March 25, 2016 · 2:53 pm

Gray Morrow

Comic book artwork grabs me constantly and makes me wonder about the lives behind the pen and ink.  Artists basically draw themselves.  Whether you are drawing Tarzan, Buck Rogers, or Flash Gordon… when you draw them, you are drawing yourself.  My first encounter with Gray Morrow was when he drew Orion in Heavy Metal Magazine (the English version of the French Metal Hurlant).

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He was capable of drawing both the grotesque and the beautiful.  Violent action juxtaposed with soft and romantic moments filled with subtle colors and complex emotion.  I began thinking that Gray Morrow must be a complex and interesting human being.  I was soon to discover his other selves.  He was the artist behind the Buck Rogers strip starting in 1979.  He and Marvel writer Roy Thomas co-created the muck monster Man-Thing.

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He also worked on Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and The Illustrated Roger Zelazny.  Unfortunately he died in 2001 at age 67.  Luckily an artist puts himself into his work, and for that reason we still have Gray Morrow with us.  It is a kind of immortality.

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This cover from Monsters Unleashed gives you an idea of how well Gray Morrow could draw.

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March 24, 2016 · 3:22 pm

Skyscape

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It is difficult to look at the sky and not feel that the power of Heaven is real.  As I approach the halfway point of my sixtieth year, and the darkness of the future draws ever nearer, I am forced to think about what I really believe.  Being smarter than the average bear has its drawbacks.  I understand why most of the writers I most admire were atheists, and all of the philosophers I have read and found agreement with are decidedly atheist.   Science, rationality, and reason all suggest that there is nothing beyond the physical realm.  Should that matter?  Faith, according to Mark Twain, is fervently believing in your heart what your mind tells you ain’t so.  In fact, Hebrews 11:1 says, “Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld.”  Even the Bible is saying you have to believe it even though you shouldn’t believe it.

So, will I go to Heaven when I die?  For me, the question is meaningless.  I look up at the miracle of a blue sky on a partly cloudy day and see the life-giving sun.  I am alive… here and now… and nothing else is really relevant.  I am a part of the great, vast universe of reality.  My existence is real and cannot be unmade… even by God, if He were inclined to do such a thing.  I am a small, insignificant part of reality, and I can be gone in the next instant like a puff of smoke in the wind.  But I am here and I am alive and I took the Paffooney picture that I used to illustrate this post.  And I face whatever comes with a smile on my face.  I am alive… and life is good.

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March 23, 2016 · 3:32 pm

Repainting and Repurposing

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One of my many time-wasting hobbies (a nice way of saying obsessive-compulsive black holes of life-absorption) is going to Goodwill and buying cheap junk/garbage to repaint and make into something more beautiful.  I recently made another trip and purchased the thing you see in the first photo paffooney.  I know that the picture doesn’t show how really bad it is.  It is a good sculpture that can be turned into something with the right paint and the right skills.  But it has age damage, paint splotches, stains, and moldy spots that don’t really show up in the picture.  I am showing it to you now before the adventure begins, and I hope to do another post when I have it cleaned and repainted so that I can amaze you with the difference.  This is a terrible time-waster that I will do because I can, and it is not meant to satisfy anybody but me.

It is not, however, the first such project.  And it takes time to get to everything done.  So, naturally, I have other works in progress I can show you.  There are other things I have started and not yet finished.

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This little beauty is actually a perfume bottle.  For some reason the marketing team thought it was a good idea to put perfume into a little smiling girl who you have to twist into two pieces at the waist to get the perfume out.  She was originally two separate pieces that were two solid colors.  I have finished cleaning her and put yellow enamel on her hair and added white to the eyes and blouse.  I know it makes her smile particularly creepy to have pure white eyes, but, hey, I’m not finished with it yet.

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These schlocky little Christmas ornament angels are simply white with no ceramic glaze of any kind.  They cry out for paint and color.  I honestly believe I can paint them and not spoil them.  In fact, I’m fairly confident that my attempt will make them better.

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The owl is actually a lamp.  You can tell by the cord coming out of his butt.  But, of course, no bulb in there, and no way to be sure if it even works as a lamp.  I am not risking a fire by plugging the thing in.  But painted as an owl, it could easily become a deterrent to squirrels who want to eat apples from my wife’s two young apple trees.

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Tom Sawyer here is apparently a cologne bottle, or possibly a very weird place to keep whiskey.  He is very like the girl perfume bottle in that you open him up by twisting off the top of his torso, but he’s much bigger in size, suggesting they are not a Tom and Becky sort of pair.  He has a hole through his right hand, top and bottom, which probably means he once had a fishing pole.  His plastic top half has significant sun damage and the top of the straw hat apparently melted a bit at one point.  So I can definitely do something with him to make him better and worth more than than the 50 cents he cost me.

