Alphabeasts: L is not for Landshark

I haven't done my drawing for this week's Alphabeasts post yet. And in fact, I didn't even want to look at one of the horrible beasts I had as an option this week.



Is it possible that you haven't heard of the Landshark? (By which I do not mean the bulette.)

Well, the real Alphabeast will show up some time after midnight, as usual.

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.

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.

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.

Where Have I Been?

Sorry for the long silence. Expect it to continue.



This is what I graded over the Thanksgiving break. A lot of that stuff is printed double-sided, and I wrote on every page.

I have a half again as much to do between now and the end of the semester. Then, I may breathe (and blog) again.

Do These Count as Steampunk?

After a couple of posts that nearly border on journalism, I want to indulge an almost pointless private impulse. Plus, I haven't unpacked from the SPX trip yet, so I don't have time to do more digging in the books I picked up while I was there.

I got to visit with Mike today before I left DC — the Mike who is the other half of the Satisfactory Comics enterprise — and we got to talking about some of our old projects, including one old, old thing from before even the first issue of Satisfactory Comics that thankfully never got past the drawing-board stages.

All that's left of this silly project is a handful of doodles, but I've saved them. And so please let me present to you a couple of pieces of nine-year-old ephemera:

Talus, the Iron Man:



The Ivory Tower:



As you might be able to tell, these were going to be the villains of the piece. I'm mainly posting them so Mike will be able to see them too, after all these years.

Robot Doodle Lagniappe

I've written before about the way I enjoy putting a little lagniappe into the envelope when I'm sending out comics someone has ordered. And I've shown you little doodles of robots, which seem to be one of my favorite "fun things to draw."

Well, yesterday someone ordered the "Full Run" of Satisfactory Comics products, and I couldn't help adding a little robot doodle to the envelope, in addition to the lagniappe I tucked into the package itself.



I know it's just a little five-minute doodle, and not especially awesome, but it was fun to make, and I thought I'd share it.

(Plus, I wanted to remind people that I still do have copies of most of our minicomics for sale.)

I think that when I drew that little guy I was thinking, in the back of my head, about this adorable little robot that Sarah Becan drew in my robot sketchbook a few SPXes ago.



If it were any cuter, it'd be entering the Uncanny Valley, wouldn't it?

Will No One Rid Me of This Abominable Pun?

Where did I get this terrible pun?


ABOMINABLE




NOBLE

It helps if you say the words slowly. And think of the two images as a comic, representing two sequential moments in time.

I know I didn't get it from Mike. I've had this pun in my head since elementary school.

Maybe I got it from The Hodgepodge Book? Somehow, I don't think so.

I think that if I saw the original illustrations, I'd recognize them. But where?

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.

Koong Foo Pawndah

Presented here, with minimal introduction and no further comment, in response to popular demand: a page of notes and doodles from a lecture (a couple of months ago) by Slavoj Žižek.

Click to enlarge.

Montreal Finds #1 and #2: Table Doodle & Mascota

A couple of months ago I took a conference trip to Montreal, and I picked up a few comics there that I really ought to blog about. I know it'll take a while, though, because all of the comics I bought are in French, a language I can't really read.

But I can show you two bits of ephemera.

First, a paper-tablecloth doodle, from a bistro where I dined with a few friends also attending the conference:



That snake critter had no limbs to start with, but one of my tablemates turned out to be such an ophidiophobe that the serpentine shape of my doodle was making her nervous. To desnakify the serpent, the easiest way was to bestow a few feet upon it. And arms. And wings.

I miss the days when Mike and I would often go for Thai in a place that used paper tablecloths. We'd often cover the table with ridiculousness before the main course arrived.

My other bit of cartoon-related Montreal ephemera is a business card from a Chilean "Café-Resto" that's just down the street from the best dang bagels you can eat.



You can tell it's a Chilean place not only because they offer "Vin Chilien" or "Vino Chileno," but because they've apparently got the endorsement of Chile's favorite son.

I enjoyed their empanadas.

I Took the Train to the MLA, and What Did I See?

So: I'm back from the MLA Convention now, after riding the rails there and back in order to save money. What could have been an hour and a half in a plane turned into nearly twelve hours on the Vermonter. It wasn't delayed or anything. That's just how Amtrak rolls. And actually it was pretty fun.

On the way down to Philadelphia, somewhere in the vicinity of Hartford, the train got completely full, and the seat next to mine was claimed by a six-year-old girl. She was traveling with an adult cousin who was (apparently) not very interested in entertaining the little one. So, somewhere around Bridgeport, Miss Six got bored.

We talked for a while, and eventually we decided that we would draw together. (I figured if the activity would entertain Prof. Wenthe, it would probably also entertain a six-year-old girl.) We took turns nominating topics for drawing: a treasure (mine), Aladdin's Palace (hers), and so forth.

At one point, she got dispirited, as if she were losing a contest, because I was a better drawer. I told her we weren't drawing against each other, but she kept pouting. I suggested that we draw something easy, and she said we should draw spiders.

She laughed herself silly when this was what I produced.



"That's a duck!" she shouted.

"No, no, it's a spider. I just drew it wrong. See, it has feet. Spiders have feet. And spiders have a mouth, right? It has a mouth. I just drew it wrong."

After that, we were friends again. Miss Six suggested that we draw princesses. Click to enlarge this, and you can see the train-car shaking my line:



Miss Six did not like this princess drawing. "No. Why is she marrying a robot?" she asked.

