"Draw Two Panels": How to Play

I have finally drawn up the rules or instructions for "Draw Two Panels," the deck-driven / aleatory comics-making process I have been working on for a few weeks. Here you go:

You should be able to right-click or ctrl-click (or option-click) and download that image and print it out, if you like. If you have any questions, please post comments below; if you want to get a few of my "discards," get in touch with me.

(I have already modified my own rules, at least for the next twenty-three weeks, as I'm adding Alphabots drawings to my deck at the rate of one per week.)

Just to add a little graphic interest to this post, I'll include a sample of my current deck, created by dealing panels randomly onto the glass of my scanner.

I'm having a lot of fun with this project or process, and I'm really looking forward to the day when someone else's panels show up in my mailbox to further unsettle my random deck.

If Blogger's not giving you a large version of the image that contains the directions and constraints, try this link.

Are These Strips About Something?

Well, this one has a couple of re-used panels, too.

Maybe I should say a little bit about how I'm making these strips. Each of them has two panels selected at random from a deck, plus two new panels that connect them or make sense of them. That process of "making sense" is what the project is about.

After they're used once, the panels go back into the deck.

And what happens to them after they're used twice? Well, more about that in the days to come.

My Panelists Archive: The Playwright: the Page and the Stanza

The real highlight of my next piece for The Panelists wasn't so much the essay but the comments section, which will go live as an archive here on this blog in about twelve hours. We were doing a week on the work of Eddie Campbell, and I came out of semi-retirement as a comics critic to write this:



As part of our week devoted to the works of Eddie Campbell, I’d like to expand on something Charles noted about The Playwright yesterday, in a way that might help me understand why The Playwright doesn’t, at least to me, really feel like an Eddie Campbell book.

As Charles noted, the original black-and-white serialized version of The Playwright appeared in DeeVee in a different format, the layout of each page working from a three-by-three grid. In Top Shelf’s The Playwright, these nine-panel grids are reformatted one tier (usually three panels) to a page, which shouldn’t seem like a significant alteration. Having only reconstructed the original DeeVee pages in my head, except for the one that Charles posted, I can’t testify to the actual effects of the change. But I think it’s within my purview to offer some speculations.

Eddie Campbell is a master of the nine-panel grid, and his mastery comes chiefly in his sense of timing. The Alec books are full of single-page anecdotes that build to their punchlines with the timing of an expert pub-stool raconteur. Here, for example, Campbell the self-publisher tries to explain to his daughter where the money comes from.



Notice the way the first tier sets up the anecdote and delays its beginning, establishing a casual tone. (And yes, the title panel takes up one of the "beats" in this grid.) This same joke could have been told in four panels with a little condensing, but the newspaper strip isn’t Campbell’s native format, and that’s not his customary pacing.

One of my favorite Campbell nine-panel grids is from The King Canute Crowd, and it’s interesting to me partly because of the ambiguous relationship between its text (in part, an anecdote with a nice punchline) and its images (Alec cleans his glasses and gives a slight smile). But I’m also really interested in the rhythm of this page, the uneven movements of its notional “camera,” the blank panel accompanying the punchline, the way the images are a self-contained unit but the text carries over from the previous pages—all in all, it’s a fascinating little bit of comics timing.



Plus, you have to feel a little nostalgic about the way Campbell “paints” with Zipatone.

Just between the Alec omnibus and From Hell, Campbell has easily eleven hundred pages of nine-panel grids under his belt, and that’s not counting Bacchus or any of his other projects. It’s his favored format, and I’d imagine that by this point in his career, he could spin any event, from removing a splinter to the fall of Rome, into a well-paced page on that grid of regular intervals.

Granted, The Playwright is drawn from Daren White’s script, but I can’t help watching for Campbell’s storytelling rhythm in the book. And in fact I think it’s there, but the current edition obscures it, or overwrites it with another rhythm. In most of the chapters of The Playwright, it’s not hard to reconstruct the original pages as you read, and to see that each set of three tiers holds together in a way that those tiers don’t mesh with the ones before or after them.

The first chapter, for example, is built from two three-tier pages of voyeurism on the bus, a page on the girl with “ever-so-slightly crossed eyes” that our protagonist Mr. Benge once dated, a page of swipes from old erotica (mostly), a page on Uncle Ernie, and a page of Mr. Benge making and serving tea. Each original page has its own subject, and each would serve as what Will Eisner called a “metapanel,” containing its several discrete units in one larger unity. The new edition reconfigures the existing panels into smaller syntactical chunks, and it alters the rhythm of the story.

