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Prose Doodle

Jim — Wed, 04 May 2011 08:07:24 +0000

An Image Problem

Some years’ back, a client of mine commissioned a humorous illustration to be used on a non-governmental organization (N.G.O.) flyer about world population issues. First he had to educate me on the subject, and sent along a thick sheaf of reading material that I quickly skimmed (this was a pro bono effort), underlining sections that I hoped would offer up image ideas.

As one who specializes in cartooning and humorous illustration, I’m more about visuals than words, and after hacking my way through all that verbiage I came away with only some general tidbits about the negative effects overpopulation has on human development, from the N.G.O. point of view. Not an easy-to-draw idea in the stack. Meanwhile, the client had specified that he wanted “an arresting image that would interest people not otherwise attracted to the subject — one picture worth ten-thousand words.“

When I reported that I had had no luck with the first batch of material, the client sent two specific ideas for the illustration. His first concept was six comic strip panels with people talking, talking and talking. They talked about too many rich people living in too many carbon-inefficient McMansions; too many middle-class people in too many cars clogging too many high-speed highways; and too many poor people needing too many government services.

The client’s second idea was visually no better (read: no easier to draw). He suggested a cartoon of a stuffy middle-aged businessman watching a television picture with crowds of poor, homeless city beggars in the first panel; starving kids in Africa in the second panel; and hundreds of polluting factories just south of the Texas/Mexico border. (But hey, at least this time it was only three panels.)

Again, no single “arresting image” suggested by any of that stuff. By wading through all those words, though, somehow my brain became focused (at least the visual half did) on what I needed to not do, which in turn suggested what I should do. The simple concept I came up with was this: The population problem is about infinite hordes of people on the face of a finite planet. But how best to show that? Especially how to show it without getting so complex that people would be almost as bored looking at the image as they would be reading a long research paper on the subject? Even more importantly, since I wasn’t getting paid, how to expend the least amount of time and effort in production?

After a lengthy doodling session I came up the rough idea you see above. The stack of people is a pretty “arresting” image, in my opinion (perhaps influenced by the National Cartoonists Society “Reuben” Award statuette designed by Rube Goldberg). The oblivious commentator off to the right side represents people like me, those of us still under-educated to the importance of the world population crisis. At any rate, my client was pleased.

(Click images for a larger views. To see the final illustration, scroll down to the “Today’s Gag” post of 5/2/11, directly below.)

Copyright © 2011 Jim Sizemore.

Prose Doodle

Jim — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 08:29:17 +0000

My Crows

Dinner is over. I’ve washed the dishes and read the paper and watched the news on television. Now I’m sitting on my balcony looking straight out at lush treetops. It’s dusk, and a cawing crow alights on a branch in front of me. Its cries are a mighty effort even for such a large bird, and its wings recoil with each shout-out. Soon, a second crow as big as the first one lands on a wire very near the first, then a third settles on a telephone pole several yards away. The first two are mates. I know all three, having watched them now for many sun-downs. They look identical, but I recognize their interactive behavior. For a beat or two the second crow eyes the antics of the original screamer, then takes up the cawing game. Quickly, the third crow follows suit. The first time I saw this crew I remember wondering what the bond between them amounted to. Are the two merely a couple? Is the single one an offspring, returned to live — so to speak — at home? Is the furious caterwauling some sort of family argument? Or perhaps a jealous complication created by a complex domestic arrangement? Interesting, I think, how my lonely thoughts create personifications.

Minutes pass. The sun is well below the horizon and my crows have disappeared from view. I suppose they’ve gone to their nests or caves or whatever for the night. The sky continues its slow darkening. The last trace of orange streaks the western horizon. One by one all sound abandons the evening, every distant warble. For twenty minutes or more there is no movement or noise near my balcony — just early evening stillness.

For a long time I’m in a dreamy trance, then I notice a rapid movement at the edge of my vision. Wings are once again propelling in the cool night. Another “friend” of mine, a bat, has emerged to feed on night bugs. It flies directly at me, then veers into a steep diagonal climb, then swoops down and darts sharply in the opposite direction. I watch its stunting display and wonder: Does it have a mate? Is that sharp ticking noise a coded message, or simply sonar? Before I have time to think again my tiny messenger is lost in the black sky.

