I Guano Wish You a Merry Christmas

Hi there! You're just in time to join another Graphical History Tour through the archives of your humble scribbler's December cartoons, carefully aged in our ancient wine cellar, each evidencing floral legs with notes of winter stone leather and an earthy finish.

2015

First off, let's get into the spirit of the season with a couple of classic Christmas movies.

We watch a fair number of classic movies in this household, especially at this time of year. After a while, the plots do seem to get mixed up in my head. Did we just witness a miracle on 34th Street, or did it happen on Fifth Avenue?

One thing that I've always liked about parodying old movies like this is that I don't have to spend the usual time making separate grayscale and full-color versions for syndication. Nope, just save the grayscale version, convert it to CMYK, fill in the pink triangle, and voilá! The colorized version is already finished!

Which reminds me, I think tonight we're watching Dudley the Angel show up to help Charlie Brown find the true meaning of Christmas in Frosty, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

2005

Speaking of whom...

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Dec. 9, 2005

Do I remember the point of the editorial this cartoon was meant to illustrate? No way. It had something to do with corporations securing "air rights" above ground level for such things as skyways connecting buildings on opposite sides of a street. 

That was the fourth-to-last cartoon of mine in the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee. At the end of the year, they decided that they didn't want to run cartoons on the editorial page any more, in favor of a weekly thumbs-up / thumbs-down listicle.

I got more appreciation from the Chicago Free Press that December, which used a cartoon of mine on the front page of their year-in-review edition.

in Chicago Free Press, December, 2005

The Chicago Free Press was a client of my cartoons for their entire run, from 1999 to 2010; this caricature of Dubya Bush was actually from a cartoon I had drawn in August, 2003.

1995

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., Dec. 21, 1995

Christmas week does generally not suit itself to cartoons about the beach hereabouts.  

The city had hired an expert from the National Water Research Institute to determine the source of  fecal coliform bacteria that had forced the city to close North Beach several times during the summer. Human feces were the prime suspect, but in December, the expert reported that preliminary studies pointed instead to gull droppings.

Dad was on the Racine Board of Health back then, and still is, so I get the inside poop on any matters related to public health here. And yes, gull droppings have been a factor in beach closings: they crap on the sand, and that stuff washes into Lake Michigan when it rains.

But human shit was also a major part of the problem. As a result, Racine extended its sewage outflow further out into the lake. The study cast much of the blame on Milwaukee's sewage system; during heavy rains, untreated sewage had to be released into the lake in order to minimize it backing up into everyone's basements.

Since then, Milwaukee's Big Tunnel project has largely addressed that particular problem. This past summer, Racine only had to close North Beach one time (but did have to issue advisories on two other occasions).

1985

I had drawn a couple Christmas issue cover cartoons for the University of Wisconsin at Parkside student newspaper by 1985, making oversized editorial cartoons for them. With the 1985 edition, I decided to make a simple, straightforward holiday greeting.

in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., Dec. 12, 1985

I also departed from usual by drawing exclusively in charcoal. This meant I couldn't erase anything if I didn't like it, and having to be extremely careful not to smudge the drawing. The original drawing is too large for my scanner; if I could have posted the original drawing here, you would be able to see all the blue pencil underneath the charcoal.

The medium of charcoal did not afford the Ranger editors much opportunity to add color to the drawing. This was well before PhotoShop and other quick and easy artistic tools; to add color, someone would have had to lay a halftone transfer sheet over the drawing and cut with an Exacto knife the desired shapes for each area where the color should print.

I  had created the Ranger flag that year, and every shape you see in green, I made using that same halftone cutting process. (Ignore the yellow; that's just the discoloring of 40-year-old newsprint, or however old it was when the UW-P library scanned it. I Photoshopped out the yellowing from the Peace on Earth drawing for this post, but not from the flag.)

Well, heck, why don't we go back yet another ten Decembers just for gits and shiggles?

1975

in Park Beacon, Dec. 19, 1975

That takes us all the way back to my high school days. This cartoon was something I drew to illustrate someone else's (possibly Executive Editor Joel Krein's) Twelve Days of Christmas list.

The principal surrounded by garbage, and the school nurse, by the way, were caricatures of real persons. And I'm quite sure that none of my fellow students caught the reference to a running gag in "Fibber McGee & Molly," a radio comedy that was well before our time. Before Assistant Principal McKee's time, too.