I know I’m not the first person to draw a comparison between the regular intervals of a comics grid and the regulated stresses and measures of metrical verse. Since I spend a lot of time in my day job thinking about the structures and rhythms of poetry, I tend to think of the comics page as analogous to the stanza in formal verse: a fixed space in which a large or small amount of action can take place, a measured unit against which a number of different rhythms can be deployed.

When the syntax of a poetic sentence runs over from one line to the next, the energy or tension that line break creates is called enjambment, and we could fruitfully think about the ways that comics scenes or story beats can be enjambed not only from tier to tier but from page to page, even when there’s no page turn involved. Many poets (and many cartoonists) will instead use the natural interruption provided by a stanza break (or a page break) to shift locations, conclude sentences, or otherwise divide one unit of meaning from another.

Thinking about it through this analogy to poetry, we could say that the original published version of The Playwright, constructed out of fairly unified pages that attach less strongly to each other, is not a heavily enjambed comic: the energy that pulls us from one page to the next is more a question of narrative than syntax. Creating more divisions within the pages, making each original tier its own new page, changes this somewhat: now, from page to page, we have a varying amount of “syntactical” pull. Sometimes the end of a page marks the end of a thought; sometimes it’s only part of an incomplete thought.

We also lose some effects of layout: the heroic genital endowment of “the actor,” for example, is squarely in the center of its original page (panel five of the nine-panel grid); its daunting omphalic (well, just phallic) centrality no longer dominates the tiers of images before and after it.

And we lose the force of nearly half of Campbell’s (or White’s) punchlines in this new format: if the first tier of what was a three-tier page is now on the left side of the book, its final tier will also be on the left, sharing visual space with the beginning of the next (original) page. That problem is a little difficult to describe, but it’s easy to show you. Here’s an imaginary or reconstructed version of that page of swiped erotica from the first chapter, laid out as I imagine it was in DeeVee:



And here’s the way it now appears in The Playwright.




The vulgar openness of the final panel is, in the original, set against a set of demure and old-fashioned concealments; full-body portraits are abruptly replaced with a close-cropped, partial, and fleshy torso. In the single-tier formatting, however, the punch of that final panel is somewhat diminished. I suppose we could argue that in its new position this panel draws a metaphor to the folds where the book’s two pages meet (an interesting reading that I don’t think I can entirely support). Or we might argue that there’s something gained by juxtaposing the more lurid moments of the playwright’s imaginings with poor domestic Uncle Ernie. In this case, however, I think I miss the set-up and release of the original, and something of its emphasis on the playwright’s chaste repulsion from the biological. In other words, I think the rhetoric of the original layout is stronger.

But that’s not to say that I would call The Playwright in its new edition crucially flawed. I haven’t said anything about the various benefits Campbell is able to wring from handling the story in color. (Robert Stanley Martin has written insightfully about the significance of particular colors; I am also interested in the way that hand-coloring the book’s repeated photocopied panels or enlargements undermines and revises its interest in stasis or repetition.) The new rhythm of the reformatted Playwright just strikes me, I suppose, as less poetic, and more like the prose of a novel or essay. We move from page to page in this book as we would from sentence to sentence in a paragraph. That’s appropriate enough to its subject matter: this is, after all, a sort of a biography, and those don’t generally come in stanzas anyway. I do wish I could read them both side by side to make my choice between them.

Stay tuned for that comments section!

Sonnets on Student Radio (for a Limited Time)

Yesterday my friend Liz and I were on the radio to talk about and read a few sonnets that she and I have been writing, mostly as a game for each other, over the past couple of years.

I think the conversation was pretty entertaining, and I think the sonnets have turned out well. If you'd like to hear the program, I'm pretty sure you can stream it until next Wednesday morning (Oct. 26), when it'll be replaced by the new week's program.

Follow this link, then follow these instructions:

Click on the "stream" button next to the "Proximate Blues / Writers@WRUV" segment of the Wednesday schedule. Once the stream starts running, our interview is about one hour and five minutes (1:05) into the program. It lasts about 45 minutes.

Let me know what you think, if you get a chance to listen to it.

The Knight of the Dopey Countenance

Recent conversation in the comments section of an old doodly post I made in 2008 has suggested that I ought to post a comic from our file of uncollected materials.

