Tag Archives: cartoons

January 23, 2015 · 1:42 pm

Ralph Bakshi

I was a Disney kid. I grew up with Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, and Jungle Book. But then I grew up and went to college and all my Disney dreams were dashed. The world is not Disneyland. The world holds many wicked wonders, some beautiful, some dangerous, some downright deadly. In 1977 I saw a movie that changed my world That movie was Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards. I saw it in the college-town theater in Ames, Iowa. I scraped up enough money to see it three times in the week that it played there. It was the Fall Semester after having read the entire Lord of The Rings Trilogy a year ago that summer. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then here it is from YouTube. You should take a look, if not watch it all;

Ralph Bakshi is the chief artist/animator behind some of the raunchiest, weirdest, and wildest cartoons of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. You may have seen some of his work.

Fritz the Cat was groundbreaking in that it was actually an X-rated cartoon, something that a Disney kid could never have imagined until he had his goofy little cartoon brain got corrupted by the colorful collage of experience you get as a farm-boy in college. I never actually saw such a profane perversion of what a cartoon was supposed to be until they had a special free showing at the student union. I went with a couple of guys from the dorm house and was flabberghasted that we could watch such a thing and not be in jail the following day. I would’ve gone back a second time, but free student union movies only occurred one time a month and were never replayed again, ever.

And then came The Lord of the Rings. Bakshi was the first one to create a film version of the novels they said could never be filmed. It appeared in the theaters in college town and I was forced to see it five times in the two weeks it stayed in the theater. I never loved anything so much in animation before. It was better even than Pinocchio. I would in later years be devastated by the fact that the movie only covered one and a half of the three books. The rest of the story never got made.

After college there were other black-magical Bakshi films. I would later get to see Fire and Ice, American Pop, and Cool World. Ralph Bakshi, and one of his lead cartoonists, Mike Ploog, would rock my world until he finally stopped making animated films. I have actually seen all of his films now, and have copies of most of them.

This is a scene from the history of music cartoon, American Pop.

Here’s another scene from that movie.He called it a “moving painting in honor of American music.”

Cool World was a combination of live action and cartoons that was loosely modeled on Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It was a foofy story that made a half-decent excuse for wonderful artwork.

Fire and Ice was Dungeons and Dragons and Boris Vellejo brought to life.

Let me end with a couple of connections to Ralph and Mike that you should check out. Their artistry has a profound effect.

http://www.facebook.com/RalphBakshi http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mike-Ploog/103982309772668

2 Comments

Filed under art criticism, artists I admire, humor

Tagged as American Pop, animation, art criticism, Art heroes, cartoons, Cool World, Fire and Ice, Fritz the Cat, goofiness, Lord of the Rings, Mike Ploog, Ralph Bakshi

January 13, 2015 · 1:09 pm

Krazy Kat

I told you before about a cartoonist from ancient ‘Toon Times named Fontaine Fox. He was a master, and I acknowledge him as one of my greatest inspirations. But he was not the original master mentor for my teenage ‘Toon Training. That honor goes to the inestimable George Herriman. He was the Krazy Kartoonist who died more than a decade before I was born, yet, through his Kreation, Krazy Kat, did more to warp my artistic bent into Krazy Kartooniana Mania than anybody else. I discovered him first. I found him through Komic books and the Kard Katalog at the local library. I own a copy of the book I pictured first in this post. It is the first Kartoon book I ever bought. I couldn’t post a picture of my actual book here because I have read it so often in the past forty years that the Kover has Kome off. It is now more of folder of loose pages than a book.

Krazy Kat is a newspaper Komic strip that ran all around the world from 1913 to 1944. Comics Journal would rate Krazy Kat as the greatest work of Komic art of the 20th Century. Art critics hailed it as serious art, and it fits snugly into the surrealist movement of Salvador Dali and others. It has been cited as a major influence on the work of other artists such as Will Eisner, Charles M. Schulz, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Bill Watterson, and Chris Ware.

