Alphabooksbeasts: Q is for Qfwfq

So: my "real" entry for this week's Alphabooks appears (as a character and as a narrator) in a couple of story collections by Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics and t zero, as well as in a couple of stories in Numbers in the Dark. Yes, my friends, as it should be, Q is for Qfwfq.

Qfwfq is impossible to draw. He has lived for many, many millions of years, since before the materials of the sun coalesced into a star, and he has lived as many different things—a sightless mollusk, a pre-terrestrial vertebrate, an essentially human (if immortal) being, and even for "about fifty million years" a dinosaur. In fact, in the short story "The Dinosaurs," Qfwfq describes himself as the only dinosaur to survive the mass extinction.

He goes on to pass in future (presumably mammal) societies, though he is still really a dinosaur and somewhat self-conscious about his status as a legendary terror and scourge. I imagine that he must change form very gradually, when his form changes, perhaps over thousands of years.

That's the moment in which I've drawn him, awkwardly making the transition from dinosaur to something more human. I hope you can tell that his beard is made of ragged little kiwi feathers.

Qfwfq is a complex guy. If you're interested in serious speculative fiction, and you haven't read Cosmicomics at least, you really owe it to yourself to get hold of a copy.

Next week: high fantasy (you know, for kids).

Alphabooksbeasts: Q is not for Quickbeam, after all

Last week I hinted that I was planning to use some "high fantasy" for this week's non-Donjon Alphabooks. And in my spreadsheet planning stage for the project I had picked out Quickbeam, one of the ents in Lord of the Rings, to be my Q.

But I've had a better idea—a better Q character who is at least technically not a human being. I'll get him up on the blog in a few minutes.

Here's the thing: I've never actually read Lord of the Rings. I don't have much emotional investment in it. I started the first book, when I was too young to understand it, and I've never tried since then. I know the story, of course, and I've done enough research to know how Quickbeam fits into it. But I don't know anything about his personality, really. I didn't have a feeling for him.

It turns out that I do have a quickbeam or rowan tree next to my driveway, though I know it as a mountain ash. It was the source of this doodle, though I'm sure I could have produced a more faithful rendition of it if I'd been sketching from life instead of memory, or trying to do this in my "official" Alphabooks style. On the other hand, there's no way I'd want to draw all that fiddly foliage with a brush.

In a little bit, I'll get my "real" Q post up.

Alphabooksbeasts: P is for Pooh and Piglet

I know I still "owe" Alphabooks a canine that starts with O, for last week, but I wanted to get this week's P post done and posted last night, and since it was nearly done when I had to turn in, here it is, slightly out of order.

But you already know: P is for Pooh and Piglet.

I cannot tell you how much I love these guys. They feel as close to me as siblings. I know stretches of the Pooh books by heart, or nearly by heart. If you have not read them, get on it.

Your heart isn't finished until you've read these books to someone.

For the record, yet again: Ernest H. Shepard is one of my cartooning heroes. I do not believe in the Disney Pooh. It is, more and more from year to year, an abomination in my sight.

Next week: rare letters call for high fantasy.

Alphabooksbeasts: N is for Nagaina and Nag

Well, don't look too closely at this week's Alphabooks entry. I'm not very happy with it, and I'd draw it over again if I had time, but I've been preoccupied with other stuff.

So this is supposed to be N is for Nagaina (and Nag). They are, as you may remember, the mated pair of cobras who threaten the household in Kipling's "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" (in The Jungle Book). Nag is killed by a shotgun blast while fighting the eponymous mongoose, and Nagaina swears her revenge.

Cobras are cool-looking creatures, as we all know. Doing my image-searching for this post, I discovered that people do some pretty strange things with cobras.

Next week: a canine or two.

Alphabooksbeasts: M is for Moby-Dick

I've already drawn the Futurama analogue of this guy (in 3-D, no less), so let's say that for this week's Alphabooks M is for Moby-Dick.

