Alphabeasts: P is for Pushmi-Pullyu

This week's entry in the "Alphabeasts" project gave me a little trouble, because it's such a strange creature that I kind of couldn't figure out how it works. As it is, I wound up departing from my available models considerably.

Friends, I give you the pushmi-pullyu.



I know what you're thinking. "I've seen that movie, Isaac, and the pushmi-pullyu is more like a llama thing than a gazelle thing. It doesn't have horns. It likes to dance. I've never seen anything like it, but your drawing isn't much like it, either."

But believe me when I say this has more fidelity to the original than what you'll see in the Rex Harrison movie (or the Eddie Murphy one). In Hugh Lofting's original The Story of Doctor Dolittle; Being the History of His Peculiar Life at Home and His Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts (1920), the pushmi-pullyu is an African animal (and that alone quashes any llama/alpaca/vicuña/guanaco theory) descended from "the Abyssinian gazelles and the Asiatic chamois" on one side and "the last of the Unicorns" on the other.



In fact, the author himself illustrated the first editions of the book (which you can now see for yourself, thanks to Google), and his pushmi-pullyu definitely has horns.



It also seems to have only one eye on each side of its head.



So, rather than the cordial double-llama, Lofting gives us a rubbery chimera, a sort of combination of the cyclops, the amphisbaena, and the unicorn, with a dash of gazelle and platypus thrown in. Egad. It wasn't an easy creature to draw. I had a few false starts.



I figured out quickly enough that I didn't want to make the posture symmetrical, though I suppose I could have saved myself some drawing if I'd done that. I also thought, for a while, that I might swipe my own drawing of the gerenuk from the Animal Alphabet, but those results weren't great.



This looks like a regular gazelle trying to fool hadpanagus by putting a papier-mâché horsey head on its rump. So, so lame.

I include that image only to chastise my own drawing hand, to remind myself that although I am getting better I am still not a very natural cartoonist. Please, pass it by.

Next week is the letter Q. I'll have to use one of my aces in the hole.

DAMN! Now, that is a STAMP!

Somehow the postal rate increase took me by surprise, so I am not ready with enough small-denomination stamps or whatever. I just spent an hour or more trying to order the right stuff on the USPS website (which is a miracle of clumsy web design).

But on the plus side, check out this year's Lunar New Year stamp.



It's enough to make you want to send mail, I tell you.

Alphabeasts: O is for Oskie Bugs

I am not sure how obscure this week's Alphabeasts critter is, though I've had a really hard time finding information about it online. I thought that Yo Gabba Gabba! was a thing these days, but maybe my impression of it is distorted by the fact that I read Evan Dorkin's blog (he is an occasional contributor to the show) or by the usefulness of the program in holding the attention of very small children.

But maybe if you're a fan of Yo Gabba Gabba!, or if you've got a wee one in the house, you will have heard of the oskie bugs.



Like Gooble, the oskie bugs are denizens of Gabbaland that appear infrequently but are treated more or less as known quantities by the show's main characters. I gather that there's an episode in the third season in which the main characters shrink down to follow the oskie bugs into their tunnels, but I'm basing my drawing here on the oskie bugs I'm familiar with. (I have only seen the episodes I can stream on Netflix, but I have seen those many times now.)

In episode 7 of the first season, "Friends," at about five minutes into the program, Toodee and Plex (the magic robot) are waiting quietly in Toodeeland to see whether the oskie bugs will come out. (One of the things I like about them: the oskie bugs will only come out if everyone is quiet. I plan to make use of that fact in the future.)



When they do come out and march across the screen, Toodee is so psyched that she wants to give Plex a high five about it; this leads to a song in which she explains what a high five is, and what it signifies. I've found a couple of badly recorded clips of the song, but none that starts early enough that you can see the oskie bugs. (That's why I snagged the screencap above.)

If you'd like to see someone "re-enacting" the scene with dolls, that's up to you.

Next week: I think my next Alphabeast had a cameo in an Eddie Murphy movie.

Alphabeasts: N is for Nerd

As you may know, I am letting myself have only one Alphabeasts creature per universe or creator. This week's critter was therefore in some ways a difficult choice, because one could practically draw a full alphabet populated only by Dr. Seuss's figments and oddments and homunculi. (I don't know whether he ever invented a critter that starts with an X, though.)

And yet, how could I resist the original nerd?



I slipped in a few nice nerd gags there. Click to enlarge and read, but don't give yourself any bonus points if you use google to "get" the references.

I'm not wild about my drawing—I seem to have as much trouble with Seuss as with Mercer Mayer, and I definitely got the head-to-body proportions wrong—but I suppose the little japes are fun.

Anyway: believe it or not, Dr. Seuss really may have added the word nerd to the lexicon. Have a look at what the OED, the ultimate etymological authority, has to say about it:



There's only one drawing of the nerd in If I Ran the Zoo, and it's one of three critters on the page (along with the nerkle and the seersucker). But in case you are curious what the original looked like, I have scanned it for you.



Next week: little critters you might have heard of if you have a little kid in the house.

Alphabeasts: M is for Mugato

This week's Alphabeasts creature is dear to my heart despite of — nay, perhaps because of — its intense dorkiness. It's not just a guy in a white gorilla suit. No, this is gorilla suit with a few horns and a tail stuck on!



This must be the week for goofy alphabeasts!

Maybe you're not familiar with the mugato. This video clip will tell you all ye need to know.