At the ICAF conference in 2005, Mike and I started drawing our first branching (or "choose your own") comic. The second of these, begun a year later at the same conference, was called "The Graveyard of Forking Paths" and eventually appeared in Satisfactory #7.

The first branching comic, "The Knight of the Dopey Countenance," appeared alongside "Graveyard" in an issue of Palimpsest, but we've never put it in one of our own comics. There hasn't really been a place for it, and I liked "Graveyard" better because I thought I'd made a mistake by beginning "Dopey" in the middle of the first row.

Now we have, I hope, fixed that small bit of disorientation. Click, enlarge, and navigate, so you can see all the different endings that our thick-headed knight manages to reach. Follow the green arrows, but don't cross the thick panel borders.



As always, props go to Jason Shiga, whose Nickelodeon strip "April Fooled" was our direct inspiration. (You can find it on his website under "strips" and then "Nickelodeon.")

I have some notebook pages pertaining to this project that I might post later this month, as a sort of "director's commentary" or something, if you're interested.

A Storytelling Exercise with Random Brushstrokes

Last night, Matt Madden described a new and interesting storytelling exercise on his blog.

Since Mike and I were having one of our rare meetups this afternoon (this time, in White River Junction), I thought it'd be fun to try a variation on Matt's exercise. For each of these two short comics exercises, Mike and I passed the page twice: once after we'd drawn the random blots or spot-blacks, then again after we'd drawn images in pencil around the other guy's spot blacks. If we'd had three or more people, we could have run this exercise without passing the paper back to the first person.

For this first one, Mike made the original brushstrokes.





(As usual, you can click any of those images to enlarge it.)

I think my drawings presented some storytelling challenges, in that they didn't really have a consistent "protagonist" or scene—those sunflowers really came out of nowhere. But I also thought it was sort of against the spirit of the exercise to plan a story, and I was trying hard to thwart my own inclinations toward story-building.

This other exercise seems to have turned out as more of a story. The initial blots are mine.






This was a pretty fun exercise to try, and I think Mike and I might do it again some time, just because it's a good limbering-up exercise for comics-making. Our thanks go to Matt Madden for the idea.

Our Contribution to "Covered"

If you're clicking over to our blog from the "Covered" project, I hope you'll stick around to check out our big summer back-issue sale and maybe some of our ridiculous "Doodle Penance" posts.

(And if you haven't heard of "Covered," I highly recommend it as a cool place to see people manipulating and laying claim to the powerful imagery of other people's comics covers.)

You might be curious to know how we chose our contribution, and why our image looks so little like the original Walt Simonson cover for Batman #366. We actually worked up two submissions for "Covered," and the one they ran was our version of the cover of the first comic book Mike ever bought.

The way we did these was typically peculiar and unnecessarily difficult.

The main thing is that each of us was, sort of like Pierre Menard, duplicating an image he had never really seen. First, we both picked covers that the other guy hadn't seen. Mike drew a set of pencils from the original cover of Batman #366...



(All of the images in this post will enlarge if you click on them.)


... and I then inked his pencils without consulting the original image:



... and then, still without consulting the original, I colored my version digitally:



I was trying to stick pretty close to the flat colors of the Superfriends cartoon there. I wanted to stay pretty cartoony in my inks as well, figuring that would be a good way to "own" the image and make it look more like our work than the original.

Have a look at the original, by comparison:



Simonson's image has a little more kinetic energy in it—a subtle change in the position of Batman's right leg makes a lot of difference in the balance of his figure, I think—and my Joker is a little bit chunky. And of course I didn't quite figure out the light and shadow on that weird building. But I think our version gains in legibility what it loses in energy.

(Mike would like me to point out, here, that the cover of Batman #366 is unique in the many-decades-long run of Batman in having a never-repeated logo for the book's title, integrated into the drawing almost in the manner of one of Will Eisner's Spirit titles. Mike has also heard that this cover existed before the story it illustrates—that the drawing by Walt Simonson was so cool that the editor ordered a story created to back it up.)

Our other cover-of-a-cover, which you'll see only here on the blog, started with drawings of Jack Kirby's Forever People #6. That's not the first comic I ever owned—my childhood copy was part of a big pile of Fourth-World comics given to me by one of my dad's friends when I was about six years old. But out of that Kirby-at-DC stash that had such a powerful effect on me as a kid, I thought this one had one of the coolest covers.

