The actually witty prince

Goddamnit, Jurassic Shore is a funnier comic than the Real Godzillas of Tokyo, if only because Jersey Shore is more topical. Ah, but whatever. Godzilla is already drawn…

The art in this cartoon looks better than normal. Well, there’s a reason!

I can’t take credit for this sculpture, or indeed, the idea of a dinosaur in jail. But I think the photoshop came out pretty well? I’m a fan of it anyway. So thanks to whomever made that sculpture - you are awesome!

Borm, by Hydroplane, directed by yours truly

I’m not putting this up on the main page just because I’m not 100% sure how I embed a youtube video there, and it seemed like a bit of a hassle to do that when I could just put it here much more easily. I think most of the people who regularly read this site will have seen the video through livejournal or facebook by now anyway.

Anyway, I wanted to go into some details and thank yous for the people who made the video possible:

-Thanks first of all to Vanessa, whose dinosaur suit has served me well over the years.
-Thanks to Oliver and Shelly for being in the video.
-Thanks to Kyle, who napped through most of the shooting. We did get some footage of him in the suit but didn’t end up using it. Sorry, buddy.
-Thanks to the kids in the park who didn’t get all weirded out when Shelley got on the merry go round with them; I was kind of worried that the parents were going to get nervous about us weirdoes being there, interacting with their kids, but I think at this point Portlanders are used to people being unusual in public.
-Thanks to Becky for filming the shots of me walking around in the industrial district.
-Thanks to all the people (like Mary-Suzanne and Lola) who have been sharing the video and trying to spread the word on it.

I actually got this footage around April, but was too lazy to edit it. Finally Renzo stepped in and made it happen, which worked out well for me. Actually the delay wasn’t that bad because I got the track so far in advance of when the album came out that we finished the video relatively close to when the album actually came out. Although given how positive the feedback about the video has been, I kind of wish that I’d been working on more videos between now and then. It might be awhile before I have another video to share because it takes so much time to get these things organized, and shot, and edited, and all that… But then again, next weekend I’m appearing in a video for my friend Thomas’ band, so there might be other things to share. We are living in the world of tomorrow and anything is possible.

Five years ago this website went live. Since then, there have been 1454 posts. That averages out to 290 posts a year, meaning that 80% of the days in the last five years I drew a comic. Now a lot of them haven’t been good for one reason or another, but they’ve gotten better, as today’s comic can attest.

(Quick sidenote: picking that Slobo destroys hobos drawing was kind of cheap, as the point of that cartoon was bad art. But the art is still terrible, so I picked it as an example anyway.)

I said I was going to commit to this for at least five years back then and see where I was, creatively. I’ve come close to quitting a few times; I took seven months off last year, which is really what killed my average. During that time it looked like I might be done with cartooning. Now I’m not so sure.

At this moment the future is more open ended. I know where I can still get better; I see how I have already improved. I see how this format can be great for telling jokes; I see how it isn’t always ideal for what I want to do. It’s easier than animation; animation often produces better products. I enjoy it; it frustrates me. (It was the best of times; it was the blurst of times.) But on the whole it has been a good process for me to learn. For every cartoon I’m embarrassed about because I did a poor job of conveying the idea or botched the execution in one way or another, there’s another which makes me glad that I did it. Perhaps it was an idea I’d have otherwise lost, or something that’s funnier in retrospect. But I feel a good deal of sentimentality towards the back catalogue of this site.

This website hasn’t done what I thought it might do, or at least what I hoped it would do. It didn’t become massively popular, and I never did open up a shop to sell t-shirts (although there was an experiment with iron on stickers and plain white tees that went terribly.) But I don’t know that I can judge the website as a success or a failure; those terms might not really apply. Its been an effort to learn a craft and I’m still learning. You can’t call a trip up a mountain a success or a failure until you are either at the top or have retreated back to camp. It takes ten years to create an overnight success and I’m not at ten years yet; it looks to me like the day when I will finally for real be done with this might be always on the horizon, continually visible, but never quite reachable.

It’s not arbitrary that I write this today; doing a state of the site address makes sense on the site’s birthday. It’s a good day for a reckoning. But then again, it is also arbitrary, because my attitude about it changes from day to day and what I’m feeling now is not necessarily representative of how I really feel about it. There are times when I just can’t be bothered to sit down at my desk and bang it out. But I’ve backed up on the throttle quite a bit and don’t try to pressure myself to make myself feel like I have to bang it out, which allows me to keep it going. But there’s one constant, I think, despite my general schizophrenia about the site, and that’s the idea that it’s better to create than not to create. In general, I believe in trying.