It's hard to capture the size and sublimity of Moby-Dick in a cartoon drawing on a computer screen (or in a book). In fact, I have an essay in my head somewhere about the difficulties of translating Moby-Dick into comics, and one of the insurmountable problems has to be the intimate scale of the images in a handheld comics page. Really Moby-Dick needs to be cartooned on the scale of Guernica or the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Anyway, I thought one approach to the problem would be to show as little of the whale as possible. There's also a lot of talk about the blankness of his whiteness, and the way that people therefore project meaning onto it. I thought it'd be fun to make as much use as I could of the blankness of the computer screen, too.

You can tell me whether you think that's effective. I will acknowledge that I ripped off the composition, in part, from a painting that Scott McCloud brings up tangentially in Understanding Comics.

And I have another image for you.

I once visited Arrowhead, Melville's home in the Berkshires, where I was told that, in the winter, from the window of his study, Mt. Greylock looked like a white whale. It seemed implausible to me. But I figure that if you have whales on your mind, over time almost anything will start to look like a whale.

Like, for example, this cloud I spotted earlier this summer.

Maybe it'll help if I show you what I mean.

Is it just me? Have I started seeing whales?

(Really I think that cloud looks more like a bowhead whale than a sperm whale, but I swear that before I got my phone ready to take the picture it was a much better Moby-Dick likeness.)

You know Moby-Dick's not really supposed to be uniformly white, right? He's sort of marbled.

Next week: a married couple you wouldn't invite to a dinner party.

Alphabooksbeasts: L is for Lockjaw and Lockheed

This week's non-Donjon Alphabooks entry comes from some of my favorite books when I was a kid and a teenager. That is, if you're willing to count them as books.*

I think it will surprise no one to learn that I read a few Marvel Comics between the ages of four or five and fifteen or twenty. I was pretty into The X-Men during the Byrne-Smith-Romita years, but nowadays I'd toss those books on the pyre in favor of some old-school Stan-and-Jack Fantastic Four. That's the real stuff.

So let's say L is for Lockjaw and Lockheed.

Can you tell from my inking which of these characters I'm more fond of?

This is another drawing that didn't get much time to develop (owing to the fact that I only finished "K" yesterday and had three ideas for entries today). In fact, I used my preliminary doodle as pencils, taping it into my notebook and tracing with a brush through the flimsy Moleskine paper. Here's the doodle:

Do you recognize the pose, or the background I swiped for the finished drawing? Identify the source (of both; it's the same source) in the comments section below, and I will happily send you a couple of alphabet minicomics or some other suitable back-issue prize.

Next week: things get deep (and briny).

*I know I'm stretching the definition of "books" for the second week in a row. All I can say is (a.) comics, even superhero comics, are fair game, (b.) these guys are definitely in some "books" now if they weren't then, and (c.) if you're anxious about it I have another post for you.

Alphabooksbeasts Bonus: L is for Larry

As with last week, I find myself thinking that I should do a quick extra Alphabooks entry, so as to be sure I really have a complete and legal alphabet by my own self-imposed standards.

So, all right, here's a little lost dog from a book I bought a little less than a week ago: L is for Larry.

Larry is the star of the Larry Gets Lost series, from which I found Larry Gets Lost in Portland while I was browsing at Powell's. It's attractively cartooned in a sort of simplified retro style, and it actually turned out to have some good tourist information in it for a first-time visitor. Without Larry's help, I might not have noticed the Portlandia statue, and I might not have sought out the Portland Dog Bowl.

Larry does not, at least not in the book, visit Mill Ends Park, the smallest park in the world (at 24 inches in diameter). If you like, you can think of my drawing there as supplementary apocrypha. If you're heading to Portland, why miss Mill Ends Park?

Well, to tell the truth, I was never able to get into Mill Ends myself. If I'd tried to put one of my feet in it, I might have crushed a third of its foliage or warped its solitary sapling. It's designed for smaller folk, of course.

Give me a few minutes and I'll put up my "real" post.

Alphabooksbeasts: K is for Katalpa Kwakk-Wakk, Kolin Kelly, Kiskidee Kuku, and Krazy Kat

My other belated "K" entry for Alphabooks takes us away to the desert Southwest, to the precinct of Kokonino, in the same neck of the woods as Monument Valley and the Elephant's Legs (or Feet).

