Alphabeasts: K is for Kalidah

Okay, my Alphabeasts entry for this week is a little later than it might have been, but considering the holiday fluster of last week, I don't think it's really all that tardy. I promised an animal you might not have heard of, from a very famous book, and I give you the kalidah.



As you can see behind the link on its name, there are kalidahs in L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, but they don't make the transition into the famous movie, except perhaps in the second and third terms of "Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!"

Here's the Cowardly Lion's description of these beasts. It's the only description of them in the short chapter that deals with them, which comes right before the drowsy poppy-field chapter.

They are monstrous beasts with bodies like bears and heads like tigers ... and with claws so long and sharp that they could tear me in two as easily as I could kill Toto. I'm terribly afraid of the Kalidahs.

Of course, the Cowardly Lion is terribly afraid of most things. But we do later learn—when the heroes are pursued by them—that a kalidah is bigger than a lion. Fortunately (spoiler alert) Dorothy and her escorts manage to avoid the kalidahs and reach the Emerald City.

Here's the only image of the Kalidahs in my copy of The Annotated Wizard of Oz, which uses the original illustrations by W. W. Denslow.



(You can see another image, with a plot spoiler of sorts, here.)

It occurred to me, as I was working on my drawing, that The Wizard of Oz isn't the only early-twentieth-century children's book with tigers and bears (oh my) in it...



Next week: I gotta fire up my Netflix queue to watch a movie from 1982.

What my Ph.D. Means to Me: Holiday Edition

I finally got my grades done on "Monday night," a little before 5:00 AM.

The last day of classes was December 7. Over the following twelve days, I graded that entire stack of papers. How much do you think it weighs?

Answer: nine and a half pounds, if we're just talking literally.

Maybe it's not as bad as it looks. I am only returning the ones above the shift, about halfway up. The others were read but not marked. But that top half of the stack has had its grammar marked (every misplaced comma, every confused homophone), along with critiques of the argument or pacing or metaphors.



Now I get to think about the holidays.

For the record, I got my Ph.D. about nine years ago, at one of the most prestigious institutions in my field. You might think that by now I would have felt some sense of professional advancement.

Instead, I have every reason to expect this workload (or more) until I retire, quit, or expire in the saddle.

The next time my students suggest that they are thinking about going to graduate school, I'm going to ask, "Do you like grading papers?"

And if they don't answer, "Like it? I LOVE IT!" ... well, I feel a strong moral obligation to discourage them.

But I shouldn't complain. I am lucky, in fact, in that I even have a job.

Alphabeasts: J is for Jeep

This week's Alphabeasts drawing ought to be familiar to all you comics fans. Back in 1936, E. C. Segar's Olive Oyl received a mysterious package, out of which emerged the mischievous critter known as Eugene the Jeep.



A jeep, you see, is a fourth-dimensional creature that has somehow been tangled up in the form of an African Hooey Hound. Or something like that. What he's doing here is telling me that I can't have any Christmas fun until I finish grading my papers.

There's some evidence that Segar's jeep actually did suggest the name for the motor vehicle, during World War II. I'd always heard that "Jeep" came from "GP" for "General Purpose," but apparently that may be apocryphal etymology. If it seems crazy to you that a marginal comics character would be known well enough to lend a nickname to a vehicle, remember that Eugene was also featured in moviehouse cartoons.



"The jeep is a magical dog that can disappear an' things."



I have to say, I found it a lot easier to wrap my head (or my pencil fingers) around Segar's forms, compared to Mercer Mayer's. Must be from reading all that Krazy Kat: Eugene seems to me to be a member of the same fraternal order as Ignatz Mouse.



Anyway, I was happy enough with my pencils this time around that I wanted to save them in case I messed them up. So here are a couple of "process" images, first of the stuff I erased under the inks in the final drawing...



... and then of the doodles that helped me figure out how the jeep works.



Next week: a creature you may not ever have heard of, from a very famous book.

Ichipotomas Fanart

Let me make it clear that although I am a big hadpanagus booster, I love all of the alphabeasts that AZ has been coming up with. If I had the time, I would already have drawn my takes on her first nine creatures. It's not just about hadpanagus over here. No, no.

This week, she invented the ichipototomas, or maybe just ichipotomas (the name has variations), about which she says:

ichipototomas is a quiet shy hipopotomas with antlers.
A super crazy creature toataly. he eats grass! he hides in the trees at day time, so hadpanagus wont come and steal his butt, and he comes down and sits by the ocean at night. but sitting there makes him itch, so he just sits there itching all night. lives under trees and fears birds. if a bird is in the tree above him he sticks his head down in the dirt, with his tail down. he eats mice while hes down in the dirt. if he’s in a tree hiding, and a bird is in same tree, he would jump to another tree or jump onto another planet and back.

Right away, I wanted to draw my own version, and I started copying AZ's painting as faithfully as I could:



But then I thought that it might be nice to put the ichipotomas up in a tree, hiding its butt from the hadpanagus, hoping that no birds were going to come and scare it into jumping to another planet.

That seemed like a scenario with some potential for drama. I mean, I am sympathetic to the itchy, but scary birds are more fun to draw.



I was sorely tempted to prop that tree up, a la Horton Hatches the Egg, to make it a little more stable, but then I thought that the ichipotomas might need a little spring in the tree when it jumped to its next planet.

Okay, maybe I should get some sleep.

Alphabeasts: I is for Ickky

This week's Alphabeasts entry comes from a children's book that I enjoyed when it was brand new and I was a little kid, Mercer Mayer's Professor Wormbog in Search for the Zipperump-a-Zoo.

