Tag Archives: goofiness

I Go Pogo!

I gave you fair warning.  Pogo has been coming to Mickey’s Catch a Falling Star Blog for a while now.  So, if you intended to avoid it, TOO BAD!  You are here now in Okefenokee Swamp with Pogo and the gang, and subject to Mickey’s blog post about Walt Kelly and his creations.

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Walt Kelly began his cartoon hall-of-fame career in 1936 at Walt Disney Studios.  If you watch the credits in Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo, you will see Walt listed as an animator and Disney artist.  In fact, he had almost as much influence on the Disney graphic style as Disney had on him.  He resigned in 1941 to work at Dell Comics where he did projects like the Our Gang comics that you see Mickey smirking at here, the Uncle Wiggly comics, Raggedy Ann and Andy comics, and his very own creations like Pogo, which would go on to a life of its own in syndicated comics.  He did not return to work at Disney, but always credited Disney with giving him the cartoon education he would need to reach the stratosphere.

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Walt Kelly's Earth Day comic

Walt Kelly’s Earth Day comic

Pogo is an alternate universe that is uniquely Walt Kelly’s own.  It expresses a wry philosophy and satirical overview of our society that is desperately needed in this time of destructive conservative politics and deniers of science and good sense.

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Pogo himself is an every-man character that we are supposed to identify with the most.  He is not the driver of plots and doings in the swamp, rather the victim and unfortunate experiencer of those unexpectable things. Life in Okefenokee is a long series of random events to make life mostly miserable but always interesting if approached with the right amount of Pogo-ism.

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And Pogo was always filled with cute and cuddly as well as ridiculous.

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As a boy, I depended on the comic section of the Sunday paper to make sense of the world for me.  If I turned out slightly skewed and warped in certain ways, it is owing to the education I myself was given by Pogo, Lil Abner, Dagwood Bumstead, and all the other wizards from the Sunday funnies.  There was, of course, probably no bigger influence on my art than the influence of Walt Kelly.

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So what more can I say about Walt Kelly?  I haven’t yet reached the daily goal of 500 words.  And yet, the best way to conclude is to let Walt speak for himself through the beautiful art of Pogo.

Pogo and Mamzelle

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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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Silly Tyger!

I think I posted this picture once before and told you it was inspired by William Blake’s poem The Tyger!  That is still true.  I wasn’t telling a lie, at least, I don’t believe I was.  So the poem goes like this;

The Tyger

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Tyger
The idea is that the Tyger represents some unknowable evil that we must fear and respect because it is beyond our understanding.  But the kid in the picture seems to be unafraid.  Was that a mistake?  Or was I really thinking this?
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Apologies to Bill Watterson for stealing his cartoon for this post.  I needed a more dangerous-looking Tyger than the one I had.

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The Ultra-Mad Madness of Don Martin

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Born in 1931 and lasting in this crazy, mixed-up world until the year 2000, Don Martin was a mixy, crazed-up cartoonist for Mad Magazine who would come to be billed as “Mad Magazine’s Maddest Artist.”    His greatest work was done during his Mad years, from 1956 (the year I was born… not a coincidence, I firmly believe) until his retirement in 1988.  And I learned a lot from him by reading his trippy toons in Mad from my childhood until my early teacher-hood.

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His style is uniquely recognizable and easily identifiable.  Nobody cartoons a Foon-man like Don Martin.

The googly eyes are always popped in surprise.  The tongue is often out and twirling.  Knees and elbows always have amazingly knobbly knobs.  Feet have an extra hinge in them that God never thought of when he had Adam on the drawing board.

And then there is the way that Martin uses sound effects.  Yes, cartoons in print don’t make literal sounds, but the incredible series of squeedonks and doinks that Martin uses create a cacophony of craziness in the mind’s ear.

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And there is a certain musicality in the rhyming of the character names he uses.  Fester Bestertester was a common foil for slapstick mayhem, and Fonebone would later stand revealed by his full name, Freenbeen I. Fonebone.

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And, of course, one of his most amazingly adventurous ne’er-do-well slapstick characters was the immeasurable Captain Klutz!

Here, there, and everywhere… on the outside he wears his underwear… it’s the incredible, insteadable, and completely not edible… Captain Klutz!

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If you cannot tell it from this tribute, I deeply love the comic genius who was Don Martin, Mad Magazine’s Maddest Artist.  Like me he was obsessed with nudists and drawing anatomy.  Like me he was not above making up words with ridiculous-sounding syllables.  And like me he was also a purple-furred gorilla in a human suit… wait!  No, he wasn’t, but he did invent Gorilla-Suit Day, where people in gorilla suits might randomly attack you as you go about your daily life, or gorillas in people suits, or… keep your eye on the banana in the following cartoon.

