October 25, 2015 · 5:06 pm

I Go Pogo!

I gave you fair warning.  Pogo has been coming to Mickey’s Catch a Falling Star Blog for a while now.  So, if you intended to avoid it, TOO BAD!  You are here now in Okefenokee Swamp with Pogo and the gang, and subject to Mickey’s blog post about Walt Kelly and his creations.

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Walt Kelly began his cartoon hall-of-fame career in 1936 at Walt Disney Studios.  If you watch the credits in Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo, you will see Walt listed as an animator and Disney artist.  In fact, he had almost as much influence on the Disney graphic style as Disney had on him.  He resigned in 1941 to work at Dell Comics where he did projects like the Our Gang comics that you see Mickey smirking at here, the Uncle Wiggly comics, Raggedy Ann and Andy comics, and his very own creations like Pogo, which would go on to a life of its own in syndicated comics.  He did not return to work at Disney, but always credited Disney with giving him the cartoon education he would need to reach the stratosphere.

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ask.metafilter.com

ask.metafilter.com

Walt Kelly's Earth Day comic

Walt Kelly’s Earth Day comic

Pogo is an alternate universe that is uniquely Walt Kelly’s own.  It expresses a wry philosophy and satirical overview of our society that is desperately needed in this time of destructive conservative politics and deniers of science and good sense.

maxriffner.com

maxriffner.com

Pogo himself is an every-man character that we are supposed to identify with the most.  He is not the driver of plots and doings in the swamp, rather the victim and unfortunate experiencer of those unexpectable things. Life in Okefenokee is a long series of random events to make life mostly miserable but always interesting if approached with the right amount of Pogo-ism.

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And Pogo was always filled with cute and cuddly as well as ridiculous.

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As a boy, I depended on the comic section of the Sunday paper to make sense of the world for me.  If I turned out slightly skewed and warped in certain ways, it is owing to the education I myself was given by Pogo, Lil Abner, Dagwood Bumstead, and all the other wizards from the Sunday funnies.  There was, of course, probably no bigger influence on my art than the influence of Walt Kelly.

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So what more can I say about Walt Kelly?  I haven’t yet reached the daily goal of 500 words.  And yet, the best way to conclude is to let Walt speak for himself through the beautiful art of Pogo.

Pogo and Mamzelle

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October 24, 2015 · 3:40 pm

Music is Life

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Last night, in the middle of the downpour in Dallas, my wife dragged the Princess and I kicking and complaining to a special concert of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.  It was one of those things… a Friday night after a long, hard week… tired bodies and aching arthritis… and she only gave us one day’s notice that she was going to do it.  But we couldn’t waste the tickets once they’d been purchased.  And the star of the show was Ashley Brown whom we’d seen in the Broadway version of Mary Poppins when it came to Dallas at the theater in Fair Park.

I don’t normally associate the DSO with Broadway musical music.  I tend to think Tchaikovsky and Beethoven.  But it couldn’t have been a fairer treat as a compensation for yielding to wifey’s whims.  Ms. Brown was vocal-tastic and utterly spell-binding as she sang “The Bird Woman” from Mary Poppins, and a toe-tingling medley of Disney songs that reached a tear-inducing crescendo with “When You Wish Upon a Star.”  Several songs by themselves would have made the evening totally worthwhile, but she topped the evening off with a rendition of “Defying Gravity” from  Wicked.  And it all helped me realize that I need music practically as much as I need air to breathe.  Music is life.

Part of what made the week so difficult was driving kids to and from school and events with rainy weather soaking the furious flying idiots on the roadways of Dallas as they barrel along in their Warp-10 wasp rockets and SUVs.  I constantly flip on the radio to the local Classical Music Radio Station, 101.1 FM.  The healing effects of classical music make me able to cope with maniac drivers and suicidal killer Texas grandmothers driving.  It calms me down and makes me sharper for dodging all those drivers who are driving the “Texas Friendly” way, which means, “Kill them before they kill you!”

