Go Bananas!

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.


copyright 2008 jas faulkner