Copyright © 2011 Jim Sizemore.

Today’s Doodle

Jim — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 07:43:20 +0000

Bad Mickey # 3,647

Today’s Doodle

Jim — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 07:39:20 +0000

Today’s Doodle

Jim — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 08:22:35 +0000

Krazy Kat

Jim — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 01:53:07 +0000

Until I came upon the Bill Watterson essay, below, I had planned to write one myself about the brilliant George Herriman comic strip, Krazy Kat. But I now know I can’t compete, so I’ve decided to filch the whole thing and present it to you here as-is. (Hope they don’t sue me.) P. S. Get The Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat book (see link below) and view the amazing — and oh so juicy — drawings of George Herriman in all their graphic glory. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore, folks — and more’s the pity.

In Which We Read With Awe And We Read With Wonder

From the introduction to The Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat…

A Few Thoughts on Krazy Kat

by BILL WATTERSON

As a cartoonist, I read Krazy Kat with awe and wonder. Krazy Kat is such a pure and completely realized personal vision that the strip’s inner mechanism is ultimately as unknowable as George Herriman. Nevertheless, I marvel at how this fanciful world could be so forcefully imagined and brought to paper with such immediacy. THIS is how good a comic strip can be.

Interestingly, Krazy Kat gains its momentum less from the personalities of its characters than from their obsessions. Ignatz Mouse demonstrates his contempt for Krazy by throwing bricks at her; Krazy reinterprets the bricks as signs of love; and Offissa Pupp is obliged by duty (and regard for Krazy) to thwart and punish Ignatz’s “sin,” thereby interefering with a process that’s satisfying to everyone for all the wrong reasons. Some 30 years of strips were wrung out of that amalgam of cross-purposes. The action can be read as a metaphor for love or politics, or just enjoyed for its lunatic inner logic and physical comedy.

Despite the predictability of the characters’ proclivities, the the strip never sinks into formula or routine. Often the actual brick tossing is only anticipated. The simple plot is endlessly renewed through constant innovation, pace manipulations, unexpected results, and most of all, the quiet charm of each story’s presentation. The magic of the strip is not so much in what it says, but in how it says it. It’s a more subtle kind of cartooning than we have today.

To the bewilderment of many readers, there are few endings in Krazy Kat that qualify as “punchlines.” Instead, it’s the temperament of the writing and drawing throughout the strip that is the joke. If you don’t think it’s funny that a strip should have an intermission drawing, or that a character would refer to his tail as a “caudal appendage,” you’re reading the wrong strip, and it’s your loss.

Quirky, individual, and uncompromised, Krazy Kat is one of the very few comic strips that takes full advantage of its medium. There are some things a comic strip can do that no other medium, not even animation, can touch, and Krazy Kat is a virtual essay on comic strip essence.

In their headlong rush for the “gag,” most cartoonists run right past the countless treasures Herriman uncovered simply by taking his time to explore the freedom of his medium. The self-consciously baroque narrations and monologues (“From the kwaint konfines of the kalabozo del kondado de Kokonino — Officer ‘Pup’ gives answer”) show that words can be funny in themselves, just as drawings can. The sky turns from black to white to zigzags and plaids simply because, in a comic strip, it CAN. No other cartoonist ever approached his blank sheet of paper with so much affection for all its possibilities.

The scratchy drawings delight me no end. They have the honesty and directness of sketches. So many of today’s strips are slick and polished, the inevitable result of assistants trying to develop a mechanical style that can be continued indefinitely. The drawings in Krazy Kat are whimsical, idiosyncratic, and filled with personality. The bold design of the Sunday strips neatly compliments the flat expanses of color or black, and the wonderful hatching brings character to the otherwise posterish approach.

Nothing in Krazy Kat had a supporting role, least of all the Arizona desert setting. Mountains are striped. Mesas are spotted. Trees grow in pots. The horizon is a low wall that characters climb over. Panels are framed by theater curtains and stage spotlights. Monument Valley monoliths are drawn to look more like their names. The moon is a melon wedge, suspended upside down. And virtually every panel features a different landscape, even if the characters don’t move. The land is more than a backdrop. It is a character in the story, and the strip is “about” that landscape as much as it is about the animals who populate it.

