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Lil' Mike's Holiday Art Gallery |
When I was 24, it was a very good year. It was a very good year for telling me where the bomb is. The day after I turned 24, I got invited to join the P-boi staff, & thanks in part to that & in part to having the best friends on the planet, I've never been more motivated to create in my entire life. Recently I started drawing again. Right now it's just comic strips on waterslides, but for the coming year I'm resolving to getting back to drawing as much as I used to when I was a kid. Recently I uncovered a box full of old marble notebooks. Ancient ones, carbon-dated as far back as A.D. 1982. Through them I rekindled my passion for visual storytelling, something that was lost to me for more than a few years. Usually that only happens around Christmastime, when my mom pulls down all the decorations. She used to break out all of our holiday arts & crafts from years gone by, & hang them wherever she could find room. This year, most of them didn't find their way up... not the ones I was looking for, anyway. Somewhere along the line, the reindeer with my little handprints for antlers (and I insisted on giving mine a red nose), the cotton-bearded Santa face & all the other usual crap you make in your grade school arts & crafts class got lost in the shuffle. Perhaps they didn't stay preserved for as long as I would have liked, & as a guy who always enjoyed marveling at decked halls, I was a little disheartened. Then I came home from work one day to find this.
Alright, so she can't spell. The important thing is that my mother found the herself lode. About 80% of the pile consists of drawings of Sesame Street & Nintendo characters, & that one on the top was a birthday card I made for my sister when I was 6. I even tried to make it sound all Hallmarkish on the front by writing "For A Baby Who is 1..." But those got tossed aside for the time being. I was "jonesing," as they say on the streets, for some Christmas cheer, & while there wasn't a whole lot of holiday-themed stuff in the pile, I managed to pick them out for the purpose of embarassing myself over the entire internet. Then Maddox can type the letter F in blod, red Arial Black, because pointing out that children's drawings are not very realistic looking sure is knee-slapping hilarious!!~11 Oops, my finger seems to have slipped off the Shift key on my keyboard a little too early! Back to how much I rule...
Wow, those are the laziest stars I've ever seen on a drawing by me. Maybe I was in a hurry & drew it during bus dismissal or something. It was definitely drawn in school. I can tell because it's on that crappy, thin, recycled newsprint the art teacher would have us use instead of "real" paper. That's fine. I don't need to be pissing off the Planteers. There's no date on it, but I'm going to wager that I drew it when I was 9. This is based on two factors:
The brown triangle Santa (played here by Dr. Freud from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure) is landing on is definitely supposed to my house, even though there are no windows that high up on it, & I tried to draw a chimney just large enough for Santa to fit through. It looks like I tried to make him tuck in his tummy a bit in preparation. I'm not sure what I like best about him: the hat, or the James Dean popped collar action. He seems to be carrying a lighter load this year, taking a tip from the Grinch & opting for trash bags in lieu of his trademark sack, & only flying with one reindeer, whose Bambi-esque speckles look more like Johnny took his tommy gun & made Swiss cheese out of him. Merry Christmas, ya filthy animal. My favorite part of the whole thing, however, is the cheerful, "awww snap" expression on the moon's face. On an accompanying piece of newsprint is this gem...
My dad was the one who wanted Nintendo. It was his gift, but I was the one young enough to let it CONTROL MY ENTIRE LIFE. Very shortly after we first hooked it up in March of 1989, my stream of consciousness became under the control of Mario & Link, & this Christmas card draft proves it. Judging from the Pac-man shape of Mario's eyes & the pointed shape of Toad's hat, the style of this drawing was heavily influenced by the animation style of the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, which had begun airing a few months earlier. Toad, as opposed to any other character, is here, I'm sure, because his hat color coordinated the best with Mario's Santa suit. Once again, this drawing appears to suffer a short deadline. Not only did I leave the penciled outline as is & only bother with drawing the edge of a castle creeping out of the right side of the paper, but that's a sloppier Mario than I remember drawing at that point in time. Getting him to look like was a process. I tried different styles, & he slowly evolved into something that actually looked like the official Nintendo drawings of their pride & joy. Here I made him a cross-eyed borderline cyclops with a backwards right hand & what appears to be a desert highway running down his coat. The hand I'll excuse, because 16 years later, I still can't drawing a decent frigging pair of hands or feet. Screw it all. From now on, I'm just going to either draw fleshy mittens or Dr. Seussish penguin fingers on everybody. lerry Christma s!
