Doodle Penance: "how do you pronounce daniel clowes"

Mike here, posting the Doodle Penance for a change. Today's formerly fruitless search item: "how do you pronounce daniel clowes." Well, it so happens that Isaac and I are well qualified to answer that question, having both had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Clowes more than once--myself as recently as last night, when he appeared at a local DC bookstore to promote his new book Wilson.
And indeed, the first word uttered by Mr. Clowes was his own surname, to correct the first of several mispronunciations of it by the employee who was introducing him as "Daniel Clothes." In an instant Mr. Clowes swiveled his microphone to his mouth to pronounce his name rightly, which did not stop the employee from calling him "Daniel Clothes" at least twice more. (At one point Mr. Clowes lowered his head in mock despair.)

So let's clear this up right away: it's NOT PRONOUNCED LIKE "CLOTHES." Or like "CLOSE" (with a voiceless S). Nor is it pronounced like "CLUES" (though it might have been in Chaucer's day). No, Isaac's handy doodle below should set the record straight once and for all:
Got it? Maybe if Mr. Clowes had resorted to the language of cartooning, as above, he might have reached the reptile brain of the employee and fixed his goofing.

Clowes was joined in the formal part of his appearance last night by Washington Post writer Dan Kois, who helpfully shouted out "Clowes as in cows," but to equally ill effect. But no matter; the mispronunciations were soon forgotten as Clowes & Kois (as in "voice") jointly commented and questioned an amusing slide-show presentation of material from Clowes's life and career, including a picture of 13-year-old Dan; two pages from his early minicomics ("Melvin the Clown" and "Sidney the Cat," based on TV's Bozo the Clown and an animated cartoon of Felix the Cat); snippets of Clowes's video for Tom Waits's "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" as performed by the Ramones;

and a few minutes from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! including a rube of a gas-station attendant scorned as an "eightball" mere moments before someone else (or was it something?) is described as "like a velvet glove cast in iron." Anyway, it was a pretty cool appearance, and I'm glad I got to check it out. And I even got Mr. Clowes's permission to post this sketch, so check it out:
Pretty sweet, huh? Meanwhile, you may have noticed that I haven't exactly offered up my own image for this week's Doodle Penance. Fact is, Isaac's cartoon pretty much covers it, plus I had a narrative to offer on the very topic that takes care of it as well as, or better than, another cartoon. But I do have a doodle, inspired by the cover to Wilson and dedicated to my co-cartoonist:

Not the best likeness, by a long shot, but perhaps partaking of some small measure of that creepy face-front pose that Clowes has been seeking at least since his mid-70s sketch of Gerald Ford (pictured in the slide show) and exemplified in this charming specimen from Eightball 8:

Doodle Penance: "bede comics for sale"

... And just like that, here's another "Doodle Penance." This week, someone came to the site looking for "bede comics for sale."

I happen to know that there is an extraordinarily cute black-and-write cartooned children's booklet (it's stapled, so in some ways it resembles a minicomic more than a book) called The Story of the Venerable Bede, by Beryl McCartney, available in the cathedral in Durham where Bede is interred. I thought for sure they'd also have this cute little book at Bede's World in Jarrow, but I can't find any sign of it on their website. (That's right: the website for an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon monastery.) Anyway, dear Google searcher, if you contact both of those places, you might be able to get the booklet for £3 or thereabouts.

On the other hand, maybe a cute kids'-book approach is not what our Googler was looking for. In that case, let me show you a house ad for the rare (because it only existed in an alternate universe) 38th issue of Bede Comics, which introduced, as you can see, the sensational character find of 730:


(click to enlarge, if you dare)

I'm pretty sure Bryan Talbot got hold of this extra-dimentional rarity, and perhaps a few other issues of Bede Comics, when he was working on his massive Alice in Sunderland:




Bede also figures prominently in Talbot's Alice...



... so maybe our Googler would be content to click this Amazon link.

Mike's off traveling this week, so I guess he gets a pass on doodling. Hopefully I've been Medievally learned enough that he won't feel like our brief was mishandled.

Doodle Penance: "comics about sauron"

Here's another week-late "Doodle Penance." A couple of weeks ago, someone found the blog while searching for "comics about sauron."

