POODLES OF DOODLES--UNLEASHED!

My BRAIN IS A LITTLE ADDLED TODAY; I took some nerve pain medication last night and I feel a little whoozie. Wow! Look at the colours, man! Far out! So, here goes, anyway: The 'toons were in my "Cartoons Finished" file, but I really don't know what's finished or what's progressing, anymore. But it did save me from trolling through all the other stuff to make a decision on what to include here: 
"QUANDRY" gives me a bit of claustrophobia when I see it. We've all had that 'boxed-in' feeling from time to time. Some people have it all of their lives; some don't even know they are boxed in. 

"ROAD TO THE BAY" makes me feel like getting in my car and hitting the road, and just going somewhere, anywhere! Maybe I'll visit Bodega Bay and feed the seagulls.
And "WHO DIDN'T KILL BILL?" Well, if you had a neighbour as annoying as Bill who turned up dead in the back yard, you'd ask that very same question. Good fences make good neighbours, as long as you have good neighbours to begin with. Otherwise you have to put up with those annoying pole-vaulter types who jump across the picket fence to 'see how yer doin', all the time. 
I always have a bit of a Zen moment whenever I contemplate "RECYCLING: THEN AND NOW". Will we ever get it right? I guess the best that can be said about it is that nature and time are the ultimate, super-duper recyclers; they recycle everything, 100%, the whole shebang! They do it all the time, and they always get the recyclables out to the curb. You go ladies!
I like the 'toon that goes with the poem "IF YOU PRESS THEM" because the fellow looks just about ready to pounce on those typewriter keys! (Must. Press. Keys. JAM THEM ALL! Must. Do. It. Now!...) Anyway, he's definitely an OCD medication trials candidate. And the "COOKIE JAR" man? Well, we've all been there, haven't we? Caught red-handed or red-faced at least once in our lives. Oopsie! Sorry, I didn't see you there! My bad. Though the guy looks like he's been caught with his hand in the cookie jar before, and he just doesn't seem embarrassed enough for my liking. His name must be "Shameless"!
As for the other 'toons and the 'toons in general: say of them what you will, and don't worry, they're just cartoons; you can't hurt their feelings*.

 

                                                                                                      

Big Man with Stick

Psssst!

Don’t call him Wee Dick.

(How he hates that name!)

But with what he’s got,

Well, we're not to blame.

He’s our man on point.

You'll need to pass him.

He keeps the without

Away from the in.

History would have him

Patrolling a mall,

Praetorian Guard,

That we now install.

    

                                                                      

“If You Press Them All At Once, the Machine Will Jam.”

In 1959—On electric typewriters, he says:

“I just pressed a key,

and look at that!”

In 2009—On computers, he says:

“I just pressed a key and look at that!”

THE ROAD TO THE BAY AND BEYOND

THE ALIENS ARE COMING! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

IT'S A WORLD FULL OF GLORIOUS HANG-UPS, BABY!

CLOSET HANG-UPS

AFTER HER ACCIDENT, SHE STUCK TO HER KEYBOARDS

WHO DIDN'T KILL BILL?

RECYCLING: THEN AND NOW

HAND IN THE COOKIE JAR

Sir Untitled

* I'VE THOUGHT ABOUT THIS BEFORE: Where do cartoons go when they die? (And I hope the cartoons of the great American cartoonist Robert Crumb live on until the sun goes dark!) Or for that matter, characters in fiction, where do they go when people stop reading them, or they get edited away, or left on book shelves too long? When you’re reading something so engrossing, with a character you would just die to meet (or to be), they’re as real as anything else. Or it seems that way. Then you look up from your book or that sketch you’ve been drawn into, and you’re brought back into the ‘real world’ with a sudden jarring. I wonder if those characters or that drawing you view don’t have a similar moment of dissonance when your eyes leave them. Do they feel less real by the absence of your gaze? Do they grow old and wither as the memory of them fades from your mind? And when the last character fades from the last person's mind, does that character then die? Forever?

There are some that live for hundreds, even thousands, of years: Gilgamesh, Achilles, Hector, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Falstaf, Heathcliff, Elizabeth Bennet, Scrooge, Oliver Twist, Sherlock Holmes, Mrs. Dalloway, The Little Prince, Atticus Finch...Well, once you get started, you can just about go on forever. Just about. There's quite a list, if truth be told. But there will come a time when even Caesar's great line, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves," will fade and be forgotten.(As an aside: I wonder if the real-life  Julius Caesar would ever have had such a moment of self-reflection, like Shakespeare's fictional character does. I think real-life JC was too busy breaking the back of Rome's republic and having it off with exotic eastern monarchs named Cleopatra. But that's just me.)

I think of characters that I've made up from time to time, fictional vignettes and what-not. A lot of them are sitting right now in a desk drawer, never having seen the light of print. All these fictional people, the well known and the many, many more who are not, all of them: the good, the bad and the ugly; the noble ones, the base and selfless, the stubborn, the vile and virtuous, all and everyone, every kind of human being under the sun, the whole gamut of human experience, emotion and thought; just where do they go when no one reads them anymore? 

To bring a story to light; to bring characters to our attention; to make us see ourselves, and to let these shining beacons of fiction or lines drawn on a page guide us, caution us, astound and mystify, humble and exult us, and always in the end nourish us with their existence; such we must always allow. They come and they will go, until the next round begins. We should honour them somehow for the riches they bring to our lives. So, Dear Reader, doodle on! Draw on! Scribble and type, and keep those characters and images alive, or make new ones live.