“When You Wish Upon a Star” was the song I sang every night to all three of my babies as I rocked them to sleep.  The essential message of that song was the milk I tried to nourish my children on.  “When you wish upon a star/ Makes no difference who you are/ When you wish upon a star/ As dreamers do./ No request is too extreme/ If your heart is in your dreams/ When you wish upon a star/ Your dreams come true.”  It’s a goopy, sentimental thing, I know.  But I have to believe in the fundamental goodness of being a human being on planet Earth.  We are where we belong and good things find you when keep faith with the wish and the star.

So I am grateful that my family forced me to go to the symphony last night.  It is the “spoonful of sugar” that I need to make my way in a world that is increasingly hard to deal with and ever more painful.  I depend on music to keep me alive in so many ways, physical, emotional, and spiritual.  It makes me wish that I could write music.  But hopefully my writing becomes music in some obscure way.  The truth is beautiful and I love the sweet musical sound of it.

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October 23, 2015 · 2:25 pm

Potpourri

“Potpourri” is a word I learned in 5th grade from Mrs. Reitz, my 5th and 6th grade teacher in Rowan Elementary School.  It means a mixture of flower petals and spices put together in a cloth bag or in a bowl, placed in a room to make it smell better in a perfumed sort of way.  But on her yellow bulletin board in dark blue letters, she taught us that it meant a mixture of things put together to make things better.  And she told us that education was a kind of potpourri because it took many different things all put together to truly educate a child.

So, why am I writing about a goofy word like that?  Well, thanks to Mrs. Reitz with her 1960’s polka-dotted old-lady dresses, her black and very staid cat-eye glasses that magnified her eyes, and her sensible shoes… I know that potpourri is the real secret to good writing.  That is my excuse for why this blog is so full of a variety of excessively goofy and off-the-wall things.  But it is not easy to do this every day, cherry-picking excessively goofy stuff out of my library, or out of my memory, or out of my own teaching experience, or even my nightly nightmares to post as another interesting bug in my butterfly-collection-style blog.  Therefore today’s post will be one of those gawd-awful list posts that gives you fair warning about what my fevered old retired teacher brain is trying to cook up for the daily lesson.

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  1.  It is time to do the happy dance because my curse worked.  For the 107th straight year the Chicago Cubs will not win another World Series.  The Mets beat them in four straight games.  I did it by switching my allegiance temporarily from the Cardinals to the Cubs.  They have always been either my second or third favorite team in all of baseball.  Yet, every time I want them to win something, they lose.  Important regular season games, playoff games after the Cardinals are eliminated, or even happen-to-be-watching Saturday afternoon games between the Cubs and a team I hate like the San Francisco Giants, the Cubs always lose.  (I know it is not nice to hate anybody, but really, what is baseball good for without teams to hate like the Giants, the Yankees, and the Reds?  There have to be hated foes for the good guys to overcome.)  Me rooting for the Cubs to win is a much more effective curse than anything Bill Sianis’ stupid pet billy goat could ever conjure.
  2. I watched a PBS Frontline documentary about the struggle in Congress to create immigration reform and the unsuccessful Herculean efforts of Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez from Chicago to build a consensus in the House of Representatives.
    Representative Luis Gutierrez of Illinois

    Representative Luis Gutierrez of Illinois

    Immigration is important to me because my wife is an immigrant.  So far, after 20 years of marriage she is still not a U.S. citizen.  And with Donald Trump preaching venom against anchor babies, we could end up having my wife and kids deported to the Philippines simply because all the mean old white guys in Congress (and possibly Ben Carson) hate foreigners on principle and only allow them as means to high profits.  This is an issue I care about because of my family and so many of my ESL students whom I love and treasure.  And this is an issue that can potentially be combatted by cartoon.  Trump and Congressman Trey Gowdy (with a football-shaped head) and basset-hound-looking Paul Ryan (and possibly Ben Carson) are all already cartoon characters who I would only have to draw realistically to make them into funny cartoons.  They are also key players in this ring-around-the-rosy-all-fall-down debate.