It's the story of a pith-helmet-wearing, beak-nosed, super-mustached professor-cum-zookeeper who has collected a "beastie" starting with every letter of the alphabet except Z. He travels to the ends of the earth searching for the Zipperump-a-Zoo, then returns disappointed to a home (SPOILER) positively infested with the little drunken gremlins.

Many of the book's beasties are about twenty feet tall, or bigger, but three domestic-size beasties follow Wormbog on his peregrinations, and one of them is an irreverent ickky



(The gingerbread man probably has salt and pepper and butter on it.)

Normally I'd link to other websites to lead to further information about my alphabeast, but there doesn't seem to be much about the ickky out there on the web. (A marginal critter from a single 35-year-old kids' book? Shouldn't there be a wiki page for it, at least?) Let me tell you what I know:

I know the critter is called the ickky because it appears in the abecedary lineup early in the book. (This splash page, by the way, could be a resource for anyone else working on the Alphabeasts, as long as you don't need it for R or S, which are covered up by characters standing in front of the fence.)



(And yes, quite a few of the beasties have bat-wings for ears.)

Wormbog's ickky spends much of the story loafing or cowering with a rainbow-scaled rhinoceros-dog critter called the kerploppus.



(The kerploppus apparently also appears in Mayer's Little Monster series, which are sequels of a sort to Wormbog. They're a little after my time, so I don't know whether the ickky returns there.)

At one point the kerploppus and the ickky abandon Wormbog in order to work for "Island Joe," but Wormbog encounters them again in a cave deep below the surface of the earth (they're working a concession stand and look mighty bored), whence they follow him home. Following their antics (and the other surplus details in the illustrations) was one of my pleasures in reading the book as a kid.

That said, I have to admit, I found it really tough to ape Mercer Mayer's forms. There's something about his curves or his lines that doesn't feel at all "native" to my drawing hand, and it took me a long time to approximate the look of the ickky.



I don't even think I wound up getting it right, in the end. But them's the breaks. Perfection is for people who don't have papers to grade.

Next week: an imp from 1936.

Hadpanagus Fanart

One of the contributors to Alphabeasts has been cranking out really crazy mythological creatures that I had never heard of before, and with her entry for the letter H I simply could not resist jumping on the fanart bandwagon.

The artist in question is AZ, the daughter of another contributor. AZ is six years old. This is what she has to say about her creature hadpanagus:

HADPANAGUS just walks around & says “look! a butt!” & he eats butts! & grows butts! & wears butts! he just loves butts!

Furthermore:

Hadpanagus also hooks butts onto his butt, so all the butts trail along behind him like a tail. he already has a tail, so now that he hooked a butt tail on, he feels like he has two tails! he even sews butts together for blankets & pillows & matreses & carpets & you know what? he even sings about butts! he just needs butts! just give him some butts! he has millons of butts he has millons of piles of butts. he eats butts with butter he also chases giingerbread men a lot, so he can stick them in the crack and then put some salt and pepper and butter on!

I am not the first to draw a fan tribute to hadpanagus, and I'm sure I won't be the last.



AZ's mom has also taken a crack at it (so to speak), and I believe her version met with AZ's disapproval. I hope mine passes muster.

If the relevance of hadpanagus's speech balloons isn't initially obvious, please give this video a minute and a half of your time.



And if you find that amusing, you might also listen to the video behind this link.

Alphabeasts: H is for Heffalump

It's the end of the term, and I should really be grading papers instead of drawing. I was joking last night about taking a close-up picture of some melted cheese on top of a pizza and passing it off as a Horta, but in fact I'm saving my Star Trek Alphabeast for a monster even dearer to my stupid heart in its way.

Instead, this week's Alphabeasts entry comes from one of my favorite books in all of Modernist fiction, and certainly my favorite such book to read aloud. That's not Ulysses, believe it or not, but Pooh. This week, H is for Heffalump.



That's a bit of a quickie drawing (with quickie coloring), and I'm not too happy with it, but I tried to make the heffalump a little different from merely a more familiar pachyderm up on its hind legs.

I am dimly aware that Disney has once again defiled the Pooh stories by creating some sort of cutesy, plush, kawaii abomination in a so-called Heffalump Movie—you may click here to see images, but beware that they are horrible and cannot be unseen. In fact, if you are a parent, I think it is crucial that you do not allow your children to see those images until they are well familiar with Ernest Shepard's original decorations.

There are two actual images of the Heffalump, in nightmare visions by Piglet and by Pooh. It is a creature of the nervous imagination, possibly even Very Fierce with Bears and Pigs. Only Christopher Robin has (possibly) ever actually seen one. The images I'm linking to are, really, conjecture at best.

And yet there is a chapter in Winnie-the-Pooh in which "Piglet Meets a Heffalump."

If you have never read this story, or indeed if you have never read it aloud, I exhort you to find a copy and read it before you hit my spoiler image below. This isn't the only time I've recommended the books, but let me say that Milne's Pooh books are great to read aloud, because they have a lot of little quirks and jokes that only appear as the reader makes the words on the page into sounds. If you haven't read the originals, and think of Pooh only as that Disneyfied pabulum, then you owe it to yourself (and anyone you read to) to put the real books in your hands. They're wonderful.

Okay, are you ready for the spoiler? In the chapter in which Pooh and Piglet resolve to trap a heffalump (despite Piglet's anxiety), Pooh himself winds up in the bottom of their Very Deep Pit, with his head stuck in an empty honey-jar. The very moment when he makes a "loud, roaring noise of Sadness and Despair" is the moment when Piglet peeks into the Pit to find out what they've caught.

This is the Heffalump that Piglet meets.



Next week: an irreverent creature from an alphabestiary I loved when I was a tot.