Here’s the second installment with the left-out page 7…
Okay, there you have pages 1 to 14 in two posts, badly photographed (the art is not that gray and dreary in real life, I promise). I will post the remaining 7 pages of chapter 1 before the week is out. I don’t know how much more of this I can still dig out, but I will try, and I work on this story to get it in a more publishable state.
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In the 1980’s I tried my hand at a graphic novel. It didn’t go very far. I applied to WaRP Graphics (Wendy and Richard Pini) for publications options. They weren’t prepared to take the project on. So, it has been in my portfolio in the closet for 30 plus years. Here is a sample of the beginning;
Okay, that is a sample of the silly saga… something I may post more of in the near future.
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In the 1980’s I tried my hand at a graphic novel. It didn’t go very far. I applied to WaRP Graphics (Wendy and Richard Pini) for publications options. They weren’t prepared to take the project on. So, it has been in my portfolio in the closet for 30 plus years. Here is a sample of the beginning;
Okay, that is a sample of the silly saga… something I may post more of in the near future.
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Mister R. Rabbit is a school teacher. He is not the scariest animal in the world, but he is quick and eats carrots, and for thirty-one years he started off the first week of school as the one holding the BIG pencil. He was the one that planned and carried out the lessons. He was the one with the carrot of irony in his pocket and the carrot of good humor tucked away in his desk drawer. For thirty one years he stood in front of the class just as you see him here.
But tonight, he is contemplating the end of the first week of no school. This week, this school year, Mr. Reluctant R. Rabbit has no class. He is now retired. No more F’s and no more A’s. No more students standing on desks to get a different perspective a la The Dead Poet’s Society. No more giant pencils. No more carrots of irony in the pockets.
This bit of a classroom rules poster is from 1982. The old rabbit had it on his classroom wall for most of the first five years that he taught. She didn’t know it at the time, but this girl is a colored pencil portrait of one of the quietest little mice that he ever taught. She didn’t know it was a picture of her, but many others recognized her. When he taught her son twenty two years later, the boy asked because he thought he recognized her. Mr. Rabbit lied and said it was somebody else in the picture.
Mr. R. Rabbit has stopped crying about it now. You can’t plant carrots of wisdom in your garden forever, and sooner or later the carrots of irony get chewed. But he still misses it mightily. He still wonders if he couldn’t have lasted one… more… school… year…
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Earlier I alluded to the plan of the super scary villain, Dr. Evil with the removable brain. He was planning on invading Mickey’s library with malice aforethought… er, anger about all the books in there… or something. Anyway, today he attacked. He showed up with several of his evil minions.
He brought some of the most evil minions I could afford on a teacher’s salary. Ming the Merciless is his most evil adviser, a real whiz with the evil plans, even though I suspect he really doesn’t like looking at the Doctor’s exposed removable brain so much.
So, once convinced, Dr. Evil put on his Dr. Normal-Guy mask. It was a disguise he often used, and was successful while wearing it, because he could sneak past his enemies while they were laughing and rolling on the ground. The laughter often started inexplicably after an enemy would ask what nationality a name like “Normal-Guy” really was.
Besides fooling the foolish Action Hero guys, Dr. Evil relied on a secret weapon. GRAMMAR NAZIS!!! He would use them to relentlessly correct the spelling of the Action Hero guys until they cried like little babies.
Will the Grammar Nazis prevail over the Action Heroes? Would they take over Mickey’s wonderful library? Would they notice how many times the villains misspelled the word “removable”?
Stay tuned next time… Same Bat Station! Same Bat Channel! For the next thrilling episode of Doctor Evil Attacks Mickey’s Library!!!!!
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For the last 25 years of my life, I have been laboring to create hand-made books filled with my magical research and spells. The two in the back are scrapbooks filled with printed images, drawings, poems, and short autobiographical compositions. I collect in them things I mean to weave into fiction, things I mean to use as models for artwork. The two in the foreground are completely cartoon stories in rough draft form. These are not books I ever mean to have published. They are filled with things I intend to use in my work at some future time. Many of these images and poems I have used already somewhere. But there are many, many more. That makes these tomes something of a treasure… at least to me.