I started with a quick thumbnail, to see whether the image would work in my simplified style:



Then I did a set of pencils in my notebook and sent them over to Mike, who had never seen the original image:



(Already I am losing some of the energy and drama in the thumbnail.)

Then Mike did an admirable job inking my simple scribbles:



... and then he put some colors on them:



What's strange—and I still can't really believe we can say this—is that the original Jack Kirby cover of Forever People #6 seems more subdued.



I'm not sure how successful either of these "covers" is—I mean, I don't think either of us should consider quitting his day job in an effort to unseat James Jean or whoever—but I have to say it was a ton of fun to put some time and effort into aping Simonson and Kirby. I won't say it has been a long time since I last copied drawings by Kirby, but this is probably the most careful I've been about it, and as an exercise I certainly recommend it.

Silence and Pantomime, plus Quiet Spidey

Well, Mike seems to be having a pretty good time re-reading Lone Wolf and Cub, and his ruminations about silence and pacing earlier today got me thinking about wordless sequences in comics, and the way they work, and in particular the difference between silence and pantomime.

So, in the spirit of the Scottish Agamemnon, I'm going to interrupt the close reading of Koike & Kojima...


I understand the difference between silence and pantomime like this: in a silent sequence, no sound is being made. Ninjas sneak up on someone, or the sun rises, or a cat climbs over an empty flowerpot. In the first four panels (at least) of "Because of This, I Cannot Love," the comic is silent: unless our little Dorito guy is audibly yawning in the first panel, the reader isn't "missing" anything because of the absence of speech balloons.


But by the time we get to panel seventeen or nineteen—and certainly by the end of the page—we're in the realm of pantomime, not silence: now, the characters are making noises (or speaking), but those sounds or words aren't being represented for the reader.

I find that I can really enjoy the judicious use of pantomime in a comic. It's a strange convention in some ways: think of how odd it would be if, in the middle of a play, the actors just stopped speaking but kept moving their mouths and interacting with each other. It's almost like those moments in a movie where the soundtrack swells up to cover the actors' voices, except that there's no music in the comics—just the quiet of the reader's imagination, filling in the conversation.

Here's one of my favorite examples of pantomime, which comes from Eisner's To the Heart of the Storm:

Would that sequence gain very much by giving Buck's bathing aunt some dialogue, or having Willie cry out audibly when he's abandoned hanging from the transom?

Or, to shift from a universally acknowledged master storyteller to our own clumsy scribbles, here's a pantomime sequence from the third issue of Satisfactory Comics:



We had originally written dialogue for this page, but once Mike had pencilled it and I was getting ready to put in the lettering, we realized that the joke read just fine without any text. Why create extra dialogue at that moment, when we were already digressing away from the fate of the main characters? (They're stuck in the Kraken's belly while this page happens.)

So I guess what I'm saying is: there's silence and then there's pantomime. The interesting power of pantomime is that it asks the reader to invent dialogue, putting the scene at a bit more distance, or reminding us of the fact that the comics page is a medium—something interposed between the reader and the imagined events that the page depicts.

On another note: I've often wondered what that Spider-Man / Scorpion Ditko / Lee page would look like with no text. So, since Mike was good enough to post it, I've applied a little Photoshoppery so I can see what it's like.



It goes without saying, I hope, that the wordless version reads more quickly. And I think the action of the fight itself becomes a lot less muddy. But there are some odd enjambments off the right-hand edge of the grid. What if we lined up the panels like this, instead?







That's a fight scene you can read without words, isn't it?

"Freedom within Boundaries": Derik Badman on Constraint in Comics

Derik Badman—cartoonist, critic, and comics theorist—recently gave a presentation at the first annual Web Comics Comic-Con and Conference, wherein he discussed varieties of constraint in comics. His presentation, "Freedom within Boundaries: the Theory and Practice of Constraint in Comics," may be viewed (and heard!) in full here.

His presentation lasts about 22 and a half minutes, during which he discusses general principles of constraint before focusing on some examples of "generative" and "transformative" constraint (borrowing categories from a Thierry Groensteen article in OuPus 1, a publication of the francophone Oubapo movement for formal experiment in comics). There are a number of interesting examples along the way, among which the following stood out for me:

1) David Lasky's adaptation of Poe's "The Raven" (which crops up around 9:50), a work I was already familiar with and which I enjoy a great deal (save for the transcription error where the meter gets loused up in a line, confound it). Its minimalism makes an interesting contrast with the Kurtzman-Elder adaptation from Mad, with its typically Elderian profusion of detail.