  3. I also need to tell you more stories about wonderful teachers like Mrs. Reitz and Mrs. Mennenga.  And about kids I have taught who lit my pants on fire (both figuratively and metaphorically), made my blood pressure rise, and touched my heart.  It goes without saying that those stories are probably the most valuable things I have hoarded over the course of my career as a teacher.  They will lose all their value if they go unshared before I die.
  4. I want to tell you about some of my cartoonist heroes.  I haven’t blogged anything yet about Walt Kelly, the wonderful Disney veteran who created Pogo and Albert Alligator.
    comicsalliance.com

    comicsalliance.com

    I plan to go on and on like this in bumblebee fashion, from flowering idea to blossoms of insight to posies of great beauty… flower, to flower, to flower… making potpourri.

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October 22, 2015 · 1:40 pm

Transportation by Imagination

How does one use the mind to move from one place to another?  Is teleportation by mental ability possible?  Can we find new ways to travel using only the mind?  New worlds to travel to?  Of course!  Anything is possible once you realize there are no barriers to human imagination.  It is possible to traverse even the beginning and the end of the universe itself.

My Art 2 of Davalon

Case in point, I have as a cartoonist tried to come up with novel ways to travel.  In Catch a Falling Star I imagined that an engineering prodigy and a scientific genius used recovered alien technology to turn an 1889 steam locomotive with a pair of Pullman passenger cars into a space vehicle using an old hot air balloon and Yankee ingenuity.  They used it to fly to Mars.

flying goldfish

A friend who read that book, Stuart R. West, who writes teenage horror story mysteries  (Here’s a link to Stuart’s stuff!) suggested an idea for an illustrated children’s book about three kids that feed bubble gum to a goldfish.  The goldfish urps up a bubble that ends up carrying them off on an adventure through the sky.  I drew a possible illustration for that book and killed the idea completely dead.  I have a secret super power for taking cute and funny ideas and turning them into things that are totally unmarketable.  I wonder if that makes me a super villain instead of a hero.  So, the cartoonist in me had to develop other ways to travel that are even more ridiculous.

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In Clowntown, a part of my Atlas of Fantastica cartoon, you travel the downtown Clowntown skyway by being flipped and flung along the Clowntown Trapeze-way.  It makes for a harrowing ride and it’s really heck to use for trips to the grocery store or coming home again with packages to carry.

Travelling in the part of Fantastica dominated by pirates is even worse.  Traveling by the science of Boomology means getting shot out of a cannon naked to get wherever you need to go.  It is not something I would want to try in real life, but the cartoon me seems to not enjoy it with only minor bumps and bruises.

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So, travelling by means of the mind alone, through imagination, is quite possible… and probably infinitely unwise.

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October 21, 2015 · 2:30 pm

The Jesus Logic

Danse 4Here is a syllogism to explain Jesus logic;

  1. Jesus walked on water.
  2. Cucumbers are 80 per cent water.
  3. I can walk on cucumbers.
  4. Therefore I must be 80 per cent Jesus.

Here is another.

  1. Jesus turned water into wine.
  2. I can drink wine and turn it into urine.
  3. Urine is an icky kind of water.
  4. Since I can do the opposite of Jesus, I must be the anti-Christ.

You can draw your own conclusions about the mathematics of believing in religion.  I have no qualms about letting others believe whatever they want to believe about the universe, its purpose, and who made it.  I think it is very pompous and self-serving to think you are qualified, either from science or faith, to say you know the absolute truth about those things and others must accept your logical conclusions.  Here is my own pompous and self-serving opinion.  There is a God. I know this because I talk to Him daily.  He speaks to me through signs and resonances and Bible-reading and feelings.  But, here’s the rub; I have hoarding disorder and diabetic depression and other mental illnesses.  Since I am crazy, you probably shouldn’t believe the voices in my head that I listen to.  But I get comfort from my belief in God.  Christianity teaches that we should love one another.  This, I think, is the most important truth we can possibly accept.  Part of loving others is not condemning them for what they believe and trying to impose my beliefs upon them.  God, to me, is everything that there is.  The universe around me is vast and complicated.  I will never know even a half a grain of sand worth of all the knowledge wrapped up in grains of sand on all the beaches on all the planets in the universe.  But the universe is alive and self-aware because I am alive and self-aware, and I am part of the universe.  And here’s the kicker, my conclusions about life, the universe, and everything make no more sense than the Jesus logic I presented at the outset.  After all, I am provably crazy.

