WHY I LIKE KATIE RICE'S GIRL DRAWINGS

I don't know if I'm up to the task of explaining why I like Katie's drawings so much. After all she draws beautiful girls wearing girlie fashions and I'm a guy. Guy's aren't interested in fashion! But I am interested in ideas. I love it when someone with talent seduces me into liking something that I wouldn't ordinarily like. It may be something I don't want to like, like fashion, but these seducers invest their their world and their vision with so much magic that I'm drawn in against my will. Katie's one of those people.

Maybe it's because her girls are so doggone happy. Katie makes it seem like being a girl is fun and I guess we're all magnetically drawn to people who are having fun. Even more important, she knows how to draw fun. It's hard. I've tried. It's not enough to draw smiles on people. The quality of the line itself has to be fun. The lines have to playfull. The shapes have to be playfull. The reader has to believe the artist had fun drawing it.



On the other hand, the lines have to have confidence. Most people are intuitively repelled by lines that appear aimless and pointless. You have to know what you want and in a playfull way not know what you want at the same time. It's a tough balance to maintain. You can see why artists like Katie are so rare.


One of the things that makes fun so hard to draw is that the mediums we all work in are so resistant to that subject. All media express some things better than other things. Television seems to favor intimate, Jay Leno-type shows and film seems to favor car chases and broad action. In the same way pen drawings seem to favor the grotesque and pencil favors super-realistic drawings. Whenever you try to draw fun, like Katie does, you'll find the medium you're using attempting to pull you away to its own bias. Katie imposed her will on the medium and tamed it.

OK, I've been saying nice things about Katie and I feel it's my responsibility as an impartial observer to try to find a dark side. If there is a dark side in Katie's future it may come about because she's a thoughtfull person and may one day wake up thinking that she's lived her life wrong and that it's an artist's duty to portray famine and pestilence. It's the serious disease and it's ruined many an artist. She says this is impossible. I hope she's right.

SHODDY, POST-SURGERY ARTICLE #5

My Four Weeks as a Gag Man

Gagman is the most coveted job in the industry but jobs of that description are rarer than hen's teeth and tend not to last very long. A gagman isn't a story man, that's somebody else's responsibility. A gagman's job is to come up with visual jokes that can plug into a pre-existing story. In other words, you get paid to be funny all day. While the poor story people labor over how to stage nine emotionally complicated characters in a scene the gagman draws two people who hate each other but have to wear the same pair of pants. Nice job if you can get it!

Once I almost got a gag job working with a famous gagman of the past, who'll remain nameless here for a reason that'll become obvious. My producer/benefactor knocked on the famous man's door and introduced me as...well, it was very flattering,...and ended with, "You two probably have a lot to talk about! I'm going to leave you two lovable nuts together so you can get to know each other!" And then, mischievously on the way out: "Now don't laugh too loud now!"

Up till now the famous man was beaming with the friendliest smile I'd ever seen but the moment the door closed he raced up to me with clenched fists (OK, I added the fists) and leaned into me with a grimace that was unmistakable. It said wordlessly: "Look buddy, There's only room for one lovable nut here and I'm it! Now beat it!" I was shocked into stammering! Eventually the benefactor came back and hugged us both and said he wished he could have been a fly on the wall so he could have heard the jokes the two of us must have come up with. The famous man beamed a sunny smile and an hour later I ended up on the street, unemployed.

I tell you this so you'll have some idea how difficult it is to get lovable nut jobs. Even lovable nuts don't want to see other lovable nuts.

The time I actually got paid for it only lasted for four weeks but it was a dream. There I was at the same studio that pioneered the concept of gagmen for animation and... Sigh! It looks like I used up my available space with the digression about the famous man. I'll pick up this story later!

Oh, yes! The drawings above are rejected fragments I did from the paid gagman gig.

SHODDY, POST-SURGERY ARTICLE #4

This is a story I've been dying to illustrate with drawings of my own but since that's not possible right now I'll let Norman Rockwell sub for me. Here's the story of ...

MY FIRST DATE

I was in 8th grade and I finally got up the courage to ask Patty Fulweider to go to the movies with me. She was a real nice girl from a good family: pretty and shy, even more shy than I was. Maybe it was her first date too. I don't remember a word of what must have been the excrutiatingly awkward conversation, I only remember how wonderful it was to be alone with a real live girl, someone with thin, tiny little wrists, a fuzzy sweater and a gold locket on an unbelievably thin chain. "Were girls really the same species as boys?", I wondered. They seemed so different!