2) Frederic and Luc Schuiten's Nogegon (about 11:10 in) presents a symmetrical layout that outdoes even issue 5 of Watchmen (the first issue in the pair devoted to Rorschach).

3) Tom Hart's implementation of Matt Madden's obstructions (14:45 or so) for a week of his Hutch Owen strip, based in part on director Lars von Trier's Five Obstructions challenge. Tom and Matt's joint effort was of course the inspiration for our own "Stepan Crick and the Chart of the Possible," also known as Satisfactory Comics #8...

4) ...which also appears in Derik's presentation (at 17:15)! I'm pleased that Derik included us in his presentation (and I didn't know we were a part of it until I followed the link to it from Journalista this evening), and I'm doubly pleased that he showcases my favorite page from the story, Isaac's riff on Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (page 7 of the comic).

5) Badman concludes the generative constraints with his own "Things Change" (19:00), based on Ovid's Metamorphoses. He shows two pages from a sequence designed so that each page doubles the panel count of the preceding page, till the art dissolves into blackness. (Before it does that, though, the use of color is quite striking, as seen in the adjacent 16- and 32-panel pages on display in his video).

So if you're interested in seeing and hearing a bit more about comics constraints (from somebody other than Isaac or myself, for a change!), I recommend giving Derik's presentation a listen.

Izzy Challenge #5

I got something neat in the mail this afternoon, and since it's a bit closer to the alleged subject of this blog than my last post, I thought I'd do some show and tell.

This is the new issue of J.B. Winter's Izzy Challenge, a jam / constraint-based minicomic in which Winter tries out new and experimental ideas for collaborative comics.



I'm in it. You see, back when I still lived in Connecticut and Tom Motley (who has a new blog, by the way) still lived in Colorado, we became neighbors in a list of cartoonists from all fifty states...



... Or, wait -- maybe that's not the best way to explain it.

The latest issue of Izzy is a fifty-state, fifty-cartoonist jam, in which each cartoonist drew a vacation snapshot for Izzy the Mouse as he made his way (impossibly, alphabetically) through the entire union. (Sorry, Mike, Izzy skipped DC.) Each drawing started with a cartoon of Izzy in a weird pose (drawn by Winter), and the cartoonist for that state chose a background and filled it in.

It's a fun little book, and well worth a read, if only to see what sorts of trouble Izzy gets into in Rhode Island or West Virginia. It's also cool to see Motley and me in close proximity to the likes of Matt Feazell and the J. Chris Campbell. (Shouts out, too, to my new neighbors in the Trees and Hills cartooning group, Colin Tedford of New Hampshire and Morgan Pielli of Vermont!)

Anyway, if you're interested in getting a copy for yourself, it's only a buck over at Winter's Etsy store. Pick up a copy of Noodle #2 (my favorite of his minis) while you're there!

Satisfactory Comics #8 (June 2008)

At long last, I am happy to offer you a way to buy the story that Mike and I were working on all last fall and winter, now in full color and easily portable:



This story will debut at the MoCCA Festival this weekend, and after the convention it may turn out to be in short supply, but I can always print more if I need to.

We've dubbed this story "Stepan Crick and the Chart of the Possible," and we're also calling it Satisfactory Comics #8. At ten pages, it might seem short for an issue of Satisfactory, but they're dense pages, and I think it's really the best story we've told yet.

As you can see, that tidy little packet contains a lot of color and a lot of incident:



(You can click that to enlarge it.)

For more information about the story -- for all of its elaborate constraints and conditions, for the alternatives we considered, for the thumbnails and the pencils, and, indeed, for the black-and-white version of each page in turn -- you can read the posts in this category in reverse order. But wouldn't it be more fun to read it in your hands instead of here in your web browser?

This version of the story comes on ten unbound postcards, each of them ready to read or to send.

Yes, we've left room for your message on the reverse of the postcard: if you buy a set to send to a friend, you'll also be able to put in some correspondence. (I recommend spacing them out, about a week apart. The end of each page is designed as a point of narrative suspense, so the reader who receives the cards slowly should get plenty of twists and surprises. If you've got several friends and you'd like to order several sets, please read the post on ordering multiple comics.)



As I said, the cards are in full color. I think they've really turned out nicely. They come wrapped in a little band (printed in two colors and sealed with a sticker of one of the characters from the story -- not necessarily this guy).



