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”.
Tag Archives: cartoons
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.
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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!)
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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.
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Hidden Kingdom #2
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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The Hidden Kingdom
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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The Hidden Kingdom
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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Reluctant Rabbit
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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