I had grand plans for this post. I wanted to really lay it on the line honestly about the ins and outs of this; and to cover my favorite memories. But I don’t know that I can do that. This site has been so integral to my life over the years that the idea of making a succinct summary boggles my mind a little, and besides, the site has been created in real time. There’s no point in doing a retrospective about my show at Sequential Art Gallery; that’s already here. There’s a lot that’s already been written on this blog about the little incremental steps, about learning how to use gradients, how to edit images in photoshop, all the little things that have helped me get better.

But I think I can say this: when I started, I knew I wasn’t going to be good, and I wasn’t. And I pushed on anyway. And when I started, I knew I was going to have to push myself, and I did. And now that I stand here after having accomplished phase one of my goal, I think I can say that I’m not really an artist yet, insofar as I think of an artist and a journeyman as separate things, but I am on my way. I feel more weary of the site, it’s true, because I’ve picked up some baggage from the years of toil. But I also do feel a sense of optimism quite often on days when I sit down to work and at the end feel like I did quality work. That sense that I’ve got a funny idea and I should share it persists and still hits me nearly daily. And as long as I have that, I think I will keep putting one foot in front of another, whether it’s in cartoon form or not.

This cartoon about thinking comes from a pretty serious place, actually, and isn’t meant to be a joke per se (despite having something of a punchline, which I just tossed in to salvage what I could.) When I started out the site, I did want to put in philosophical things as well as observations and jokes, but as I got older my philosophy got a lot more personal and became less cartoon-worthy. But I liked this idea and wanted to elaborate on it here.

Not too long ago I was realizing how much I’m like a cat in the way that I look for attention. By that I mean that a cat can be very attention craving, but only on it’s schedule; often cats are very aloof when you want them to pay attention to you. And I’m the same way - I will often want to go out and be extroverted and be with people, but I am often introverted and have other goals, too, and my schedule doesn’t always mesh with other peoples.

But then I got to thinking about how dogs are, and that lead to another sort of revelation. A lot of people more or less live for their significant other, and as they go through the day they save things to tell them. I go through my day and then later try to think of things to tell people. My internal monologue, then, is inner driven, while others live more externally. They think about sharing, and I share what I’ve thought, and I think it’s a completely different way to look at relationships.

After I drew the cartoon, though, I realized that I had done something similar in the past. Perhaps two somethings. Because there’s definitely this love as a dead bird cartoon, which has a similar cat goes hunting set up (but is more of a joke), and I think I’ve done a cartoon before on how people save up their thoughts to share with their significant other before (but I don’t remember any of the details and thus can’t search for it in my archives.) So perhaps this isn’t so much a revelation as a recurring theme…

Still, I think it’s worth running a second variation on the theme. For one it’s already drawn, so fuck it, but more importantly I think it highlights a second perspective in an interesting way. The comparison to dogs is worth exploring - not that I do that here, but I raise it in such a way that someone else could explore it for themselves if they were interested. By offering a second option, it raises more of a question of how to be instead of a question on how not to be.

Finally: more dead bird jokes here.

This one about Samson, the Wicked Witch and the barber isn’t bad; but you can tell that I had a few approaches in my mind I was juggling, and I never quite settled on one. The final cartoon is succinct enough, but the fortune is a completely different cartoon, and the further reading is another one. All totaled there’s a lot of words there. But I liked all the ideas and didn’t want to jettison any particular one of them.

A lot of blankets around here lately. Two in a week? Weird. And they’re both so existential, too. A synchronicity, I guess.

Parodying Robert Frost is kind of funny, but a little too easy. I feel like hundreds, if not thousands, of people have parodied this because its so infamous. However, it reminds me of a Chris Rock monologue about why he told Monica Lewinsky jokes even though everyone had one: because he thought his were the best. If yours are funnier, then tell them. This isn’t the funniest parody, but it’s a very El Kiablo one. (I’m kind of displeased with the drawing, though.)

Lots of Oz stuff lately, too. That’s one that I’m obsessed with that most people probably don’t think about / care about much. But who cares? It amuses me.

We’re a few weeks away from the five year anniversary of the site, which is crazy. It took a lot of hard work to get here. I’ll probably blog more about it on the actual date; I want to think about what I want to say. But it is on my mind. The original goal was to do it for five years, and at this point in my mind I’ve committed to keep going indefinitely. I’m still getting better, and I want to keep going until I feel like I’ve got nothing to learn… But I also want to use my talents in the most productive way possible. Ah, why did I start talking about this? I’ll save the rest of it for the July Fourth entry.

This cartoon about Otto Von Bismarck’s famous statement about politics and sausage put me in a little bind of a bind, because it’s one of those times when what was said was not what we remembered. There are a lot of different permutations of that line out there, but the one that he most definitely said is far clunkier than what is often repeated in pop culture. I was torn: do I use the actual quote which would ruin the joke, or be a shoddy writer and attribute something to him that he didn’t actually say? Accuracy matters, you know?