Now, I suspect I know which of our pages drew this searcher to the site, but it's true that Sauron is a subject Mike and I really haven't broached. So, in order to satisfy that long-gone Doodle Searcher, here's some of our faux comprehensiveness:

Mike got his "doodle" done first. He adds, he says, "some relevant text" to the template from Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics, by which he has been much charmed of late.

Please click to enlarge, because this blog template's not good at displaying Dinosaur Comics legibly:


Mike adds, "I am pleased to note that a search for the terms 'hobbit' and 'hobbits' in the archives of Dinosaur Comics turned up no hits."

As for myself, by dint of the peculiar reading practices of my childhood, "Sauron" to me never primarily signifies the End Boss of the Rings. Rather, Sauron is this guy: a psychic-vampire were-pterodactyl predator on mutants whom the Claremont-Byrne X-Men encountered during their post-Magneto's-Antarctic-Base sojourn in the Savage Land. Again, click, if you want to see my scribbles bigger.



Here are some "process" thumbnailing doodles that I include simply for the sake of completeness. You needn't click on those. I have to say: Sauron's not as easy to draw as I thought he'd be. Those wing-arms of his are pretty hard to work out, and his head is a weird shape.




Uncanny X-Men #115 was one of the first comics I ever owned, and I read it to pieces, engraving it into my brain so thoroughly that I still had a clear visual memory of Sauron hypnotizing Wolverine into thinking his teammates were monsters, a couple of decades after the last time I looked at the comic. Still, before I could draw this doodle, I felt I had to do some image research.

Here's the cover, yanked from the Grand Comics Database:



The previous issue ends with the revelation of Sauron as a villain, resurrected (or retconned into survival) from a pair of issues in the Neal Adams X-Men era, in a splash panel that also contains some stunningly pulchritudinous Storm cheesecake. (I am stunned also because the seven-year-old Isaac that grabbed that issue from the newsstand didn't even register it.)

Wolverine, in his early one-dimensional "hothead" mode, charges in to attack Sauron in another dynamic splash page. (There's a nice bit of foreshadowing in the previous issue, in which, via "fastball special," Wolverine kills a gigantic pterodactyl that has grabbed Storm out of the air.) Cyclops warns him not to get too close, but for the time being, no one else on the team knows that Cyclops has faced Sauron before.





I love that last pair of panels: the heroes transformed into monsters. That's the way the general population is supposed to see the X-Men anyway, right? Looking at them now, I wonder whether there's an inking or coloring mistake in the monster version of Nightcrawler. Maybe it's just supposed to be a creature of creeping shadow? (The highlights between his ears could be eyes, I think.) But hey, I'm not going to say Terry Austin mis-inked Byrne, nor will I blame any influential art directors of The New Yorker for misreading Terry Austin's inks.



Anyway, there's the sequence I remembered so vividly.

The next thing Cyclops does, in case you're worried, is knock Wolverine unconscious so that the three unhypnotized heroes don't get cut to ribbons.

And young Isaac grows up to be a bit of a nerd.

Doodle Penance: "double speedy"

This week's "Doodle Penance" comes from the fairly simple search term "double speedy."

I can guess which of our pages gave the Google a place to land, but clearly this is an issue which we haven't really addressed before, and since I know we have a readership that appreciates comics-history arcana, I'll give a few details.

Some of you may know that in 1971, the year of my birth and the year Jack Kirby moved to DC, shockwaves rocked the zeitgeist of Green Lantern and Green Arrow when it was revealed that Green Arrow's kid sidekick Roy Harper, a.k.a. Speedy, had fallen prey to the seductions of heroin. It's a pretty famous story, and the cover has seen at least a handful of swipes and parodies. (Scroll through all the images in that link on "swipes"; it's worth the time the whole post takes.)

What you may not realize is that DC almost undertook their own twist on this famous cover, at that moment in the early '90s when mutants (and mutagenic serums) were all the rage in comics. Yes, they briefly considered having Roy Harper shoot up with some sort of dragon's-blood mutie-juice that turned him into a double teen. Here's a treatment for the cover of the never-completed story:



At least, that's my explanation for the Googling this week.

As for Mike, he says,

My initial thought also involved Oliver Queen's ward, but when Isaac sent me a sneak-preview of his contribution I knew I'd better try something else. (I'm fine to post something nearly identical to his work when the similarity is not premeditated but only discovered after the fact of drawing... but since I hadn't drawn anything yet it seemed not quite cricket to duplicate his doubled Speedy and thereby quadruplicate the critter.)