Once I got it into my head to draw a character from Krazy Kat for the letter K, I couldn't limit myself to just one. For the record, the busybody duck, Mrs. Katalpa Kwakk-Wakk, was the first to occur to me, but she's not the only Kokonino denizen to sport those initials. There's also the brickmaker Kolin Kelly, and of course Krazy him/herself, and his/her erstwhile love interest, the sensational character find of 1930, Kiskidee Kuku. (He's a poodle.)

Kiskidee Kuku's appearance in Kokonino unsettles the natural order of things. Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse are on the outs with Krazy, no bricks get tossed, the jail remains untenanted, and eventually pretty much everyone just up and leaves town. Over the span of several Sundays, things go wobbly, then (of course) everything settles back down again.

Anyway, there's a picture of the problem jauntily trotting into Kokonino.

I tried to keep the colors in my drawing close to a duotone print, because I don't really think of Krazy as happening in color, despite the splendor of Southwestern geology and the fact that the Sunday Krazys were in color for years.

I "get" Herriman's doodles about as well as I get Trondheim's character designs (I can fake Herriman's backgrounds all right, and I can do a passable Ignatz from memory), though I wasn't sure about replicating them with a brush instead of a nib. And let's face it: drawing Krazy Kat is like forging someone's signature. Herriman drew all of these characters as doodles, really, and if you draw the same doodle several times a day for decades, it's going to pick up some personal idiosyncrasy.

I hope I have at least rendered Krazy &c recognizably. Please let me know what you think.

Now, if you are a purist and don't consider Krazy and her compeers to be "characters from a book," I have two things to say to you:

First, although they were designed for a more ephemeral medium, I know them from books. It's true that I saw Krazy in the local free weekly, or maybe the Daily Texan, while I was an undergrad, but I knew her/him first from the collection edited my Patrick McDonnell and others and from the weird novel by Jay Cantor. And my love for Krazy has only been extenuated and enriched by the Fantagraphics collections.

Second, I have a post that will "count" anyway. So there.

Next week: a couple of Pet Avengers.

Alphabooksbeasts Bonus: K is for Kriss

This isn't my "real" Alphabooks submission. It's just a speedy doodle that I colored very quickly. Maybe you've seen these Monster "graphic novels" (albums, really) by my hero Lewis Trondheim.

I only have a couple of them, and I have to admit I've only glanced at them so far, but they look really fun. Monster Dinosaur, in particular, seems to have a kind of funky jam-comic quality to it, involving dinosaurs drawn by a host of French (and other?) alt-comics heroes. I can spot one, for example, by David B., and I think there's one by Craig Thompson, too.

Anyway, I don't know much, but I can tell you that the family's eponymous monster is named Kriss.

Also, he is totally fun to draw, like so many Trondheim creations.

Okay, hold on. Let me get the real entry online.

Alphabooksbeasts: J is for Jeremy Fisher (and Jack Sharp)

As I said in my "Alphadonjon" post, I'm traveling this week, so this post is actually being composed at 3:30 AM on Thursday night, for scheduling, instead of Sunday night. Maybe I'll be able to keep it brief.

Okay, J is for Jeremy Fisher. You know his story, right?

Maybe you'll even remember (I hadn't) that the stickleback he catches is named Jack Sharp.
 

I'm not wild about the way this drawing turned out. I wanted to emphasize the smallness of the characters (I mean, he's just frog-sized), but apparently I couldn't be bothered to draw a setting for him to be small in. (I drew this several weeks ago, knowing that I'd need to be away.)

This was one of those drawings that, like my Gurgi and my Pushmi-Pullyu, went through a lot of problems, even up to a completely inked version of the drawing that I decided to scrap. This time, though, it wasn't a problem of character design.

I just couldn't seem to get the character or the pose to look good. Here's the scrapped ink version, very much like the final version in some ways, but missing even the tiny bit of energy I was able to get into the finished one.

I leave it to you, in the comments section, to diagnose what has gone wrong here.

