novel set in the little Iowa town I grew up in during the 60’s and 70’s.  (You might not fully believe me yet, as I have not published more than one of my hometown novels, but I do have a hometown setting made of a hidden fairy kingdom, a haunted house, a mad scientist’s laboratory, a witch’s hovel, a mysterious sea captain’s house, a house haunted by rumors of werewolves, and a connection to the dream lands that often lets other-worldly clowns wander our streets.)  (That last now holds the record as the second-longest parenthetic expression I have ever used in my writing.)

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Of course, setting by itself is meaningless.  It must be interactive with the characters that inhabit it.  As the dragon crashes through the castle wall behind them, Princess Aurora and her little mechanical body guard, Clockwerky, are not even facing it.  Are they ignoring it because they are actually quite stupid?  Or since it seems to be heading out of the scene to stage left, are they simply assuming it has to be somebody else’s problem?  Either way the setting and the characters don’t mesh in a way that furthers the actual story… at least, not without a lot of additional explanation.

So, can I explain in any sort of a simple fashion how this 500 word treatise on setting is to be understood?  Yes.  Very simply, settings are built of details… lots of details.  And settings and characters have to work together.  Here endeth the lesson.

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Mervin the Minotaur and Barrabas the Half-Ogre each roll a natural 20 to double-slay the dire elephant that was threatening princess Jasmine, while in the background, Oneorb the Cyclops rolls a 1 and bashes himself in the head.

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March 12, 2016 · 6:09 pm

Cowboy Dolls

Cleaning in the library led me to rediscover an old project.  Roy Rogers and Trigger had been sitting next to the TV in the library.  I found them both on the floor between the TV and a book stack.  Time to pick them up and put them back in shape.

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The doll is a random military action figure rescued naked from a thrift store.  I thought the face looked enough like Roy Rogers to turn him into that particular hero.  The horse is from Mattel, and probably is part of a Barbie play-set. It was given to me by a relative.  I dressed Roy in a Lone Ranger Captain Action uniform with a Tonto gun belt, both created by Playing Mantis Toy Company in the late 1990’s.  The hat is actually from a Cowgirl Barbie because I wanted a Roy Rogers-style almost-white hat.  The Lone Ranger hat is too flat-brimmed to look right and way too large to fit on Roy’s smaller head, and the only other cowboy hat I have for it is a Johnny West hat from Marx Toys in the 1960’s, and that is dark brown.

Everything Johnny West that I still have was salvaged from the house where I grew up back in the 1980’s.  They belonged to my little brother, but ended up in my collection because he outgrew dolls and action figures long before I did.  I wish I still had the doll himself, but I think Dabney blew him up with a firecracker when he was a teenager.

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So, I have to be happy with only having Roy and Cowgirl Barbie to play with.

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March 11, 2016 · 4:18 pm

Happiness

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It took a while.  I started this blog in 2013.  But I have built it up gradually.  And now I have reached the point that my publisher’s publicity expert said I should reach in a few months.  My novel is not doing nearly as well.  My high-priced consultants (high-priced for me because I have no money) want me to spend more money to try again to get the novel noticed.  What I have actually noticed is that they are making a helluva lot more money than I am.  I am resolved now to do it on my own.  I will find my own way in marketing, or fail on my own.  I don’t need to be paying anybody to help me fail.  I am doing that quite well on my own.  And I have reason to think this blog might be succeeding.  The I-Universe marketing team cannot legitimately claim to have anything at all to do with that.  I thank them for what they have taught me about the business.  They taught me that no one really wants to help me but me myself.  They are in it for the money.  And like unsuccessful authors everywhere, I have begun telling myself, it is not about the money… especially not money for them.

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