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October 20, 2015 · 2:25 pm

Rehab for Disney Princesses

20151018_131244I am in the habit of rescuing dolls from places like Goodwill.  I particularly look for the abused or over-loved toys that may be a little bit marked up or a little bit broken.  My work table (which was once-upon-a-time a drawing table before being over-loaded with unfinished projects) is loaded with doll parts and beat-up dolls.  In the photo Paffooney you can see two naked dolls that I have been working on.  One is a Disney Princess, Ariel the Little Mermaid.  The other is a Barbie doll with jointed arms and legs, possibly a ballerina in her previous doll life with molded ballet slippers.  The fairy in the foreground is possibly a real fairy that I have coerced into lending me some of her magic to help these poor once-loved toy dolls.  We are in the process of rehabilitating them.

Now, you realize that Disney dolls are more cheaply made than Barbie dolls (that is important to understanding the evil corporate empire run by a cartoon mouse primarily for hideously huge profits… I love Disney, but it is evil).  Ariel has a funky body that has a signature lopsided waist joint.  She is proportioned in ways that make her hard to make clothes for, and definitely hard to dress in Barbie clothes.  That was intentionally done because Disney is in competition with Mattel and, besides, the basic Barbie body is patented.  Disney can’t just steal the entire design.

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The thing about dolls is that they are created for little girls to love.  And their plastic princess personalities are kinda air-headed.  They become easily addicted to the love they get from little girls, and they continue to soak it in no matter what it does to their bodies or how it shortens their potentially immortal plastic lives.  Ariel came to me with marks on her legs from black and red markers, and apparently melted rubber bands.  I had to scrape and clean her bendable soft-plastic legs with cleaning alcohol (the same stuff I use to reduce anti-electric build-up on the wheels and rails of model trains).  Her hair was a sunburned frizzy mess.  It looked exactly like you’d expect an addict’s hair to look.  I had to start to combing it with a metal dog comb, and then I was able to use one of the human combs I used on my own hair and beard.  Finally, I found a cheap Barbie costume that has an open seam in front to wrap around the  and seal with Velcro.

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I dressed Ariel by stretching the fabric around her (especially the badly-proportioned bosom… dang that evil, sexist Disney design).  I only had to twist her delicate arms slightly out of shape to make the dress that was never intended to fit her actually fit.  You can see that I still need to find a way to restore color to her sunburned hairdo, but it is plastic, and if no little girl talks her back into her cycle of addiction, I can probably use acrylic paint.  Ariel looks much better and healthier than when I found her.  Of course, I learned to do this doll rehab bit from having a daughter who played with dolls in a brutal way that apparently required ritual sacrifice and dismemberment.  Let me show you one of her Princess Jasmine dolls I saved successfully from addiction and death.

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October 19, 2015 · 3:55 pm

The New Me

Catbird Me 2I was recently half-bullied and half-convinced that cleaning up and cutting hair and beard would make me feel better over all in spite of six incurable diseases and the ravages of old age.  Well, I fell for that line of reasoning in spite of my lovely reddish-purple psoriasis patches and flaking skin on my face and back of my neck.  And, the added push came from a possibly brief respite from facial and neck patches.  Things are mostly healed up in the parts you can see.  So, now, my wife says I look twenty years younger.  (Of course, she probably thought I looked about a hundred and thirty-five with the long hair and beard.)