Next week: a koffeeklatch of ko-konspirators. Wish me luck.

Alphabooksbeasts: I is for IT

For my non-Donjon Alphabooks entry, I have chosen a disembodied brain that I hope will be familiar to all of you.

Yes, I is for IT.

IT's name is not an acronym. IT's just capitalized because you're supposed to speak ITs name with fear and respect. IT dominates the minds of an entire world. IT is what Big Brother wishes he could be.

IT poses some compositional puzzles, if you're just working from the description in Wrinkle in Time.

For starters, IT is on a dais inside ITs dark dome-shaped building, but L'Engle doesn't say whether the disembodied brain is floating in a sort of receptacle, or in a terrarium, or just sort of flopped onto the dais in a pile. I opted for the fishtank approach.

Second, IT is supposed to be larger than a human brain. I exaggerated this a bit, but if you're just drawing a brain in a tank, how is anyone to get a sense of scale? I had to put Meg and Charles Wallace into the picture as points of reference.

I had a lot of time to think about this drawing before I had a chance to put it on paper, so I guess it's no surprise that my first doodle is pretty close (in terms of composition) to the final version.

Next week: a stickleback and the fisherman who catches him.

Alphabooksbeasts: H is for Humbug

For this week's non-Donjon Alphabooks, I have paid a visit to a book I enjoyed quite a bit as a kid.

You may recall that in the 1961 novel The Phantom Tollbooth, our your protagonist Milo is accompanied by a watchdog named Tock and a flim-flam insect called the Humbug.

I had originally hoped to make my Humbug look a little like P.T. Barnum, but none of the portraits I could find of Barnum made him look much like a bunko rascal. (More like an avuncular scamp.) Anyway, I took my cues from some textual clues and made the Humbug look a little dandified.

You may be more accustomed to seeing the Humbug like this, as he appears in the book's original illustrations by Jules Feiffer:

(Here he is, talking to Milo)

Or, perhaps, if you're conversant with the feature-film Phantom Tollbooth, this will be the Humbug you picture (on the right, duh).

(Here's the source for that Chuck Jones image.)

I wanted to work from the way the Humbug is described, however, and although there's not much visual description in Phantom Tollbooth (which is more concerned with the fun of language than with non-linguistic details), we do get some information:

...from around the wagon stepped a large beetlelike insect dressed in a lavish coat, striped pants, checked vest, spats, and a derby hat. "Let me repeat—BALDERDASH!" he shouted again, swinging his cane and clicking his heels in midair.

So apparently the Humbug goes for sartorial hodgepodge. Does the result look a little bit more 1968 than 1961to you?

Here's a doodle.

Next week: some disembodied evil, and maybe an outer-space sea-slug. We'll see.

Alphabooksbeasts: G is for Gurgi

I'm not so happy with this week's second Alphabooks entry. I have an old fondness for this character that probably dates back to fourth or fifth grade, but despite a lot of effort I wasn't able to get him to look right.

The problem for this week is a really hard one. The character you're looking at, Gurgi, appears in The Black Cauldron and the other Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander, which I devoured when I was in elementary school, probably too young or naïve to understand everything in the books. I remember only a few little things about Gurgi—one scene where he ducks his head down below his shoulders trying to avoid the big evil bad guy; the fact that he's always hungry and unkempt—and I haven't read those books for more than thirty years.

I'm pretty sure that the editions I read had no illustrations, so I was trying to recreate a really dim memory of how I would imagine Gurgi while I was reading about him. If you do a little Google search for him, you'll see that the Disney movie has completely colonized the visual imaging of this character, even though Disney's version probably could not swing a shortsword.

So I started this business trying to draw a faint and distant memory of an imaginary person.

Some of those were pretty close, but I wasn't happy with any of them, because although they fit the descriptions I was reading of Gurgi, they really didn't look like much like my memory. I even went so far as to work up a complete inked drawing of that bugbeary version of the guy. Maybe in some ways this one's better than the one I colored.