UPDATE (NOVEMBER 2012):
I'm afraid that this issue is, at least temporarily sold out. You can still read the comic (in black and white) here on the blog, but for now all the in-print copies of SC8 belong to other people.

Two Little Abecedarii (June 2008)

With this year's MoCCA Festival just a couple of days away, I'm happy to say that Mike and I will have a handful of new comics at our table (although Mike himself will not be there; instead I'll be joined by our pal Tom Motley). The new stuff is also available to you, our website reader, for just a pittance. Here's a pair of our newest publications, both of which are small books containing illustrated ABC poems:


My "An Alphabet That's Fun to Draw" is a republication of my page from the perennial favorite (and nearly out-of-print forever) "_____ Are Always Fun to Draw." I had always meant to republish that poem at a larger size, because many of the drawings have details (or fun) that don't show up well in their original (reduced) context.

The book will look a little bigger than that if it's not being held in a huge, hammy meathook of a paw.

Here's a couple of pairs of pages:


Who doesn't like to see fantasy dragon-bashing melee on one page and our sixteenth president in danger of electrocution on the facing page?


And although the absence of a beard in this self-portrait dates it a bit, who hasn't felt that same need for a nap? And who hasn't imagined the same dialogue between Hello Kitty and Squirtle?

If you want more explanation of that project, or a list of the fun-to-draw things that appear in the book, click here for further details.


Our other little ABC book, aptly titled "Abecedarium," is written and drawn by Mike (as you can see on this cover):

(Again, if your paws are more petite, the book may appear larger.)

This little gem of a book picks out twenty-six of Mike's "Fantasy Folk" illustrations (originally created to decorate the margin of our submission to the second volume of Elfworld) and describes these twenty-six folk with a poem in rhyming couplets of Middle English. (Mike has posted a glossary of the more obscure Middle English words in the poem, but really it's not at all difficult if you read it aloud.)

Among the folk thus described are a Hermit, a Nymph, a Wodewose, a Fairy, and an Undertaker; also appearing are a Pedant and a Scribe who may look a bit familiar...



These two happy little books are available at our Storenvy shop.

What I Drew That Was "Fun to Draw"

By the time this year's MoCCA Festival is over, I hope that a few people will have copies of the republication of my "Alphabet That's Fun to Draw" -- this little booklet:



It originally appeared in our multi-author sketchbook project, "_____ Are Always Fun to Draw", in which each of twenty-two cartoonists tried to cram forty or more items from a master list into a single 8" x 7" page.


I like the results a lot, but I only have a few more copies of that book, so I'm bringing out a larger reprint of my illustrated ABC poem from it as a little 28-page booklet. Since I didn't have room in the micro-mini to explain the project or list the fun things that I drew, here's some more information.

You can follow the link above (or in the sidebar) to get a more thorough explanation of the project as a whole, but here's the list of things that I fit into my twenty-six panels:

accordions, apples, bats (or other things with bat wings), birds, bones (loose bones), bugs (especially beetles), cats, chickens, chimeras or other hybrid animals (if you count Squirtle as a squirrel-turtle hybrid, which I do), cigarettes, clouds, cowboys (especially drunk ones), demons, dinosaurs, dogs, dorks (if I count as a dork, and this post would indicate that I do), dragons, ducks, earthworms, ancient Egyptians, explosions (especially mushroom clouds), eyes or eyeballs, fire or flames, fish (especially in goldfish bowls), flies (to indicate bad odor), Frankenstein monsters, girls (especially pretty girls), glasses (for reading), goths, guns, (especially rifles or ray guns, and I got both), helmets, Kirby krackle, knights, letters, lightning bolts, Abe Lincoln, mermaids or merpeople, monkeys or apes, the moon, mountains, ninjas, octopi or squid (including giant squid), Olmec heads, pirates or pirate hats, pizzas (especially with pepperoni), plaid flannel shirts, Pokemon, pterodactyls, robots, rockets or spaceships, ancient Romans (well, I got Carthaginians), samurai, Saturn or other planets, self-portraits, skulls or skeletons, smoke (little whiffs and big puffs, and I got both), snakes, space aliens, swords, the undead (especially zombies), treasure chests, trees, turtles and tortoises (if Squirtle counts), umbrellas, vampires, vikings, wiwaxia, x-ray specs, and zeppelins

Is that sixty-nine different items? Anyway, it's more than forty.