The centerpiece of the strip is a love triangle. Krazy Kat the Kharacter is a feline who may be female or may be male but is definitely deeply in love with Ignatz Mouse. The Krazed rodent hopped up on seriously stinky fromage (cheese to us non-French speakers), is Konstantly throwing bricks at Krazy’s head… obviously out of serious disdain, however, Krazy sees it as a confession of love. Offisa Pup, the police watchdog, wants to jail the malevolent mouse for battery and protect the precious Kat, whom he obviously loves with an unrequited love. Explanations are superfluous in the weird world of Krazy Kat. How can I explain the charm, the humor, the good-natured violence of a strip such as this? There are echoes of it in Tom and Jerry animated cartoons, but nothing like it really exists anywhere else. Krazy has her own unique language, a language that you naturally learn to interpret as you read the strip. Ignatz exhibits psychotic frustrations that he takes out on the world around him in our name, that we might experience hubris at his expense. And what’s with that mysterious sack of “Tiger Tea” that Krazy carries about and keeps a Klosely guarded “sekrit”?

I honestly hope you will give Krazy Kat a thorough “look-see”. Because if you like Kartoons at all… and it doesn’t have to be the Krazy Kooky love of a seriously overdosed addict like me… you will fall desperately in love with this one. It is a world of its own, a superbly superfluous abstract anachronism. It is a surrealist’s dream of fun with puns and tons of buns… or something like that. Simply put… read it and don’t like it… I dare you!

2 Comments

Filed under art criticism, artists I admire, cartoons

Tagged as art criticism, artists I adore, books, cartoons, classic cartoons, comic book, humor

December 29, 2014 · 4:17 pm

Toonerville, a Place I Once Lived In

There is a place so like the place where my heart and mind were born that I feel as if I have always lived there. That place is a cartoon panel that ran in newspapers throughout the country from 1913 to 1955 (a year before I was born in Mason City, Iowa). It was called Toonerville Folks and was centered around the famous Toonerville Trolley.

Fontaine Fox was born near Louisville Kentucky in 1884. Louisville, of course is one of the two cities that claims to be the inspiration for Toonerville. Apparently the old Brook Street Line Trolley in Louisville was always run-down, operating on balls of twine and bailing wire for repair parts. The people of Pelham, New York, however, point to a trolley ride Fox took in 1909 on Pelham’s rickety little trolley car with a highly enterprising and gossip-dealing old reprobate for a conductor. No matter which it was, Fox’s cartoon mastery took over and created Toonerville, where you find the famous trolley that “meets all trains”.

I didn’t learn of the comic strip’s existence until I was in college, but once I found it (yes, I am the type of idiot who researches old comics in university libraries), I couldn’t get enough of it. Characters like the Conductor, the Powerful (physically) Katrinka, and the terrible-tempered Mr. Bang can charm the neck hair off of any Midwestern farm-town boy who is too stupid to regret being born in the boring old rural Midwest.

I fancied myself to be just like the infamous Mickey (himself) McGuire. After all, we have the same first name… and I always lick any bully or boob who wants to put up a fight (at least in my daydreams).

So, this is my tribute to the cartoonist who probably did more to warp my personality and make me funny (well, at least easy to laugh at! ) than any other influence. All of the cartoons in this post can be credited to Fontaine Fox. And all the people in them can be blamed on Toonerville, the town I used to live in, though I never really knew it until far too late.

2 Comments

Filed under art my Grandpa loved, artists I admire, cartoons, Toonerville

Tagged as art criticism, artwork, cartoons, Fontaine Fox, humor, Toonerville, Trolley

December 28, 2014 · 5:56 pm

The Next Little Project

All right, the time has come to figure out what to write next. I have another thirty-plus-year-old writing project that would make an absolutely, terrifically horrible novel that I want to try to tame. I have a cartoonized version created back when I was young and stupid… in about 1981, before the invention of the graphic novel. It is in full color. It was done before I learned how to draw. It is a book that will now go under the ridiculously alliterated title The Captain Came Calling.

The novel is set, like all of my hometown stories, in Norwall, Iowa… The fictionalized version of Rowan, the town I actually grew up in. It isn’t quite as dorky in real life as it appears in my cutsified illustration, but it is approaching it at glacial speeds.

The town’s portrayal will have to change as I attempt to update and clarify characters.

The people have to be switched about. Phyllis Murphy has to become Mary Murphy. The Pirates will have to switch from the 90’s Pirates to the 80’s Pirates, as the main character, Mary Phillips has to create a new Pirates’ Club that didn’t exist when I first wrote this bilge. I have to update and increase the plot, adding the back-story through the inclusion of the Captain’s Logbook… How else can I get mermaids and the voodoo priest into the story otherwise?