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So, see for yourself what I look like now.  It is scary to contemplate.  I look almost normal.  What kind of protection is that for society in general?  Now mothers can’s say to their children, “Let’s go over here, farther away from that creepy old fellow.”  There is danger that they might come close enough to hear me tell a joke.  Don’t believe me?  You should’ve seen the look on the face of that young mother from India who overheard me tell my kids at Walmart, “Milk prices have gone higher than gas prices here.  They must have changed to using gas-powered cows for milk.”  Really!  You’ve should have seen the expression on her face as she heard me say that.  It was like she had tasted some of the milk from gas-powered cows.  And it got even worse when she overheard my kids agree with me.  She was sure that I was an absolute danger to the educational health of her little happy brown children.

I am not certain that I can stay the way I am at the moment.  Being a spotty-faced old man again doesn’t have a lot of appeal.  But I am not sure I want to go back to Mr. Hairy again, either.  I liked the author’s beard and the Gandalf hair, but it had drawbacks of its own too.  I shall try this new me for now, and do the best I can to stay this way.  So be warned, keep your kids out of earshot.  You wouldn’t want to have any of them laugh themselves to death.

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October 18, 2015 · 3:33 pm

Table Talk on Sunday

“What will future people think of our culture if the only archaeological artifact they have to go by is a spork?” Henry asked over Ramen noodles.

“A spork?” asked Mom.

“You know, one of those spoon/fork thingies, the plastic ones?”

“It won’t be a problem,” I said.  “In the far future the people will all be cockroaches.  They will know what a spork is because of racial memory.”

“Euuw!” said Mom.  “Not cockroaches!”

“Yes,” said the Princess, “cockroaches can survive nuclear winter…  They said in school that they are radioactive-proof.”

Donner n Silkie“I don’t think they can ever become intelligent,” said Mom.  “They don’t die when you cut their head off.  Um, well, they don’t die until they starve to death because they have no mouth to eat with.”

“But nuclear winter will make food harder to find eventually, and the smarter cockroaches will evolve,” I suggested.

“I don’t believe in evolution,” Mom said.

The kids looked at me and grinned, shaking their heads.

“And if it is true, they will run out of food with all the people and animals dead,” the Princess suggested.

“Ah, the cockroach population will boom with all the dead things to eat, and the rotted stuff will grow mutated plants and fungus that they can learn to farm,” I said.

“And the smart ones can eat the stupid ones,” said Henry.  “There will be lots and lots of those.”

“So we are all agreed that cockroaches will rule the earth, and it won’t matter if they know what a spork is or not, right?” I concluded.  So we basically solved the problem of repopulating the Earth after Armageddon.  Of course, Mom is a Jehovah’s Witness, and believes in a Paradise on Earth for forever, so we wish her well getting along with the evolved cockroach civilization.

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October 17, 2015 · 3:40 pm

Dog Writes

Jade Monster1Okay, like, my name is Jade Beyer.   I know I look like a dog, but my family lets me be a people sometimes.  They let me eat enough people food from their table to turn into one of them.  You know, like, all fat and unhealthy and some stuff.  So, since Mickey is being lazy today, he said I could write his blog for him.   It won’t be very long because it is taking forever to pick out the right keys with my nose.  And my nose is bif… I mean big enough to hit the wrong key sometimes.  So I have to edif caretully and ofren.

My family does a lot of funny stuff I can tell about.  Like how they pee.  They go in my extra drinking places.  You know, the white things with the extra funky tasting water.  Why are you not laughing about that?  Don’t you get it?  The house is full of carpets where they could pee and mark their territory with their scents.  But they would rather just pee where I drink.  I don’t get it.  And why is Mickey yelling at me that I can’t write about that?  I just did, didn’t I?

But besides that I can tell you about my Momma.  Mickey is my Momma.  Why do I say that even though Mickey is a man?  Well, when I was a wee little puppy and my family found me in the street, Mickey was the first one to pick me up and hold me.  He was the first one to feed me.  He says I must have “imprinted” on him as baby animals sometimes do.  And that’s why he’s my Momma.  I love him best.  Even when he is grumpy and mad at me.  I chew up a lot of his stuff because it smells like him and I love him so very much.

