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: 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: 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.)

Kokonino Street View

I've been thinking about the landscape in George Herriman's Krazy Kat for the past few days. In particular, I've been thinking about the effects generated by the protean backgrounds—the mesas that turn into weird-looking trees, the melon-rind moon that appears and disappears, and so forth. Kokonino County is famously unstable, and Herriman's background doodles are one of my favorite things about the strip. (Also among my favorite things: the characters, the writing, and the concept. There is nothing about Krazy Kat that I do not love, except for its finitude.)

I have also been thinking that although Kokonino does not present a stable mien, it does have features: places that the characters (who never comment on the shifting scenery) recognize and can easily find. There's the Old Smoke Tree, for example, or the Enchanted Mesa of Joe Stork. And there's the Elephant's Legs.



That's an image from 8 July 1923. Krazy is walking on stilts amid the waters of Red Lake, and the Elephant's Legs are there on the shore.



Here they are again, one week earlier, by the side of the selfsame lake.



They don't exist only in 1923, mind you. Here's a funny bit of business from 3 October 1926, in which they wind up pinning Krazy's "[caudal] appendage":



Don't worry. She (or he) gets loose when Ignatz squeaks nearby and the legs jump up in fear. And here they are, meandering with clouds in the shape of an elephant's rump and haunches above them, in the throwaway central panel from 20 September 1925:



Maybe that's how all of the Kokonino landscape features get around.

I had always assumed that the Elephant's Legs were a flight of Herriman's fancy, but it turns out that, like the Mittens (which also appear repeatedly in Krazy's backgrounds), they're a real geological feature in our real Arizona, near Tonalea, in the northern part of the state, on the Navajo Trail. (The actual formation is called The Elephant's Feet, and there's a rest stop nearby that Google Maps will hit. Pull back far enough on that map, and you'll see the names of Shonto, Kaibab, Kayenta, and Kaibito, all of which also feature in Krazy Kat regularly.)

In fact, you can see the Elephant's Feet with Google Street View:



Go have a look.

Lone Wolf and Cub month concludes with Volume 28: The Lotus Throne

The Lotus Throne, the twenty-eighth and final volume of Lone Wolf and Cub, has about three hundred pages of comics; of these, 172 are wordless and lacking even in such human utterance as shouts or groans, though they may occasionally feature a sound effect; and in the one hundred forty-second and final episode, "Arms," only fourteen of its sixty-one pages feature text. Accordingly, the images for this final post are all wordless, and I'll try to keep my remarks brief.

Because really: it's a bit daunting to approach the end of such a long and compelling narrative, and I really don't want to provide any major spoilers. The last image I've scanned comes with over a hundred pages left in the volume, so I think it's safe to keep reading—even if I show you this:

That's the blade of Itto Ogami's dotanuki, the sword that has sustained him in his four-year path of vengeance. The sword-polisher spy who offered to sharpen it the night before the day of battle sabotaged it, and finally it snaps off as Ogami faces the last thirty-six surviving grass ninja who stand between him and Retsudo Yagyu. He finishes them off—he's still pretty nimble, and there are lots of unused swords lying around in the hands of corpses, after all—but he gets a serious wound right after the blade breaks, and that wound doesn't want to close up.

The last sword he uses on the grass makes its final cut when Ogami uses it to slice through a strand of Buddhist rosary beads (as it were), draped across the blade by the dying ninja who revealed the treachery of the sword-polisher. Take a look at this page and tell me that Frank Miller didn't have it in the back of his head when he drew the murder of Martha Wayne in The Dark Knight Returns:

But, as I say, that's the last stroke that Ogami cuts with a sword from the grass [and Isaac, I'm using every fiber of my being not to make the obvious pun, here]. When Retsudo finally appears, he suggests that Ogami take up one of those whole weapons to face him, but Ogami declines, declaring that the souls of the grass could never rest if one of their swords chopped down the great tree of the Yagyu (these are Ogami's metaphors, not mine). So he begins the battle armed with just a hilt and a shard:

I should note that artist Goseki Kojima very rarely breaks the panel borders, even in scenes of high action, so it's quite an emphatic choice for him to put the broken blade outside the panel, and at the top of the page, yet, where the margin is widest. But look what he does with that broken blade here:

No, it hasn't grown back, nor is Ogami suddenly wielding a lightsaber. But this image shows something of the force of Ogami's connection to his sword: like a phantom limb, he can feel it though it isn't there.