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So, even though I told you about Bruce Timm and Wally Wood and other toon artists long before I got around to telling you about Don Martin, that doesn’t mean I love them more.  Don Martin is wacky after my own heart, and the reason I spent so much time immersed in Mad Magazine back in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.

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Doodle-Bop!

Sometimes the only thing you really want out of life is just to get by. You get tired of always having to climb the danged highest mountain.  You get tired of trying to swim the danged deepest sea.

16750_102844509741181_100000468961606_71393_6278100_nSometimes all you want to do is doodle-bop!…  To draw in pen and ink and post your derfiest doofenwacky doodles so you can just make your way through another danged day.

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You aim a lot for different, and undeniably original… because no one thinks like you… certainly no one who is real and has a real brain.  You are gifted with an “other-ness”, a sing-songy simpering something that makes you want to doodle and do what no man has done before.  (Does that sentence exist anywhere else in all of literature?  Even if there is some alternate dimension with infinite monkeys typing on infinite typewriters?  What’s a typewriter, you say?  Danged millennials!)

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I really can’t help it, you know.  I was a middle school teacher for 24 years.  That sort of thing has mental health consequences.  And if you wring the sponges in your stupid old brain hard enough and long enough… doodle-bop! comes out.

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Turtle boy’s magic iron of irony!!!

And you have to wonder why some of the stuff that is in your stupid old head is even in there.  Why is it that sometimes the words “Argyle socks are filled with rocks” are drifting through the vast empty spaces in the logic centers of your brain?  There has to be a reason for everything, doesn’t there?

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I do believe I have made myself chuckle at least a dozen chuck-tacular times in the chuck-a-tational crafting of this cheddar-cheesy post.  But it only really counts if I can make you girlishly giggle or guy-like guffaw with my word-munching and cartoony paffoonies.

Wild Ride

The terror-filled cartoon car chase that is life as usual.

You may have noticed that everything is black and white, even though it doesn’t have to be.  Good versus evil, hot versus cold, everything can be divided up simplistically… but the really profound part of simplicity is vibrating reverberations of complexity that lie just underneath.  Words have meaning, even though they are just a bunch of crooked squiggles marked on a page.  (Yes, I know… “or typed on a computer screen”.  Danged millennials!)

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And so, this is my doodle-bop!  Probably not the doodliest or the boppiest doodle-bop! I could have bopped… but there it is.  I have made it through another sorta creative post without losing my mind…  Honest!  I did not lose it.  It is merely temporarily misplaced for a moment.  It will be back in its proper place tomorrow… probably.

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Inside Toonerville

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The Toonerville Post Office and Bert Buchanan’s Toy Store.

Toonerville is not only a wonderful cartoon place created by Fontaine Fox in the 1930’s, but the name of the town that inhabited my HO Train Layout when I lived in South Texas and had the Trolley actually running nearly on time.  The train layout has not been restored to working condition for over a decade now.  The buildings which I mostly built from kits or bought as plaster or ceramic sculptures and repainted have been sitting on bookshelves in all that time.  I still have delusions of rebuilding the train set in the garage, but it is becoming increasingly less and less likely as time goes on and my working parts continue to stiffen up and stop working.  So, what will I do with Toonerville?

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Wilma Wortle waits on the station platform for her train at the Toonerville Train station. I built this kit in the 1970’s, hence the accumulations of dust bunnies.

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Loew’s Theater has been awaiting the start of The African Queen for more than twenty years.

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Main Street Toonerville at 2:25 in the afternoon. Or is it three? The courthouse clock is often slow.

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Grandma Wortle who controls all the money in the family likes to park her car near the eggplant house when she visit’s Al’s General Store.

But I may yet have found a way to put Toonerville back together through computer-assisted artsy craftsy endeavors.

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A two-shot of Bill Freen’s house and Slappy Coogan’s place on the photo set to start production.

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Bill Freen’s house lit up with newfangled electricical. (and I do believe that is the way Bill spells it all good and proper.)

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Bill Freen’s house cut out in the paint program.

So I can make composite pictures of Toonerville with realistic photo-shopped backgrounds.  Now, I know only goofy old artsy fartsy geeks like me get excited about doofy little things like this, but my flabber is completely gasted with the possibilities.

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Bill Freen’s house at sunset… (but I don’t get why there’s snow on the roof when the grass is so green?)

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Portraits in Pen and Ink

Simple, clean lines and basic, well-defined shapes go together in black and white.  They are in the basic nature of being a cartoonist.  You translate what you see into line drawings where a few simple lines become a complex and meaningful image.