As the artwork is poetic, so is the writing. With the possible exception of Pogo, no other strip derives so much of its charm from its verbiage. Krazy Kat‘s unique “texture” comes in large part through the conglomeration of peculiar spellings and punctuations, dialects, interminglings of Spanish, phonetic renderings, and alliterations. Krazy Kat‘s Coconino County not only had a look; it had a sound as well. Slightly foreign, but uncontrived, it was an extraordinary and full world.

Darn few comic strips challenge their readers anymore. The comics have become big business, and they play it safe. They shamelessly pander to the results of reader surveys, and are produced by virtual factories, ready-made for the inevitable t-shirts, dolls, greeting cards, and television specials. Licensing is where the money is, and we seem to have forgotten that a comic strip can be something more than a launchpad for a glut of derivative products. When the comic strip is not exploited, the medium can be a vehicle for beautiful artwork and serious, intelligent expression.

Krazy Kat was drawn well over half a century ago, and yet it’s a much more sophisticated use of the comic strip medium than anything we cartoonists are doing today. Of course, a 1930s Sunday Krazy filled the entire newspaper page, whereas editors today usually cram at least four strips in the same amount of space. This reduction of size greatly limits what can be drawn and written and still remain legible, and it goes a long way toward explaining the comics’ devolution.

Even so, the whiteness of paper is still vast, uncharted territory, ripe for exploration. There are plenty of exotic lands for a cartoonist to map, if he or she will leave the well-worn paths and strike off for the wilds of the imagination. Krazy Kat is like no other comic strip before or after it. We are richer for Herriman’s integrity and vision.

Krazy Kat was not very successful as a commercial venture, but it was something better. It was art.

Bill Watterson is the creator of Calvin & Hobbes.

Today’s Quote

Jim — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 08:27:14 +0000

Scenic Graffiti II

Jim — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 08:05:37 +0000

Around this time of year I’m usually in the mountains of Virginia, on the way to visit relatives in my hometown near the West Virginia line. And this season, on two-lane Rt. 32 West, which runs through Goshen Pass on the way to Warm Springs, Virginia, I pulled off as I always do at the nearly waist-high stone wall overlooking the Maury River, some 80 feet below. The view is beautiful but, as I said in last year’s post, it’s hard to photograph scenic images without resorting to visual cliché, so when I visit this spot I like to foreground the graffiti on the wall. New scribbles are added all the time and an update is in order—same place, one year later, but with fresh doodling. And you’ll notice in the last image this year I had photographic competition. (But wait, is the lady focusing on the graffiti, or the fallen leaves—or her foot?)

(Click images for larger views.)

The Head Doodler

Jim — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 08:18:55 +0000

My New Mailbox . . .

Jim — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:33:31 +0000

Why It Makes Those Sounds

By Jacquie Roland

Today, for some reason, I decided to redo my mailbox. (As if I don’t have enough other stuff to do.) However . . . When I came in to get out of the heat and have a cool drink, my phone rang. Not unusual. Except that I couldn’t find it. I could hear it, but . . . Well, as it turns out—in a fit of artistic madness—I had epoxied my live phone into the assemblage. (The old phone had dropped out of sight behind my work table.) And now my good Ma Bell is glued into the sculpture. Forever. *sigh* I guess it will just have to keep ringing until the battery wears out.

This post was adapted from an e-mail I received yesterday from my friend Jacquie, who, as you can see, keeps very VERY busy in upstate New York. This 3-D doodle was too good—and the story of its creation ‘way too funny—to keep to myself. Click images for larger views.

Doodlemeister's Weblog » doodles

Prose Doodle

Copyright © 2011 Jim Sizemore.

Prose Doodle

My Crows

Copyright © 2011 Jim Sizemore.

Today’s Doodle

Today’s Doodle

Today’s Doodle

Krazy Kat

In Which We Read With Awe And We Read With Wonder

Today’s Quote

Copyright © 2010 Jim Sizemore.

Scenic Graffiti II

Copyright © 2010 Jim Sizemore.

The Head Doodler

My New Mailbox . . .

Why It Makes Those Sounds

Copyright © 2010 Jacquie Roland.