CARTOONS AGAIN

THESE WERE DRAWN A FEW YEARS AGO. I often use a mechanical pen or a fine-tip black ball point pen, and haven’t doodled in a while. Now I’m thinking it’s time to get down and dirty again with some ink! OK! I'm looking at this here toon and cummon! Talk of getting off on the wrong foot in life! Are we done before we've even begun. Do I have such low expectations of the future?

Ooopsie! That’s the next cartoon. I think I should call this one:  "DOG PADDLE, DAMNIT!"

 The thick lines for  the toon sheets below come from a cluster of statues I once saw at the Toronto Exhibition grounds. I’m not sure if they’re still there, or been trucked away to a landfill to make room for a Starbucks. Anyway, one summer, I was part of a group of barely-employed university students who got this gig filling out ticket requests (into old fashioned paper envelopes, mind.) It was for…wait for it…the King Tut exhibit that was being held in Toronto later that fall; whatever year that was I can’t remember; Google it if you’re OCD and need to know.

     There was a small building we worked out of, mostly on our own as I recall, and in a nearby courtyard there were all these statues from Greek mythology—centaurs and nymphs and gods of all sorts. They were small, maybe three or four feet tall, and made of cement. You could sit on them if you wanted. The surface of the statues was rough and unpainted and they had strong, squat, thick appearances—almost like they had grown out of the earth or were boulders that happened to be in the shapes of mythological creatures. I drew a number of such figures based on the memory of those statues I saw that summer. The third toon has some further examples. I like the sculptural aspect to some of them. They’re not great art, but fun, and I like the ‘cheeky’ mood the gals generally are in. Oh, by the way, if you or any of your parents didn’t get the Tut tickets as requested, or the date/times were wrong, well we were mostly stoned during the time we worked there. Sorry about that. (And I was in love with a girl who was learning Mandarin, and who was as far above me as Aphrodite. (Sigh) So I drew these goddesses instead….

Cheers, Jake.