This week's
"Doodle Penance" comes from someone who reached our website looking for "model sheets beard."
I'm sure that this anonymous googler would have had more luck clicking over to
Jon Dyer's beardstyles chart, or his
Quest for Every Beard Type. But we here at Satisfactory Comics try to
provide a
service, so we're going to provide some doodles of beards today.
In the past, there has been some conversation about which comics characters have the
best beards. My intent here is not to provide criticism or evaluation—Indeed, I haven't even mentioned the
best beard in comics—but merely to display a small gallery of styles. My gallery here is limited more by my own doodling time than by the range of possibilities.
Here we see a couple of fine beards from
Fantastic Four, around issue 48 or 49.
Here are a couple of fairly obscure 1960s Marvel villains with excellent and distinctive facial hair.
And here are a couple of comics characters who just let the whole beard grow.
One's dour, and one's beery, but they worship similar old gods.
The other thing I ought to use this Doodle Penance for is to give Mike, once and for all, a model sheet for my own beard, since he can't seem to remember how it works. He's not the only one. I had a conversation (by email) with a cartoonist friend who said he'd never seen my beard, even though we've met up at least five or six times since I started wearing a beard two and a half years ago.
For the record, this is how it grows out of my head.
Mike, what have you got this week?
—Isaac, I have doodles of six different beard styles. Most of these are absent from Jon Dyer's chart in the precise forms shown here, though there are similar styles, to be sure. We start with a style that I have often wished to see on modern faces but which I have thus far seen only in ancient statuary and hieroglyphics:
the Pharaoh.
Next, a style whose variants were sported by such well-known figures as Whitman, Tolstoy, and, especially, Marx:
the nineteenth-century intellectual.
Next, a style that would not be entirely out of place in the cartoon world of Gustave Verbeek's
Upside Downs, though it misses the point somewhat in looking the same whether upright or topsy-turvy:
the symmetry.
Then we have a "style" that might better be described as a disorder, and which might well be worn by one of Grant Morrison's pirates of Manhattan (from
Seven Soldiers of Victory). Alongside Nobeard and Allbeard, there'd be this guy—but what would you call him? His beard style is called
the negative.
This penultimate style is based on a description I heard of a linguistics professor whom, sadly, I never saw with my own eyes. "Forked red beard" is what I was told, in a nutshell. A darker model below portrays
the Cambridge linguist.
Last and probably least, we have
the Cates, also known as
"Mind the gap"—least because, despite its admonishing alias, I failed to recall that there should be a space between the two halves of Isaac's mustache. The beard proper, however, is fairly accurate in this blockish rendering, if the beard may be construed as separate from a detached mustache.
Looking at this erroneous rendering, I can see why Isaac keeps his mustaches divided: there's something shady about that character above, though I can't quite put my finger on it. At any rate, them's my beard models. Further evidence, if any were needed, that I have kept clean-shaven as long as my chops have needed razoring.
Okay, a word or two of explanation. Today is the estimated due date for my beloved spouse to deliver our child-to-be, so pregnant bellies and navels, umbilical cords, etc., are on my mind. Last night she and a friend had a discussion about the moment when innie bellybuttons pop during pregnancy to become outie bellybuttons—what our friend referred to as the "turkey timer" effect. (So far, no such effect on the beloved spouse's umbilicus; further evidence, perhaps, to support the OB's prediction that we're "not having a giant.") Pogo's comment is a riff on a well-known authentic Pogo line: "It hard to figure the angles on a worm child."
Much earlier, Kelly produced a four-panel promotional image for the '52 presidential campaign under the headline "The Political Dope"; I think the last image of that sequence is what the Google searcher sought (though the previous panel also gives a glimpse of the Pogomphalos):
That, then, is my survey of Pogo gazing at navels. Hope it at least answers some searching questions!
