Where could Rik Tod be? Why isn't he at the Cinema 4 Pylon?

Hmmm... sorry I can't be here at the Pylon on my birthday, or even at my normally scheduled appointment with corporate slavery.

I have a date with a certain exposition called D23 at the Anaheim Convention Center. Might even be seeing an exclusive preview of the new Tron movie, along with watching the original film. Might even get to see a screening of the new Walt and El Grupo documentary, or sift through 85-plus years of Disney-related ephemera and original drawings and the like.

Or I might be banging Daisy Duck. She does have that tail action going...

Happy Birthday to Me!

Comics on the Road to Nowhere? Pt. 11 of 11: "Exquisite Corpse" Drawings 3 & 4

Here's the final post of this series, featuring the other pair of "Exquisite Corpse" drawings done by my brothers Mark and Chris:


I remember my brother Chris was quite amused by the fact that with the Monster Dance Party he had drawn his image going off the page rather than into it. As a result, the drawings are going in opposite directions. Usually the practice is to carry the action towards the next possible drawing.

You will note that this final picture is different from the rest in that, instead of the paper being halved and then drawn on each opposite side, this time it was folded twice, so that there are four separate drawings, two each by my brothers:


Again, I will leave it to Br'er Mark to add his notes in the comment section. All I know is that I love these.

Thanks for the very few comments we have received on these. I hope that while most of you were not reading these posts you were out having a shitty time. We had a ball playing these games, and we were only hoping to share in the experience, and perhaps even get a couple of people to pass the game on or play with us. At least a couple of you got it.

The Cinema 4 Pylon now returns to its regularly scheduled programming...

Comics on the Road to Nowhere? Pt. 10 of 11: "Exquisite Corpse" Drawings 1 & 2

For the last two posts of this series, I am going to say very little, and let these combined drawings by my brothers Mark and Chris do most of the talking:

Pretty sweet. I love the randomness of their imagery, and how the two separate pieces play off each other in unexpected ways. I am uncertain of the order in which my brothers created all four of these pieces, so please check the comments below. I am fairly certain Mark will provide some notes on their process, and his continued memories of the experience.

Also, if you want to do your own experimenting, please see my first post in this series for instructions on how to do it, or look up "Exquisite Corpse" on Wikipedia. (You can even learn why the game is called by that name, or even how there is a reference to the game in Hedwig and the Angry Inch...)

[The final post will appear in a couple of days, and then the Cinema 4 Pylon will close the art gallery and begin its regularly scheduled movie griping again...]

Comics on the Road to Nowhere? Pt. 9 of 11: "Bugs" Gone Awry, or References Only Brandon Lawrence Would Appreciate...

I suppose that having eight out of the nine comic pages we created in our road trip drawing experiment come out even halfway readable/enjoyable should be enough. That's a pretty good batting average (for the record, .889 rounded up, baseball card-style). This one, which I shall not even finish giving a complete (or even pun-filled) title out of my exhaustion and frustration with the page, just simply did not work.

Here's the strip, and then we shall discuss:


See? It's sad it didn't work out, because this was the other strip in which we involved my nephew Aerin at the beginning (see the last post). His drawings adorn the first couple of panels, and it starts off with a decent enough premise. But, things went awry with "Bugs" quickly. It just never gets any of that "oomph" going... and then I made the fatal mistake.

I slipped in one of my left-field references -- not so much arcane, but merely aged in variety -- this time to an old vaudeville routine that was popularized in different incarnations by The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello and many others, often called "Niagara Falls" or "Slowly I Turned, Inch by Inch" or other titles. Personally, I know it as "The Susquehanna Hat Company," being more up on one Bud & Lou movie version than Larry, Moe and Curly's famous one. (Bud and Lou did it several times, including a "Niagara Falls" version on TV.)

So, I worked the reference in, but there were no takers. My brother didn't pick up on it, and I couldn't help him with it, or really elaborate on it until he was done with the panels. Thus, the doom of the strip had been spelled out. I closed it desperately with another reference to the skit, and this was after about an hour or so of staring blankly at the final drawing in the last panel, longing for inspiration. But, none ever came. I resorted to a fall-back plan of little distinction, and so we had the first abject failure of our experiment.

And, since I cannot stop with the references sometimes, somewhere Chico Marx is saying "I abject!" Or, at least I wish he would...

Comics on the Road to Nowhere? Pt. 8 of 11: Puppet Snarkiness

There was a certain inevitability to my nephew Aerin getting involved with our surrealist comic experiments. The kid may only be eight, but he draws up a storm. There are even times when it seems like he never stops drawing. Well, when he's not reading or playing with toys or building with Legos or all the other things that kids do. (These are also all things that, admittedly, his dad and uncles also continue to do despite, or because of, their ever-increasing dotage.)

We didn't even really need to persuade him much. All you have to do, in most cases, is draw anything, and Aerin will want to draw along with you. He was more than a little distracted, though, on our road trip with his own drawings to really get involved until we had already started over a half-dozen strips. But, soon enough, there was a lull in the overall activity, and so he and I were soon starting a strip. I took what he was probably thinking as a couple of mice atop a fence to be a pair of puppets and leaped off from there. However, the dear boy lost interest in the process soon enough, and the rest of the drawings past the first three panels were completed by his dad Mark and his Uncle Chris.

I think this one actually worked out rather well, and didn't go too far astride of what was set up in the beginning. This is not necessarily a good thing when the original point is for things to get as wacky as possible. But, sometimes I like it when things work out logically despite the scenario or the looming possibility of a complete trainwreck. (You will see an example of this form of failure when I post, in a couple of days, the final strip we completed on our trip.)

Personally, I love the stances of the mice in the fourth panel, but I truly adore the way the second mouse flashes the chocolate starfish at the puppeteer in Panel #7. I wasn't expecting it at all, and I laughed like mad. And I have, as a notoriously evil puppeteer myself, always enjoyed the notion of puppets rising up to critique their own "master." This might even reflect my overall views towards authority in general, perhaps even the way that I also have to keep myself riled, even just a bit, at whatever management holds the keys to my own employ, even if I actually like most of them and have respect for their overall practices.

While I don't wish to always be the puppet that I fully recognize that I am, I at least, while filling that role, wish to be the puppet that has just enough rebellion in him to poke his oppressors in the eye when they don't expect it, and to be able to summon up just enough voice of my own to tell them they suck. And they stink. And it is very likely that I will always remain just that...