I fully intend to re-finish all of these projects and post the results on this blog.  Don’t hold your breath waiting for me to finish them… you could easily turn purple and die doing that… but I do intend to start work on these things soon.

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March 22, 2016 · 3:16 pm

Stories from the Gingerbread House

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So, I have been struck by a lightning bolt of inspiration.  While working on the werewolf story I have been writing since 1998, I decided to make the sweet little old German lady from the Gingerbread House into the main character of her own novel.  I can’t help it.  Grandma Gretel is based on a real person I knew as a child.  She was a concentration camp survivor from WWII who lived by herself in our little Iowa town.  And I loved her.  I can’t help but write a story about her in fictional form.  So, here is the start of my goofy new project;

Recipes for Gingerbread Children                                                                                          (Rezepte für Lebkuchen-Kinder)

A novel by Michael Beyer

Gretel baked gingerbread the way Mozart composed  symphonic masterpieces, or Leonardo DaVinci painted women with mysterious smiles.  People loved her gingerbread cookies and were hooked with one single taste.  And her recipes were a carefully guarded secret, as was the reason that she lived alone in the little town of Norwall, Iowa, on the eastern edge of Wright County.  Gretel was basically a very happy person, a very loving person.  But there were good reasons for her secrets to remain secrets, and though the people of her little Iowa town loved her and took care of her, they must never know the truth.

“Gretel, old girl, you make me work hard for my milk,” complained Lumpkin the Brownie as he deposited the special bag of flour on the kitchen table.

“Ya, you are such a kidder, you are,” Grandma Gretel snapped at the little brown-skinned man who had just climbed through her kitchen window and thrown the small bag of magical ingredients on the table.  Lumpkin was a local fairy and benign spirit who got away with living in town because he was only three inches tall and could turn invisible at will.

“No kidding, Grandma.   Brownies don’t like to do work.  We’re just as lazy as human beans.  We only do this stuff because we are compelled… or bribed.  And your milk and your gingerbread is magical.”

“Ya ya, magical… this I know.  But what you can be telling me is… did you have to do any bad things to get the fairy flour?”

“We are not the Unseely Court, Grandma Gretel.  We don’t deal in evil or pain.  We do it for love.”

“Love of cookies and milk I am thinking.”

The brownie grinned a great, wide, and particularly ugly grin.  “Still counts as love, old woman.”

 

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March 21, 2016 · 3:45 pm

Time Marches On

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The basketball weekend was wild and wicked and mostly unsatisfying.  ISU advanced to the Sweet Sixteen.  But Iowa was taken out easily by Villanova.  And the UNI Panthers fought the Texas A&M Aggies to a two-overtime loss.  It was a better showing than last year.  Better than Iowa has done in a long time.  Still, it would’ve been better if there had been even one more victory.  Sorry.  Success makes me greedy.  Maybe the Iowa State Cyclones can win again and make it better.

Over the weekend I discovered that giving up taking the blood pressure medicine I was on because of rising drug prices may have saved my life.  The drug they put me on reduces blood pressure by suppressing adrenaline.  It has side effects that robs the body of energy.  It has also been proven to elevate certain chemicals in the body that collect in the lungs and hamper lung functions.  This explains why I have COPD.  It also explains why I have been feeling better after I stopped taking the medication.  Maybe I have to start thanking my piratical health insurance company for refusing to pay for anything and forcing me to give up medication that may have been killing me.

I have been getting viewer traffic on this blog at higher rates than ever.  I just went through a period of ten straight days of 50-plus views per day.  I went as high as 150 on Sunday the 13th and hit over a hundred one other time as well.  I am looking at it as a good thing because I don’t actually believe the NSA takes my conspiracy theory posts seriously and isn’t closely monitoring me as a potential tinfoil-hat problem.  (You know the tinfoil hat is supposed to make it harder for the government to read your mind, right?)  So, there is some degree of confidence that I am getting away with stuff because I am hiding behind the mask of writing humor.

Anyway, today’s post is merely a time-waster meant to keep my string of every-day posting alive and keep me in practice writing down words and ideas.  There is never a guarantee that they will be funny ideas, or thoughtful ideas, or even coherent ideas.  That is the nature of writing.  You can’t always be Tolstoy.  Even Tolstoy wasn’t Tolstoy sometimes.  (Except that technically he was always Tolstoy.  You know what I mean.)  Now let’s see what the NSA makes of that.

 

 

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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?

Mickey

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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