Then I realized that, umm, no matter what the man did or did not say, he never ever uttered a word about wienermobiles. I was adding that in. So what does the rest of it matter? I’m already butchering his quote for comedy. Realizing that made me feel real, real dumb for debating the ethics of it for a good fifteen minutes.

I went from an average of one a day to one a month - four this month and one in November is five cartoons in five months. The last four I uploaded weren’t particularly strong. They were basically the sort of crap I’d say on facebook, but with an illustration to make them a “cartoon”. But they are better than nothing.

I kind of want to get back into this a little, but no promises. It was a rocky winter, and I’m not sure what the spring will hold.

Ten minutes into watching 7th Heaven, the first film to win a best director Oscar, I realized that the film was so crazy that I had to liveblog it. What follows is both hilarious and very, very long. It is basically a minute by minute recap of something that has to be seen to be believed, written up to encourage you to not see it, because if I found out that anyone believed in this movie, I would be very sad.

-First title screen: this movie takes place in “Hole In the Sock, France”
-Second title screen: The only way to get from the gutter to the stars is to climb the road of courage.
-It starts off in a sewer, which I assume is where the road of courage terminates.
-For the first five minutes, the ratio of characters in the movie to people with mustaches is 1:1. This is the first sign that, yes, indeed, I am watching a silent movie.
-Incidentally, the street sweeper’s mustache is 98% of a Snidely Whiplash, and yes, he does twirl the ends.
-Lots of talking, no text screens. “Rat”, as he’s called, points up in the air. Text screen: “Look!” Very Helpful. (Incidentally Rat is looking up the sewer grate up some women’s skirts. Naughty!)
-One day the square jawed hero will work his way up to street sweeper. According to him, he deserves to be working “in the sunlight”, and not fishing clothes out of the sewer with a pitchfork (which as far as I can tell is his job.) Will he escape the underground caverns that are fit only for alligators and deformed mutants? Only time will tell.
-Cut to: a woman whipping another woman. The whipper says “stop your bleating and go get me some absinthe”. I’m paraphrasing, but “bleating” is definitely used.
-The whip-ee pawns a stolen wristwatch to a man that looks like Boss Tweed. He gives her some cash and she buys some absinthe. Meanwhile, the whipper is visited by the priest, whom she tells to fuck off, until he tells her that her aunt and uncle have just come back from the South Seas and they are rich now.
-Aunt and Uncle visit. Lots of gesturing. Apparently the Aunt smells like “sandalwood”, also, “of home”. The Uncle has no truck with this olfactory hoo-haa and cuts to the chase with - and this is an exact quote - “Tell Me - have you kept yourselves clean and decent?”
-The whipper lies and says, yes, they have been douching. (There’s no text screen so I’m assuming that’s what she was mouthing.) Uncle smells through the ruse, asks the honest sister, who tells the truth. (”We do have herpes of the syphillis.”)
-The Uncle throws some cash on the floor and leaves angrily. Oh, there’s going to be a whipping!
-There’s a whipping.
-Good sister runs. Our intrepid sewer working hero hears the screams and climbs out to save her. By save her, I mean “dangle the bad sister over an open sewer grate until she swears to put down the whip.” Once he’s let the bad sister up out of the sewer he says - and this is an exact quote - “If I catch you at it again, I’ll cut out your gizzard and fry it.” (Was he consigned to life in the sewer for his woman threatenin’ ways? Or for just speakin’ so old timey?)
-This shit is crazy. We’re only fifteen minutes in and we’ve had priests, guys named Rats, whippings, sewer escapes and threats of gizzarding.
-Our hero is apparently called Chico. When told that it was nice of him to save that girl from a beating, he replies “She wasn’t worth saving. A girl like that is better off dead.” Oh snap!
-Apparently his friend has no opinion on that, as he just shrugs and then starts eating bread with Rat, who looks a lot like John Leguizamo.
-Wow, Chico is chaaa-aarming. He yells at a girl who has just been whipped into submission “Don’t just lie there like a dead fish and ruin our party.” It is a sewer workers eating bread party, and that is the worst type of party to ruin.
-He wakes her up by rubbing half an onion on her nose? I guess only Princes are allowed to smooch.
-”I’m not afraid of anything. That’s why I am a very remarkable fellow!” Pick up lines like that make me really want to see Chico’s OK Cupid page.
-Chico asks his fat friend “You believe in God. Did he make this girl to be beaten and strangled in the gutter?” Rats responds by sniffing crumbs he left on a car’s running board and then eating them while twitching his nose.
-Apparently Chico can’t believe in God because he hasn’t been promoted to street sweeper already, although why God would reward a guy who would point to a harmless fellow like Rat and say directly to his face “I think you’re proof that God can’t exist” is beyond me.
-He also prayed for a good wife “with yellow hair” and all God “threw in his path” was a “miserable creature like that”, which he says while sneering and pointing at this stranger who was just whipped like a dog in the street. Yes, indeed, I have no idea why God is not giving this guy every reward in the world.
