Tag Archives: pen and ink

Warrior Elves

One of the most interesting parts of the old-time Dungeons & Dragons campaign were the elves and the part they played in sweeping adventures and war.  Elves, who revere magic and live closer to nature than humans, were a popular part of our game.  Nobody wanted to play an elf, however.  They just wanted to recruit them as NPC hired help.  I was able, though, to create a few with character.  The elf Fernando was a thief and an illusionist.  When a Minotaur killed him, the players worked hard to bring him back from the dead.  Of course, he was named after one of the players, one of the reasons they were fond of him.  The elf Apollo was inspired by the Elfquest characters of Wendy and Richard Pini.  Those comics were read and reread till they started to come apart at the staples.  I still have them.  The Paffooney pictures one of Apollo’s sons who was among the elven legions that defended Castle Gansdorf from the armies of the Red Dragon and the Black Wizard.  Most of the elves died in that battle (which completely covered my living room floor in miniatures and cardboard castle parts).  I don’t remember this elf’s name, but he survived the battle and the castle defenders won, holding the walls of the inner courts.

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Comic Book Fever

I have long wanted to tell my stories in comic book form, a thing that causes no little difficulty.  Problem one, my arthritis makes 64-page stories difficult, let alone the hundreds of pages needed for a graphic novel.

I do have a couple of things that I have worked on over the years, though.  Here are a couple of things;

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Sorcerer’s Duel is a tale of Dungeons and Dragons players, while Hidden Kingdom is a sword and sorcery tale set in the tiny world of fairies and mythical creatures (made small over the centuries by the disbelief of most humans).  Both are graphic novels that will probably never see publication.  I can expose them on this blog, however, and maybe generate interest in my fiction.

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Imagination Made Me Do It

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Is it a curse?  Or is it a blessing?  My mind doesn’t travel in straight lines.  More likely circles, or curly-cues, or just plain scribbles…

Whenever I have a problem, like now, with money, or my children, or my wife, or my dog, or my job, or my… goodness this seems to go on forever… I tend to get screwy ideas about mass public transit via circus cannon, or dog diapers, or little green men invading the Earth and claiming to be from Mars although they are really from a planet one hundred light years away…  Well, you get the idea.  Off topic… outside the box… from deep left field… all sorts of cliches to explain why I don’t think normally about stuff.  I just can’t.  I need to sail on a sea of dreams in a ship with pink sails.  Escape… dream… imagine…  And sometimes it solves the problem, but usually it doesn’t.  And life goes on, but with a little less cash than before, a little less discipline than before, a little less love than before, a little more rolled-up newspaper…  You understand.  The Devil didn’t make me do it.  Imagination did.  And so I must go sailing.

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The Book of Old Art

I have notebooks full of old drawings of many sorts.  Some novel-related, most not.  Let’s start with my first novel… one not published yet.  I call it Superchicken after the central character.

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And here are supporting characters in various stages of drawing…

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The story-teller character is, of course, the younger version of me.  This story is more than thirty years old.

I have many other drawings of various weird things.  You may notice the signature says Leah Cim Reyeb.  That goofy old etruscan so-and-so is actually me, my name spelled backwards… err… sdrawkcab.

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So… there it is.  A sample of the contents of my old book of art.  I am not completely demented yet, but as you can see… I’m getting there.

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Cotulla Cowboys

Cotulla Cowboys

I began my teaching career in deep South Texas, in a place called Cotulla. One thing I learned right away about Cotulla was that it was the same school district where Lyndon Baines Johnson taught as a young man. It was the site, at the Welhausen migrant school where LBJ taught, that the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 was signed. I later learned that LBJ had referred to Cotulla in his autobiography as the “donkey-hole” of Texas. Of course, he used the biblical word for donkey. He must of loved that town in much the same way as I did. Cotulla made the nightly news often enough that my relatives in Iowa all discovered where it was. It made the news as part of the weather report… hottest place in the nation. I guess we averaged about 107 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. Hot, hotter, and hottest… I made friends with the mayor of Cotulla, William L. Cotulla whose family had founded the place two generations before. I taught there long enough to become the middle school English department head. I had three whole people in my department. I regularly went to the Wild Hog Cook-off and LaSalle County Fair. It was the kind of place where you have to be a cowboy. And I was. It was the high school team name after all. So there you have it… love it and hate it both… the reason I am a cowboy.

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May 9, 2014 · 12:25 am

Making Fan Art

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.

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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.

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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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Fan Art

Fan Art

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.

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April 24, 2014 · 12:57 am

Space Ninjas and other Bright Ideas from a Dim Bulb

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As cartoonists go, I am rather a failure and a flop.  I have not made a single dollar on my cartoon art.  Instead it has all gone into lessons at school, charity programs, and various role-playing games with geeky boys.  Still, I have brilliant insights into what would make good adventure fiction, especially for geeky boys.  You take outer-space teenage travelers, turn them into ninjas with ninjitsu powers, and then give them special mutant mind powers like telekinesis, pyrokinesis, telepathy, and clairvoyance.  Little Mutant Space Ninjas I call them.  And, yes, I know how lame and goofy that all is, but I love it.  I think others will love it too.