I do like his ape feet, and his mild resemblance to Sir Paul McCartney, but I still don't think that's close to the way I was imagining Gurgi when I was reading about Taran all those years ago.

So, at like 3:00 AM, when I should have been coloring if I wasn't sleeping, I started doing new doodles. There's some improvement here, though the pose I settled on seems really stupid in retrospect. What's wrong with just having him sitting on the ground? And why did my finished version wind up looking so mean, when these ones are cute?

Well, if I had world enough and time, I'd try another run at the guy. I wish the ten-year-old version of me had left me some better notes.

Next week: I suppose it's a pun, from a book full of puns.

Alphabooksbeasts: F is for Ferdinand

My non-Dungeon entry for Alphabooks this week knows just what it means to stop and smell the flowers. Ferdinand is a bull in Spain, where bulls go to the bullring, but Ferdinand, like Bartleby, would prefer not to.

I have to admit that I hadn't read The Story of Ferdinand since I was a little kid, and I bought a cheap copy last week to get ready for this drawing. And I was struck, when I read it, by the way the shade of death hangs over the book.

Ferdinand, who just wants to smell flowers under a cork tree, is drafted for the bullring because some bullfight handlers see him immediately after he's stung by a bee. As the story goes, when he's turned out into the ring he just sits, and the various picadors and toreadors are so embarrassed by his torpor that they send him home. But if a bee would make him angry, wouldn't a half-dozen sharp lances also do the trick? Isn't the whole point of the long lead-up to the final matador getting the bull into a position of seeing red? I don't actually know, but I have the feeling that Ferdinand is a little generous with its plot devices.

Anyway, I started overthinking this, and considering recasting the story so that is was centered around a rodeo instead of a bullfight—that way, at least Ferdinand wouldn't be threatened with death—and then I started considering breeds of bull (Hereford, Longhorn, Brahma, etc.) that you'd be likely to see at a rodeo. And then someone reminded me that I was supposed to be drawing the character in the book.

So I pushed aside my overthinking and clumsily drew a bull sniffing flowers under a tree.

I'm still not sure I got the horns or the hooves right, but they look close enough that I am not kicking myself about the drawing. That means that people who didn't grow up on a ranch will probably have no problem at all with the bovine details in the drawing.

Next week: a fuzzy little dude.

Alphabooksbeasts: E is for East Dragon

This week's non-Donjon Alphabooks entry is from a really recent publication: East Dragon, West Dragon, which is written by Robyn Eversole and illustrated by the incomparable Scott C.

As the title might suggest, EDWD is the story of two dragons from different sides of the world (and different folkloric traditions). West Dragon would have been fun to draw, too, but Oh Man did I enjoy putting this guy into my notebook.

I really love that Lunar New Year stamp. I had actually thought of incorporating it into my drawing of East Dragon even before I saw this fun post with cartoons and pasted-down stamps by my former student Caitlin McGurk over at the Billy Ireland Library blog. But of course the article sealed the deal.

Then is was just a question of figuring out how I could get the stamp into the drawing without forcing the real subject to turn his back. (The answer? Bring in some dudes to do the picture-hanging for him.)

 I am pretty proud of my imitation of Scott C.'s style there (and I did a sort of clever thing with Photoshop that probably is way below the skill level of most cartoonists, but still felt smart to me). This is what East Dragon looks like in the actual book.

(It was easy for me to scan this page because, for some reason, my baby son has loved to tear pages out of his first copy of EDWD. Don't worry; I have a second one on the shelf for him when he gets over this phase.)

One mark of Scott C.'s awesomeness that I recognized only this week is that he's actually not at all easy to imitate. Getting East Dragon's face just a little bit wrong knocks him completely off-model and unrecognizable. There was a lot of erasing in my pencils this week, and my doodle was way, way off.

If you like Scott C.'s work, and you already have a copy of the fun, adorable East Dragon, West Dragon, let me suggest that you purchase a rare (and fun) item that contains a page of Scott's doodles.

Next week: someone else with horns.

Alphabooksbeasts: D is for Dodo and Duck

This week's non-Donjon Alphabooks characters both come from one of the books that got me through junior high and the early years of high school: Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

Yes, D is for the Duck and the Dodo.