-The priests overhears this actual quote - “That’s why I’m an atheist - because God owes me ten francs!” - and is amused. Is it preachy time already?
-Apparently the priest keeps job appointments with the streetwasher’s guild in his pocket. He’s like the Wizard of Oz, except with the actual power to give you what your heart desires. Is this the first step on the Road to Courage?
-Also the Priest hands out magic medals that “you just might need some day”. I hope that Chico gets shot but the bullet gets stopped by one of the medals, and that’s how he knows that Jesus is Magic.
-I love how when people laugh in old movies they always put both fists on their hip and then rock their entire torso back and forth.
-And Chico starts cleaning the street, just like that? But is his workday in the sewer done yet? If he just quit halfway through his lunchbreak, that’s poor form. Someone has to fish those rags out of Hole in the Sock’s sewers after all.
-Apparently Chico doesn’t think the good sister is better off dead because he keeps her from stabbing herself with a knife she found in the street, which is where all knives are kept in France, I think.
-Oh, he was just upset that she was going to kill herself using his knife. He folds it up and basically tells her to find somebody else’s knife.
-Chico turns back around to ask “But… Why would you want to take your life?” Well, besides from being a worthless gutter wretch who gets beaten by her sister in the street and then told to her face that she’s proof of God’s general worthlessness?
-Oh, apparently Chico only didn’t like her because he assumed that she liked being a worthless gutter rat who got beaten in the street. Now that he knows that she doesn’t like it, he upgrades his appraisal of her to “not bad”. If she gets “yellow hair” who knows how far his approval will go?
-Apparently none of the other things he’s said have qualified as him putting his foot in his mouth, but saying that he “almost feels sorry for her” does.
-I can’t believe we’re not even a quarter of the way through this movie. This liveblog is going to be epic.
-The sister with the whip re-appears with a cop, but she’s not trying to get Chico arrested for assault. She just got arrested for crimes unknown and talked the cop into letting her find her sister so that she could also be arrested. How sweet of her. Although why the cop bought that line of reasoning is beyond me, because “Don’t arrest me until I walk around and point at some random person and get them arrested too” is just a bizarre defense.
-Chico tries to defend the good sister by saying that she can’t be arrested because she’s his wife. Because wives aren’t guilty of whatever unnamed crime she has been accused of?
-The cop writes down Chico’s address and warns him that if he’s lying, an investigation will prove it. Although why this cop has time to devote to seeing if people who claim to be married are actually married when people are literally getting whipped in the street is beyond me.
-If the cops find out that he was lying, Chico will lose his job as a streetwasher, which he literally got nine minutes ago. Is those going to lead into the most awesome marriage proposal of all time? “Will you have me through sickness and health, so that I may push refuse down into the gutters with my hose’s stream of pressurized water?”
-No, its not a marriage proposal, she just points out that if she sleeps over at his house this might fool the cops, which he hadn’t thought of. So this is turning into a Three’s Company style comedy where you have to lie to fool the landlord, who has time to spy on your house all day but will never think to try to find a marriage license, which is probably a simpler way to see if someone is married.
-His first compliment to her: “You have a great head!” Definitely love at first sight.
-To complete the worst meet cute in all of film history, she replies “you have a great heart!” then kisses his ring as if he was the pope. Then he looks disgustedly at his hand. Classy!
-Chico introduces her as his wife to his fat friend, who has only been gone for five minutes. When his friend looks dubious, Chico punches him and tells him to crank up Eloise, which is apparently the name of their car. I hope Eloise is their Streetcar of Desire, because that is probably the best thing for an animalistic jackass to drive up the road of courage.
-He wants the good sister to promise not to take advantage of him, which is generally a big worry for men who meet women while they are eating bread in the street after coming out of an open sewer.
-We watch them go up all seven flights of stairs to his room. Scintillating!
-She likes his room, probably because an absinthe fiend isn’t hiding in there with a big leather strap, waiting, just waiting.
-”Never look down. Always look up! I always look up and that’s why I’m a Remarkable Fellow!” I wonder if this film was originally titled “A Remarkable Fellow.” Or, alternatively, if the Coen Brother’s film “A Serious Man” was almost titled “Eighth Hell”.
-I should point out that Chico looks like the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz with Eraserhead hair.
-What Frank Borzage has done here is exactly as epic as what David Lean did in Lawrence of Arabia. Exactly.
-She hasn’t even been in his room ten minutes and she strips to her undies and crawls into bed. No wonder her uncle wouldn’t have her in his home.
-Huh. Her face reminds me of Matthew Broderick. If he thinks she has a great head, wait till he sees Ferris Beuller’s Day Off!