Second grade. I remembered the minute I saw it, because I remembered getting lauhged at for still liking Oscar the Grouch at the refined, grown-up age of 7. Also, I had just seen the Goonies for the first time, so I decided to start going by Mikey. That lasted a year until I dropped the y on my fancy Hollywood autograph that I mentioned earlier. My favorite's the part where I still put "Michael W" as my official, school assignment name. I guess that's where I drew the line. Formality for my teacher, but Santa & me? We was tight, yo. This Santa was a trace job, but my ADD-induced impatience kicked in about halfway down the beard. Or, if I was writing it in that letter, my ADD-induced-impatience-kicked-in-about-halfway-down-the beard. To hell with detail. I wanted to get this thing done so I could go over to the Texas Instruments computer. The 8-bit train whistle of Addition & Subtraction 2 was calling my name. Alright whatever I'll use the red crayon for Santa's eyes & facial hair, too. Crap, now they look like rosy cheeks. Screw it I'll draw my own mustache. There, a nice brown one. See, Santa? I flatter you with youthful looks. Now let's have those stuffed animals we discussed in the mall the other day. Actually, the Talking Mickey Mouse wasn't stuffed. It was a plastic thing with a pull string & a mouth that moved up & down as it talked. My neighbors had one. It was in their garage, which they often kept open in the summer, & since I was a nosy idiot with no concept of property or privacy, I'd just wander in there & start pulling Mickey's pull string. "How 'bout some cheese, please?" Dammit, you already said that one! Say your name again. "How 'bout some cheese, please?" Oh, this stupid thing's broke. I'm leaving. While I'm looking at Santa letters, here's an older one from when I was 5.
For a kid who loved the alphabet so much, I sure had some sloppy handwriting. Even the cute little heart I appear to try to be making out of the o in Love is lopsided. Most of that is due to the fact that I didn't start holding a pencil properly until second grade. Before that I just held the big, fat pencils in a clenched fist, and Wait a minute. Does that say Jan at the top? As in January?! Either I was a selfish little brat, or I was still really excited about Christmas & wanted to get a jump on things before another 12 months came & went. That would explain why I used the word "Today," like I'm placing an order at a restaurant I frequent during my lunch hour. It would also explain the post script I left on the back...
Yeah, I'll be anxiously waiting for the next year until your arrival! Meanwhile, here's something a month earlier... on time & everything.
This one is page 12 of a booklet of stapled pieces of paper that I've sloppily entitled "The Month Book" on the front. After I get to December & realize that I'm only like halfway through the booklet, so I decide to improvise...
Oh, alright, we're doing the 12 Days of Christmas now? The last thing on my mind as I was drawing this was "December," so it works. Here we see a happy pilgrim about to be attacked by a zombie partridge. It's not green because it's a zombie. It's green because that's what color pears are. It looks like I'm using a measly 12-pack of crayons, so yellow-green was not an option.
And now we have two turtledoves being chased by a hungry forest creature. Judging from his shirt, his name probably starts with F, because everybody I drew in 1985 was taking fashion tips from Alvin & the Chipmunks.
AHA! Now I see what I'm doing! When I was little, there were only 3 versions of the 12 Days of Christmas in the entire universe: the weird Andy Williams version where he fucks up the lyrics, the Disney version where everybody goes crazy & I'm the only one in school who knows who the hell Clarabelle Cow is, and the version I'm using as inspiration here... by John Denver & the Muppets. John started the song out, so that must be him being chased by the zombie partridge up there. He's wearing a hat just like on the record cover. Fozzie sings the second line, so he's the one chasing the turtledoves on page two. Maybe he's telling them a bad joke, & that's why they're running away. On this page, we have Gonzo & a French hen doing that slow motion scene where two people run at each other for a hug.
Robin sings the part about the calling birds, so here's my best representation of him. It looks like I didn't understand that birds had wings instead of arms, so this calling bird has both. If I'd have done this a few years later, I would've passed it off as a koopa paratroopa.