I also have to be a little bit more politically correct about the portrayal of the tiki-idol-men. South Seas’ Magic can’t be racist or misogynist. And then there’s the whole thing about Captain Dettbarn’s less-than-Iowegian morals that has to be dealt with. He’s basically a clown character, not a villain.

And the Captain is cursed with invisibility. That is no small thing to pull off in work of fantasy fiction in a Young Adult style. It has to be believable enough to make the audience accept it, even if it is a comedy caper of the lowest sort.

3 Comments

Filed under cartoons, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as artwork, cartoons, colored pencil, drawing, new novel project, novel writing, Paffoonies, pen and ink, re-writing old garbage

December 6, 2014 · 3:25 pm

Goofy Me

The more I looked at the silly simpering grin on my old foolish face, the more I realized it needed a few things added. So I added a few of my dream babies. You know, those characters I have created in cartoons and novels who may have started with my own three kids, or kids I grew up with, or kids I taught over the years, but ended up with a large injection of my own mental DNA in their final, fictional selves. So here is a self portrait that I privately refer to by the title “Goofy Me”.

Man, is that ever goofy!

1 Comment

Filed under artwork, cartoons, drawing, self portrait

Tagged as aliens, artwork, cartoons, Catch a Falling Star, characters, colored pencil, goofiness, paffooney, photo, self portrait, shameless self-promotion

December 2, 2014 · 8:37 pm

The Rest of my Classroom Gallery

Here’s what’s left in my camera from school white boards and lessons.

There you have it, the results of 31 years of doodling on the chalkboard (which became the dry erase board). And yes, I did tell them the cartoon fairy drew all the pictures. Especially when they were in my class for the second or third year when they asked, “Who does all the pictures on the board?” And yes, I started doing this back in dinosaur days in white chalk on a green blackboard, followed by colored chalk, which later became a gray marker-board for washable marker, and finally became dry erase white board. And I really bought my own chalk and markers too. Teachers do that, you know.

Cartoon Board-Work

I admit it. I was a goofy teacher. Kids never knew for sure whether I was serious, joking, or halfway in-between. I worked for hours sometimes preparing the chalkboard, or later, white board, for the days lesson, putting key points and reminders up in cartoon form. I used characters, symbols, jokes, pokes, and silliness to get the idea across. Principals and others who evaluated my teaching always wondered why my classroom sounded so raucous and wild from outside the door with kids laughing, music playing, and sometimes desks being shuffled and shoved around the room. The perfect-classroom-is-a-quiet-classroom crowd always hated my teaching style. But the ones who came in and participated, got involved in paying attention and watching the kids interact with the content loved it. I am not bragging. My lesson plans were a mess filled with booby traps, explosions waiting to happen, un-intended consequences (also called teachable moments), and brainstorms that threatened at any moment to electrocute somebody with lightning. Teaching is a dangerous business. But the point is, there is an art to teaching that brings out the artist in you. I offer the following evidence;

Space Pirates

I enjoy science fiction almost as much as I enjoy humor in both my reading activities and my writing. My goal has been, since reading Douglas Adams’ wonderful trilogy, or quadrilogy, or possibly quintology of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to write such an opus. That is the real reason my first published novel, Aeroquest, exists. Sorry about that. First novels are often a bizarre over-reaching, trying to do too much, shooting in too wide an arc, and getting totally lost in the tangle of plot, character, and purple paisley prose that characterizes a novelist’s obsession with his own inner eye.

Swashbuckling space-pirate teenagers are the students in my teachers-in-outer-space epic, Aeroquest. It gives you an idea about how silly the entire project really is.

My novel is a total mishmash of things from Star Wars, the Marx Brothers movies, Star Trek, Dune by Frank Herbert, old Flash Gordon serials, Indiana Jones, Tarzan, and several things like Nebulons (the little blue alien people) that I made up from my own Saturday-afternoon childhood daydreams. Parts of it are actually funny, I think, like the part about flying out of jungle danger by levitating with an anti-gravity bustier one of the characters wears because of her overly-generous up-front endowment. But parts of it are incomprehensible and sad. And not sad in a good way.