Somehow, the school administration let us get away with this cartoon. If I remember correctly, the Park Beacon had to yield to administration censorship once in the two years that I was on staff. An installment of Kevin Cacciotti's "Being Cool in School" comic strip included advice to "destroy school property," and Principal Thompson made us black the cartoon out of every copy with magic markers.

Except for the copies we saved for ourselves.

✍

Well, that's the Graphical History Tour for this week. Thanks for coming along, and have a Merry St. Lucy's Day!

Flights of Fantasy

Refreshing my memory about one of the cartoons in last Saturday's Graphical History Tour, I came across a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons doodles I had drawn 40 years ago this month.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Sept. 8, 1983

The previous year, I had written a much-too-long article for the ill-fated Kenosha Tribune about GenCon, the annual August convention of fantasy gamers hosted by TSR Inc. Originally held in the company's hometown of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin (hence its name), the convention moved to the more spacious University of Wisconsin at Parkside just outside of Kenosha from 1978 to 1984.

In 1983, I stuck to drawings, GenCon having included an art show in that year's convention. GenCon was held August 18 and 19, 1983.

I had a hard time finding the original of this pen-and-ink drawing, until I remembered that in spite of the stiffness of the characters, I liked it enough to have it framed and hanging it in my old apartment.

"Arbar Laurethôl's Inexplicable Dream," August, 1983

Sure enough, there it was, somewhat yellowed from its years on a wall, still in a frame on a basement shelf of odds and ends from my apartment that have never found a home in our house. 

I'm fairly certain that I don't have the original drawings for the D&D creatures in the Ranger clipping at the top of this post, however. I do have some similar sketches for the GenCon recap in a Ranger the next September; but if I ever got the kobold, grimlock, and white dragon drawings back from the Ranger, I probably slipped them into my AD&D manuals that got soaked after our basement flooded several years ago.

For someone who hates drawing buildings, I certainly included quite a bit of architecture in "Arbar Laurethôl's Inexplicable Dream."

"Attack of the Corbinards"

I dispensed quickly with the task of drawing any architecture in "Attack of the Corbinards," in which Hitchcock gets medieval. It could probably have benefited on a cinematic level from a more populated battlefield. 

None of these drawings were stored with the others; this one shared a folder with some charcoal drawings and wound up with some charcoal smudges on it (removed with Photoshop).

But I believe it was included in the 1983 art display. It doesn't have a title on the back, but it does have my signature and the numbering of the exhibit organizers there. The signature on the front of these, by the way, is a quondam runification of my name.

Further technical arcana: the siren and "Arbar Laurethôl's Inexplicable Dream" were drawn on bristol board, whereas "Attack of the Corbinards" was drawn on plain old typing paper. It also wasn't printed in the Ranger, so now it's a Bergetoons exclusive.

Church Work

Supralapsarianismback Saturday begs your pardon for wallowing in my juvenalia again this week.

My mother is at the point in life where she has been going through her things to separate out the things she needs from those she no longer does, giving away the stuff she thinks someone else might want, and throwing out the rest. Among the things she has given to me so far is a big folder stuffed with clippings of my cartoons.

I have the originals of most of them, but there are a few pages of cartoons I had completely forgotten about, drawn for the church where I grew up. I kind of remember drawing the above cartoon for the monthly newsletter — at least I remember the time spent laboriously drawing all those straight lines with a Bic pen and a ruler. (It's hard to see in the scan, but the missile farthest to the left is full of cross-hatched lines.)

The church's copying equipment wasn't kind to all that meticulous shading and thus to the hand-drawn lettering. Some of the voided areas appear to be fingerprints, which, from my subsequent experience with church copiers, I take it to mean that there were a lot of paper jams running that page.

The next two must have been drawn for a fund-raising drive. Obviously, the Sunday School wanted to buy a VCR, although I suppose they could have wanted to enroll the Sunday School teachers at the local technical college to learn how to work the new-fangled things. (I kid.)

I do remember how the basement room where the senior citizens' group met would flood would flood during a heavy rain. It didn't flood bad enough to float the piano, but it certainly made the room unusable for a week or two. Mom was the coordinator of the group in those days, and she would occasionally enlist my help if she needed a program during a school vacation.

That piano was beyond the point where floating in water could do it any further harm.

