BOOK REVIEW; "WHY LITERATURE IS BAD FOR YOU"

I love this book! I also love literature and so does Peter Thorpe, who wrote the book. What he's saying is that literature, even the best literature, has an unrecognized dark side and that it's hurt almost as many people as it's helped. Here's a sample of Thorpe's style:




Sorry about the underlining. I hate to read a book after someone else underlined it. Usually I do all my underlining lightly in pencil so I can erase it if I have to. It looks like I used a ball point pen here. Sorry.



A few chapter titles: How Literature Seperates Us from Our feelings/How Reading MAkes Us Lazy/Our High Toleration of Incompetence/Oversimplifying Human Nature/Why We Write Badly/How Literature Gives Us the Lust for Revenge.

Interesting, eh?

"TALES OF WORM PARANOIA": DRAWINGS THAT DIDN'T MAKE IT TO THE SCREEN

This (above) is from a deleted scene where Sally finally realizes what the Worm's intentions are. I did the sketch and Tuck Tucker did a genius job on the clean-up. The scene was deleted for time.

These last two drawings are inbetweens from the brilliant animation Glenn Kennedy did on the Worm addressing the audience in the beginning of the film. He had great teardrop theories and a beautiful, cartoony line that made me regret the necessity to color the scene. The originals of these drawings, along with a bunch of others, were stolen from the studio before they could be photographed. Luckily I had xeroxed a few before the thief got them.

Glenn did the scene over again, and he did a good job, but the first version is the one that lingers in my mind.

PICTURES THAT INFLUENCED ME #1A

BASIL WOLVERTON

Three of these are pictures I saw in Mad Magazine when I was a little kid. One I discovered a little later, I don't remember how. I loved them when I was a kid and they continue to influence me even today.

What impressed me about the drawing on top (above) was the idea that you could do a drawing in the wonderfully ignorant, over-the-top style of the class clown but still project delicacy and restraint. This isn't a shout-at-you, Big Daddy Roth picture. The restraint actually makes it funnier than than Roth. I always meant to ask John K if this picture influenced him because John's caricature style can be described this way.

My school friends and I used to crack up over the galoot and the elbow (above). I KNEW guys like this, guys who aren't bullies, but who step on little people because they don't seem to be aware of their existence. When you're this big only other big people are on your radar. And look how eager and stupid the guy is!


This (above) is the picture that made me aware that cartooning is often about worlds in collision. Two men with totally different personalities are forced to sit so close that they interfere with each other. The pictures are funny even without the beard-in-the-soup gag. They made me aware of rhythm, framing, and funny staging. They also reminded me of the centrality of funny drawing. I stared at this a lot before the teacher confiscated the magazine.



The panel on the left (above) is the one that really captured my imagination. I thought the disgusted guy in the middle had such a funny face that I was driven to spend countless hours mugging infront of the mirror, trying to learn it. Now I've gotten really good at it.
I love to draw this kind of guy, A character who reacts with disdain and disgust to people around him.

TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF MY MEDICAL PROBLEMS

First let me describe what happened. I get the eye surgery and it turned out better than I expected. A few hours after the operation I lifted the patch and was amazed to see how clear everything was, clear and very, very clean. I had no idea that the world was such a incredibly clean place. You could eat off sidewalks like these! I went to sleep happy as a bug.

The next morning I wake up with a pain in the abdomen. I go to pee and nothing comes out. I try to pick something up and I can't. Just about everything I did hurt like crazy. Things get worse and worse til I end up in the emergency room of the local hospital. They speculate that the anasthesia I just had was responsible. They jam (and I do mean "jam") a catheter in ( a memorable experience) and the pee comes out like it was shot out of a firehose. I had to wear that stupid catheter and carry around a bag for a week. Well, it turns out that I get a bladder infection from the catheter and then, on top of that.....I'm going to stop here because I've probably already exceeded my gross limit. Anyway, I experienced more pain in the last two weeks than all the pain I've felt in a whole lifetime before that. I also discovered that pain sucks.


This has been such a bad experience that it's actually changed my philosophy. I used to think nature was all about fuzzy little ducklings and beautiful, forest waterfalls. I used think of nature as my friend. Now I think of it as a masked assassin hiding in the bushes with a knife. In my darkest moments I hear it saying, "Are you still here?"

