This is a continuation of my cartoon series The Atlas of Fantastica that can be found at Mickey’s House of Fiction (my cartoon vault). It is an adventure from a dream about pirates and money and bankers and finance.
To be continued soon…
Tag Archives: cartoons
Life is Surreal
I have told you before that I am a seriously committed surrealist. Not in the sense of “committed to an institution” sort of committed, but seriously committed. All cartoonists are by nature surrealists. Bill Watterson created Calvin and Hobbes around the idea that a toy tiger can come to life in the evil imagination of a child. Jim Davis created Garfield around a seriously self-absorbed and greedy talking cat. Elsie Segar created Popeye about a one-eyed sailor who drank from a magic pool to gain invincibility and maintains it with iron-fortified cans of spinach. To be a surrealist, you must put unlikely things together to make something fantastically super-real… so unreal it seems flawlessly real… er, how do you actually define surrealism without resorting to the dictionary definition about “juxtaposing severely mismatched items created with photo-realism”?
Surrealism is actually more real than realism. If you simply take a photograph of your picture idea, a picture of a birthday cake or a picture of a clown or a picture of your favorite bicycle’s back wheel, you are not showing the reality of life. You are only taking a photograph of a thing. You cannot get more than the physical, objective reality of that thing captured on photographic paper… or in a digital image (I am learning not to be a dinosaur even though I am old). Reality is so much more than that. It is the feeling, the evocation, the nuance, the… stuffy stuff-ness of stuff… and an infinity of other things that make reality seem real.
Take for a moment the whole notion of flying cars. I am trying to create a hero-worship colored-pencil Paffooney about Astroboy riding in a flying car. I am still puzzling out how I am going to make this scene look like the car is flying by juxtaposing something. (By “juxtaposing something”, I, of course, simply mean putting one thing next to another thing… but it is important for artists to use hundred-dollar art words wherever possible to prove that they are serious artists) (I, of course, am actually making fun of my own stuffy stuff-ness in that last parenthetic expression.) (Maybe juxtaposing parenthetic expressions with the phrase “I, of course,” in all three of them is a kind of surrealism?)
So, why am I taking on this silly topic right now? Right now I am a working artist in the midst of making art. I am not just a cartoonist… I also write novels… silly young adult novels about voodoo men and snow babies and incompetent alien invasions and fairies successfully invading a middle school in Iowa. I am suffering from six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor… so I could drop dead of a heart attack or stroke any second… I may not finish most of the artwork I am now working on… and I am blogging… I need a lot more silly topics like this to fill 500 words a day for every day of 2015. I am writing this down in a published blog on WordPress because I need to put all my thinking down in a crystallized form to preserve it in case the opportunity to do so suddenly ceases. And all of that muddle of meaning is so surreal it hurts. I could do a better job than this of summing up and pulling it all together in a tighter package, but it is all about the messy business of surrealism, after all… another way of saying… “It’s about life.”
Filed under humor, Paffooney, surrealism
Bits and Pieces
Having written 1000 words again for no apparently good reason yesterday, I figure I am entitled to a shorter, pithier, sissier, saucier, sillier post today (the kind where I use long strings of adjectives in order to fill up the paper… a trick learned from little darlings in English class that figured I would be happy with a page full of words, and that it didn’t matter if it made the least bit of sense). Writing is, after all, piecing together the puzzle that is my noisy noodle, full of imaginings, weird images, and all sorts of listy-type things that I could list here to fill up more space if I weren’t so danged lazy today. I found a good article about being a writer while my noodle was simmering and trying to cook up today’s post. It gives insight into the tumultuous brain-scape that I am struggling with at the moment because I am (sadly) a writer.
Here’s the article from AuthorsPublish
I am trying to noodle out a cartoon that I am trying to compose from a rough draft that has more holes in it than Swiss cheese has bad smells. I suppose you could call that cartoonoodling (but would never actually call it that because you’re not as dippy as I am). The drawings of that composition come first. So, here, at least, they are!
I know you can’t possibly know what sort of sense to make out of these because I haven’t put the words and dialogue balloons into these pen and ink and red drawings. (Remember, Clown Noire is a new cartoon genre I am trying to develop like black-and-white Film Noire movies, only in black-white-and-red pen-and-ink cartoons.) So, foolishness aside, these are only raw work-in-progress Paffoonies. Or maybe not foolishness aside, since foolishness tends to be the whole point.