Mom's note on the page with this last clipping identifies it as accompanying Hunger Sunday in 1985. I've abandoned the Bic pen and ruler technique and gone over entirely to shading with a quill pen and india ink by this time. There's an allusion here to the parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:

 "Now there was a rich man and he was clothed in purple and fine linen, making good cheer in splendour every day. And [there was] a poor man, by name Lazarus, [who] was laid at his gateway full of sores, and desiring to be filled with the crumbs which fell from the table of the rich man .... "(DARBY)

No Fool Like an Old Fool

It's Spoofback Saturday and April Fool's Eve to boot, so let's take a break from wallowing in the centennial of World War I just a bit.

This is not a Mike Peters cartoon. It's a parody I drew for my college newspaper's mock issue in 1979. In addition to scribblings by resident St. Olaf cartoonists, the Manitou Messenger ran Mike Peters's cartoons distributed by College Press Service. They were more dependable than my editorial cartoons were; but as irrepressible as Mr. Peters was and is, he didn't send us material for the parody issue in which we student journalists blew off steam.

So I mimicked his style as best I could in a cartoon buttressing up one of the conceits of that year's parody issue: that there had been some sort of nuclear accident involving Ytterboe Hall, a 79-year-old red brick dormitory that, in reality, the school administration wanted to tear down (over the objection of its residents and our "Keep Ytt Up" slogan. Ytt would be demolished a few years after I graduated, but St. Olaf eventually put the Ytterboe name on a new building more in keeping with the campus's limestone motif.)

One of my other Mike Peters parodies didn't involve campus issues at all. Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of State Al Haig was the John Bolton of the day, famously declaring after the president's attempted assassination by John Hinckley, "I am in charge!" I think, however, that the caption beneath this cartoon must have been copied from a real Mike Peters cartoon, because I don't remember inking it. I don't have the original of this cartoon, and it was a long time ago, so I could be wrong. On the other hand, I wasted a lot of time mimicking halftone with a Bic pen and a ruler on these things; the forgery of Peters's print style in the caption, if that's what it is, is considerably more true to Peters's handwriting than that of the word "France" on the map.

But how does one parody one's own work?

For one thing, I answered any reader who had told me "I don't get it" by drawing cartoons so impossibly dense, inside, and disjointed that nobody could possibly "get it." Except for Idi Amin (referencing an earlier cartoon that had him hiding out in the utility tunnels beneath the campus), most of the characters in the above cartoon were campus personages. And just to be as obscure as possible, Gwenellda's time-traveling friend was a character from The Uglies, a Manitou Messenger cartoon by L.K. Hanson, dating from a decade before any of us students had come to campus.

Having a time-traveling character in my cartoon would have been more impressive if I had somehow known to include the work of 2018 Herb Block Award winner Ward Sutton, who drew for the Messenger eight years later than I had.

But if I had had that power to see into the future, I wouldn't have been so cocksure that I'd never need to know Thing One about computers. And I might have made it to the Messenger's staff photo on time senior year.

For the UW-Parkside Ranger (renamed the Stranger) in 1984, I depicted the swearing in of the unnamed police detective in the "Funny Paper Caper" I was drawing that year as the 37th president of the United States (with a character from fellow Ranger cartoonist John Kovalic's "Wild Life" as Veep).

Various political figures and a few Ranger staffers populate most of the rest of the cartoon.

But there's more to a parody newspaper than cartoons. Photo editors liked to get in on the laughs, too. Holland Hall at my alma mater is blessed with the most massive urinals you have ever seen in your life, so some enterprising Messenger staffer depicted the school track team posing inside one.

Other memorable photos I remember involved an enormous abstract iron art piece called "The Spirit Also Helpeth Us" by Dorothy Berge (no relation as far as I've ever been able to tell), depicted in various situations such as addressing a convocation in Boe Memorial Chapel. Or gigantic mutant squirrels menacing the campus due to that nuclear leak in Ytterboe.

And in those days, they did it all without PhotoShop.

So did I, taking a file photo from 1955 that appeared to show Ronald Reagan talking to an empty space, and using it to illustrate a bogus story about Basil Wraithbone, a washed-up actor who used to be one of the Ghostly Trio on "Casper, the Friendly Ghost."

If PhotoShop had been around in those days, and if I had had the foresight not to be so snooty about eschewing computers, I could have made it so that you could still see the empty space behind Mr. Wraithbone.

That story is too long to include here in full; so here's another bit of Fake News I wrote.

It's too long, too, but short enough for today's post, and I got to use a couple names I picked up in Medieval History class.