I'm amazed at how little comfort people in pain can take from secular philosophy. Epictitusis is helpful but you have to change your whole life to make his ideas work. Modern philosophers are more interested in problems like "being" and what the order of words in a sentense tells us. Has philosophy ever been more irrelevant to the problems of real people than it is now?

Modern Christianity puts so much emphasis on God being love that it finds people in pain to be an embarrassment. When my dad was a kid everybody believed that love was only one aspect of God and that he was also a stern taskmaster who put us on Earth to test us. Pain fit into my dad's concept of the universe a lot better than it fits into ours.

HOW TO WRITE A FUNNY CARTOON SHORT6

Here's everything I know about writing shorts in one short paragraph!

A funny cartoon is always built around a funny sketch and a funny sketch is always built around a funny situation. When I say funny I mean something that cracks you up just thinking about it and which makes other people crack up too, especially when they imagine your character doing it. You and your friends keep adding to the original funny situation until you've worked it up into a sketch. After that you're only problem is to figure out a story reason to justify the sketch and a quick way of getting out of it. The funny sketch is the core of the cartoon. That's it. Believe me, if you know that, you know a lot!

Are there exceptions? Of course there are, especially when you factor music in. Your music man is one of your most important people and no story should be finalized (or voices recorded) before you've integrated good opportunities for music & SFX into the story.

There's probably a lot more to say on this subject but this is the best I can do with my mind swimming from meds. I have no idea how people stretch stuff like this out into whole books. Short cartoon writing is the easiest kind of writing there is. If you draw, if you're funny (cartoon funny, not stand-up) and if you have a knack for structure then you're ready to hang your shingle out. Hmmm... Maybe there is one more subject to cover....6

OK, here's something on the subject of taste. If you want to cultivate taste then ask yourself this fudamental question: What is the purpose of a story? I mean any story, whether it's told by Shakespeare or indians sitting around a campfire. The purpose of a story is simple: it is to entertain by blowing people's minds. I don't know about you but I never go into a music store with the intention of finding something mildly interesting to listen to. I go with the hope that something I stumble on will change me forever. I go with the hope that I'll make contact with greatness in some way or be shown a truth that I didn't know before. I think everybody's like that. Don't deliberately disappoint.

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSSON'S PAPER CUT-OUTS

Every once in a while I cut something out of white paper just for the heck of it (above). I got the idea from a book on on Hans Christian Andersson's paper cut-outs.



According to the book, which I don't have at hand, Andersson thought he was ugly and hoped the cut-outs would make him more acceptable to the people he told stories to. That's Andersson above. In my opinion he's exceptionally handsome.

The cut-outs look like they could have been done by Matisse. Did Matisse know about these? Was he influenced by them?

Incidentally, Andersson always used big scissors and white paper.

GUSTAV TENGGREN"S BILLION DOLLAR PICTURE

I say billion dollar because my hunch is that these first two pictures are the ones that inspired Walt to make Disneyland. Look at the picture of the hearth (above). The artist beckons us deep into the picture then rightward for an imaginary walk into the fireplace. Look at the low, sheltering ceiling and at the beams which appear to struggle heroically to hold up the ceiling. Check out the ship which every boy would want to get a closer look at. Can't you hear your footsteps on the floor? Isn't the glow from the fire appealing?

Then there's the toy shelves (below). Each toy is one that you'd like to pick up and look at. You'd like to run your fingers along the edge of the shelves, maybe over the carvings. The artist could have made the shadows deeper and slightly more menacing, but that would defeat the purpose, which is to invite the viewer to come closer and examine the toys. There's a real tactile pitch going on here. I want to step into the picture then touch every toy on the shelf.

Maybe you don't see why I'm singling out Tenggren and the pictures above. Maybe you're thinking that all the top-grade Disney artists probably had the same ability, or close to it. OK, take a look at the picture below.

This is obviously a the work of a really skilled painter but it doesn't invite me in and I have no desire to hold the toys. The window might have been more interesting. After all, windows are a powerful psychological symbol just like hearths. Here the window is just a prop. The pillar is pretty good but we don't see where it connects to the ceiling so we never root for the hard-working little pillar struggling to keep the ceiling up. The floor is just textured color.

Tenngren had the ability to make the viewer want to enter his pictures, look around and pick things up. To me they suggest Disneyland where you really can enter these worlds.