-Ok, this is the exact problem with Chico as a character: he sees that she’s already in bed. He thinks about it and then decides to sleep somewhere else. Chivalrous, right? But even though there’s a pillow on the other side of the bed she isn’t using, he takes the pillow from underneath her head for his own use.
-And the problem with her character is that this act makes her sigh with lust.
-She wakes him up with the smell of coffee. Also the look of her new haircut?
-This movie is making me glad that I’m not a French gutter woman in Flapper times.
-He also woke up to a new haircut: Kramer’s, from Seinfeld.
-He’s mad that she made him breakfast, because that was such a womanly thing to do, to try to “get at him” through his stomach, but he’s one streetsweeper who won’t be taken advantage of. After the cops come, she’s gone!
-His windows don’t have any glass in them, and there’s a board that leads from his balcony to the next high rise, which doesn’t seem very safe, as apparently Mario the Plumber, who lives next door, can just walk into his house whenever he wants to. And he will, even if it’s clearly an awkward morning after, where two people who made mistakes the night before chat awkwardly over bacon about the cops.
-Mario’s Good Morning: “Now that you’ve crawled out of the sewer, Comrade, I can recognize you as a neighbor.” I feel like saying: if working in a sewer was all that was keeping you from wandering into my room whenever you felt like it, Comrade, I might just tear up that Priest’s magic streetsweeper ticket.
-Actual screen of text: “Permit me to escort you to The Hose.” This is followed by them bowing to each other and then marching arm in arm to where their hats are hanging. The girl is finally realizing why he is such a jerk to women, maybe, and also why he wanted to sleep on the balcony last night.
-He fake kisses her to prove to Mario they are married, then emphatically says “I DIDN’T MEAN IT”. With flawless execution like that, there is no way his we’re married ruse can fail. After all, police always buy into cover stories that are told by people with the emotional maturity of a temperamental seven year old.
-After being an asshole to this street urchin whom he barely knows, he then leaves her in his apartment while he goes to work. If he comes home to find that he still owns as much as two buttons it will be because God loves to take care of fools.
-Within ten seconds of being given the hose, Chico accidentally turns the hose so that it blasts water up his co-worker’s ass, which is why we like to have these little things called “job interviews” now.
-The police do come knocking at his door, but their plan is to point to her and ask “is she your wife?” then leave when Chico says yes. Which makes me wonder what would have happened if they had actually been married and she’d just been out buying milk. After all, the only evidence that our heroine did anything wrong is that an absinthe drunk whip-holding skank fingered her as she was getting arrested, so it would suck if she ended up getting arrested because of one tiny hole in their flaw proof plan.
-Also: if the police are that gullible, maybe he should have asked the priest to be a drug kingpin and not a streetsweeper. Well, if he’d done that there would have been fewer opportunities to comically blast firehoses up communist’s asses.
-Now that the police have decided not to arrest him, she tries to go. He decides that while she should finish giving him a hair cut. Breakfast = devious plot. Other forms of waiting on him hand and foot = “you’re not in my way”.
-She says she believes in God, because He has brought her to Chico. Chico, ever the gentleman, responds with “don’t worry about God, dear, leave the big thoughts to me - the idiot who got mad at an all powerful being for not immediately putting a hose I don’t know how to use in my hands after I gave ten francs to the church.” She nods and picks up the scissors again.
-Will she stab him? I hope she stabs him. There’s too much movie left for him to die, though. Unless this is Pyscho and there’s a big shocking twist coming.
-Random scene of the Priest stealing an orphan off the street. I am sure that this scene will not be followed up on. (UPDATE: it is not.)
-Back to the apartment: she’s mending his clothes. Man, I really need to save more women from whippings.
-When she’s done sewing up his jacket, she wraps the arms around herself, and then caresses the sleeves. Then wistfully sniffs the armpits of the jacket? Although I find this scene disturbing, I am at least glad that she didn’t start off by mending his underwear.
-He brought her a bridal gown. Did he fish that out of the sewer? And speaking of his sewer job, I bet Rat is happy now that he can look up skirts as much as he wants to without the threat of getting dumped in a river of shit by a smug jerk-off.
-Before she’ll marry this abusive shithead, she wants him to say that he loves her. He talks for a minute without a text screen, so its unclear what’s happening, then after thirty seconds these words appear: “I can’t say it. It would be too silly.” If someone woke me up with bacon and coffee, I would tell them their shit smelled like roses, even if I thought that was a silly thing to say.
-We’re an hour into the film and I think she just got a name: Diane. Although maybe her uncle called her by her name before he called her a slut and walked out of her life for good, I can’t remember.