Because being able to namecheck Frankish kings seemed so much more useful back then than getting into the vanguard of the computer revolution.

Olympic Fever

I've long been a sucker for the Olympics. I'll spend hours watching sports I won't watch for two seconds over the next four years. And come the next Olympiad, I won't even remember how curling is scored or how many periods there are in ice hockey.

To follow up my syndicated cartoon this week about Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon and his snub of Vice President Pence, Slalomback Saturday presents a selection of earlier cartoons I drew about the Winter Games.

I had wanted to lead off with this cover drawing I did for the UW-Milwaukee Post, thinking it had been for a winter Olympics issue. But when I finally dug it up the other day, I discovered that this December, 1990 issue of the Post had nothing to do with the Olympics at all. Perhaps I used a photo from the 1984 or 1988 games as the basis for this drawing.

At any rate, I didn't have the use of computer graphics in making and shading this picture; instead, I used an exacto knife to cut the shapes of each individual shade of black or blue from screentone sheets, very thin adhesive plastic, clear but for the halftone dot pattern printed on it, which I then very carefully applied onto the drawing (or, in the case of the blue shades, to a separate sheet).

I left plenty of room for teaser headlines, but the editors for whatever reason opted not to include any.

This year's Olympics mark the second time that the Russian national anthem would not be played for Russian gold medalists. The Soviet Union had broken up only a few months before the Albertville games of 1992 (the last time the winter and summer games were held in the same year). Most of the newly separated nations did not yet have their own Olympic committees; the U.S.S.R.'s State Committee on Sports had been disbanded and its funds for athletes disappeared along with it.

Officially, athletes from Russia and eleven other former socialist republics that year competed instead as the "Unified Team" ("Équipe Unifiée" in the host French) under the Olympic flag; popularly, they were known as the "Commonwealth of Independent States" team. They did win 45 gold medals that year. As is the case again in 2018, when those winners stood on the podium, the Olympic anthem was played.

When the Winter Olympics returned a short two years later, there was a more personal drama dominating American coverage. You may have heard about it.

On January 6, 1994, U.S. Olympic skater Nancy Kerrigan was attacked by a hit man hired by the ex-husband of another U.S. Olympic skater, Tonya Harding. The attacker attempted to break Kerrigan's right leg with a metal baton; Kerrigan was merely bruised, but was forced to withdraw from the U.S. National Figure Skating Championship underway at the time.

Media attention to today's Olympians is nothing compared to the feeding frenzy around Kerrigan and Harding, packing their practice sessions and camping out in front of their homes as the attack plot quickly unraveled. In the end, Kerrigan won a silver medal at Lillehammer, Norway; Harding, after crying to the judges about a problem with her skate laces, was allowed a reskate of her aborted routine but came in eighth anyway. And while no complicity on Harding's part in the attack plot has ever been proven, she was driven from the sport and stripped of all her titles and awards.

So she tried boxing instead.

The organizing committee (SLOC) for the 2002 games in Salt Lake City was overwhelmingly white, straight and male (and, yes, Mormon) until one of the few trustees not in that demographic, Lillian Taylor, convinced the SLOC that it needed to diversify. As part of its effort to do so, the SLOC created a minority-outreach council responsible for recruiting volunteers from various minority groups, eventually including the LGBT community.

A gay man and a lesbian woman were named to the SLOC's diversity committee, and LGBT volunteers were involved in everything from working as translators to parking cars to working security details to managing volunteers for an entire venue. The Gay and Lesbian Times enthused that the Salt Lake City games “will go down as one of the most-gay inclusive Olympics to date.”

That same year, I drew this cartoon to accompany a Milwaukee Business Journal editorial characterizing Milwaukee businesses as being slow, steady, and ethical, as opposed to the fast and loose reckless opportunism of national firms. The inflated profit claims of Enron papered over by its accountants at Arthur Andersen had helped usher in the dotcom bust of the previous year.

Meanwhile, Apolo Ohno had grabbed the world's attention in short track speed skating. In the finals of the 1,000 meter race, he and three of his rivals collided in a massive jumble, allowing the sole skater remaining upright, Australian Steven Bradbury, skate past them to cross the finish line first. It seemed a natural image for that week's editorial.

I hasten to point out that all that form-fitting lycra is not the reason I get so wrapped up in watching the Olympic games.

Well, not the only reason.

And back to Russia we quickly go.

