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)
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.
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.
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
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
I have wanted to be a writer and cartoonist from childhood onward. I didn’t really begin in earnest until the last few years of my teaching career with retirement looming directly ahead. Now I have made the leap off the cliff. I retired a year ago. I did everything short of bankruptcy to put my accounts in order, and transformed myself into a starving artist. I have a full retirement from Texas, subject to a grandfather clause (no relation to the Santa Clause) that allows me to receive enough money to live on for the rest of my life (thanks to the trick of being a teacher back before George W. Bush and Rick Perry came along to pillage Texas education and reduce what they pay those lazy, lousy teachers for their lifetimes of service). Of course, I must try to limit my expenditures as much as possible, because… well, it is a teacher’s pension.
But my plan from the 70’s, begun in high school and carried out through college and my teaching career has allowed me to stay on track to create something massive and complex. My story ideas have been collected over time and are all based on a very simple rule… “Everything is connected.” Every story I now labor to put into prose mentions other stories and has story fishhooks in it to catch readers and pull them into something else. Most of my work is set in farm-town Iowa in the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s. I made them all a part of the 20th Century on purpose because the personalities the characters are all based on were a part of my life then. Certain elements run through all the stories. Let me explain a few.
1. Some characters appear in many stories (sometimes as a main character, and more often as a supporting character. The French boy who sings karaoke beautifully and makes his cousin’s bar business a success by entertaining people there appears in two stories that happen at about the same time. Both of those stories are still waiting to be written. Tim Kellogg appears in my stories from the time he is but a twinkle in his parents’ eyes until he becomes the leader of the infamous boys’ gang of liars called the Norwall Pirates.
2. Most of the stories are centered around members of the Norwall Pirates. They are a group of small town boys dedicated to adventure, telling lies, and seeing girls naked. Much of the magic, science fiction, fantasy elements, and just plain hallucinations in my stories are the fault of boys who tell stories and lies so well that sometimes they believe them themselves.
3. Character arcs that begin in one book will often continue in another. Sometimes I go back in time and explain something that happened much earlier. The Pirate’s club first appears in my novel Catch a Falling Star set in 1990. The origin of the club is told about in Superchicken, a novel I have blogged about, but not yet published. That story happens in 1974. Valerie Clarke is introduced in the novel PDMI Publishing LLC is currently working on, Snow Babies, which takes place in Winter of 1984. She is the leader of the Pirates in the finished, but not yet submitted novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. That story spans 1988 to 1991.
4. Much of my nuttiness was originally created in the 1970’s. Even though the stories were given a setting much later, all the illustrated Paffoonies I have dropped into this post were drawn in 1977 and 1978. I keep these cartoon character model sheets in one of my magical tomes, the Norwall Book, a loose-leaf binder full of drawings and junk carefully preserved in plastic page-protector sheets.
So, this is all the proof that my leap off that cliff into retirement will either make a very big splash or hit the rocks very hard. It will be very something. And I hope to live to see it… especially to get all of the stories I can possibly finish written and published… with a ghost of a hope that my own drawings, cartoons, and illustrations will count for something. So, now my plan is revealed. Let the enemies plan their counter-moves, and may the devil not move the water at the bottom of the cliff.
Filed under humor, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Like a lazy idiot I have been posting stuff I’ve already created to Mickey’s House of Fiction and pretending that it means I am actually getting writing work done. Today’s cartoon story, Expelling Evil, the Series, attempts to exploit my constant playing with dolls to make a humorous adventure cartoon strip. I realize that it is still incomplete and most probably a spectacular failure (at least, as much of a failure as is possible without destroying the internet or making your computer explode). But it makes me laugh, and I have been wanting to put it all together in one place. So, here is the link;
https://authormbeyer.wordpress.com/2015/05/23/expelling-evil-the-series/
Here is a photo Paffooney from the story to help you remember how much you want to avoid reading it all again.
I do promise to add on to the end of it in Mickey’s House of Fiction every time I bore you with another episode and nearly make your head implode from reading it. The purpose of that plan being to allow to find all of it in one place and thoroughly ignore everything in one go.
Filed under action figures, cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, my vault
When last we left the Captain Action Hero Team, they were busy trying to rescue Mickey’s beloved X-Box with the EA Sports Baseball ’04 game that Mickey loves. The Evil Doctor Evil had taken over the library and turned it into an evil lair for his evil minions of Evil. But Captain Carl Action had led his team into the fray and clobbered the Agent in Red with a kiss and the Grammar Nazis with bad grammar. Dr. Evil was feeling foiled.
The pretty Barbie doll (whose name was really City-Style Christie) was captured and at the mercy of Evil Doctor Evil.
Dr. Mindbender had an evil talent for bending minds. He possessed considerable talents of ESP (which here stands for Extremely Stupid Puddlebrains). The poor captive doll was bent to Dr. Evil’s evil will.
Suddenly Mickey’s blog stood on the verge of losing its PG rating (which was already on shaky ground anyway). Then, faithful Max Steele pulled an answer out of his… thin air… urm, yes, that was what I intended to say.
The day appeared to be saved by a good old bop on the bean. It was Captain Carl’s favorite problem-solving solution, as it is for practically all action heroes… definitely the ones with the hollow plastic heads in Mickey’s Action Figure Collection. But one important task still remained un-done.
