The mamblings of a hard-reading redneck in Nashville who loves books, thinks everybody should have their own pony and Atticus Finch, and wants to be a cowgirl or a pomegranate when she grows up.
I needed to do some cartooning and exposure to the latest round of "Bloggers are lame!" verbage from people who should know better inspired this piece. Yes, it's rough, hastily scribbled and may have typos. And No, I don't hate anyone I lampooned here, they're just the people whose remarks caught my attention.
Note: Yes there is a lot of text and it's TINY! To see a larger version of the page, click on the link below the picture and then click the cursor one time when it turns into a magnifying glass. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I've been busy working on a comic, partially as a response to all of the anti-blogger stuff I've seen in the mainstream media and partially because cartooning is such a great walk-up to painting. I was getting out my fine-line markers because I was feeling too lazy to get my drafting pens dirty and saw something that I'd almost forgotten I had:
I keep this in every black drawing pen can I've had over the years. For those of you who are too young to recognize this item, it's a Bic Banana. My parents got it for me sometime late in 1972 at a McDonalds in Bossier City, LA. Maybe all of those years of filching Daddy's art supplies were starting to take their toll, because it was around that time that my parents enrolled me in classes at the Barnwell and (finally!) started buying me my own paper and supplies. Grumbacher, Prang, Strathmore and Winsor & Newton meant far more to me than Barbie and Skipper ever did. This doesn't mean that I was immune to pressure from Madison Avenue.
Even though they weren't available at the local Weingartens yet, the ads promised colors I'd never seen in school markers: teal and magenta and light brown and hot pink! McDonald's was offering a free Bic Banana with the purchase of whatever oil-based product with banana flavoring they were passing off as a shake that month. My poor Dad bought the "shake" and probably split it with the poodle while I skipped happily off with my precioussssss Bic Banana to luxuriate in fine, dark lines of ink that didn't involve pens with nibs and Mom wishing to sweet Jesus that I liked my Suzy Homemaker cleanup set as much as I loved making a mess.
For what it's worth, it still writes.
And...Mom was nice enough to buy me many, many sets of Bic Bananas over the years. She also bought me Dip Dots and Shrinky Dinks, so I guess she gave up on me being like her sweetly Virgoan Southenr Belle self came to understand my strange ways.
Hi! I hope you enjoy my blog! Please bear in mind that everything written here is copyrighted and belongs to me. Please do not copy or distribute anything from here without my permission. Please accept my presumptive gratitude for being a mensch!
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