And that magical image is one of several non-literal images that appear in this volume, adding to the grandeur of a work that must be one of the few comics that deserve to be called epic. Here's an earlier non-literal image, a stunner of a double-page spread:

This image gets extra force by way of contrast, coming right after a quiet page where Ogami and son Daigoro prepare to leave the opening scene of battle against the grass. It's also forceful as a terrible echo of an earlier image from way back in volume 3. In the central episode of volume 3, "The White Path Between the Rivers," the origin of Ogami's feud with the Yagyu is revealed in a conspiracy to disgrace Ogami and murder his wife. It is then that Ogami abandons the way of men to walk the demon path to hell, meifumado, a narrow road that he must navigate with a pure heart to avoid falling into the river of fire, greed, and the river of water, jealousy. There are drawings of that path in volume 3—but the rivers are not then choked with corpses, as here, and Ogami's footprints do not stain the path with blood.

Another non-literal image earns a double-page spread in this last volume to illustrate something of a little speech that Ogami gives to Daigoro. It's about the persistence of life even after the death of the body, and it uses metaphors of ocean waves to describe the ebb and flow of life across endless generations of reincarnation. After the speech, Ogami rests in his rude hut while Daigoro stares out toward the riverbank, where he sees this scene play out in his mind's eye:

But the unreality of this scene is broken by the arrival of the all-too-real figure of Retsudo, who comes striding up at last. The end is really about to begin. And before the epic duel is over, forces conspire to attract all the ruling class of Edo to the scene of the battle. The reasons why don't matter for this post. They may have intended to intervene, on one side or the other, but ultimately those assembled are hushed and stilled by the fight playing out before them. Here they are, watching:

And what do they see? I have chills just thinking about it. It goes on for a hundred pages, what they watch, and it includes such scenes as this three-way battle of wills and hearts:

It doesn't end here, but it does end. The ending is stunning, moving, epic. Amazingly, the conclusion feels both inevitable and worthy of the thousands of pages that have prepared for it. Lone Wolf and Cub by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima: it's for the ages.

Darwin Cartoons for Darwin's 200th Birthday

Today's the two-hundredth birthday of one of the people I admire most, the author of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin. I admire Darwin for the contributions he made to our understanding of the natural world and its history, for his insight and reasoning and courage, and for the thoroughness with which he documented the evidence for each step of the thinking in his masterpiece.

But I also admire him because he was a bumbler and a procrastinator, like me; because he was aimless and unemployed after he graduated from college; because he undertook an around-the-world naval voyage even though he suffered severely from seasickness. It's wonderful when you get to know a "great mind" through his or her writing and find that genius to be amiable, self-deprecating, and humorous, while also brilliant and aware of the tragic struggle that drives us (and all life) to succeed.

So today, on Darwin's bicentennial, I am marking the occasion by drawing a couple of doodles in his honor, depicting two of my favorite moments in his autobiographical writing.

First, from his university days as a zealous beetle collector:

I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.

That's a passage from Darwin's Autobiography.

By the way, Darwin's coleopterophilia was so well known that one of his contemporaries, Albert Way, drew this cartoon of him in 1832, when Darwin was off on the Beagle voyage.



The caption reads, "Go it, Charlie!"—as in "Go get those beetles!"

Here's one of my favorite moments from The Voyage of the Beagle.

Darwin describes the Galápagos tortoises:

I was always amused, when overtaking one of these great monsters as it was quietly pacing along, to see how suddenly, the instant I passed, it would draw in its head and legs, and uttering a deep hiss fall to the ground with a heavy sound, as if struck dead. I frequently got on their backs, and then, upon giving a few raps on the hinder part of the shell, they would rise up and walk away; but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.

Now, on the off chance that you've come to this post looking for a comic that engages Darwin or Darwin's thinking a little more seriously, or just for more competently drawn pictures, let me recommend Jay Hosler's kid-friendly synopsis of evolutionary theory, Sandwalk Adventures.




Hosler is a professor of biology, a practicing research biologist, and nice guy, as well as being a fine cartoonist. If you know a kid who's of reading age and curious about the natural world, Sandwalk Adventures would be a great way to set him or her on a good path of inquiry and reasoning.