("The Duck and the Dodo," by the way, would be a killer name for an English-style pub. I'm just putting that out there.)

(You'd better click and enlarge, for the joke.)

You may not remember the Sea Pool of Tears that Alice falls into after she shrinks in the first few chapters of the book. This incident happens before the really memorable incidents like the Mad Tea Party, the run-ins with the Caterpillar and the Cheshire Cat, or the croquet game, not long after Alice peeks through a little door and sees a beautiful garden that she cannot reach.

Anyway, everyone's quite wet when they come out of the Sea of Tears, and the Mouse (not pictured) starts reciting a chunk of very dry Medieval English history to dry everyone out:

William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, [...] declared for him: and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable —

At this point, the Duck interrupts, asking what the archbishop found.

"He found it," the Mouse says. "Of course you know what it means."

And that's how we get to the dialogue that I quoted in my drawing. It still makes me chuckle, and I think I probably say "When I find a thing, it's generally a frog or a worm" once or twice a month. Mike can probably confirm that for you.

This was an easy drawing for me to put together. I think I must have drawn my share of ducks and dodoes in the past.

Next week: a little tribute to one of my "Always Fun to Draw" bros. (Aw yeah.)

Alphabooksbeasts: C is for Caliban

I've been wrestling with drawing this week's non-Donjon Alphabooks character for decades, on and off. Probably if I sit down to draw him again next year, I'll come up with something entirely different. That's in part because there's no single right way to draw Shakespeare's Caliban.

We know these things about him:

• He's half-human, having been sired on his witch mother Sycorax by the devil-god Setebos.
• He's ugly, and somehow deformed, based on the way Prospero and Miranda talk about him.
• He's capable of doing menial labor, but he doesn't like it.
• Stephano and Trinculo, when they find him hiding under a cloak, think he might be a dead fish or something. He has an "ancient and fishlike smell."

As I was thinking about designing him, I sort of vacillated between two dramatic demands the play has for Caliban. When he is cursing Prospero in soliloquy, I think Caliban has to seem genuinely malicious and a little frightening. But when he's been seduced by Stephano, Trinculo, and their bottle of liquor, he suddenly slides downhill from being the villain of the piece to being ridiculed by the ridiculous. (In this way, his character trajectory almost resembles Malvolio's. Think how fun it would be to see the same actor playing those two parts in repertory.)

You can see Caliban costumed all sorts of ways for different productions of The Tempest. In fact, he might be one of the most fun Google Image searches I've ever done. Some people really play up the half-devil heritage. Some play up the fishiness. There's an awesome-looking full-size puppet Caliban that seems to favor humor over menace. I've even seen someone trying to design a Caliban with Sendak's Wild Things as a base.

I wanted to discard any worries about actually putting a human being into the "costume," and just design the "real Caliban" that the stage actor would be trying to approximate. If I'd seen the really fun Arthur Rackham illustration before I started working on mine, I'm sure I'd have been influenced by it.

These doodles seemed a little too far in the direction of malice for me. I'd already done another version that I liked better:

There's not must malice in that version of Caliban, but I like the way he looks anyway. I especially like the distortions of his anatomy. It's fun to picture those big shoulders toting a bundle of logs.

But then I started thinking about this "sympathetic Caliban" in the drinky scenes, and in Browning's "Caliban Upon Setebos," pondering the nature of his deity and the nature of the misfortunes inflicted upon him by Prospero's arrival.

That doodle is obviously very close to what I wound up drawing. I just let him get a little more zonked out as he dug deeper into the bottle.

I mentioned at the top of the post that I've been drawing Caliban on and off for years. I was able to put my hands on a couple of classroom doodles from my first year of grad school, fifteen years ago if I'm doing my math correctly. I don't have anything to say about these; I'm just sharing them in the interest of completeness.

Next week: fowl.

Alphabooksbeasts: B is for Bobo

For this week's non-Donjon Alphabooks character, I'm choosing a little chimpanzee who has recently become dear to my heart.