Inside the theater we watched the movie while nervously shoveling popcorn into our faces. It was something to do with our hands and I wondered what we would do when the popcorn ran out. Really, I'd gotten much more than my money's worth already. Just sitting next to all that mysterious femininity was almost more than I could bear! Even so, I was curious about that other side of girls that guys talk about...the PHYSICAL side!

After about half an hour I made my move. I pretended to cough into my hand and instead of returning it to my lap I put it on the seat behind Patty! Painfully I inched it up to to the far shoulder of her fuzzy sweater and let it rest there. I half expected her to slap me but she didn't! I didn't look at her but I could tell she continued to stare rigidly ahead at the movie screen just like I was. I was in heaven! My first date and I had already scored a shoulder!

Now I was only in 8th grade and it didn't occur to me to push my luck any farther. After all, I'd already exceeded my expectations by a mile! I decided to revel in the luck I already had. Still staring straight ahead I squeezed the shoulder and sort of played with it a lot. I mushed it and puffed it up, I twirled my fingers in the angora, I grabbed it and sort of jiggled it. I was having a wonderful time till it occurred to me that you could never do any of that with a guy's shoulder. Guys have solid shoulders. This girl appeared to be boneless!

I was profoundly shaken! What this meant was that girls don't have the same kind of skeletons as boys! Their shoulders must have lots of little bones like boys have in their wrists. Why hadn't anyone told me this before!? I wiggled the shoulder this way and that and , sure enough, it was soft as soft could be. Finally I could hold it in no longer and I turned around to Patty to ask her to explain to me why girls don't have shoulders. To my amazement she was stiff as a board, staring straight ahead, and frozen out of her mind with fear. I looked at my hand and it wasn't on her shoulder...it was on her breast! I did what I'd call now a Tex Avery take and whipped my hand away like a bullet!I didn't know what to do so I did what she did and withdrew into myself, staring rigidly ahead at the screen for the rest of the insufferably long show.

I haven't the slightest idea what happened after that! My mind is a blank! Somehow we made it home, that's all I know! I don't know if I ever saw the girl again.

OK, that was my first date.

What was yours like?

SHODDY, SECOND-RATE, POST-SURGERY ARTICLE #2

By the time you read this I will have had my eye cut up and I'll be on my sofa sporting a towel-size bandage on my face. I probably won't be in a mood to post anything much so here's the solution, a dip into Uncle Eddie's extensive photo archive. I call these...


MY ''INDIANA JONES'' PICTURES

The man in the first picture (above) is an executioner at the court the court of an Indian maharaja, circa 1910. All of these pictures were taken in the i910s and 20s.

Above, 3 Sikh police officers from the Punjab. Below a Cambodian monarch.



Above a somewhat European-looking Algerian woman. Possibly her mother was a European captured and enslaved by Barbery pirates. Below: I don't know. I've never seen buildings like this before.



Above: a Bhuddist temple in India. Below: a chieftain in Gambia

Above: a sultan of the island of Celebes, surrounded by his bodyguard. Below: a narrow rattan bridge spans a chasm across a Formosan jungle.

Above: an island chief in the Solomons. Below:?

Above: war canoe, Solomon Islands

SHODDY, SECOND-RATE, POST-SURGERY ARTICLE #1

I'm recovering from cataract surgery and so have to foist woefully inadequate and esoteric posts on you for a few days. My hunch is that a few readers are going to like them. The first one has to do with...

THE ASTONISHING DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ANCIENT AND RENNAISANCE SCULPTURE

The top five scuptures were executed in Rome sometime in the 1st or 2nd century A.D. The bottom two are Rennaisance scuptures by Donatello and Michaelangelo. Look at the difference! The Romans seem stern, manly and efficient. The Rennaisance heads seem thoughtful, sensitive and subject to doubt. What a difference! Click on the pictures and see for yourself!







Here are the two Rennaisance sculptures. What are these heads trying to tell us? Would modern heads resemble either of them?

THEORY CORNER GUEST RANT #1

Guests Can Sit in the Theory Chair (But Don't Leave Crumbs)!

It's true!!!!! You can sit in the Theory Chair and rant just like Uncle Eddie! Here's how it works...


Draw a quick-and-dirty comic of yourself on the Theory Chair, explaining your (probably completely erroneous) theory to Uncle Eddie and the Theory Corner readers. Take as many panels as you need. Do any subject you like except politics, which Uncle Eddie hasn't got a clue about. Post it to your site and send me a link or a URL. I'll dupe it, add or subtract a little, and print it here when I'm able.

Don't worry about the quality of the drawing, just the quality of the theory. It's OK to have a theory like, "Men suck and this is why!"