The Art Gallery of Lil' Mike
Westfall, Ages 2 - 5
written by Mike on July 12, 2025 (drawn by Mike from 1983-1985)

One of the more frequent things people want to know about you when they read your writings on a website like this one is how long you've been at it... how long you've been writing. Most of the time they just want to know how long you've posting crap on the Internet, & that answer's simple. Four years. Wow... four whole years... as of this week, to be exact. It sure seems like a long time, but when I take into account any casual, not-for-a-grade writing I've done offline, which really isn't too much more, I haven't done a lot of writing in my lifetime. Not nearly as much as you'd expect for a guy who calls it a hobby now, at least. I took two creative writing semesters in high school, & that's about it, really. Before that, I was much more into drawing.

It's strange. Besides that dorky little comic strip I drew last week & random, poster-sized projects my mother talks me into making for her preschool classroom, I've barely done so much as a doodle in a notebook. When I was growing up, I'd go through entire notebooks in a matter of hours. Mom says I was like the Tasmanian Devil when she gave me a marble copybook & some markers to shut me up during Mass. I'd be just about through the thing by the time it ended & we were going in peace.

What happened in the middle, then, that made me lose my love to draw, sketch or doodle? For what reason did I leave behind THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF ERT? For these answers,  I must take the Dragon Sword of the Hyabusa family & go to America  I need look no further than freshman year of high school. The school's only art teacher was an ancient nun who gave me straight C+'s in basic design, & for years I attributed it to my not keeping my workspace as neat as she would've liked. It was frigging art class. How do you expect there not to be a random clutter of paint & pencils all over my desk? Yet in retrospect, I look back at the work I handed in. I don't even need to dig it out. I can see it in my mind... and the small imperfections that are supposed to show that I'm only human & I'm allowed to make my share of mistakes (ooh-ooooh) also show signs that I was losing my passion. I'm not too sure why. I suppose it'd be easy to blame ol' Sister, but I don't believe for a second that it was entirely her or the class's fault. I wasn't exactly putting much effort into stopping my passion to draw from escaping me.

And so, in an attempt to reunite my love of drawing with my overall passion to create, I went searching for my artistic roots... the notebooks I scribbled all over as a toddler. Mom had to have kept some of them. Sure enough, not too far back in the attic lie the mother lode.

An entire box full of notebooks, containing the very essence of of my early '80s counterpart. My eyes lit up as I skimmed through the pages. Above everything that I've ever written about before... more than the Nintendo games, the TV shows, & Antietam Drive, itself... these are the most important ingredients to the child I once was, the beginnings of a creative soul breathing his own life onto a canvas of paper. So it is my great pleasure to introduce to you an old, dear friend of mine... myself, between the ages of 2 and 5.

Just looking at the cover tells us a few things about my art philosophy as a two-year-old. I appear to be bored with the plain black & white of the cover, & felt the need to add a little color to it. I don't know what the green or brown crayon squiggles are supposed to be, but the yellow marker is unmistakably a face... with what I guess is an angry bug or something in the corner. But the face is what jumps out at me, & shows my need to personify everything at that age. I now have a little more appreciation for programs like Blue's Clues with all the crazy talking furniture.

The personification theme carries into the the pages of the notebook, where I put faces on everything from numbers to a picture of my house.

The one of my house, besides the architectural inaccuracies, by which I mean the placement of the door & lack of windows more than I do the inclusion of ARMS & LEGS, is actually pretty good likeness. It was painted light blue back then (a color I still like better than the light brown it is now & has been for the majority of my life). If you will now excuse me, I'm going to sit here & have a giggling fit over the mental image of MY HOUSE RUNNING AROUND THE TRACK AT THE PARK. It'd totally wear one of those red, white & blue sweatbands around its head, too.

As you can kind of tell from the picture with the happy walking numerals, a notebook was never really finished for me once I drew something on every page. I'd just go back to beginning & draw something completely unrelated to the existing pencil scribbles in marker. It was my stream of consciousness at work...

And here we see the beginnings of my habit of going off onto tangents. A quick flip through these pages shows me going January, February, THE CAT IN THE HAT, April. A closer look shows that I was on a calendar kick during my first run through the book, & an HBO kick the second time around. "Dr. Seuss On The Loose," written on page April in a eerily prophetic newswoman jumpsuit yellow, refers to a TV special featuring animated Seuss stories such as the Sneetches.

It looks like I even tried to emulate the Cat in the Hat's handwriting of the letter "e" in the sand for the title at the beginning.

This tribute to my third parent, the Television, is quite prevalent throughout these books. It's nice to see that I've always been a pop culture enthusiast from the get go. A lot of these pages feature what has to be my capturing of the "title screen" concept. See how it just says "the sneecehes" up there? At least half of these pages are like that. Just a title page. Like I'm setting up a story. One spiral notebook, in particular, has Garfield on the cover, & on every 6th or 7th page within, I simply wrote GARFIELD, or HERE COMES GARFIELD, or GARFIELD ODIE JON MIKE SCOTT MOM DAD. Yes, Garfield is like part of my family. Even though I'm allergic to cats.