But I am seriously planning to rewrite the awful thing and get it published with a better publisher. I have worked a little bit on doing a graphic novel of the thing. I have my doubts, though, that I have enough drawings left in my arthritic old fingers to accomplish that part of the daydream. The world needs space pirates, especially now when an evil empire of the wealthy elite has taken over our world and threatens to crush us economically under its heel. Pirates rise up to take what they like from forces that outnumber them. They do the Robin Hood thing, taking from the rich and giving to the poor… er, or possibly keeping it for themselves. I mean, if they are the poor, then that’s okay, right? So, I have shared a Paffooney of some of the student pirates from my totally awful first novel, talked up the daydreams and fool’s hopes in my ill-fated novel Aeroquest, and acknowledged that you should never, ever pay the bloated price the cheap-o publisher with no editors on staff charges for the whole mess. Wait til I get it rewritten. It will probably be even more horrible.

3 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as Aeroquest, artwork, bad novel writing, cartoons, colored pencil, drawing, first novel, humor, nonsense, paffooney, space pirates

October 22, 2014 · 2:43 am

Things You Probably Ought to Know about Mickey

As Mickey’s go, the one who is writing this is a moderately interesting example of the breed. Still, there are things you probably ought to be made aware of. A sort of precautionary thing…

First of all, this particular Mickey is an Iowegian. That means he comes from Iowa, the State where the tall corn grows. It is a prime reason why his jokes are corny and his ears have been popped (oh, and he does actually have two, unlike the picture Paffooney where only one is showing). His fur is not actually purple. If anything now, it is mostly silver-gray. But the Paffooney is a magical portrait, and purple is the color of magic. He has a goofy, and sometimes fatal grin. You may not be able to prove that he has ever actually grinned someone to death, but it is likely he could always dig somebody up.

Another irrefutable fact about this Mickey, unlike many many Mickeys, is that he used to actually be a public school teacher. He taught the little buggers for thirty-one years, plus two years as a substitute teacher. He did twenty-four of those years in middle school… twenty-three of those in one school in South Texas. His mostly Hispanic students managed to teach him every bad word in Spanglish… err, Texican… err, Tex-Mex… or is it Taco Bell? Anyway, they taught him every bad word except for the word for cooties… you know, piojos. He learned that word from an old girl friend.

A despicable thing about him… (you know despicable, right? It’s that word that Sylvester the cat always uses) is that he actually likes kids. That’s just not normal for someone who teaches them. Teachers are supposed to hate kids, aren’t they? But he never did. It is true that he yelled at them sometimes, but he never did that because he hated them. He did that only for fun. And he actually apologized to kids sometimes when they got into behavioral trouble, because he said it was the teacher’s fault if kids are bad, and, besides, the kids are so surprised by that, that they forget all about the behavior and can be flammoozled into acting good.

The last and most wicked thing you need to know about Mickey is that he cartoons up a storm sometimes. He loves to draw everything that is wacky and weird. He has more goofball colored pencil tricks than a Charles Shultz and a Dr. Seuss rolled together in a sticky lump with a George Herriman stuck on top in place of a cherry. He steals ideas and techniques from other artists and steals jokes from comedians, undertakers, and random juvenile delinquents. He also puts together lists of wacky oddball details that don’t quite fit together and weaves it into purple paisley prose (somewhere in this whole messy blog thing he has also defined purple paisley prose and how to make it… in case you were curious.)

So there you have it. The Truth about Mickey. The sordid, simpering, solitary facts about Mickey. The straight poop. (wait a minnit! How did poop get there? Not again! I thought I had cured that!)

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as artwork, autobiography, cartoons, colored pencil, drawing, goofiness, humor, paffooney, purple-paisley prose, satire, teaching

September 2, 2014 · 11:34 pm

Hidden Kingdom #3

Let me regale you with a tale of mice and men who’ve had too much ale and all are looking very pale… Okay, enough of that nonsense. Here’s the rest of chapter one;

You see here the end of chapter one. I am still in the process of trying to find all the pages for chapter two. I will post here what I can find, and if there is interest, I may continue this project.

3 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as artwork, cartoons, drawing, fantasy adventure, goofy stuff, humor, paffooney, pen and ink

Tag Archives: cartoons

Ralph Bakshi

Krazy Kat

Toonerville, a Place I Once Lived In

The Next Little Project

Goofy Me

The Rest of my Classroom Gallery

Cartoon Board-Work

Space Pirates

Things You Probably Ought to Know about Mickey

Hidden Kingdom #3

Catch a Falling Star FB Page

Recent Posts

Stars We’ve Caught

Catch a Falling Star

Follow Blog via Email

Categories

Meta