I am writing this today because Mickey is busy shaving off his face fur.  He found some old pictures of himself for yesterday’s post, and it made him wonder if he could look anything like that again.  I tried to chew the old pictures so I could love them even better, but he just got mad at me and swatted me on the ears.  He said I could show you the old pictures, and not eat them.  So here they are before the temptation gets to me;

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Wasn’t he a goofy-looking kid?  I like him better with glasses.  I tasted his glasses once, but not the ones in the picture, the ones he is wearing now.  His face doesn’t look anything like the third grade pictures any more.  I would very much like to lick that little-boy face with the same tongue I use to lick my own butt, but Mickey says he’s glad I can’t because that kid was dumb enough to let a dog lick his face.  Apparently when people get older, you just can’t lick them as much.  It just makes them grumpy.

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October 16, 2015 · 2:07 pm

Gilligan’s Island

Gilligans IslandI mentioned the other day the G-word from when I started teaching.  I mean, Fernando was guilty of starting it with his comment, but it caught on fast.  Before I knew what had hit me, every kid in Frank Newman Junior High School was calling me Gilligan.  I was, in fact, thin and somewhat gangling as a twenty-five-year-old teacher, and I suppose I did have a goofy sort of smile, and a rather childish innocence (compared to the vato locos I was teaching at the time).  You can see for yourself.  ABCmemeThis is a high school graduation picture of me, but I didn’t change much in the seven years of schooling that passed before they dubbed me Gilligan.  Alright, the horn-rim glasses were mega-nerdy, I admit.  I only wore that style until they didn’t make them any more.

The reason the name bothered me was because they were trying to use it to gain power over me.  The more they irritated with it, the more they could make me mad, the more they could get away with calling me that and only making the principal laugh about it when I tried to report the misbehavior, then the more they could control whether we actually learned anything or not during class.  (The principal, at only four foot eight in height was dubbed “Papa Smurf”, and the History teacher, Mr. Stackwell was known as “El Pato” (Spanish for the duck) because of the way he walked and the fact that his face reminded even me of Donald Duck.)  But I did eventually observe that other teachers would ignore and even smile about it when they were called their own nicknames.  (Thank you, Mr. Stackwell, for giving me that example.)  I learned that I could accomplish more by owning it.  My classroom became “the Island” or “Gilligan’s Island”.   And we began feasting on cooked coconuts of learning.  I regularly pointed out that on his show, Gilligan often got the attention of the movie star, Ginger, and the farm girl Mary Ann.  There were benefits to being a single guy with two available girlfriends on a tropical island.  (I even tried the two-girlfriends-at-once thing in real life, but that’s a horror story for another day.)Hilda

El Loco Gongie often accused me of speaking Martian to the class because I used a lot of words that were, to his small mind, too big to be real words.  So I owned that too.  I would put groups of five big words on the chalkboard (or, at least, words they thought were big) and spent time each week expanding their vocabulary with “Martian words”.  I learned to fill dangerous down time when the class wasn’t doing anything else with “puzzlers”, trick questions or thinking games.  I asked them to answer difficult questions like; “You are in a room with four southern exposures.  Each wall has a window in the center of it.  A bear walks by one of the windows.  What color is the bear?”  (I promise not to tell you the bear was white… oh, uh, well, anyway, you can still figure out for yourself why that is.)   We began to have a lot of fun on Gilligan’s Island (Room 2 in the south hallway of Frank Newman Junior High in Cotulla, Texas).  Diamantina even told Papa Smurf that I was “funny”.  Of course, Papa Smurf had a long talk with me later about why teachers shouldn’t be funny, at least before May of their first year.  But I learned that when she had told him that I was funny, she meant my class was enjoyable and she was happy to be there.  Funny equals learning.  That was the most important lesson Gilligan’s Island taught me.

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