The second and third Speedys I thought of were Señor Gonzales and Wesley Webb West, better known as Speedy West (a name apparently given him by Slim Wilson—the human Slim Wilson, not the Muppet). When an image search turned up a picture of Speedy West wearing a necktie not unlike Speedy Gonzales's neckerchief, I decided to double up on the Speedys by drawing Mr. West's head on Sr. Gonzales's body. So that's what I did.



That's Mr. West's pedal steel guitar in the background, of course. Furthermore, in an effort to satisfy the "double speedy" request, I drew this piece PDQ; but you probably didn't need me to tell you that.

...And that's this week's attempt at penance. What will the rest of the week hold? Time will tell.

Doodle Penance: "comment dessiné une sloth"

We chose last week's phrase for "Doodle Penance" because of what Mike called its "wonderfully bad French": someone came to the site searching for "comment dessiné une sloth."

And so, this afternoon, when I caught a rare stretch of idle minutes, I decided to practice dessiné-ing une sloth, with these click-to-enlarge results.



How's that for a paresseux parisien? I drew it without reference images.

My thanks go out to the members of the freshman comics-history class at the Center for Cartoon Studies, who reminded me of the essential iconography of the Frenchy striped shirt. A baguette and a beret might not have been enough to Francofy my folivore.

Stay tuned for this week's Doodle Penance. It'll be speedy...

Doodle Penance: "detached mustache"

This week's "Doodle Penance" comes from some anonymous web-creeper who came by the site looking for "detached mustache," just as the title above implies.

Mike finished his doodle before I got mine done, so I'll let him explain his results:

In a way, this doodle would serve just as well as my inaugural contribution to WHWBR?, since it is based on images from one of the few comics I've had any time for lately. In my typical fashion for reading webcomics, though, I tend to forget to read this one for weeks on end, then binge on a couple of months' worth of archived strips. So far I'm up to January 2005, which means I am well acquainted by now with the usually mustachioed figures of Nice Pete and Lyle from the famous Achewood:



It should be clear from the typography (as it were) how my thought process worked on this one. Surprisingly, the Achewood-specific element came really late in the day: I had notions of just drawing guys screaming in agony as mustaches were torn from their faces, thereby conveying the sense of an "ache"; but this version seems less horrendous, as if the 'staches really did just detach, slipping down from 'neath the noses of Nice Pete and Lyle, and thereby, Samson-like, depriving two of the hardest characters in Achewood with the main source of their strength and danger. At least, they don't look so tough to me now that they are clean-shaven.

So that's Mike for this week. And, perhaps predictably, my own analysis of the search term proceeded along a similar path. Noticing, as Mike did, that both words contained the same string of letters, in the spirit of Lewis Carroll's "Mischmasch" word game, I started searching for the other magpies that contained T-A-C-H-E.

I hadn't known that tache itself, in English, means a buckle or a clasp; nor had I known that in French tache means a blot or a stain. Equipped with those obscurities and one cheat I allowed myself to invent, I cooked up this story in seven silent panels:










It was nice to draw an actual comic for a change. Not that I had time to do it, really. But sometimes you have to make time for fine art.

Doodle Penance: "compound words classroom display"

Okay, this is actually last week's "Doodle Penance." I got behind during my recuperation,and I'm in a hurry now, so I am sort of dashing off the doodles. Still, I feel penitential.

So: someone was directed to the site during a search for "compound words classroom display." I've designed a three-part display to demonstrate the properties of compound words: how they are made, and how their meaning works.



TAR + TAN =


TARTAN




SUB + STANDARD =


SUBSTANDARD




BAND + ANNA =


BANDANNA


Mike's take on this is a little different. He says,

Taking "classroom" and "display" as a PAIR of compound words, where "display" should be analyzed as "Dis play," I realized that the likeliest choice of a schoolroom production of a "Dis play," or drama set in Hades, would be Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos (No Exit). So here's my image of an awkward in-class performance of said play in a high-school philosophy classroom, featuring a somewhat unlikely troupe of actors.



Click to enlarge it, folks. Them's the doodles.

Doodle Penance: "zakuzaharra"

This week's "Doodle Penance" starts with a single word: "Zakuzaharra."

I was surprised when I saw it, because I hadn't remembered the brief conversation we'd had in the comments section about the names of the characters in that cool postcard of figures from Basque folklore. Turns out my former student John had inadvertently made us a target for anyone searching for Zakuzaharra information.