-Apparently she equates the phrase “Chico + Diane = Heaven” with “I Love You”, although I’d say it’s much closer to “Me Tarzan, You Jane”.
-Regardless, he refuses to repeat it when she asks him to. This man won’t even trade three measly words for a lifetime of free haircuts.
-”Hell no we won’t be married in no Church, lady! God can suck a fat one!”
-But wait - will the magical medallions the priest gave him, which he just sat on for no reason, change his mind?
-Mario walks in again. Apparently she is also now cooking for Mario and his wife. This woman was built to be a doormat like a T Rex was built to be a killing machine.
-Huh. I have no idea why war broke out, but apparently, according to a poster they are showing, it did. (Incidentally, they are reading the poster from his 7th floor apartment, even though it is attached to a telephone pole at eye level.) The one thing this movie was lacking so far was the salvation of so many Private Ryans, so this development can only be for the best.
-While Diane is giving soup to Mrs. Mario, Mario explains that the regiment Chico and Mario are in (obviously all street sweepers are in the same regiment) is leaving within the hour. But can he really start a new job on an hour’s notice if a Priest doesn’t hand him a magic job ticket first? That seems dubious to me.
-Two minutes of un-translated talking later, and Chico has been convinced that he must go “defend our women”. I’m curious as to what Mario said that convinced him; did he point out that if left unchecked, their absinthe fueled enemy would take a whip to every defenseless human in the middle of their very own streets?
-Diane returns from giving Mario’s wife soup in her wedding dress. Chico looks apprehensive, then he says that he loves her. She says finally!, which is a funny response given that they’ve known each other 48 hours. She doesn’t seem to be questioning why he looks so unhappy.
-She says being happy is strange, and that it hurts. The faces she’s making to illustrate happiness tell me that this actress knows the emotion about as well as Jack Skellington understood Christmas in the Nightmare Before Christmas.
-The army marches past, and like a rat drawn to the Pied Piper, Chico realizes he must go. Fortunately he has an entire military uniform already stored in a dresser.
-He says he’s afraid. Her response is to throw back all the bullshit he’s been telling her this whole time about only looking up and never being afraid. Its hard to read her emotions with her eyebrows being so random and super-wiggly, but I don’t think she said that as sarcastically as I would have.
-Now that she’s met Chico, she, too, is a remarkable fellow. She cradles his head to her bosom and cries.
-Doin’ it seems imminent, although the way Chico is waltzing her around and failing at making out, I’m not sure he knows how. Somewhere her uncle is weeping and throwing rumpled money on the ground.
-Uh oh! Magically priestly medallions are strategically seen. Doin’ it ain’t happenin’.
-He just said that he might be an atheist but it might be time to give God one more chance. Boning is definitely off the menu now.
-They put the medallions on each other, which now officially makes them married. I think the cops knew what they were doing when they forced these two to pursue a retarded ruse. I bet 90% of hole in the socks marriages come from trying to outwit the cops by actually doing the thing you said you had already done on the spur of the moment as a cover story.
-Mario comes through the window again, too late to help be a witness, but early enough to cockblock the best part of the wedding night. They have fifteen minutes to obey that poster that just got put up in the middle of the night. That is one hell of an effective poster.
-Before Chico leaves his new bride, he promises that every day at 11 am he will come to her. I did not know he had the powers of an incubus.
-The sister magically reappears at the door before it can even be shut after Chico’s exit. Yet somehow the two of them do not see each other? Or did they see each other and agree that the sister is welcome at Chico’s house whenever? I hear that dangling people over an open sewer was notorious for making people fast friends in old France.
-The sister steals Diane’s medallion, which I think officially annuls the marriage. She also refers to Chico as “her sewer man”, which is awesome, because until now I hadn’t realized that Chico is basically the Phantom of the Opera.
-An epic catfight ensues which leaves Diane with the whip. She pretends to use the whip about as well as I play air guitar, which is to say, with an excess of enthusiasm but a complete dearth of reality.
-The next title screen warns of a “tidal wave of death rolling relentlessly down upon Paris”. The Frenchmen must really be incompetent if they’ve been at war for two hours and already the “gray coated armies that stretch halfway across Europe” are already knocking on the gates of their capital.
-Two guys in a shop create a map of the war in France using bread for the enemy and sugar cubes for the French. A fat dirty man steals a few things from the store while their backs are turned, then decides to leave everything else in the store alone and to steal the bread off their map. Then he spills everything he grabbed on the floor and puts the few sugar cubes he did manage to keep in his hat, which he then puts back on his greasy head. Oceans 11 it ain’t.
-The fat man shows up to Mario’s apartment to give the food to Mrs. Mario and Diane. Sugar cubes fall everywhere when Diane removes his hat. This is truly the best way to illustrate how the horror of war hits those on the home front the hardest.
