Showing posts with label Susan Brown. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Susan Brown. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Morty Comix # 2488


We had our family holiday gift exchange a couple days before Christmas. Susan gave me a potato gun with two spuds to use as ammo.



It does NOT shoot up to 50 feet, as we shall see. However, I am looking forward to years of service. We'll get back to this gift in a bit, but let's move on to ...

... a somewhat revolting present from Bryan and Zach. These dismembered plastic monkey parts are in a bag. And as if that wasn't creepy enough, the monkey's eyes on the severed monkey head BLINK!
 
Stay with me now. All will be be revealed by the end. I made a grid with 50 little squares on a sheet of cardboard.

Then I arranged the disgusting monkey parts on a TV tray. 

The grid was placed under and behind the tray.

I shot several potato pellets at the monkey parts, which were precariously balanced at the edge of the tray. Although the little spud bullets hit the targets, they lack the required velocity to knock them to the floor. So when the label declared "Shoots Harmless Potato Pellets," they meant it.

So it was time to haul out a more advanced technology to achieve my goal. I went to the toybox and extracted the gyroscope.

 You can tell the monkey's expression is politely apprehensive at this juncture.

 I let the gyroscope rip

It did not fail me as it knocked over two revolting monkey parts. A foot landed on numbers 27, 28, and 32.

Now it was time for the next phase, but I knew the potato gun would not be able to do the job. Mr. Spud himself told me this was all a half-baked idea anyway, and he took his leave. But I thanked him for helping me with the initial parts of this project.

  
So I made a much simpler grid, narrowing the field to three.

And this time I brought out the heavy artillery,  foam darts!
 
It took a few tries, but in less than 3 minutes I knocked a repulsive monkey hand into the grid. It landed on number 32.
 
32. That means Minnesota, the 32nd state, admitted to the Union in 1858. I've been over Minnesota in a passenger airline but have never set foot there, but hopefully someday I'll be able to pay a visit.

None of my ancestors parked there on their way West in the pioneer era (but a few were next door in Wisconsin in the 1850s-1860s).

Minnesota has a great tradition of creative comic art, was one of the hotspots in the Newave era, and today remains a prominent place for our brand of comix. Meeting Matt Feazell at SPACE 2011 was a real honor and even though he now lives in Michigan, I nominate him for Minnesota's Cartoonist Laureate for his amazing past contributions.

 Anyway, I rolled the dice the for the next step. As you can see, the number was 7. That's lucky!

And the 7th largest city in Minnesota is Plymouth. I consulted a map of that city and decided to just pick a street name I liked, and Cheshire was my choice. A co-worker calls me the Cheshire Cat and I admire that character.

So I randomly selected an address on that street, which turns out to be home to a business enterprise. I'm mailing it tomorrow morning. This issue of Morty Comix will probably be tossed in the trash or recycling, but I hope you readers enjoyed the narrative. Actually, in many ways, these blogposts are the real Morty Comix, the hardcopy product is residue.

Obscuro comix in action!


Monday, August 8, 2011

How the Bear Festival Became the Bear Festival








Actually the short answer for how the McCleary Bear Festival developed this bizarre culinary sideshow probably had something to do with this equation: Journalists + Alcohol x 2 = An argument over which county has the best tasting bear, Grays Harbor or Skamania.

I hope these articles put to rest the error made over and over by my townsmen, even proclaimed on banners and to the press, that the McCleary Bear Festival was first held in 1958. The first was held in 1959.

Susan Brown and I created a documentary on the history of the Bear Festival back in the 1990s. Thanks to our IT wizard Sarah it is available on Vimeo.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Morty Candle Box






A Morty candle box constructed about 15 years ago by my sister-in-law, Susan.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Cranium Frenzy # 8


















Along with a few other titles, Cranium Frenzy # 8 came into the world during my print-on-demand phase, so it never really had a 1st edition print run in the Kennedy Guide sense. The first ones were printed about October 1995 and the title was made available on a demand basis through 1996. I'm guessing maybe a hundred or so in this time period? All versions were published in regular digest size.

Yellow Edition, 1998, 2 copies, pink cover, yellow guts.

1st Danger Room Reprint Edition, June 2005, 5 copies, blue.

One of the very first long comix I drew after nearly dying in March/April 1995. Not only is my existential side more entrenched in the storyline, but the surgery had an impact on my nervous system. If you look closely you can detect the unsteadiness of my drawing hand by the Richter Scale-like seismic squiggles in the felt tip lines. At first it didn't seem so bad, but then it worsened and finally peaked around 2000, I guess. I'm steadier today but my left hand has never regained the old control.

What had happened to me? The doc said I had swallowed a toxic substance, a poison of unknown origin, and it was killing me from the inside out. The lab could not identify it and I have no clue what it was. They slit me up a treat and took out pieces of me on April Fools Day, 1995. I still have a nice long scar on my abdomen. There is much more to this story, but that is for another post.

Trivia:

Page 1: When Evergreen student Lee Norton interviewed Morty in the mid-1980s for the Cooper Point Journal, she described his ear floating in his drink. That image stuck with me, so I used it.

Page 4: Yes, that wooden bear really exists. I'm attaching a news article from the Jan. 15, 1997 East County News where my sister-in-law Susan and I are photographed next to thing on top of McCleary City Hall. I remember the bear was cracked and covered with a fine patina of thin green moss not visible from the street. Such are the realities of living at the edge of rain forest country.

Page 6: Hamlet stuff.

Page 8, panel 5: And that's exactly how it happened.

Page 9: Nixon in Orwell's 1984.

Page 10, panel 5: I really was reading Whitman's Leaves of Grass at the time they told me I had to be sliced apart or die. Somehow it seemed fitting.

Page 11: How Can You Sleep?

Page 12+: The Big G has always been one of my favorite characters to use as a foil for Morty. Mukey too. In this case, I've got all three interacting.

Page 15: It's them damn giant reptiles again! I think I must enjoy drawing all the jagged and pointy lines on these critters. That's the only explanation I can come up with.

Page 20: I'll talk more about Mukey the Mutant Membrane when we see his only solo comic which is entitled, strangely enough, Mukey the Mutant Membrane.

Back cover: Two truths. Both correct. Paradoxism needs a snappier label than "Paradoxism."

By the way the video we produced was entitled From They To We, it was 30 minutes long and aired on Olympia's TCTV for the better part of a year.