This week, B is for Bobo.

Maybe you've never heard of this cute little guy. I had no knowledge of him before the last few months, but now I sort of adore him. He's the star of three picture books: Hug, Tall, and Yes. Hug is a current favorite around my house.

In it, Bobo wanders through the jungle and the savannah, gradually realizing that all of the other animals have someone to cuddle, and he's alone.

(Bonus: sequential images. "Where's Bobo?" is an interesting question for this two-page spread.)

When his loneliness finally takes over, Bobo lets out a tortured barbaric yawp (which is also the word "hug," but in huge wavy letters), then settles down amidst the other animals to cry to himself.

Don't worry; the story has a happy ending. Bobo's mother finds him, and there are several really happy hugs at the end of the book.

I know it's sappy and a little too sweet, but I think Jez Alborough's cartooning is fun, and the colors in the book are gorgeous. I have read this book at least once a day for the past several months, and although the dialogue only uses three words, I am not bored with it. That's a strong endorsement, right?

Bobo was actually pretty hard for me to figure out, as a drawing. He's such a top-heavy little coffee-bean. I tried and tried. Eventually I got close, but I think copying Jez Alborough gave me something like my Mercer Mayer problem: these are just not character designs (or curves) that I would naturally come up with on my own.

Next week: a very ancient and fishlike smell.

Alphabooksbeasts: A is for archy

Okay, first of all, I officially retract that image of Aslan that I posted late Sunday night. I'm going to need to draw from Narnia later in my Alphabooks alphabet, and I wasn't too happy with the way Aslan turned out anyway.

 Actually, as it turns out, A is for archy, the free-verse poet reincarnated as a cockroach who cavorted on the keyboard of Don Marquis starting in 1916 (about seven years before e. e. cummings's first book, if you're keeping track of poets with odd typographical habits).

Maybe you've never heard of this poetical cockroach, but I first encountered him when I was a mere tyke, in a Time-Life book about insects and spiders that excerpted "archy declares war." (archy never uses capital letters, because while he is jumping around the typewriter he is unable to push down the shift key at the same time as a letter key. Kids, ask your grandparents about the medieval technology I'm talking about.)

I don't still have that book, and I haven't been able to determine for sure, but I think that same poem may have given me my first glimpse of the cartooning of George Herriman.

(I'm pretty sure this particular image did not appear in the book I had; I borrowed it from this blog post.)

You can get archy with Herriman cartoons here.

When I finally did see Krazy Kat during my undergrad days, maybe archy had to some extent made me ready for what I was going to see. For that, I thank the Time-Life company, I suppose.

I didn't want to try to ape Herriman for this drawing, though, in part because I'm planning to visit him later in the alphabet, but mainly because I know enough entomology (and have spent enough time with cockroaches) that I wanted to aim for a little more fidelity to the actual critter form. Here are some preliminary doodles.

I gave him boots in one drawing because I figured he'd need a little extra weight to get those typewriter keys to budge. They looked silly, though, so I gave him some leather shoes instead. The next doodle was pretty close to what I wound up with for pencils. In some ways, as usual, I like the sketch better than the finished inks: more energy, and a sort of scruffy quality that seems right for a cockroach.

If you're wondering what rules led me to pick and then reject Aslan, here are my personal guidelines for the AlphaBooks project:

1. I'm planning to do two alphabets this time, one of which will consist entirely of Donjon characters. 

2. For my other alphabet, as with Alphabeasts, I'm going to draw twenty-six characters from twenty-six different sources. 

3. None of my characters will be human beings. (Mostly they're animals. This is because I have been enjoying drawing creatures for the first two alphabet projects, and because my skills as a caricaturist are really still too minimal to be honed by a project like this.) 

4. That said, they'll all still be characters—that is, they'll have personalities that go beyond their natural animal qualities. (There may be an automaton or two in the list, but even they will be distinctive individuals.)

I've got the alphabet all planned out now (at last!), and I'm psyched to get drawing. Next week, we'll meet a little chimp, and not the one who spent time with the fortieth president.