Well, here he is, to remind you: Zakuzaharra.



I'm not expert on Basque folklore, so before I started my doodle, I did a little digging. As near as I can tell from this page, Zakuzaharra is a festival figure from Lesaka, a little village in Navarre. He seems to be performed by multiple people at once—on this page you can see a few people dressed as Zakuzaharra—and he seems somehow to embody the bad vibes and problems of the people in the town. He carries a balloon or bladder on a string, with which (I think) he hits people.



That's about as far as my knowledge of Zakuzaharra extends. But I figured from that much research, I could do a doodle:



One of the things that I found visually interesting about the costume is that the stuffed burlap bag that makes up Zakuzaharra's legs and torso doesn't cover his arms, so you can wind up with this shambling fat hulk with skinny human arms. I tried to play that up in my drawing.

As for the balloon or bladder, I'd like to know more:

Why does he hit people with it?

How does he choose his victims?

What does it feel like to get hit with it?



Hey, quit it!

Mike sends the following report:

Once again I was moved not to create a doodle per se (by making marks on a surface) but to build up a cartoony image in another medium. This time I have used the most plentiful medium available in Washington, DC, these days: snow.



It may be a bit hard to make out the outlines of this figure—mostly because, well, it doesn't really have "lines" as such—but it's a fairly close rendering, in snow, of the cartoon image from that awesome Basque folklore postcard. At least, it's as close as I could manage. Here's a close-up of his sheyn ponem (or should that be shney ponem?):



And thus our blog becomes the primary English-language internet resource for information about a festival figure from a little village in the Pyrenees. Please, if you read this entry and know more about Zakuzaharra than we do, fill us in!

Doodle Penance: "karton zorro"

This week's "Doodle Penance" is a simple two-word search term that for some reason we haven't addressed on the site. As usual, the search request yielded zero seconds of reading time from our searcher. Let's see if we can remedy that and provide some more helpful information for the next person who searches for "karton zorro."

Right away, I had a hunch what the Googler was looking for: you see, one of my colleagues who lives out in the countryside (a couple of towns away) was telling me recently that she and her neighbors regularly stage mock fox hunts. They rent a pack of foxhounds and ride after them on horses in pursuit of a mock fox. This mock fox, sometimes played by my colleague's husband if I'm getting the story right, carries something that's been soaked in fox pheromones or fox urine, to attract the dogged pursuit.

I figured that this colleague and her compeers, or some similar association, might have been looking on Google for some cut-rate South-of-the-Border fox pheromones. (Zorro, you see, is Spanish for "fox.") Getting a half-gallon of the stuff seems excessive, but if that's what our search term log wants...




Mike explains his own "doodle" thus this week:

—Since "karton" is Yiddish for "cardboard" and "zorro" is Spanish for fox, I have naturally cut an adorable cartoon fox out of a piece of cardboard. Herewith is a silhouette image of Fenwick Fuchs, the fennec fox.



... and adorable it is. (If that's not enough fox-cute for you, try scrolling down this page a little bit until you get to the fennecs.)


As long as we're on the subject of foxen, let me show you a couple of photos I took from the kitchen window this past October. This fellow (or perhaps she's a vixen?) made his way across our back yard just slowly enough for me to paparazzi him (her?) twice.





Yes, even in the city, here in Vermont, there's wildlife once in a while. Let's hope my colleague and her neighbors don't get wind of this.

Doodle Penance: "what does it mean to doodle balloons"

This week's "Doodle Penance" comes from someone who punched the question "What does it mean to doodle balloons?" into a search engine. Maybe it wasn't Google. I don't keep track.

Mike and I may seem to reveal something about our habits of thought when we answer this question. My thoughts went like this: Well, I haven't doodled balloons, so let me try it out. Perhaps the meaning will be revealed to me in the process. And so, during a lecture I attended this evening, I drew balloons instead of my usual pile of robots, kachinas, and puny hulks.



After twenty of thirty of these, I realized what I was drawing. Here's a somewhat scale-corrected version of the mini-doodle at the bottom of that image:



Maybe that's no big revelation, but I hadn't thought of it before.


Mike, meanwhile, resorted not to experimental methods but to literary analysis. Better click it so you can read it:



I believe he takes the palm this time around. I'm always pleased when Mike's doodle comes with doggerel.