HALLOWEEN'S ONLY A MONTH AWAY!!!!!!!

Halloween is only a month away!!!!!!! I'd intended to do a review of what's on display in the Halloween stores this year, only they're still putting things up, so I guess I'll have to wait. In the meantime, here's a few pictures.

Here's (above) my favorite,  an astonishingly beautiful, die-cut cardboard Moon and cat, probably from Germany in the 10s or 20s. Man, the Germans were good at this sort of thing! The piece is a work of art, yet you could buy it for the change in a kid's pocket! Is Halloween celebrated in Germany?

A vintage, paper-mache pumpkin (above), possibly also German.



This picture of a skeleton sitting on an old porch (above) reminds me of a job I had selling door-to-door in small, Sleepy Hollow-type towns in Pennsylvania at Halloween time. The towns were nestled in the hollows of hills and from a distance all you could see were old, wooden church steeples rising above mounds of  October-colored Maples and Chestnut trees. All the Halloween decorations on porches and windows were home-made.



A terrific pumpkin design!

Plastic and day-glow paint (above) made into an art form.



Soon we'll all have robotic Igors (above) to do our bidding. Maybe they'll rebel and turn nasty.



It's great to see designers turn their attention to the holiday.



What part of the body is this (above) ?

A mask (above) that looks like a zombie version of the lead singer in the band "Sha-na-na."

Siamese pumpkins (above)!



This (above) is only slightly more exaggerated than what you see on the street. Robert Crumb would love this girl!

Painterly paper-mache masks with oddball fabrics (above)...a delight for the eye.

Nice, very nice!



It's hard to believe that God isn't a cartoonist.

This (above) is the reason you don't see Wonder Woman on the street anymore, catching bad guys. She had an almost fatal attraction to Twinkies, and now leads a quiet life in a small town, eating Jenny Craig and watching daytime TV.

No comment!

Aaaaargh! Where's the eyewash!? 

MY CREEPIEST POST EVER!

Get ready for a really creepy set of pictures. These are similar to the pictures I gathered twenty years ago when I was deeply depressed because I couldn't find work. I didn't really believe in luck, but somehow I got it into my mind that my luck had turned bad, that I was a cork on the waves of fate, that I was drowning with no rock to grab hold of. It's not a pleasant memory. Maybe I was flirting with a nervous breakdown and didn't know it.



Anyway, for a few miserable days I found solace in gathering together pictures on the theme of luck, and luck gone bad. I threw in a few disaster pictures too. I had the crazy idea that by hanging them on my bedroom wall, I'd derive some kind of wisdom from them. Fortunately I had the sense to realize that doing that would spook my family, so the walls were spared.




Actually the idea might not have been as crazy as it sounds. I've frequently been jolted out of depression by pushing whatever downer ideas I had to such an extreme that they seemed outrageous and even funny.






Images like these (above) from Hitchcock's "Spellbound" fit into that category. They're serious and scary, but somehow funny at the same time.












At first I confined myself to images of luck, good and bad, then I branched out to weirder stuff.



I've never been interested in tarot cards, but in my addled state I began to wonder if there was something about them I should investigate.



Like so many people before me, I marveled at the simple directness of the "death" card. Kelly says death might only mean the end of something, and might be a positive sign, but in my ignorance I interpreted it as literal death. No, I wasn't suicidal. When you're a family guy that avenue is closed.



I thumbed through Dore's depictions of Dante's "Inferno."



The idea of seemingly bottomless pits leading to a netherworld seems appealing when you're depressed.



I remembered Poe's story about a maelstrom which began with a description of a black sea hidden away from the world.



A storm at sea is the ultimate metaphor for turbulent thoughts.



Here's an oceanic vortex. Adventure stories I read when I was a kid frequently mentioned vortices and I got the idea that they were a frequent occurrence. "Moby Dick" contained a frightening description of one.




Anyway, you might be curious to know how I got out of this depression. Well one day, after months of shopping my portfolio all around town and being turned down, I actually succeeded in getting work. The moment I shook hands with my new employer every one of those weird thoughts flew out of my head, and never really returned. It's amazing how work can improve your mental health, almost overnight.
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Years later, I read Knut Hamsun's novel "Hunger," which may be the ultimate story about going nuts from lack of work. I won't reveal the unforgettable ending, but I can recommend the story to people who feel they're at the end of their tether.



I hope I didn't depress anybody with this stuff. It had a happy ending after all.

THOUGHTS ABOUT INDIAN CARICATURES

Recently John K put up a terrific blog post where he argued that classic cartoon caricatures of indians were a natural exaggeration of the way indians really looked, and he put up several pictures of real indians to prove his point. It was a terrific article and if you missed it you should go back to John's site and read it.



I have to admit that Sitting Bull certainly looked like the old caricatures, especially the ones with big noses, but were noses like that really common among the indians?