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These are a few of my Aeroquest mutant space ninjas.  (Left to right; Taffy King, Billy Iowa, Gyro the Nebulon, Sara Smith, Sensei Ged Aero, Ham Aero Junior (an adopted Nebulon), Shu Kwai, Jadalaqstbr, and Alec Songh.)

Kids identify with child heroes.  They also like action, adventure, and wild Sci-Fi special effects.

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This it Tiki Astro, the artificial boy.  He’s an ultra high tech metaloid (robot) who is made to be practically indistinguishable from a real boy.  He was built by his “father”, a metaloid nanny-bot that was infected with Ancient technology and adopted the pseudonym Happy Jack.

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Space ninjas have to be really cool and really really destructive to capture the interests and imagination of today’s young boys.  This ninja boy is Sejii Killer, the son of the space pirate King Killer.  He can single-handedly mow down whole armies of minions and deadly Nathir plant men.  He can seriously alter the populations of whole worlds.  That’s the kind of killer kid I need to put into space ninja cartoons.

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So look out, World!  My cartoon ninja kids from outer space are on their way to invade your sci-fi dreams and adolescent fantasies.

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Why do they love karaoke in the Philippines?

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This is cartoon that I actually got published in a comic book from Ben Dunn’s Ninja High School comic book series.  You could look it up.  Nobody paid me anything, but maybe it will be a collector’s item some day.

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I have been married to a beautiful Filipina for nineteen years now.  We have two handsome sons and a beautiful little girl.  I am going so far in learning a new culture that I have chosen to learn how to speak that gawd-awful language Tagalog.  Salamat.  If you gave a chicken monkey-lips and set him to caterwauling, you’d have some idea how Tagalog sounds to a jaded old English ear like mine.  I love it.  “Flowers” would be “mga blklk” in Tagalog.  How beautiful is that?  I don’t have to worry about having a sense of humor.  They will laugh at me just for my pronunciation.

I am quickly learning also to take part in the most important ritual in Filipino culture.  Karaoke.  It’s a uniquely oriental thing.  Friends and family gather around the TV and start passing around the “magic microphone”, “Magic Mike” for short.  Dang!  That’ll be my name from now on.  Just call me “Magic Mike”!  The words appear on the screen in front of rotating still pictures that vary from the aerial view of Mad Ludwig’s German Castle to a beach in Hawaii.  The words themselves have been placed there by some Japanese or Korean guy who barely knows how to speak English.  He apparently sits in his Tokyo apartment all day listening to American CD’s and trying to write the words down exactly as his Samurai brain slowly processes them.  The grammar is always twisted and goofy, many of the words are wrong.  The mistakes on the screen can throw me way off singing one of my favorite songs when it gets to the part about “birds is flying over the rainbow, so why won’t I?”  Ah!  The total comic artistry!  And get this, the machine scores the performance.  You can hit the most cat-strangling, nails on blackboards sort of notes, and if you hit the beat right, it gives you a 94 and calls you a star singer.  Sinatra is turning over in his grave.  Barbara Streisand will be turning over in her grave too as soon as my singing kills her.

Don’t get me wrong.  As silly a thing as karaoke is, I love it.  It makes me feel good to belt out a round of “I did it my way”.  I sing better than some of our friends.  But, we have some real singing talent join us on occasion.   James is smoother and more polished singing a Beatles tune than the Beatles themselves.  Ernie sings “Beautiful Sunday” so well it brings a tear to my eye.  And of course, there’s nothing that tickles me more than hearing a Filipino tenor putting his all into “My Wild Irish Rose”.

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I am Popeye

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I am Popeye, I sez, because I just am…  Yeah, that’s right, I yam what I yam. 

First of all, I looks like Popeye.  I has that cleft in my chin, very little hair left on my ol’ head, and I gots the same squinky eye (what squinky eye?).  I has had that same squinky eye since I wuz a teenager and got kicked in the eye doin’ sandlot football (bettern’ sandlot high divin’, fer sure!).  I also has them same bulgy arms, the ones that bulge in the forearm and is incredibobble thin on the upper arms.

Second of all, I has Popeye Spinach-strength.  I look weak and scrawny, but I is a lot tuffer than I looks.  I go into classrooms full of wild, crazed high schoolers, and grabs their attention, tells ’em what’s what, and makes ’em woik.  (Woik is a voib, and that means I is woikin’ when I makes ’em do it.)  I kin stands ridicule and kids what will remarks on the hair in my ears and my squinky eye.  I tells ’em that the scar on my face was did by a bloke with a knife (which it were, cause I had skin cancer and the doctor used a knife to get it off).  I have taken all kinds of nasty punches from life (diabetes, blood-pressure problems, prostatitis, arthritis) and I still keeps comin’ back fer more.  In fact, I can winds up me arm and give that ol’ Devil a good Twisker Sock right in the kisser.

Third of all, I has a typical Popeye Sweet Patootie.  My Island Girl Wife is like Olive Oyl in very many ways.  She is always tellin’ me what to do.  She compares me to ol’ Bluto.  She panics and flails her arms when there’s a crisis.  And she expects me to always save the day and never says “thank you” after.

So, I mean it when I sez “I am Popeye”.  I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam!

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