There are about 12 random pages on which I've just written HBO, not so much because all the good stuff came on that channel, but it looks more like I'm trying to recreate the famous "Feature Presentation" intro. You know, the one where the camera zooms out of a house of a family turning on the TV, then hovers over a city & up to the night sky, out of which a large, metallic HBO title hovers in for a close-up. I love how Toddler Me was so interested in little things like making a grand entrance.

It looks like my appreciation for the Home Box Office superseded an attempt to make a Father's Day card. On the first page, my Mom wrote FATHER at the top, so I'd have something to copy from & spell it right. It looks like I messed up in the process, judging from both the anarchy of pencil scribbles, & the fact that someone wrote "frustration" in the corner of the page in cursive that I don't recognize. Probably some sort of counselor. I remember accompanying my parents to quite a few of those in my early years. Guess they hadn't invented ADD yet.

Also, yay for me for spelling "superseded" right on the first try! Thanks, A Boy Named Charlie Brown!

So much for perfect spelling. The scribbling shows up a lot in these books. I didn't pick up the concept of erasing yet, so I just crossed out my self-proclaimed mistake a bunch of times & turned the page. This catches my attention, because I remember doing something similar whenever I hit a wrong note on my little toy piano. I'd just randomly smash the keys & start over. It was either my musical variation of a director's "CUT!", or my imitation of Don Music from Sesame Street, only he'd actually pound his face on the piano. At least I wasn't that stupid.

Let's skip to October & take a look at an attempt at an original show on paper...

My favorite, besides the ending "RAR" of course, is the little countdown page at the beginning with the angry face going 3, 2, 1... and what appears to be a door to certain doom. Or, you know, Mr. Pumpkin.

The presence of the Jacksons stickers, in particular, surprised me. I don't remember being a fan. I mean, I've always loved Michael in Thriller, & I remember watching maybe ONE episode of the Jackson 5 cartoon, but enough to warrant stickers? Maybe one of the older kids my mom babysat at the time liked them. There are other stickers in the other books that are little more "me."

Oh man. Garfield even took over the page with Sesame Street Easter stickers. That's a pretty amazing feat, considering how important the Street is to me. Luckily, Sesame Street has a stronger showing in another book, as do a host of other characters.

These are immediately followed by a page that says NOW MORE WUZZLES in the corner.

Starting with Butterbear, who was my favorite because she was a girl & I had a crush on everything nice, pretty & female. That's the only explanation I have for liking all the girl stuff I did & then GROWING UP TO BE STRAIGHT. Not a lot. I didn't collect Barbies or anything, but when I was four I asked Santa Claus for & received My Little Ponies for Christmas. Thinking back, that must've made my dad feel a little uneasy, but he never showed a sign of it. He was always supportive of me being whoever I wanted to be, & for that I'm forever grateful.

Also, I have no idea why Bumble-lion appears to be in a wheelchair or Hoppo is crying HEEELLLP! Well, the latter happened a lot in the cartoon, but I don't remember Bumble-lion ever being paralyzed.

After the Wuzzles is what appears to be Pac-Man eating an unusually long-armed Mickey Mouse. Or maybe it's a collection power pellets who aren't happy about being eaten. Either way, it's their own fault for FUKKIN CAMPING!

I've even written "Chapter 2," etc., before each of these little character sections. Toddler Me was either a child psychologist's wet dream or his biggest challenge.

Then I proceed to draw all 26 of the Letter People, complete with attempts to write in cursive. It was the new thing all my older cousins were doing, & I was trying to write pretty like they did. I like the detail I tried to put into some of these guys, including Mr. B's big button ears, Mr. C's cotton candy fur, & Mr. D's doughnut head. You'll also notice that they're drawn over a series of pages where I had written numbers, in word form, numeral form, & draw this amount of balls form. These continue after Mr. Z, only by the time I get to about 27, I stop drawing the balls & start writing the numeral a second time in block numbers.

Gumby & his friends make a cameo appearance when I reach #30. Then I get to block number 33 & go back to the alphabet, proclaiming NO MORE BLOCKS!

My attention span was doomed from the beginning. After I publicly announce that I quit writing block numbers, I sent Gumby et al on a little adventure where they drive to the beach, at which point I only have a few pages left in the book. So I graduate from scribbling out SUBMERGE EVERYTHING IN A PAGE FULL OF OCEAN!

This, I suppose, was my symbolically sending forth the Great Flood & starting anew with another notebook. And this continued, year after year, dying down to doodles among my school notes, & then lunch napkins, & eventually very little drawings at all. Thankfully I found new outlets of creativity. Writing. Making websites. Telling redundant jokes about Zelda characters. I guess the making websites part sort of replaced the drawings, & the Jacksons stickers were replaced by screen captures of cartoons that aren't on TV anymore.

But taking another look, I suppose the writer in me was, indeed, present back in these notebooks the whole time. The constant appearances of the alphabet, the TV show title screen pages, & the Chapter assignments show a sign of a storyteller in the making. I'm still a storyteller in the making. Somewhere inside the caverns of my creative juices lies some sort of masterpiece waiting to be found. Eventually I'll discover it & give it form. Meantime, I stay here & hone my craft, my readers cheering me on, my best friend acting as muse, & my fellow staff members reminding me, as I try & remember to remind them, that we're capable of creating great things. It's what we do. I have no other choice. It's my passion & my purpose. To play God & breathe life into a world of my own.

Even if I have to drown the entire frigging page after the first try.