[By the way, notice that Sitting Bull's eyes are top and bottom bracketed, and close together, which makes the nose seem even bigger. I've seen those eyes before, but where? Maybe in cartoons, where they were used even on white people. If this picture is responsible for that, then this might be one of the most influential photos in the history of cartooning!]



I'm no expert on native-American noses, but to judge from John's photos, lots of other indians had noses that were only slightly bigger than whites'. It's a small thing to argue about I know, but I'm in a nit-pickey mood so this disagreement finds itself on this page. John thinks I'm blind.




For me it doesn't matter much if big noses were common, or just limited to Sitting Bull and his relatives. The caricature works and is funny. I am glad that I got to thinking about this because it started me thinking about funny indian caricatures in general.

My question is, why is it common for indian caricatures to be wide-eyed, smiling, and full of energy? No doubt some indians must have been like that, but the ones you see in photos tend to be earnest and serious. The best photos of American Indians are among the masterpieces of 19th Century photography.



I have a theory about where the wide-eyed, fun-loving look came from. I'll bet cartoonists were consciously or unconsciously combining the indian look with what they thought black swing musicians looked like. Maybe the swing era conspicuously used a lot of tom-tom rhythms, so indians came to be associated with it. Compare the smiling wide-eyed indian above (the color picture) to Louis Jordan (the black & white photo).



Logically it doesn't make any sense to combine people who are so different, and yet the synthesis works like a charm. You can't argue with what works. Maybe this is one of the secrets of good caricature: combine elements that intuitively fit, logic be damned!



One of my all-time favorite indian caricatures is the wide-angled, copper-colored doll (above) holding the tomahawk. It's Louis Prima meets Sitting Bull. The wide angle face emphasizes the big, happy grin. This is a mischievous but highly likable figure that seems intended to diminish racial tensions, not inflame them.



Eventually Italians (above) got into the act. Look at those eyebrows! This isn't surprising considering that Italians often played indians in the movies.



The most famous of all Italian film indians was Paul Picerni, shown here (above) in a still from "House of Wax." I'll bet the red doll with the thick eyebrows (the picture above the picture above) is actually Picerni.



Just for the heck of it, here's (above)the original Cleveland Indians logo from the 30s and 40s...



...and the redo, done in 1950. I like them both, but my favorite is the older version. Thanks to Rogellio for the useful info about this.



You could argue that indian caricatures don't look much like real indians, but so what? Caricatures of white people don't look like white people, either. When's the last time you saw a white guy who looked like Barney Rubble?




Hmmm. Well, maybe I chose the wrong example. If you put my schnoz on Brad Bird's face...


One last word: John is afraid that this post will make his seem racist, which was far from his intent, and I'll add that it's very far from mine too. I can't stand racism and would never deliberately do anything to contribute to it. My intent is not to hold indians up to ridicule, but simply to show them in a humorous light, which is different. I'll bet if I lived in the 19th century and showed these pictures to indians, they'd double up laughing at the caricatures of their friends.

Thanks to Kali, John and Mike for letting me use these toy pictures. The opinions are entirely my own.

THINKING ABOUT GEORGE HERRIMAN

A lot of present day print cartoons look like they were executed by graphic designers, rather than cartoonists. The best examples, like the one above, are thoroughly professional and even lots of fun, but I still prefer the old styles. They seemed to have more to say about the human condition. A graphic artist's first concerns are all technical, things to do with repeating shapes, arcs, negative spaces and all that. A cartoonist on the other hand, is informed by design but is more interested in what's being expressed. Take George Herriman for example.



When compared to modern cartoons Herriman's work (above) looks positively untidy. Some of it looks more like sketchbook pages rather than formal drawings. The lettering is all askew and the cartoonist seems in danger of drifting off the point sometimes. Does it matter? There's a marvelous sense of fun and life here. You can see the artist struggling with his medium and with his own imagination. There's a sense of performance, of spontaneity. You feel the drawing could easily have spun out of control, but the artist brought all his skill to bear and wrestled it to a satisfying finish.



Some artists refer to Herriman disdainfully as "the Scratchy Artist," because his lines were always short and broken. I have to admit that I quit working in pen and ink because the results came out that way. Maybe I should have stayed with it. It occurs to me now that a lot of old cartoonists couldn't get around the problem either, and simply learned to live with it. They made scratchy into an art form. In the Herriman drawing above (click to enlarge) the scratchiness actually adds to the humor. It makes everything more comically ignorant, and makes for interesting textures.



Here (above) Herriman shows us his delight with the idea of riding around in wheeled vehicles, and the pleasure he takes in encountering hills and waterways and trestle bridges. Some cartoonists are sensualists who feel compelled to use the cartoon medium to express their delight with the physical world. I feel that way myself. Herriman reminds me of how privileged we all are to be alive and able to experience all this!