"I think she loves the robot," I said. "See? There's a heart coming out of her there."

"She shouldn't love a robot," the little girl said. And then I got a grade of two Xs. That's not good.



I tried again, with the same princess and a different husband.



Before I could get another bad grade, I had the cheese announce his own verdict, and asked Miss Six to read it out loud.



As you can see, from the very moment I left Burlington, my high-octane critical intelligence was concerned with post-structuralist cultural critique and the hermeneutics of alterity.

Unsung Cartoonist's Little Symptom Guy

As I tidy my desk before a trip to the MLA, I find that I clipped a set of small cartoons from a mailing I got about some diabetes-related medical product. I liked the little cartoon illustrations of hypoglycemia symptoms enough that I saved them, and now I'm going to pass them on to you.

One of the things about insulin is that, in helping the body metabolize its blood sugar, it can sometimes do its job a bit too well. When blood sugar drops below a healthy or normal level, these symptoms can result:


(You can click to enlarge that.)

Which of these hypoglycemia symptoms might also be caused by a trip to a professional convention like the MLA?






If you keep your eyes open, even your junk mail might have interesting cartooning in it. I think this little symptom guy is really a nice piece of drawing, and my hat is off to the anonymous cartoonist who drew him.

Hand Turkey Corrigendum: Abner Jenkins Is Miffed

Okay, so in the post I made a few days ago, one of the Marvel Hand Turkeys was pretty much unrecognizable. Partly that's because it's derived from an obscure costume design for an obscure character. But mostly it's because I got the freaking hand design wrong. I am not too big to admit my mistakes.

Here, what if I had posted this? Would you have been able to guess then?



You see, in my haste to get the doodles up online, I looked only at the first image for this fellow that I found—only the first thing to hand, so to speak. And truth be told, I could have done my homework more thoroughly. That first image really doesn't reveal the full weirdness of the hands in Abner Jenkins's first Ditko-style suit of super-villain armor.

Yes, the "answer" to that missing Hand Turkey was supposed to be none other than the Beetle, in his original Human-Torch-fightin' getup.



I'm sorry! Next time I'll pick my reference images more carefully!

Hand Turkeys of the Marvel Universe (Old-School)

I had a dorky notion some time earlier this week. It occurred to me that several comic-book characters would have a hard time drawing the traditional "hand turkey"—you know, where you trace the outline of your paw and draw a beak onto the thumb part of the outline. Some folks' mitts have decidedly non-meleagrine silhouettes.

Having thunk this nerdous thought, I could apparently only exorcise it by drawing (and hamfistedly coloring) a select few "Odd Hand Turkeys of the Marvel Universe." See if you can identify all six.








Dang it! I forgot to draw a hand turkey for Ulysses Klaw! Well, maybe I'll save him for next November. Can you think of anyone else I've forgotten?

Another Halloween Envelope Doodle

Inexplicably—or at least unexplainedly—I got another order for the Satisfactory Comics "Full Run" (now only $20*) a day or two after I posted that little thing about lagniappes last week.

(*That's not a sale price: this month's orders have actually run me out of stock on one of our comics, so I dropped the price.)

Since I'd essentially promised to load in a few bonus treats, I put some more postcards into that envelope (along with every comic I still had in stock), and since I love Halloween almost as much as the next blogger, I adorned the envelope our little werewolf guy from "The Graveyard of Forking Paths."



Hooray for a growing readership, hooray for lagniappes, and hooray for Halloween!

Proof of Concept: Hot Cold Lozenges

I've been having a hell of a time coughing out the dregs of the cold that knocked me down three weeks ago, so I've frequently been fantasizing about trips to the local pho houses and Thai kitchens, where the gunk could be rousted by a nice pepper-induced salubrious lubrication of my lungs and sinuses.

And as I cogitated on the prospect, I got a little Ironic Sans: that is, I came up with an idea, possibly a rather good idea, that I have no power to realize:



Imagine lozenges in your favorite spicy sabor, at a nose-runningly intense degree of heat. Mysteriously potent wasabi, sriracha, chipotle, and vindaloo, in an easily portable form. Wouldn't that be healthful when you had a cold? What better way to dislodge a loogie or make your phlegm less phlegmatic?

Dr. Propter's: they get your juices running!

If anyone from Hall's or Vick's or Altoids or whatever is interested in the idea, I'll sell it for a very reasonable sum.

If any of you poetry fans can tell why I've attributed these pills to Dr. Propter, bonus points for you. Ditto if you're a candy aficionado and identify the origin of those shapes and colors.

Now, enough about salubrious lubrication, and back to my usual lubricious lucubration.

I Like Lagniappes

Some kind soul just ordered the Satisfactory Comics "Everything" combo—one copy of every minicomic Mike and I have made (except for the Mapjam, which is out of stock)—and I felt like I needed to do a little something extra for the envelope.

Onto the envelope, I doodled this little guy, whom I'd never see again if I hadn't scanned him.



I also tossed a few random postcards into the envelope, since they weren't going to affect the shipping costs. Hopefully, when the envelope arrives, it'll seem like a treasure trove of goodies, chock full of dorky fun. I know that when I get a package in the mail, I'm always psyched to get a little random bonus, even if it's something I'd never have paid for. I like the little lagniappes, so I try to put them into (or onto) every package I send.