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My one-legged Batman is an exercise in  foreshortening and trying to burst through the two-dimensional confines of the page to grab the viewer.  I learned this trick from comic book artist Jim Lee.

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His sidekick is rendered as a static portrait where the computer monitor in front of him lights up Robin’s intense and thoughtful face.

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She was an excellent teacher and former nun… she was a mentor to me, taught me a lot about life and love and great beauty.  How do you adequately portray the wisdom and the patience in those highly magnified eyes?  I drew from memory only.  She never considered herself beautiful.  But she was.  And it hurts not to be able to capture it correctly.

Not every portrait is literal.  Sometimes you exaggerate facial characteristics and behavioral quirks are emphasized to create humor in the portrait.

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When I was first married I did a double portrait of us as a knight and his lady fair.  I know, I know… it is so sickeningly sweet that it punches me right in the diabetes.  But, hey, it doesn’t really look like me anyway.   It is more of a portrait of Porky Pig in glasses and hair.

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There is an art to pen and ink that cuts right to the heart of who you are and who you want to be.  Simple lines in black and white… there is no more incisive tool for putting my goofy old mind down on paper.

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Something Creative Goes Here

Not Alone

Sometimes the creative brain gets a little too hot and needs time to cool.  That means I need a meaningless filler post to maintain my every-day posting.  So, I give you a picture of Mike Murphy carrying his girlfriend, Blueberry Bates’ books home from the bus stop on a country road in Iowa.  And, of course, they happen to meet an alien named George Jetson, whose father named him after a character on his favorite Earther TV show from the 60’s.  It is a strange thing to have your brain over-heat from too many creative neurons firing at the same time.  But it can lead to notions of intergalactic peace and cultural exchange… or racist comments like, “Tellerons have heads that look like giant boogers!”  But I should be able think more rationally tomorrow.  I hope that turns out to be a good thing.

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Hydra Hair

No, this isn’t a post about the Avengers… but that’s a cool idea.  I just haven’t seen the new movie yet.  I will… so be patient.  You probably don’t really need a lot of comic-book fan-boy love right now anyway…  That is such a nerd-need, and you are not a nerd… at least, I haven’t been corrected about nerd-things on my blog, which leads me to conclude there are no nerds reading my squishy-goofy-gallywumpas.  This post is about my daughter, the Princess.

PrincessSpecifically, this is a post about the Princess’ hair.  You see, the Princess was unfortunate enough to be exactly between two opposite extremes of hair-genes.  She inherited her mother’s thick, dark wire-hair, but the wild-hair, mind-of-its-own crazy go-every-direction hair she got from me.  She inherits the worst hair-features from both of us.  So how do you to tame your hair in the mornings when you have thick, unruly hair  that not only refuses to be tamed, but will willingly grab the brush out of your hand and throw it across the room?  Well, you apparently borrow your brother’s comb without permission and give the hair 500 rat-nest-dislodging yanks and then lose the comb so that your brother is mad at you for the rest of the day… I mean, the rest of the week… er, the month, the year… maybe the rest of the Princess’ life.

This morning;

Me;  “Please don’t eat your brother’s comb when you are finished doing that.  Put it back on the sink in the bathroom before we go to school.”  (This is a helpful dad-statement used every morning when I watch her battling the hair at the breakfast table, but inevitably the comb is missing the next time brother Henry looks for it.  She must eat it when my back is turned to go start the car.)

Princess;  “I will, Dad…  Geez….  But I can’t believe all the hair I have now on my pants and shirt.  How can I lose this much hair every day and not be bald?”

“Princess, you are really, really good at growing hair.”

“Oh, I know it.  In fact, I’m pretty sure when I pull out one hair, three grow back to take its place.”

“Wow!  That’s like mythological, or something.  Do you wake up in the night to find little Hercules-type guys climbing up on your pillow trying to cut your hair with swords?”

“Yeah, it keeps me awake at night.  But you know in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Books, the hydra has to be turned to stone or be burned with fire to defeat it.”  (I cannot, of course, argue this point as she has read all of the books and is an irrefutable expert on the subject of Rick Riordan’s mythology.)

“Oh, mercy!  You mean the little Hercules-guys are climbing on your pillow with torches?”

“Yes, but I got a bunch of little Minotaur-guys to fight them off, so my hair hasn’t been burned.”

“Well, that’s good…  but what about all the little cow patties they leave in your blankets?”

“Dad, hair problems are hard.   You can’t expect to have it all easy, right?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

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Cloudscapes

Cloudscapes

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.)

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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;

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.

The finished picture.

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