Today I bought a new book. It is called The Art of Joe Kubert, edited by Bill Schelly. I got it at Halfprice Books for a mere six dollars and ninety-nine cents. It is filled with treasure. From the 1950’s to the present day, Kubert has been an artist behind Hawkman, Tarzan, and Sargent Rock. He is fantasy and surrealism at its graphic best. I plan on pouring over it all summer long.
Here is a study in Looniness… I have always wondered where the edge is… the border between silly, cute, and creepy. I believe I have found it with this bizarro character study. I attempted to add to the effect by making characters seem unbalanced, off kilter, and even growing out of other characters’ ears. The background pulls at your perceptions and senses as much as the primary objects do. And so… I pull a Salvador Dali with a mixed bag of Dr. Seuss, Disney, and Warner Brothers. Melting and fused toons in place of watches and human bodies. If this isn’t surreal, then I don’t know what is. Okay, I admit it. I don’t know what is!
My last post, “The Time is Coming”, was about as down and depressed as I am capable of getting. I am better now. Maybe I should explain how I did that.
I brought myself out of depression by grading papers. I know, teacher cliché, right? But there is much, much more to it than that.
In my last period class, I have one precious girl student who has been paying me for my many cartoon drawings on the dry erase board. You see, I have for many years been using my cartoonist skills to illustrate things on the board and draw attention especially to the lesson focus and objectives. Kids love these. It inspires them to commit random acts of doodlery. They imitate my toons and sometimes create their own. I don’t do Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny any more, not because I can’t, but because the owners of those copyrights have become unreasonably litigious and have sued teachers for imitating their copyrighted work. I only use cartoons of my own creation now. I have developed my own cast of characters. Some of my students have done the same.
The girl, whose name and identity I cannot here divulge (it is the law that protects student identities, but I thoroughly buy into the notion) turned in a paper yesterday with Chibis all over it. She gives me drawings of her own creation because she likes to repay me for sharing my cartoons with her. She also covers her papers with these things because of the laws of doodlery. When you are in a high school English class, your life is at risk because you could easily become bored to death. The first law of doodlery says that you must use every spare moment of the lesson to draw something. This keeps both your mind and your hands active enough to keep you alive. The second law of doodlery requires that you make maximum use of every blank part of your answer page. The third and final law of doodlery is to draw things that are different. If you draw too mundane, or too much the same, your mind goes numb and death by boredom is looking in through the windows of your mind.
So today’s Paffooney, this offering of Chibis, is the same set of doodles that pulled me out of the darkness. I copied the pencil Chibis from her paper, as precisely as I could in every way except size. Then I inked them and colored them. I won’t tell you what the Vietnamese word means or why it is there. You are entitled to your best guesses.
A Chibi is a version of a manga or cartoon character that is child-proportioned or deformed by an exaggerated cuteness. I gave the main figure blue hair because in manga language blue hair means youthful, energetic, cool, and introverted, a perfect description for my little Bishoujo, my little Chibi-doodler. She is now officially a life-saver, a heroine in my book.
Yesterday’s post was dark and depressing, and I fear the issues that created it are real, and they are not going away. But don’t worry for me. I know how to handle such things. And I do have help.
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This acrylic painting is called “the Family Outing”. Believe it or not, I painted it before I was even married. How did I know that families have to constantly fight dragons together? Well, before I became the dad with the sword, I was the son watching from the mouth of the cave. The mom in the picture is not my wife. No dragon would ever dare attack my wife. The helpless blonde was more like an old eighties girlfriend, a much less dangerous woman. The dragon, of course, is only just barely dangerous. He represents something like fear of death and dismemberment, not the kind of life threatening dangers of married life, like credit card bills.
Catch a Falling Star 