If, on the other hand, you're just wondering where I got that image of Darwin with his fancy pigeons at the top of this post, well, it's an enlarged and colored version of his appearance on the cover of Satisfactory Comics #7. And why is Darwin on our cover? Because one of the hastily improvised strips in that issue features yours truly, ranting about a couple of common misconceptions about evolutionary theory.

Please click these pages to enlarge them, and you can read "...And Another Thing" totally for free, as part of your Darwin Bicentennial celebration.




(That's script by me, thumbnails by Mike, pencils by me, inks and letters by Mike, from a prompt by our pal Tom Motley, roughly halfway through our crazy thirty-plus-hour drawing marathon.)

Swipe File #1: Walt Kelly's Churchy LaFemme

On this Friday the Thirteenth, I give you our version of Walt Kelly's Churchy LaFemme, a turtle who is mortally afraid of said date, as pictured in Satisfactory Comics #1 (Dec. 2001):


The original Churchy would typically react to Friday the Thirteenth like this (as portrayed by Kelly in the early 1970s):


You may be wondering what Churchy is doing in our comic book. One of the things he's doing is establishing a precedent...

...Well, I'm not sure about that. But ever since the first issue of Satisfactory Comics, we have made it a practice to include at least one swipe* from another cartoonist, so there's a precedent, all right; and it is also true that the use of such images can be controversial or problematic (not to say dangerous) depending on the circumstances. So I'd like to talk about swipes in general in a later post.

For now, though, I want to explain why Walt Kelly got the nod as the first cartoonist to whom we've paid homage in our meager way. Among comic-strip enthusiasts, Kelly's Pogo ranks as one of the greatest works in the canon of classic American strips, and though I also love and admire Krazy Kat and Peanuts, for me Pogo takes the palm. I first came across a Pogo book on my parent's bookshelves at the tender age of seven, and it is no exaggeration to say that Kelly and his work have had a decisive influence on my subsequent development. Though I had enjoyed drawing as long as I can remember (and I remember a few Spider-Man drawings from kindergarten), it wasn't until I read Pogo that I started drawing my own comic strips, within days of devouring Prehysterical Pogo (in Pandemonia) (1967). It took a long time for me to stop deliberately aping Kelly's work, and to this day my natural cartooning idiom shows a heavy Kelly influence, not always in evidence in my two-brained collaborations with Isaac. For me as penciller of this first issue, though, it was a no-brainer to choose a character from Pogo for our first swipe from classic comics, even if I can't remember which of us proposed Churchy as the appropriate critter from the extensive Pogo repertory.

Some notes on the swipe itself: our imitation extends to Churchy's dialogue, which parrots the swamp-speak mishmash of Kelly's Okefenokee denizens, as well as to Isaac's lettering and inking, which strove to achieve a calligraphic thick-and-thin variation with the unsupple tool of a Micron fiber-tip pen. As we have continued as cartoonists, we have expanded our toolkit, and today neither of us would be so foolhardy as to attempt a Kelly-esque line with a pen that offers so little give. If we're feeling confident, we'd probably use brush and ink, as Kelly did, though more likely we'd rely on our trusty brush-tip pens. In a pinch, we might try to get the right effect from a nib pen, which is what I did for years before I learned that Kelly's line was from a brush (not a self-evident fact to the untrained seven-year-old eye).

This panel featuring Churchy is not the only homage to Kelly in our comics, though it's the most blatant swipe. Satisfactory Comics #4 invokes Kelly in all sorts of ways throughout, and so do a couple of panels in our Treatise Upon the Jam. In a way, my first contribution to the Mapjam project also alludes to Kelly's overwhelming influence on me—overwhelming and apparently continuing!


*Swipe is the term used by cartoonists to describe the use of another's images for reference, parody, or homage, though it can also refer to the work of rip-off artists who do not acknowledge their indebtedness to their predecessors. Since the very rendering of Churchy and his dialogue in a more calligraphic line shows a difference from our usual work in the first issue, we do not believe that our quotation of Kelly's image represents an attempt to pass off his work as ours. Moreover, we included Churchy precisely so that he would be recognized; and if any readers did not recognize him previously, I hope this post will direct you to Kelly's comics, which offer more than mere satisfaction—though I'll let Kelly's original have the last word here: