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
Troubled hearts can be soothed with words. In 1Samuel 16:23 David plays the harp and his singing was a relief for Saul and the bad spirit departed from upon him. In the same way, the written word can touch the soul of the reader and, like Saul, free the reader from the demons besetting him. That is power. That is responsibility.
Of course, I am the last person to claim that I can teach you to write with power… I can’t even claim that I can write with power myself. But I know how to write well enough to make myself laugh, cry, and feel through my writing. And occasionally someone else reads my writing and agrees. Through years worth of being a writing teacher, I do have some thoughts about how it may be done.
First of all, I am not wrong to choose David’s harp playing, inspired by Jehovah as it was, as a metaphor for writing power. It is in the very sounds of the words that a great deal of emotion and meaning is embedded. One can evoke a very bitter and angry feeling by describing a cruel woman not as a “mean girl” but as one whose laughter is “like the crass cackling of devious old witch”. Mean girl has too soft a labial sound, even with the hard g, to be as ugly and staccato as the repeated k sounds added to the tch and the fact that “devious” comes so close to “devil”… a related word. A happy feeling can be created by describing a smile as “a sudden sunburst of white teeth and happiness”. That almost makes me laugh…unless you add “shark’s” between “white” and “teeth”… and then I am convinced I am about to be eaten. The s sounds in the description are like a sizzling burn that leads into the firework display at the end of the word “sunburst”. To write with the music inherent in words, at some point you have to hear it out loud. I always hear the words in my head when I write, spoken in a wide variety of voices. But to truly get it right, I have to read aloud to hear with my ears… which I have already done three times to this paragraph alone.
In order to have power, writing must manipulate feelings. I don’t mean by using the word “manipulate” that it is some sort of Machiavellian bad thing. Simply put, a writer must control the feelings of the reader, not by sound alone, but by the depth of meaning of the words. You must be able to weave a paragraph together not only with the simple meanings of the words themselves, but all the connotations and denotations in those words. You must use metaphor and simile, comparison, allusion, and sensory details. Ernest Hemingway had a working style almost completely devoid of metaphor and the writer’s own personal commentary… but that only worked because all his themes were about dispirited people suffering tragedy and loss and a pervasive sense of disconnectedness. Hemingway is a powerful writer… but his books never make me laugh. Purple prosey over-describers like Charles Dickens can make me laugh with a simple list of things. “The boy’s desk had a nearly dry ink bottle, several pens that needed new nibs and were chewed about the grip, and a small stack of papers crammed full of ink drawings of skulls and skeletons.” It is that last startling detail in the list that makes the mundane suddenly funny.
I suppose to do today’s topic true justice, I should write about it in book length. There is so much more to say. But I have bored you long enough for one post with writing nuts and bolts. It is enough to say that I believe in the magic of words, and I think that if, like any good Dungeons and Dragons wizard, you study your books of magic long enough, you can soon be casting fireballs around the room made up of nothing but words.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, writing, writing teacher
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
Today is going to be difficult with a lot of important work to do that I can’t even write about for a while. It involves taking risks with my secret identity and pushing for good things to happen. You are aware that Mickey is my secret self… the superhero mask I wear to fight evil, right? No? Oops! Forget that I said anything. I have no secret identity. We are just doing this post today for the whole Red Nose Day thing. There is no hidden agenda. No secret sauce and super powers. I swear, on my honor I only tell lies in my fiction… that’s the truth… I tell lies.
Here is a link explaining the whole red nose thing…
And if you see a hero who seems a little goofy around the edges, wearing a red nose as his super-hero disguise, and he fumbles and bumbles as he tries to do the right thing, remember… that isn’t me. It is somebody else.
Filed under humor, photo paffoonies
Here is a page for collected stories that I mean to build on and expand. It is my intention to file cartoons here and edit them and add more pages via posts. So for a first attempt let me use an old cartoon that was rejected once by Heavy Metal magazine in the early 1980’s and rejected a second time by a cartoon magazine that no longer exists and I can’t even remember the name of… I am thinking they had very poor taste in cartoon art anyway.
Now, of course, this a finished four-page one-shot. It was intended for a magazine that sought this kind of full-color art and had an over-all science fiction and horror fantasy theme. I was too light and colorful with this short for their needs. Disney characters on the PJ’s might have been a legal problem too. So I am left with an unsaleable example of my best colored-pencil art, done when I was still pretty much a clueless kid and not yet a teacher. It was worth doing, but will never make me a single dime.
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 no doubt about it, being a writer is like getting naked in public. It never used to really sink in before I published books, and when no one read my writing or listened to me when I talked. Suddenly, I am being read… and even… frighteningly, being believed.
I now have 678 followers, a number of whom actually read and comment on my posts. I do my best to entertain and make them laugh, but it is the nature of real writing that the contents of my life as a whole spill out for all to see. I try to keep private things private, but it is becoming more and more obvious that I need a much bigger purple teddy bear. Readers of my blog know that I was a public school teacher for thirty-one years. They also know that I did not want to leave that job, but I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor, and my health let me down. They may also know that I was the victim of a sexual predator when I was a child and recovery has taken a lifetime… in fact, it is still going on. They may know that my family life has become difficult because health issues affect an entire family, especially when the costs of care are turned into gigantic scary monsters by an increasingly greedy and corrupt health-care industry (not doctors and nurses. mind you, but the higher-ups who really make all the money off drugs, tech, and insurance.) There are no longer skeletons in my closet. All my darkest secrets become fuel for writing and bubble out of my cauldron, transforming into butterflies, who may have started as worms, but have worked themselves into filigreed winged creatures that flit about in the sunlight. I turned one of my most horrible experiences into a post for https://www.facebook.com/groups/1000Speak/. It was the story of Ruben Vela, and it was about my inability to prevent a tragedy. Here is the link; When Compassion Fails. Gobs of sobs from readers in the comment section. I usually try to make them laugh… but crying is a part of the reading game too.