Maybe you would prefer the sort of cartoon that isolates a creature from its natural environment, without that mysterious grainy background. (And if you're the first to tell me, in the comments below, where I got that background, then I'll happily send you a couple of alphabet minicomics for free.)

If you want to see its feet, in other words, or if you just want it bigger, here's a picture from my working files.



It took me a while to work out a pose that would allow me to show off the mugato's goony face and the row of ridiculous dinosaur-style spikes that run down its back. Here are some of my notes, on the back of an envelope.



Next week: another possibly apocryphal mid-century etymological surprise.

Makeshift Speedy Lettering Method

I haven't mentioned this here on the blog, but I just finished writing the introduction for my friend Sarah Becan's graphic novel Shuteye, which collects several years of her minicomic series by the same name. Shuteye got funded recently on Kickstarter, and I'm really excited to see the final product. It's going to be a nice-looking book.


I was really flattered when Sarah asked me to write the introduction, and as I thought about it (and about the look of the book), I decided that I would offer to letter the introduction by hand. I think it'll fit in better with the rest of the work that way, and Sarah seemed genuinely happy that I had offered to do the little bit of extra labor.

I had also been yearning to do a little lettering. I have to admit, though, that this work didn't quite wind up scratching that itch, because I had to do the final work in a sort of hasty way.

Because I figure someone might someday want a method for hand-lettering a large chunk of text that is speedy but gives competent results—like, I am not going to be embarrassed for Sarah to publish what I wound up with—let me tell you what I did.

1.) Okay, first I had to write the text. And because I do that in a word-processing program, I had a file I could work with. I set the text in small caps (which you can do as an option in Word with control-D), and chose a font that seemed to have spacing and proportions sort of like my all-caps lettering hand. I set the dimensions of the page to correspond with the pages in Sarah's finished book.



2.) I printed it, and through a process of tinkering I got it to print at a size I liked. After a botched first attempt I realized I needed to print it at about 80% size, because full-size 13-point Century looked good in the space available but felt unnatural when I tried step three.

3.) I got out the lightbox and another sheet of paper and "traced" the text I had printed. I wasn't actually tracing it. I have done that before, for different sorts of projects, but in this case I was just using the spacing of the rows as a guide, and the image shining through the lightbox as a reminder of the script I had written. I even altered the text on the fly once or twice.



It's worth noting that, at this stage, I could have opted to do the work much more neatly, but I didn't want my finished product to look like I'd been tracing something.

4.) Because I was lettering pretty fast, I wound up making a few mistakes. I knew I was going to be putting everything through Photoshop in a couple of steps, I figured I'd just write corrected versions of the same words off in the margins, where I could easily cut and paste them into place.



A couple of times it took me more than one try to get a simple word right.



(This second version shows the brightness / contrast adjustments that came during the Photoshop work.)

To do this lettering, I just grabbed the nearest pen to hand, which was my slightly damaged daily-use Rapidograph. Probably this is a weird practice, but I have a ".50" Rapidograph that I keep around for writing postcards and other stuff when I want a nice dark ink. Sometimes I use it for doodling. I really shouldn't use it for finished work, though, because the little needle inside the nib is slightly bent, and that makes it leave like a little "tail" as it approaches the page from some angles.

You can especially see the problem when I write the letter E.



I wound up having to erase each of those things individually in Photoshop; I could have saved myself a lot of work if I'd had a better Rapidograph inked up and ready to use. Anyway, on to the last "step."

5.) I scanned both pages of text, adjusted brightness and contrast, and cleaned things up. That could have taken less time than it did.

The end result: definitely hand-lettered, a little sloppy, but with good straight lines underlying the sloppiness. Lots of imperfection, which means character, and that's more or less what I was shooting when I offered to hand-letter it in the first place.



I didn't have to use an Ames guide at all, even though I was dealing with big blocks of text. I just used typing paper and a pen near at hand. And I think it still looks better than the lettering in Britten & Brulightly.

I'll print the full text of my introduction here on the blog when Shuteye is available for sale.

More AZ Fanart: Antiosour vs. Bonosour

Maybe you thought that hadpanagus and ichipotomas were enough for me. Nope! I like all of AZ's animal creations. I might even manage to catch up with her Alphabeasts alphabet if I do more than one a week.

And so I present you with antiosour and bonosour, who are natural enemies.



Originally, AZ posted these two creatures with no notes, so I had to try to figure out what I could about them just from the drawings.



My first thought was that the circles over their heads might be a sort of organic, permanently attached speech balloon or thought bubble.



Or, I thought, since bonosour seemed to be a bird, maybe they were ornamental feathers. But, as it turns out, such is not the case. Here's what AZ has to say about antiosour:

He is a crazy bad guy. He doesn’t do anything but sit around looking mad. He can’t even really move around. He tries to take over the world by sitting on a stool and electrocuting people with his antenna, which can send signals through electrical wires.

And as for bonosour? Well, his cranial appendage is an antenna, too:

AZ says, “Bonosour is a birdie. He never gets electrified because the electric in his antenna goes back to Antiosour’s antenna.” So, Bonosour is immune to Antiosour attacks, because he absorbs Antiosour’s electricity and shoots it back. Bonosour does not like Antiosour, because he is a good guy. But, curiously, he does not use his powers to save people; he only uses them to protect himself.

With that information in hand, I was able to work up this doodle or thumbnail.



And then it took me a couple of weeks to produce the finished art. Maybe I'll get my next drawing done more quickly. There are plenty of awesome AZ creatures where these came from!