September 9, 2008
December 3, 1972
The winter of ’72 was a busy time for me as a street photographer in South Baltimore. In the Mid-Atlantic region we have fairly mild winters, some warm days even through December, January and February, and of which city kids can be counted upon to take full advantage. We certainly did when I was growing up in the neighborhood during the ‘40s and ‘50s. (Judging from my ‘70s photos it was still true then.) City streets and sidewalks absorb and retain heat from the sun, and when you add to that windblocking buildings, urban areas are usually at least ten degrees warmer in winter than otherwise would be the case, which of course means that we kids had that much more outdoor play time. On any warm sunshiny day—even some pretty cold ones—we spent as much time as possible exploiting the vast concrete and tar-paved playgrounds that began a few steps outside our doors.
I spotted these ’70s kids on South Hanover Street in my old neighborhood and was attracted to their play-acting antics, which reminded me of my own “pretend” exploits twenty-five or thirty-five years earlier. (For some of us, at least some of the time, nostalgia can drive creativity.) After giving me permission to shoot, and while I snapped a few frames, they “shot” back at me with their toy guns. Throughout the session we exchanged tough guy military movie dialogue; and we stayed “in character” the whole time. What I find interesting these days is the startled reaction of some (actually most) adults viewing these images for the first time. I guess the fact that the boys are brandishing toy guns makes them uneasy; but it’s understandable since they weren’t there to witness the playful context. Understandable, but somewhat sad. And usually, until I point it out, these same adults fail to notice that the lad on the right is wearing a boy scout patch on his shoulder. (Click images for larger views.)
Copyright © 2008 Jim Sizemore.
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kids, photography | Tagged: adults, boy scouts, city kids, creativity, guns, kids, military, movie dialogue, nostalgia, photography, playacting, playing, South Baltimore, street photographer, toy guns | 
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Posted by Jim
September 6, 2008
To purchase reprint and/or other rights for this cartoon, buy a framed print, or have it reproduced on T-shirts, mugs, aprons, etc., visit the CartoonStock website by clicking the sidebar link.
Copyright © 2008 Jim Sizemore.
2 Comments | cartooning, gags, illustration | Tagged: bureaucrats, business, business as usual, business ethics, cartooning, cartoons, D. C., ethics, gag cartoons, gags, government, lies, lobbies, meeting, out-source, politics, power, Today's Gag, Wall Street, Washington | Permalink
Posted by Jim
September 4, 2008
The following represents an e-mail exchange I had today with a fairly well-known “B-list” cartoonist and humorous illustrator about the “Marginalia #2″ piece directly below this post. To save embarrassment (to him) I’ll use our initials to indicate which e-mail writer is which. RD began with a snarky one-word critique of my post:
RD: Dull.
JS: Mean.
RD: Honest.
JS: Sad.
RD: My feelings exactly. I love to doodle…as do all cartoonists..but “real” doodles come form the subconscious..often leading to creations of ideas you would never have had otherwise. I’m always amazed at what doodles can often lead to. Your doodles lack that spontaneity. I’m not being mean, I’m just trying to be honest. If you don’t want a response…don’t ask for it.
JS: The funny thing is I totally agree with you about what constitutes “real” doodling. What you don’t get is I’m just having fun with it by doing an “analytical” number on it. It’s satire. Lighten up.
The fact that I had to explain what I was up to indicates that my mild attempt at satire failed, or perhaps it was too clever by half and simply went over RD’s head. But the thing I still can’t understand is why he would go to the trouble to send a mean-spirited response to it in the first place. I don’t understand pettiness in any form. (There was a bit more to today’s exchange, but in the later stuff RD went completely off the doodle track and began to critique my gag cartoons in political terms as “right wing.” Having self-identified my whole adult life as a left-leaning hyper-progressive but fiscally conservative liberal, that’s where he really lost me.)
Copyright © 2008 Jim Sizemore.
Leave a Comment » | cartooning, doodles, illustration, writing | Tagged: analytical, cartoonists, doodler, doodles, doodling, dull, e-mail, embarrassment, fiscally conservative, honest, humorous illustrator, hyper-progressive, ideas, left-leaning, liberal, marginalia, mean, pettiness, response, sad, satire, spontaneity, subconscious | Permalink
Posted by Jim
September 4, 2008
The Tale of the Hare
If I were playing the part of a movie pulp fiction detective (think Bogart’s “Sam Spade”), and a leggy blond perched on the end of my desk asked me to take the “Too Happy for Words” case, a mystery in the form of an essay, the first question I would have is: Why in the world did someone (me, in real life) doodle a guy chasing a hare (or is it a rabbit?) on the last page of an otherwise straightforward essay about marriage, motherhood and fiction writing? I’m sure of one thing, the real me didn’t unconsciously doodle the image as an audition to illustrate the text. If by some chance I were to get such a gig, a rabbit would be the last thing to occur to me. I just re-read the McDermott essay (excellent, by the way), and there are no rabbits or hares in it; and discounting human babies, no small animals of any description. So far, then, my investigation has dead-ended.
