MORE AUTOBIO! (5-11-23) (Patreon)

My being perceived as Young, Gifted and Black was developing. One day I came home to a dining room full of building toys...Legos, Tinkertoys and the rest. It glowed. Again, my mother's doing. I'm guessing it was to develop my exceptional mind. But I was probably a disappointment. I did not have the patience or inclination to really hunker down and construct objects. I made abstracts.

I had my peculiar creative ways. I had “Walter Lantz's Easy Way to Draw”, but didn't advance far with it. I liked the zip in the stick figures and made my own. I put Buzz Buzzard's hooked neck on my own bird beings like BALDY THE EAGLE (doesn't my genius make you shudder in awe?). It seems I wanted to do my own thing with whatever I did. I wasn't good at taking lessons, even though I had the Walter Foster cartooning and animation manuals and others. I would pore them over, then do my own drawings without construction lines, often with a common pen so there was no erasing.  I knew how to put a cartoon body together; I had a reasonable sense of composition. (I knew when it didn't work, but had scant knowledge of the term.) If there was anything outstanding about my very young drawings, it was the gifts of action, expression and dialogue. I was spewing stapled together “comics” by the carton.,  I didn't separate the scenes into frames on a page. I found that crowded and limiting. I had scenes progressing one panel per page, so they were kind of a hybrid between comics and animated scenes.

I was fascinated by the feel of speed on the one hand, and detail on the other. “Speed” to me was Jim Tyer and Howard Post. They had zip; they looked like they were done quickly, but they communicated. I was fascinated by Tyer's work. It was years and years before I took note of his name, so he was “The Stretchy Guy”.  I got the impression that the forms expressed what was inside the character's mind, feet, etc. (It was the same with Japanese brush painting for me; more later.) His sensibility contrasted crazily with the orderliness of the title cards and other animators in the films. (Carlo Vinci, my other favorite, was “The Neat Guy”.

Post I knew from his comics in CASPER and SPOOKY. He was the only Harvey artist that caught my true interest. Again, zip, squishy inking, poses stilted but also expressive as hell.

I took the volume of MAX UND MORITZ from the library more often than they wanted to let me. The words I couldn't understand, but who needed to? It was all there in its attitudes and brutalities, easily understood by everyone. Wilhelm Busch was another artist that changed his technique with the characters' emotions. Stolid and blocky, or loose and feathery.

Of “detail”, there were the ancient films of Fleischer and Columbia. (I say “ancient”. But the films were barely 35 years old when I was seeing them.) The 30s POPEYES were rich. I remember especially one scene with Popeye and Olive riding on the horns of a happy bull. The stands with the cheering throng was animated in perspective. Olive was throwing kisses, the bull's eyes moved goofily from left to right, all under a deluge of confetti. That shot has haunted my thoughts ever since.

The non-POPEYEs were not on TV by that time (1967), but I had the 8mm, 50 foot condensations and watched them to shreds. The films moved slower. Every galumph of the Seymour Kneitel feet was rich; thet would actually droop in the air before landing for a step. And the eternal throbs of the characters. It was positively baroque.

The effect of the one SCRAPPY cartoon I had was similar, and even stranger gags. A hotse's head pulled out and stuck back into the proper end, and the same horse apparently being given an enema. And again, so slowly and smoothly; unearthly. I knew new cartoons weren't like this, and it was a dashed pity.

This was when images from the 30s stuff were exceedingly rare; you had to wait until the hours of air time to see the images at all, and I had to make do with the uninspired, callow licensing art. MICKEY cartoons were barely in release in any venue. It was a huge event when one accompanied a tedious live action feature such as THE BOATNIKS. I begged my mother to take me to that just because THE KLONDIKE KID was scheduled to accompany it. When we got there, they told us that film had been torn and it wouldn't be shown. Crestfallen, I went in to watch the feature, and it was as it is for me and most movies. My eyes glazed and I took mere notes of the action, seeing and understanding what they were doing, but not following the plot, just seeing the proceedings. The film ended, and Mickey's hace flashed on huge on the screen. I got an idea of what the effect must have been in 1933! Maybe my mom pulled strings, maybe not, but I had six minutes of Mickey and wouldn't see him again for years.