Tune in next time for the only “Fight of the Century” in which Manny Pacquiao can’t possibly disappoint you!
Filed under cartoons, doll collecting, humor
There is a place in the cartoon part of my brain where the dream-stories of Fantastica take place. I am trying to get my goofiness all lined up to produce a more finished cartoon saga using all the goof-gas and whooey that I have stored up in that squirrel-den I call my mind. I prepared a setting already… a single set that already showed you what Animal Town looks like, where all the people are anthropomorphized animals. Here it is again to refresh your memory.
Animal Town is just one place in the larger Toon World of my silly imaginings. There are many more. I intend to draw these toons in what I call “Clown Noir”… that is, the drawings will be in pen and ink, filmed in black and white and red… especially red for noses. Got the idea? I hope I haven’t spoiled the joke already. Spoiled jokes are kinda like spoiled milk; they make you want to put a clothespin on your nose (and that kinda hurts, so it becomes harder to laugh.)
I also wanted to introduce a few of the denizens of Fantastica. (That’s denizens, not Dennis’ sons, because I used to think all the people that lived in one place somehow became the children of Dennis, but then Dennis told me that just ain’t so!)
Rugs Rabbity is a class of cartoon character I like to call a hero. I know what it looks like. I probably did steal the character from Warner Brothers, but filtered through my dreams Rugs becomes something else other than pure Bugs. He is, after all, a parody of a parody, and when that turns all parrot-y then we are looking at un-punny puns. Makes you want to put another clothespin on your nose, doesn’t it?”
And here are two more parrots that I hope you will recognize and copyright lawyers will not. They are much more insane and destructive than their counterparts from Mr. Prizney.
But cartoon dreams are not all animalized, and not all borrowed from elsewhere. I am capable of making up my own characters too that don’t satirize and plagiarize and turn me into a toon-thief. If you visit Crumpwell’s Wild West Ranch, there are one-of-a-kind characters that you might meet there too.
Flash Crumpwell is a hero character also. But unlike Rugs, he is a little dim in the light-bulb-lighting department.
Handsome Harry has always got his face covered somehow, because, after all, if you are so good-looking that women always faint at your feet and men always shoot you on sight, life can become a little too interesting. All in all, as a villain, he would rather just blow stuff up!
Princess Doe-Eyes is the real ruler of the Bignose Tribe, because, after all, she has a tiny nose, and her father is chief because his nose is the biggest in the tribe, but he can’t really see over it or around it… and when you’re in charge, that can kinda get in the way. Davy Crickett is an Indian fighter from the old days, but he cannot bring himself to fight with the Princess or her Bignose Tribe. He much prefers to play with her.
And we must certainly not forget the clowns. Here are a couple of Clown villains (as if we need more reasons to be afraid of clowns!)
The Messmaster is a Clown who loves a good pie fight. He will whirl and hurl and get you in the face with a strawberry or blueberry or Ray Bradbury pie (those Sci-Fi pies can get particularly messy and smelly… Clothespin number three… and it is getting hard to breathe.)
Badnose is an even more evil Clown bad-guy. I can’t begin to explain why his nose is so bad.
Lastly, let me share a scene with you from the rough draft of The Clown Town Caper, a detective story starring Detective Squiggy and Little Mickey (my dream-self).
Filed under action figures, cartoons, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink
This is Wildcat Street in AnimalTown. It is a cartoon setting where some of my stranger dreamy-time cartoon stories take place. One of my magical tomes is a self-created cartoon dreamworld where the plot is my life story told through the cartoon interpretations of my dreams. AnimalTown is only one of the many settings from that long and graphically goofy tale. There is also ClownTown, the Pirates’ Nest, Monster Mansion, Toon City, Crumpwell’s Wild West Ranch, and the Toonworld Space Port, along with other weird and wacky corners of my imagination’s geography. I am thinking of expanding my blog to include web cartoons in story form… and if I do, I have a few wowser-oonie stories to share set here in AnimalTown. It is a place run mostly by the prominent Moosewinkle family, headed by Mayor Moosewinkle, Judge Roy Moosewinkle, and prominent and incompetent attorney Woolbinkle J. Moosewinkle. (There is obviously no connection what-so-ever with the cartoons I watched as a kid. Surely those could not affect my dreams.) The various stores and businesses in downtown AnimalTown all have to try to stay in business with stiff competition from Walrusmart, which is rumored to be secretly controlled by pirates.
Here is AnimalTown resident and sometime teenage know-it-all, Mandy Panda the panda-girl with panda-child Henry Panda, they are both immigrants from the distant Pandalore Islands where they originally spoke the Pandalog language.
I actually teach here in AnimalTown (in my dreams, I mean), and I do it in my rabbit incarnation, Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.
So here is a classroom scene with me doing my wonderful teaching with my gigantic magical pencil. (I sometimes refer to the magical pencil as Larry… but everybody knows only crazy people name their pencils.)
So, let us see what happens when a crazy person dreams cartoon dreams and draws them down to blog on his blog with repetitive repetition of the same tired jokes and jolly paffoonery.
Catch a Falling Star 