Sometimes (the two drwgs above) Herriman tuned out the environment and focused on cartooning for it's own sake. Sometimes you just have to draw characters all by themselves so you can surprise yourself with silly drawings that seem to posses a life of their own. Like all artists in their best moments, Herriman must have been amazed by the power of what he put on paper. I imagine that he must have felt like he was a conduit for some mysterious energy that exists in the world. Maybe that's when you know you've arrived as an artist, when you frequently find yourself "in a zone," watching the stuff that comes out of your pencil as if you were a spectator being awed by someone else's work. That's only an occasional feeling for me. For Herriman it must have been an every day experience.



BTW, all the Herriman here was courtesy of "The Stripper's Guide," a blog about old comic strips. Blogger won't accept my link for some reason.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT MISFITS

This post isn't about the Wild West but that's the best I could do for a pictorial theme to match my subject. What I'm really writing about is my re-action to a heartfelt video that a girl put up on YouTube. She won't allow her video to be embedded, so all I can do is put up the YouTube link and request that you come back here after you've seen it. Go ahead, take a look at it, and I'll see you back here in a few minutes.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbDiE-Urg34&feature=related





Have you seen it? Then you know that this is a film where a girl spills her guts out about not fitting in. You can see why. She's minimally educated, probably had trouble in school because she refused to submit to authority, has few friends, and no marketable skills. She tells us that she's also kind to animals and has memorized most of the dialogue from The Lord of the Rings films. Oh, and she's overweight, but not really fat.

She and I don't have much in common but I have to say that I was moved by what she said on the video. She's the kind of person who would have thrived on the frontier 150 years ago. Independent types weren't uncommon then, when character was valued more than education. She'd have had skills aplenty as most frontier people did, and with all that work to do she probably wouldn't have had a weight problem. She'd have had a decent husband and family, land of her own, and the respect of her peers. Her love of stories and her ability to memorize them and act them out might have made her a local celebrity. That's IF she had lived on the frontier in 1858.

Unfortunately for her she lives in modern times, probably in a big city. Her, and an enormous number of people like her, have been labeled misfits and tossed out into the street. There's just no place for independents like her in modern society. Our beehive society values team players and people who don't mind knuckling under to authority and even bureaucracy. It seems like every era favors one kind of person and penalizes another.





Me, I'm probably best suited to modern urban living...I'm interested in animation where co-operation with other people is a necessity, and besides, I like the stimulation provided by modern life... but it really bothers me that my society alienates so many of its own citizens just for being themselves, for being the kind of gritty, feisty people who made civilization possible in the first place. My guess is that at least 25% of all able-bodied, mentally healthy Americans just aren't cut out for college, ticket-punching, bureaucracy and all that. They want adventure and romance in their lives, meaningful work, dignity and independence. That seems reasonable to me. My question is, why don't we give it to them?

Well, we were bound to run out of frontier land, but there's other things we can do. We should make it easier to start and maintain a business...if you want to paint "Taxi" on the side of your car and ferry people around, no one should stop you. Maybe education needs to be adjusted for some people so misfit types can do it later in life when youthful rebellion is out of their systems. Let's try to think of ways that would make society more congenial for its worthy misfits.

A TERRIFIC RUSSIAN PAINTER: VICTOR VASNETSOV

I love Russian painters and one of my favorites is Victor Vasnetzov (1848 - 1926). Part of being a good painter is knowing what to paint, and Vasnetzov certainly knew that. He was riveted by the architecture and wall art in the Czar's palace. And no wonder...it's beautiful! Are these rooms still standing? Wouldn't you love to go to Russia and see this for yourself? Why doesn't some public building in the West reproduce some of these rooms? Why doesn't Disneyworld?




Russia's such an interesting blend of East and West. The red pillars are reminiscent of China, and so is some of the wood carving, and the dress patterns sometime seem influenced by the Islamic south, yet the less formal, European-influenced Russian character seems to pervade everything.

The Vasnetsov painting above manages to capture something else about Russia, and that's what a magical country it used to be. You see it in the art and the literature. Here's the beginning of a Russian kids story: "In the golden holiness of a night that will never be be seen again and will never return, there lived in a certain country far, far away at the other side of the great waters, a little mosquito."



Russian traditional dress (above). Beautiful!



The Russian Orthodox church certainly contributed to the country's character. The religious art I've seen emphasizes the tragic, as if to say human beings find nobility and wisdom in their encounters with great suffering.




Talking about suffering, this poor girl (above) looks miserable, but everybody around her is celebrating. At least she has a pretty place to be miserable in.




A Vasnetsov witch (above) abducts her victim, then makes her getaway. Is that a baptismal font? What's going on here?




A typical covered porch outside the elevated front door of a well-to-do house. These outdoor porches were common in old Russia. Maybe that's where you took off your boots, or maybe it was meant to be a buffer separating the house from the world of freezing wind and ice outside.