So, here’s a picture of Michael Mouse surrounded by friends and admirers of all sorts. I can’t help the surrealism any more than Salvador Dali could, but the point here is that I, like Mr. Mouse, am a Mickey. I am filled with Mickey-ness. I am a part of all of Mickey-dom… but never Mickey-dumb! “Sweet Mickey, warm Mickey, little ball of yucks… Cool Mickey, wry Mickey, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.”
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.
Life is like Moose Bowling,
Because…
In order to knock over all the pins,
And win…
You have to learn HOW TO THROW A MOOSE!
My homage to “the Ghost Who Walks” was carefully chosen. I scanned my Phantom comics from Charleton looking for the right pose. I found an image of him punching toward the viewer. I thought, “Why don’t I put that view on horseback and have him riding toward me and punching.” Why did I think that? Who knows? As an artist, I’m kinda erratic and crazy that way. I guess that’s why I claim to be a surrealist. I do believe all comic book artists have to be surrealists to do their job. That’s true whether they do super heroes, ducks who hoard money in vaults and wear spats, pigs who wear a coat and a tie but no pants, or alien monsters hungry for the nearly naked flesh of Dale Arden. Uh… maybe I’m revealing way too much about my thought processes here… So here’s step one, the pen and ink.
Then I had to give it some colored pencil treatments. Black and white with crosshatching is cool, but it is also like bare bones, without life and energy. So I used the powers I have over cheap Roseart pencils and madly scribbled in colors carefully balanced to show just how truly chaotic my perceptions of action and adventure really are.
Now, I know the Phantom’s horse is either black or pure white, depending on which version or generation of the Ghost Who Walks is being depicted, but I did a yellow horse. I know… I know… I did pansy colors when I really should’ve gone fire red or all bloody crimson. I’m completely violating continuity. But I never completely do what I intend to do. If I don’t screw it up at least a little bit, then it really isn’t me. Besides, what else is there to yell at myself about and twist words around to make it sound like I’m being all comedically gifted and funny?
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One of my all-time favorite comic book characters has always been Captain America as a member of the Avengers. Just like so many other artists hooked on comic books, I have drawn my heroes numerous times. Here is a sample. This is mostly a pen and ink drawing, colored with colored pencils.
The Dust Man is unique because he creates worlds from chalk dust. He draws pictures on the chalk board in colored chalks, sometimes massive full-board murals. He is a natural at telling stories, whether they are pieces of great literature read aloud (he used to do Rikki Tikki Tavi by Rudyard Kipling, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Joey Pigza Loses Control by Jack Gantos, and The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket), or they were incidental slice-of-life stories about his own experiences, or even re-tellings of historical figures and the events in their lives (one student used to sum up all of these stories by saying “first you tell us what wonderful things he or she did, then you tell us how that person died a horrible or painful death”… and I often found humor in that). The Dust Man was a natural teacher of boys, able to connect their silly and hormonal little lives to a great wide world of significant experiences. He could teach girls too, even though he found them much harder to understand. But now, in 2014, he will lay the chalk down for a final time. The dust will race across the blackboard no more. The stories will go from oral to written form. And something will be, regrettably, forever lost. (And, yes, pathos is humor too, a fond but bittersweet memory… so I did not miss-tag this post!)
Although the child in the painting is definitely not me or one of mine (the dog is Queenie, and she was real), and although I grew up about as far from the sea as you can get, this painting reveals something critical about who I am. My Grandpa Aldrich was a singular man of wisdom and good humor. He could tell a funny story with the best of them. He was a farmer and inculcated in me a farmer’s work ethic, that get-up-before-dawn style of thing. He never got mad, even the time I broke the plumbing in his house by playing Tarzan in the basement, swinging on the bathroom pipes in the ceiling. Everything I know about how to love, and how to act, and who to be I got from him, or at least from him through my mother who was his child. My grandpa lasted into his eighties and was alive until I finally got married at 38. He lives in my heart still, guiding my actions… even the words I am writing now.
Yes, I think I was born entirely in the wrong time. I could’ve been a great pulp fiction cover artist. Of course, I would’ve done great work and starved to death, because that’s what most of them did. It was, however, a time when art was blazing with brightly-colored surrealism. I was inspired by the artwork in this book; Pulp Culture, the Art of Fiction Magazines by Frank Robinson and Lawrence Davidson.
I used to find secret treasures like this in my Uncles’ bedroom when I played there at Grandpa’s house in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. They were full of cowboys with sixguns, pirates and skeletons, poisonous snakes, nearly nude ladies, and science fiction heroes from the future. So I decided to create one of my own.
What’s it all about? Surrealism’s quest to make life more like art. Pretty heroines can strike back at the heart of evil with goodness, and sweetness, and most importantly, nearly nakedness. We can skew the future by applying the wisdom learned in the past. You know, pure unadulterated fantasy. And hopefully we will be making a skew towards goodness and the light, not darkness and evil.
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Yes, I have become a wizard. It isn’t just my author-beard and my Gandalf-hair. It is a matter of wisdom. To be a wizard, you must be a wise guy… in more than one sense of the word. I am a wizard because over the past 33 years, I have had about everything that could possibly go wrong in a teaching career go totally wrong. I have also had things go totally right. I have gotten teacher evaluations that are so high that you can’t score any higher. I have also been evaluated so low that I was dropped immediately, It took two years of substitute teaching to get another job. I have been accused of being stupid, of being evil, of being a child molester… none of that proven… except possibly the stupid part. I have been a department head, a gifted and talented program coordinator. I have taught every kind of kid there is. I loved many of them with the love a teacher feels for those he must reach… and then does. Experience makes you a wizard. Now that I am retiring, I am not giving up the magic. I am still going to reach people. I will have to do it mostly through words and ideas.
So, I am thinking a lot now about my magic. I am still working at my craft. I am practicing by trying hard to post a blog post every single day. You have to stretch ideas all out of shape. Mash up old ideas and rehash old drawings and paintings. Make something new out of something old. Shuffle things around, pair them with something different… You have to rearrange the matrix of the mental world you live in. Okay, enough stretching and mashing. I am a wizard of words, and this that I am typing now is my magic.
So have a little bit more of my magic. This little wizard is young Prinz Flute. Drawings are part of my magic too. You wouldn’t believe how much teaching I did with cartoons on the board, on the overhead projector, on handouts. Drawings make the ideas go around.
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Catch a Falling Star 