-Every man and every car in Paris has been ordered to the front. Somewhere Talouse Latrec is cursing.
-Even though the poster mobilized everyone within fifteen minutes, they waited long enough to march the soldiers out of town that the soldier’s wives having begun stealing food to survive. This problem is solved by two minutes of shots of people sitting on top of cars that are driving towards the front.
-Suddenly Mrs. Mario has a baby which she didn’t before. These are the only people in the world who probably actually have offspring using storks. (Update: this baby will never be seen again. What is it with this film and disappearing babies? Is there some secret Parisian orphan black market I don’t know about? I don’t remember that from Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities, and that seems like the sort of thing he’d have mentioned.)
-Apparently just the sight of the French army in their commandeered taxi cabs is enough to make the Germans retreat. I guess the Germans hadn’t really thought this whole going to war thing through if they didn’t expect the French to show up eventually. Or is it that they are scared of taxi cabs?
-All the shooting makes the fat greasy man angry. He rips open his vest in an animal rage. He’s like Wolverine, except without claws and the alcohol ravaged nose of W.C. Fields.
-When the fat man’s cab and everyone next to it is blown up by canons, he cries for the cab and squeezes its horn sadly a few times, which is the only appropriate way to mourn a car.
-Now Diane has been forced to work in a sweatshop? That’s news to me. She tells a Colonel “I wish you wouldn’t come around here”, even though he appears to be her boss and that is a weird thing to say to your boss. He replies: “Listen to me, Diane, the world is upside down. Ideals, traditions, beliefs - all in discard.” This war, which has lasted less than ten minutes, has lasted so long that France has turned into a nation of nihilists.
-Apparently that is the Colonel’s idea of a pick up line. He asks to take care of Diane. Even though that is no less random than how she met her actual husband (and by actual husband I mean weird misogynist she pretend married in the seventh floor cubby hole where Anne Frank hid), this offends her deeply.
-Her idea of a comeback to being hit upon is to say “Chico fights at the front. I fight in this munitions factory. The important thing is that we all fight shoulder to shoulder.” Will this Colonel realize how many double entendres he can make about fighting shoulder to shoulder? That seems like it could segue into two-backed-beasts pretty easily.
-No, he just goes to watch what the other ten women in the entire factory are doing.
-At the war front, Rat comes up and strokes Chico’s new medals. Creepy.
-More food thievery. I knew France’s food is well regarded, but I didn’t know their food theft was also so remarkable.
-Halfway through his chicken leg, Chico realizes its time to mind-talk to his wife, which he must do in total solitude.
-Her shift at the munitions factory doesn’t require her to be there at 11 am? Weird. Why did they even have her make shells? Did they put that whole part in there just to remind me of the Simpsons joke where Mr Burns says “Like Schindler I made shells for the Nazis, but mine worked, damnit!”
-Chico goes to all the trouble of mind talking to her and all he can say is “Chico. Diane. Heaven.” That is one helluva waste of psychic abilities. Why does he talk to his wife like he was trying to communicate to an ape in sign language?
-Next title card: “Day after Day, Year After Year…” Didn’t all of the Krauts retreat already?
-More double entendres, as Chico tells Rat “We’ll fight fire with fire. Mario and I have handled the hose before.” By this he means that he is part of the firefighter’s brigade, which is exactly like being a street sweeper, in that setting other human beings on fire is exactly like using a pressurized stream of water to knock rags into sewers for some light-deprived asshole to fish out later using a pitchfork.
-The more battle scenes we see, the more this movie feels like a random assembly of stock footage that somehow all features the same people. Ed Wood’s chances of winning an Oscar would have been a lot better in 1927 than they were in the 50s, apparently.
-Chico is stuck in no mans land overnight, which doesn’t bother him as much as the fact that his watch has stopped does. How will he know when its time to think the same three retarded words in the general direction of his simpleton wife, whom he has never slept with and apparently hasn’t seen in years?
-This problem does not bother Rat, who has crawled to no man’s land with a keg of wine, which he is trying to shotgun. This makes Rat the only likeable character in the whole damn movie.
-Rat saves Chico from a bayonetting, which Diane psychically knows about. The creepy sexual harassment Colonel is nonplussed and tells her to get back to work making shells. Doesn’t he realize that magical realism is so, so romantic?
-Apparently Chico is dying? He’s giving the marriage medallion to someone else. As he is on his deathbed I hope he is comforted by the knowledge that God let him be a street sweeper for two inexplicable days.
-His final words are “very - remarkable - fellow” apparently. Anyone whose last words are a self-high-five sucks.