And here it looks like I took a break because one of the four calling birds is laughing at something hilarious.
If Miss Piggy saw this, she'd exaggeratingly karate chop me for drawing her like a Picasso pig. Not satisfied with having an inanimate object in the song, I decided to make the gold ring anthropomorphic. And hungry for McDonald's fries? Did I originally mishear the line as "five onion rings"? Or is that a P under the M on the left? Maybe that's my visual representation of Piggy's "badump-bump-bump" in the song.
I'm pretty sure I didn't know that "a-laying" meant eggs. I actually was pretty sure that I thought it meant taking a nap. But the goose shown here with Scooter seems to be more interested in just a-hangin-out. I'm kind of surprised that, being the son of an avid birdwatcher of a father, that I draw every member of the bird family exactly the freaking same.
OH NO LOOK OUT SWAN! Wow, I didn't know I could draw such a convincing look of sheer terror at that age. I also don't know why I thought Lew Zealand started with an R. Or wait, maybe it's a B, for "boomerang fish."
Oh man. That cow is my favorite thing in this whole book. It looks like a cave painting. You know, I don't think I understood that Rowlf was supposed to be a dog. I was just trying to do the best I could to recreate his floppy ears, & it turned it looking more like he's a three-headed monster & the other two are looking over their shoulders.
Eraserhead on the right is supposed to be Beaker, seen here with Bunsen, who looks like he's ditched his glasses in favor of monacles on each eye. Also I think I was trying to give the dancing lady a pair of tap shoes. Tap shoes, as you all know, are large & balloon-shaped.
Representing the ten lords a-leaping are Statler & Waldorf, whose names I didn't know back then. They were just "the two guys on the balcony." Hell, they're just "the two guys on the balcony" for the majority of people my age now. For some reason, one of the men appears to have leapt right out of his clothes! I'm going to assume that one is Statler, since his shirt appears to be the longer of the two, & he was the tall one. And also he's on the right. Actually, maybe he didn't leap out of his clothes. Maybe he got knocked out of them by Waldorf's GIANT BOXING GLOVES.
Oh, great. Thanks to that calling bird screwing around, we've run out of pages! I guesswe'll just quickly draw a piper piping & Beauregard in red-violet crayon with a Q on his shirt for God knows what reason & move on to something a little more spiritual. Sorry, Kermie. You understand, right?
That's sweet. A Christmas card centered around the religious meaning of the holiday. This is supposed to be a recreation of the classic Nativity scene, which as you all know, took place in the middle of a lush, North American evergreen forest. Hey, I was 5. For all I knew, Bethlehem was the next town over from Happy Valley, where that singing harp lived. Let's see, starting on the left, it looks like the ox & lamb are standing by for the Little Drummer Boy to show up so they can keep time. Then we have the Virgin Mary wearing a veil shaped like a shark's fin as she folds her giant Popeye forearms in prayer. The Baby Jesus (you can tell it's him because he's wearing a T-shirt with his initial on it) is lying happily as his father, Joseph, is either rocking his manger crib or pushing over the first of three Wise Men.
The second wise man appears to be pilfering a sheep under his robe & wearing blackface. The latter, I can explain...
These guys are part of my mom's wood Nativity scene, which is older than I am & thus is my visual definition of what it means to have the house decorated for Christmas. See the guy on the left? His skin is literally black. Not dark brown. Jet frigging black. The same color as the guy's beard in front of him. So, this being my 5-year-old counterpart's definitive image of the birth of Christ, I had to make one of the Wise Men black. That's how it was supposed to be. I didn't even learn the concept of racism until years later, when we started studying Black History Month in school. Before that, my favorite TV show growing up featured a green guy who lived in a trash can in front of an apartment building that housed a black family who lived on the floor above an orange guy & a yellow guy. Different people just came in different colors. Like cars. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that teal-colored people like Skeeter Valentine didn't really exist.
The corniest, most awesome thing about our Nativity scene is that, using Google Earth as a guide, I noticed that my mom just happened to position the Wise Men so that they are actually heading toward the stable from the east. I highly doubt she even knows that, but I guess you can mark it off as one of those magical Christmas coinkey-dinks. And isn't that what Christmas is really all about? Coinkey-dinks?
No? Ok.
Happy Holidays |
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