The pageantry of the opening and closing ceremonies is not to be missed, as each host endeavors to outdo the ones which had gone before. So, too, do the fashion designers who create the outfits the athletes wear as they parade, cell phones held aloft, into the stadium.

Some of the outfits are more successful than others, and the 2014 Sochi Olympics included some curiously complex pastels that looked as if the athletes had engaged in a frosted doughnut fight outside the stadium. That is not to say that all the outfits were as hideous as Cartoon Costas makes them out to be.

But it must be frustrating to put all one's hard work into designing and manufacturing fresh, new, and exciting jackets, caps and sports gear for the fastest, highest, strongest men and women as they strut onto an international stage... or to be the organizing committee responsible for paying those top-notch designers tens of thousands of dollars, yuan, euro, or rubles for their brilliant, imaginative ideas ...

...and the only thing anyone remembers is the guy from Tonga wearing nothing but baby oil.

Remembering John B. Anderson

SimonSezback Saturday today pays tribute to John B. Anderson, who died this week in Washington, D.C. at the age of 95. The Republican Congressman from Illinois was the first person I voted for in a presidential election, first in the 1980 Minnesota Republican caucuses, then in his Independent candidacy for the presidency.

We college students for Anderson were a devoted bunch, and I've seen a lot of Facebook comments from people my age who are still proud to have voted for him, and have never voted for a Republican candidate since. In the small town where I went to college, we vastly outnumbered supporters of all the other candidates —put together!— at the local caucuses, held on the same day as the New Hampshire primary.

John Anderson campaigning at UW-Parkside, March 27, 1980.

But by the time of the Minnesota Republican Convention to select the state's actual delegates to the National Convention, representatives from non-college districts had the votes to send a delegation committed entirely to the presumptive nominee, Ronald Reagan.

What endeared Anderson to us brand new voters was his earnestness and his willingness to go against a politician's instinct to say exactly what the people in the room might want to hear. From his New York Times obituary:

Mr. Anderson refused to pander, telling voters in Iowa that he favored President Jimmy Carter’s embargo on grain sales to the Soviet Union after it had invaded Afghanistan. He called for a gasoline tax of 50 cents per gallon — when a gallon cost $1.15 — to save energy.
Early on, when all six of his rivals for the Republican nomination assured the Gun Owners of New Hampshire that they firmly opposed gun control legislation, Mr. Anderson said, “I don’t understand why.”
“When in this country we license people to drive automobiles,” he added, “what is so wrong about proposing that we license guns to make sure that felons and mental incompetents don’t get a hold of them?”
He was roundly booed.

My cartoons of John Anderson in 1980 betray the humorless earnestness of a dewy-eyed supporter of a doomed cause (and the difficulty I've always had with drawing hands). My characters were stiff and two-dimensional in more ways than one.

Anderson's campaign left me with a lasting dislike of media coverage that focuses on the poll du jour. But for third-party candidates like Anderson, popularity polls have a real and practical effect on whether the League of Women Voters allow them to participate in televised debates, or even whether they can get on the ballot at all.

So too election rules crafted by the two major parties to safeguard their own interests. Anderson had to fight to get on the ballot in Ohio, where the deadline for an independent candidate to get on the November ballot was in March, well before either major party's nominee had been decided. In Anderson v. Celebrezze, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Anderson's favor, reasoning that

"Not only does the challenged Ohio statute totally exclude any candidate who makes the decision to run for President as an independent after the March deadline, it also burdens the signature-gathering efforts of independents who decide to run in time to meet the deadline. When the primary campaigns are far in the future and the election itself is even more remote, the obstacles facing an independent candidate's organizing efforts are compounded. Volunteers are more difficult to recruit and retain, media publicity and campaign contributions are more difficult to secure, and voters are less interested in the campaign. It is clear, then, that the March filing deadline places a particular burden on an identifiable segment of Ohio's independent-minded voters."

Mainstream cartoonists who had welcomed Anderson as a breath of fresh air in February were dismissing him as a quixotic kook in October. Still, I desperately clung to the prospect that The Issues were more important than The Polls. I even let the candidate of the Libertarian Party (which had a small but vocal presence on campus) in on the act.

President Carter in the above cartoon alludes to the brand spanking new Stealth Fighter planes (the F-117 and B-2 Spirit) announced by the Carter administration earlier that year.