I am also trying to advance through the struggles of two novels at once. I am still trying to progress through the middle of Stardusters and Space Lizards, where I have to bring the totally evil villain, Senator Tedhkruhz the lizard-man (no relation to the real life Senator I am obviously trying to make fun of), together with his well-deserved comeuppance. I know how the novel ends, but not how the middle-middle and the later-middle connect to that end. 
And I am trying to finish the beginning of the novel When the Captain Came Calling. I have to come up with a way for the evil mermaid that sinks the Captain’s ship to reach that condition of being righteously indignant about the wrong done to her enough for her to use her fishy mermaid powers to swamp and wreck the ship.
But rather than bore you with the details of my inner swordfights with the weapons master of the Pirate crew that runs my brain when I’m writing, I will leave it here… after all, I promised I was going to write less words today, and I am already at 494.
Filed under cartoons, humor, NOVEL WRITING
Another Dadgum Post About Pirates
This one isn’t about Bank of America or Aetna… specifically. It is just me adding to my cartoon vault and the story of the pirates in Fantastica.
This is the second panel of the story that can be found at The Pirate Vault
And panels three and four are all I have gotten done on this comic so far.
This nonsense will all be continued in upcoming days, and the whole thing is in my cartoon vault.
Cartoon Nuts n’ Bolts… Mostly Nuts
I am setting out to make a web comic that I can post piece by piece on my blog and then build into a graphic novel in my vault. But that is a harder task than you might realize. The stories exist in rough draft form, very, very rough, but will have to be re-drawn to turn into something publishable. Naked cartoons are a problem for me. Not only do I draw them while I am naked because I have considerable discomfort from moderate plaque psoriasis and sitting in the nude is less painful, but I have a tendency to use naked ideas and even draw naked toons…which all need to be toned down to be publishable. I do believe that naked is funny… but I don’t hold with naked and crude or naked and gross. So I am going to rebuild these stories element by element and put some clothes on them. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough money to buy the equipment I need to draw directly on computer. I also don’t have any real practice at that. So, I am stuck with drawing on paper with pen and ink and colored pencil, and then digitizing the result with a camera and photo-shop. So here are some cartoon elements that I will now start whittling into shape. I will try to show you my process here as much as it is possible to do.
Here’s some nuts;
And here’s a bolt;
And if you can figure out how it all fits together already, then you are definitely smarter than I am. I will be busy in the next few days trying to figure out how to insert Tab A into Slot C without giving that phrase any unfortunate double meanings… and I will do my best to keep you posted and show you the results.
Filed under cartoons, humor, work in progress
Five More Pages
When you are reading a good book, it is hard to stop even though you know you’ve no reading time left. It is hard to put the thing down. My comic book, Hidden Kingdom, is absolutely nothing like that. I am doing five pages today, and no more. I am adding them also to my vault. So maybe today’s the day you would be better served to go look at the whole thing (so far) in the vault.
Here are today’s five pages (along with another look at my goofy cover)
Ghost Post #2
I am getting better. but the headaches have not gone away and it is hard to write. Give me time and I will do better.
Ghost Posts
I am forced to cheat a bit today. I am ill, and I am trying hard to keep my ghost inside. But it is only cheating a little bit. I am posting today. I am using old cartoons. I am doing less than the target 500 words, but I have gone over the target all week, and it averages out. So this is a ghost post… not because a ghost writer is posting it, but because this writer is ill and trying not to become a ghost. So here are the ghost hunters again. You will help them most by NOT pointing at the ghosts and screaming. That kind of scare can’t be good for their health.
The Secrets in the Vault
Today I want to direct your attention to my vault. It is a new blog page where I keep cartoon stories that I intend to continually edit and update with new ‘toons. It is called Mickey’s House of Fiction. You can find it here;
The Paffooney’s I offer today as a sample are merely the title page and introduction of a new cartoon project.
Filed under cartoons, humor, Paffooney, Paffooney cartoony
Going Back to the Fairy Kingdom of Tellosia
Today, feeling quite lazy, I decided to revisit Hidden Kingdom. It will add to what I already have in the vault at this link;
I will pick it up with the last two panels that appeared a little too fuzzy for my taste. I will edit them in to the vault.
So now you know what a cartoonist does after writing a thousand words yesterday and feeling quite lazy today. He cheats and ducks responsibility. What are the going to do about it anyway? Turn me into a bird?
Filed under cartoons, Hidden Kingdom, humor
Catch a Falling Star 