And where are the Trolls? I see them on the internet everywhere. I know other bloggers who have cut off comments because of Trolls. They don’t seem to come around me with their leg-breaking, gut-busting insults and four-letter-wordy mayhem. Do I not deserve that as much as anybody else? But I know better than to actually wish for what I don’t really want. It is okay, Trolls, if you decide you’d rather apply the soul-crushing efforts elsewhere.
The point is, while I have always wanted to be a writer and have some experience with naturists and nudists, I have never before now had to come to terms with dancing naked in the sunlight in front of God and everybody… but continuing to write means dealing with it now.
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
Mondays are usually blue and difficult days. It is hard to get out of bed. And if they are hard for me, a retired old graybeard with few responsibilities beyond getting the kids out of bed and cooking breakfast and walking the dog and waking the kids up again and keeping the dog from eating the breakfast on the table and waking the kids up again and getting them out of bed for real and … well, they must be harder for kids, right?
So, I had the dog walked and breakfast served and the table cleared and we were getting ready to go to school and drop off beloved daughter at her middle school.
“I had a bad dream last night,” said the Princess. “A zombie was chasing me in a Minecraft landscape.”
“Ooh, sounds terrible. Were you by any chance playing computer games way too late last night? Maybe Minecraft?”
“Dad! It was a terrible nightmare. It made me lose sleep!”
“Did I ever tell you about my duck dream?”
“Aw, Dad! This was a scary dream, not funny.”
“Well, you know, sometimes you can have a dream and take control of it. It is called a lucid dream. If you just realize that you are dreaming, you can direct what happens. You can make a sword appear in your hand and cut the zombies’ heads off.”
“What happens when that doesn’t stop the zombie’s body from chasing you?”
“Well… look at the time. We are going to be late for school.”
“Oh, uh… I don’t have any money left in my lunch account at school.”
“You couldn’t have told me this Friday after school? I don’t have any money on me. We need to hurry and stop by the ATM at the bank on the way to school.”
So, we hurried to the bank. I handed her the twenty dollar bill.
“Um, Dad… I forgot my school I.D. at home.”
“Ah, yes… Monday.”
She made it to school at least five minutes before the late bell with money for lunch and her I.D. on so that she wouldn’t forget during the day who she actually was… well, if she did, she could at least remind herself with the I.D . Whether the zombie apocalypse happens and her dream comes true and my advice about nightmares actually saves her… I have my doubts. But with daughters, there is always hope. You hope that if you continue to feed them and get them to school on time, and talk about their fears, and address their numerous shortcomings with humor and understanding, they will turn out all right. And maybe, just maybe, they will pick a reasonably good nursing home to stick you in when you get so old and forgetful that you are too goofy to wear pants in public.
Once upon a time, the English poet and, I would argue, cartoonist, William Blake once said, “You look at the sky and see clouds, while I see the assembled heavenly host!” This is why my literature class in college about the Romantic Poets of his day made him out to be a certifiable nutcase who probably belonged in in a mental institution. (And back then, in the 1800’s, the sanitarium was a place where inconveniently crazy people went to die.)
Look at a couple of my cloudscapes. Do you see angels?
Cloudscapes (a poem)
Blue and white and filled with light…
The cloudscape burns with angels…
And wholly bought with grace unsought…
I long to fly with angels…
Are they really there in the cloud-filled air?
I see them there, they’re angels!
So, there you have it. I’m a loon. I don’t even have the excuse of being a Romantic Poet and well-known for my poetry as a defense against the loony bin. But as the matter stands, I am fully willing to accept the consequences. Creativity has its price. And, while you may not agree that I am somewhat creative, I am swimming in a vast ocean of perceived revelations that enriches me and fulfills me at the very same moment that it drains all the energy from my soul. If that is not what it means to see angels… then I do not know anything of use to anyone but me.
The word “angel” (according to Wikipedia, the source of all true knowledge) comes to English via Late Latin and the word “angelus” which the Romans stole from the Greek ἄγγελος ángelos, The ángelos is the default Septuagint’s translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mal’ākh denoting simply “messenger” without specifying its nature. (Notice, I am giving full credit to Wikipedia because it is far more all-knowing than I.)
I have many atheistic and agnostic notions in my ultimate belief systems, but still, I claim to be a Christian and believe in God Jehovah… within limits. I still communicate with God on a daily basis, and while I don’t publicly pray anymore (a notion promoted by the Biblical Jesus) I find answers to my questions and solutions to my problems from the observable universe around me.. the messengers of God. So, now that I have fully rationalized being crazy as a loon, I am going to tell you where that craziness is taking me. I started a new Paffooney for one of the books I am working on. Here is the pencil sketch;
This will be a picture of Valerie Clarke and her Daddy, the farmer Kyle Clarke. In my fiction, Kyle loses his farm to the bank (in the Family Farm Crisis of the 1980’s) and believing himself incapable of any longer supporting his family, kills himself. But the thing is, the love of his daughter transcends death for Kyle. She is able to reconnect with him time and again because the angels work for her as well as for Kyle. I may be loony and ill in real life, facing the Angel of Death myself, but I am not done doing God’s work… not yet… not for a long time to come.
Catch a Falling Star 