The “Too Happy for Words” essay by novelist Alice McDermott (“A Bigamist’s Daughter, “That Night,” “Charming Billy”), is collected in the book The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, a paperback published in 2003. From the rereading I’ve concluded that the essay is concerned mainly with the different attitudes to marriage and motherhood held by some wary young feminists and their older “sisters,” many of whom have married and are, on the surface at least, happily raising kids. It seems the question the younger women are asking (and some of the older women are asking themselves), is to what extent, if at all, does familial devotion stunt their ambition and creativity. Here’s how Ms. McDermott puts it: “I wonder if it’s superstition: if we feel that to admit to such contentment in life would compromise our status as artists—perhaps recalling the poor actress in The Portrait of Dorion Gray who fell in love and lost her talent.” And Ms. McDermott goes on, “As a writer I recognize that much of this can be accounted for by the demands of plot—no doubt all happy mothers are like happy families: alike. And as Tolstoy warned us, sustained joy doesn’t make much of a story.”
This final McDermott quote I marked provides the clue I need to solve the case. On the last page, just above my doodle, she writes: “Fiction requires the attendant threat, the dramatic reversal, not only because these are the things that make for plot and tension and a sense of story, but because without them any depiction of our joy might appear overstated. We hesitate to include in our fiction what so often strikes us in life as something too good to be true.”
Put another way, Ms. McDermott is talking about conflict, the device that drives all story telling. And with that I think I’ve found my little insight, the knowledge which logically leads to a solution of the original query. Rabbits are famous for having lots of babies, right? In fact, they are the very symbol of fecundity—motherhood squared, so to speak? And is there anything cuter than little bunnies hop, hop, hopping in a field of flowers or down the road? But what happens when you add a man pursuing the bunny with something else in mind, perhaps something sinister like dinner? With those questions in mind I think I can say that the mystery of the connection between and among marriage, motherhood, fiction writing, and my doodle, is solved. My unconscious illustrator seems to have come up with an idea my conscious mind would have surly missed, or rejected: The “attendant threat” of a man on the hunt, and the joy he finds in that, contrasted by the sheer terror felt by his prey. Case closed.
“The Tale of the Hare” is the second in a series of occasional posts under the title Marginalia. In these posts I will display and comment upon a full-page scan from one of my personal library books on which I’ve doodled and/or underlined—or, as some would claim, otherwise defaced a scared text (to the true bibliophile all text is scared). These folks, shocked by the desecration, predict (and seem to wish), that I will suffer some vile punishment for my transgressions. Copyright © 2008 Jim Sizemore.
Leave a Comment » | doodles, fiction, illustration, marginalia, non-fiction, writing | Tagged: Alice McDermott, ambition, animals, attendant threat, contentment, creativity, doodle, doodles, doodling, dramatic reversal, essay, familial devotion, fecundity, feminists, fiction, hare, hunt, idea, insight, joy, kids, life, marginalia, marriage, motherhood, mystery, non-fiction, novelist, plot, prey, pulp fiction, rabbit, story, superstition, tale, tension, terror, text, The Writing Life, Too Happy for Words, writing | Permalink
Posted by Jim
December 3, 1972
I spotted these ’70s kids on South Hanover Street in my old neighborhood and was attracted to their play-acting antics, which reminded me of my own “pretend” exploits twenty-five or thirty-five years earlier. (For some of us, at least some of the time, nostalgia can drive creativity.) After giving me permission to shoot, and while I snapped a few frames, they “shot” back at me with their toy guns. Throughout the session we exchanged tough guy military movie dialogue; and we stayed “in character” the whole time. What I find interesting these days is the startled reaction of some (actually most) adults viewing these images for the first time. I guess the fact that the boys are brandishing toy guns makes them uneasy; but it’s understandable since they weren’t there to witness the playful context. Understandable, but somewhat sad. And usually, until I point it out, these same adults fail to notice that the lad on the right is wearing a boy scout patch on his shoulder. (Click images for larger views.) 