-Sexual harassment Colonel is sent to deliver the news of Chico’s death, despite the fact that he was not at the front and has a factory to run. He finally tells her (and us) whether Chico was his first or last name, and what his other name is. (His full name is Chico Robas.)
-Diane smiles and walks away. She knows Chico is still alive. Maybe she’s still getting thought telegrams? Is it possible to impersonate someone’s dead husband in a thought telegram? I guess it would be kind of easy since all her husband ever said to her was three words; it would probably be harder to fool Abraham Lincoln’s wife, because his thought telegrams would probably be more verbose and specific to his speech patterns. Also because she was sitting next to him when he got assassinated.
-Mario reappears. Tellingly, he has an empty sleeve. Also, the front of one side of his shirt is oddly shaped and too large.
-Mario tells her to believe the colonel when he says that Chico is dead. Not because Mario was in the foxhole and watched him die, mind you, even though that happened, but because it’s the government saying so, and you have to believe the government.
-I bet the Sexual Harassment Colonel is torn by Mario’s argument. On the one hand he wants Diane to believe Chico is dead. On the other hand, he believes that in these times all beliefs are to be abandoned, so appealing to the truthiness of the government probably doesn’t hold much water with him.
-The priest appears, holding the medal. Now she believes that Chico is dead. The Priest is probably very busy if he has to watch every French soldier die and then take all of their belongings back to their loved ones, magic medallion by magic medallion.
-She says that if he could have died without her psychically knowing it, then the whole magic-mind talking thing must have been all fiction. Specifically, she says: “Then he didn’t come every day. Then he never came at all.” Which is a fitting description of their years long but 100% sexless marriage.
-The fat man barges in Kramer style to tell a room full of people who were at the front yesterday who just wandered away on personal business that the armistice has been signed and that the war is over.
-Now everyone is cheering, except for a sad Diane. Will the movie end with her accepting her dead husband’s atheism? God I hope so.
-The Priest sees what she’s thinking and tells her to knock it off. Well, fuck.
-Yes! She’s using her newfound spine to tell the Priest to eat a bag of dicks! (That is not what the title card says but for that one scene I can read lips.)
-And…. suddenly Chico is not dead? WTF. Maybe he was just faking that invisible wound to get out of the war, before he knew it was going to end the next day anyway.
-Chico starts walking up the staircase, which used to be a regular staircase but now that we are looking down at it is a spiral staircase. Diane swoons into the arms of the Colonel, who promises to take care of her. I sense some upcoming Odyssey action with bows, arrows and dead suitors.
-Chico arrives. Instead of hugging him, she falls to her knees in front of him in blowjob position. Diane, I hate to break it to you, but the Priest is still watching.
-He claims to have been hit by every shell ever made and he also claims that he will never die. That is the exact sort of thumb in the face of God hubris that turned Dracula into an undead nightmare in Bram Stoker’s book.
-Now that her dead husband is back from the dead, she can believe in God again, at least until the next time he fakes his death to get out of doing something for one day longer, at which point she will be a nihilist again. (This makes me think that she might actually be a bitter fit with the Colonel, who as far as I can tell, has never rubbed an onion all over her face or told her that she was wretched garbage to her face.)
-Oh, he’s not dead. He’s just blind. Yet somehow he walked unassisted from the war front back to his own apartment in the same amount of time it took the entire city to get news that the war was over? And what kind of battlefield medic can’t tell the difference between someone who is blind and someone who is dead? Why didn’t he know the difference for that matter - he’s the one who gave away his necklace. And how did he get blinded in no man’s land in the middle of a flame thrower charge without any damage to his face? I am so glad I only have two minutes left of this movie.
-He says that his eyes are still filled with her. Creepy. She promises to be his seeing eye dog, more or less. Gross.
-He tells her that she won’t have to worry about his blindness for long. Nothing can keep Chico blind for long, because he is a very remarkable fellow! Jesus, the ego on this guy. I wish they’d cut to a reaction shot of the Colonel rolling his eyes and doing the international gesture for wanking off, but they don’t.
-Then a ray of sunlight highlights both of them… but its not coming from the side of the apartment which has the windows in it, which means that in all of his infinite generosity, God has decided to to give the unemployed blind guy the proper welcome home of knocking a hole in his roof.
-And we’re out. Oh my, how I am ready to be out.

Wow. Five cartoons in the last three months. I’m really slowing down, enh?

I’ve actually had a few ideas for cartoons but no energy to make them. Its sad because when I do sit down to work on one it takes me way longer; I’ve lost a lot of the drawing ability I built up through repetition. I feel rusty and the finished images feel less satisfactory to me.

Still, my movie project is going well and I hope to put more cartoons up here soon.