Mickey Free Keeps an Eye Out for Enemy Camp

January 17, 2011

Finished the "When Mammoth Jacks Attack" episode of Mickey Free for the current issue with a couple hours to spare. Issue is being uploaded, via ether net, to our printer in Kansas City even as you read this. Really hanging out on this one, with Cowboy Christmas, yearly budget meetings and all the Billy pardon, media madness (Wall Street Journal, CNN and Horizon and Channel 3).

Now it's on to future Graphic Cinemas, like this one:

Went home for lunch and pulled out a landscape study out of my failure pile and took another crack at it. Added the blue along the distant ridges (which really popped the depth), added the figure of Mickey Free to bottom, peering over the ridge at the "Enemy Camp." Put a canopy on the campfire smoke (it usually curls straight up and then canopies out, I assume because it reaches a cooler layer of air?), and added Mick's mammoth jack. Unfortunately, I ended up with a donkey rather than a mammoth jack. Need to rework that a bit for the final.

Mick is on a quest now and he's deep in Mexico, and, to boot, he's got random fires burning (besides this campfire) everywhere, which adds to the choked sky.

You Can't Be Serious
I'm reading Hitch 22, the memoir by Christopher Hitchens and the older I get the more I realize that seriousness should be taken in very small doses. Hitch is quite funny and I'm enjoying his stories.

Most people use the term, "You can't be serious!" as if it's an accusation of frivolity, but my take is— If you are going to survive and thrive you can't be serious. Consider this title taken for my autobiography.

Well, that, and this for my coda:

"Life is like a B-movie. You don't want to leave it in the middle of it, but you don't want to see it again."
—Ted Turner