This last cartoon was an extra wide oeuvre which you probably need to beclickify to embiggen to eulegibilitous size. I expect most readers to recognize the poem (itself a parody) and the song parodied by Ronald Reagan and John Anderson in this cartoon; the James Russell Lowell hymn parodied in the Jimmy Carter panel is more obscure today (my Lutheran denomination dropped it from its hymnals after 1978).

Ah, the zeal of youth! Been there. Voted that. Bought the t-shirt.

Thought I still had the bumper sticker, too.

Stormtrooperback Saturday

Readers who followed the link from the Bergetoons Facebook page the other day might have noticed that the graphic on the FB post wasn't actually from this week's cartoon. Actually, it was a portion of this:

Back in my college days and well into my 20s, I was a Dungeons & Dragons player, and even attended a couple of GenCons back when they were hosted at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. I wrote a running narrative of one of the campaigns I played in, and this was an illustration for the cover of Volume IV.

Our dungeon master (the person who devises the setting for the other players to role play in) wanted to switch us over from a medieval game to a futuristic one, to which end he placed one suit of storm trooper armor in a dungeon. My fighter character tried it on, found that it was much lighter yet more effective than the chain mail he was wearing before, and happily took it as his own.

It had the drawback of being radioactive, but my character wasn't smart enough to make the connection between the suit and his hair falling out.

In more traditional garb

I also remember a Star Wars-themed game I played in at one of those GenCons in which all us players were Sky-Walk-R clones trapped in a filming of Episode IV -- the only episode to have come out at that point.  The slightest deviation from the plot could prove fatal to a character; and when time came for the game to be over, the surviving Sky-Walk-R clones were still trapped in the trash compactor of the Death Star as we players were struggling to remember how that particular problem was overcome in the movie.

It is quite possible that we had neglected to instruct R2D2 to tap into the Death Star's main computer.

Days of Dungeons and Dragons

We've pretty much cleaned up everything we can in our basement. Our little flood -- God's subtle way of telling us it was high time to clean up the basement -- may yet force us to replace the drywall in the furnished section of the basement, and we're crossing our fingers that no water wicked up through the corks of the wine bottles stored upside down in the bottom boxes. We've filled up our garbage bin twice and recycling bin once, and I've taken trumkloads of damp cardboard to the recycling dumpster at work; and there is still plenty of garbage left to go.

This is a drawing in colored pencil from the inside front cover of one of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books I had to throw out. I'm already forgetting which book -- I think perhaps it was inside the Dungeon Master's Manual, but I can't even remember finding a Dungeon Master's Manual in the box. I could swear that I owned one, but the more I think about it, the more I become convinced that I only scanned drawings out of three books.

And I remember for certain that the remaining drawings in this series were inside the Fiend Folio and the Monster Manual II.

At any rate, this was the second or third drawing, continuing the theme of having a doorway in the background. Or maybe it's a window. At any rate, this monster has arms long enough to be of some use. She clearly doesn't get enough sleep, however.

D and D Days

Yesterday morning, I went down to the basement to fetch a box of cereal from the pantry, and stepped into a half inch of water.

Probably overworked due to this rainy spring, our eight-year-old sump pump had stopped, and water rising (we now believe) through a hole left in the floor by the guys who installed our basement bathroom covered the entire basement from one end to the other. I was able quickly to restart the sump pump, but a fair amount of damage was already done to nearly all of the cardboard boxes anywhere on the floor.

Among the lost items was a box full of the scripts from all of the plays I have ever been in (including a book of all of George Bernard Shaw's plays bought because the local theatre guild needed the scripts for You Never Can Tell returned) -- ouch! I also was forced to discard, some of my old friends will be horrified to read, all of my 1980's era Dungeons and Dragons manuals.

I haven't played D and D in nearly 30 years, but I couldn't throw those manuals out without first scanning the drawings I added inside the covers.

This is the first drawing, from the back cover of the Monster Manual. I drew it using some green fountain pen ink that had belonged to my grandfather, and without first sketching out a pencil outline of any kind -- meaning, whatever line I put on the page, I was stuck with.

What I'm saying there is that you shouldn't try to make any sense of this particular drawing. The short-armed ape-like beast, the mallet-wielding creature with eyestalks beneath its nose, and the fire-breathing horse aren't patterned after any monster in the game, mythology, literature, movies, or the Reagan administration.

Some of the other drawings make more coherent attempts to tell some sort of story. The media vary from Bic felt tip pens to colored pencil, some of which did not hold fast against a little bit of water at all. I'll be posting a few of the other sketches from time to time as the spirit moves me.