As I lay here ill with another in an endless series of viral infections, I am reminded of the real reason I have been thinking so much lately about Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. (Of course the fact that I am re-reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles has something to do with it). It’s all about character. That’s what Victorian writers were all about. No one ever handled characters as masterfully as those two novelists. And, being ill and in pain, subject to problems with debt and credit cards and bankers, I began thinking about villains. Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist is one of the scariest villains in literature. Murdstone from David Copperfield and Daniel Quilp from The Old Curiosity Shop are relentless predators. Uriah Heep from David Copperfield is smarmy as they come. In Tess young Master D’Urberville-Stokes has stolen the family name, and he steals Tess’s innocence in a manner that would make him a rapist in our day. He gets away with his horrible crime and later destroys the innocent woman, one of the best and most worthy characters in literature, because a corrupt and disintegrating culture allows him to do so. These characters are so carefully drawn and gloriously illustrated in the prose of these books, that I can see them in my artist’s mind’s eye. So I was inspired to draw a villain today. Since I am forced to think about bankers now, I drew a pirate. Yes, I know there’s no transition between Victorian novels and this picture, but I am not well, okay?
This particular pirate has a red face, red hair, red mustache, and wears red clothes, so naturally his name is Black Timothy. He is a credit card banker for Bank of America, the foulest kind of pirate to ever sail an international bank on the high seas. His friend is named Scruffy Bill. Now, when pirates get an arm or leg or other limb blown off by cannon fire or cut off in a saber fight, they replace that part with a wooden prosthesis. Bill has lost every limb he has, including his head. Now that his head is replaced with a wooden prosthesis, he can only repeat what Black Timothy says… but that works out well, because no one really understands Tim when he speaks, and Bill uses simpler words to say the same thing (primarily because he doesn’t remember all the bad words Black Timothy knows). So Bill takes the place of a parrot, and he serves as a translator for Tim allowing all of us to be truly disgusted by what he says.
Now, I am aware that my villain in no way matches any of the wonderful characters in Victorian novels, but I wanted to make a Paffooney with pen and ink and colored markers, and I have a lot of red markers. Forgive me for random acts of Paffoonery.
Catch a Falling Star 