I went outside to look at lightning last night (Wednesday). Another picture I have been fiddling with for a few months yet vexes me, and I thought I would try something simpler. One character, no interaction, no complex objects to put in proper perspective. Easy? I can make an undending, confounding ordeal out of anything!

I subsequently felt bad about leaving that elpse out in the thunderstorm in such an alarmed state that it transformed into an armadillo.

Thus to ease the situation, without so much thought that I risked another disaster, I drew a fresh elpse. But something just out of view seems to be upsetting elpse. Is it you? What are you doing? Whatever it is, please cut that out! I think elpse has had a difficult day.

Oh, so much to say. Which means I cannot focus enough to say any of it.
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Only Spider-Man, or Scooby Doo.
Gosh can I think of a more absurd and inexplicable cross-over?

Scooby Doo Wrestlemania Family. This seems absurd, but it fits in perfectly with our culture of pretending we are beyond the advertainment of previous decades while continuing to engage in it. This may even be less synergistic than John Cena’s previous subject, since this does not also involve a cereal company. I assume this film ends with Fred pulling off Rey Mysterio’s mask to reveal he was Oscar Gutierrez all along.

Upon further reflection, I must consider that these things are so self-referential now that some mask-related remarks are almost certainly in the script.

Purplespace, in a comment, reminded me about The New Scooby Doo Movies series named such due to the hour-long length of the episodes (and you can be certain those have enough action and plot development to fill a whole 10 minutes). I had forgotten about the precedent set there, although in that situation the guest stars were usually out of place, since their professions were typically not conducive to scooby-doing. The Gang would be at a carnival or an undersea research laboratory and then suddenly “Hey gang, look! It’s Laurel and Hardy! Even though they’ve been dead for 30 years!” Or maybe just Hardy was dead, assuming he is the fat one. They certainly were not an ACT at that point.

I assume Scooby Doo at Wrestlemania involves meeting branded, living wrestlers employed specifically by the WWE at the time the film was made. Andre the Giant and Ludwig Borga won’t just be standing around waiting to be invited to help solve a mystery that has nothing to do with wrestling or promoting Vince McMahon’s current whims.

In fact this film is a decade and a half overdue; I thought it was a joke, but Space Jam was big money, right? I don’t know why there weren’t more weird mergers of old style white people cartoons with new-style not necessarily race-exclusionary sporting culture. Apart from all the weirdly-racist imagery in those old cartoons, naturally. Scooby Doo is not known to be racist and The World Wrestling Ederfation also has that potential, so maybe this is progress in the realm of high profile athletic competition/ half century old animation franchise crossover. Suddenly thinking about Space Jam has caused me to ponder that yet again now that Scooby Doo at Wrestlemania seems sane and sound by comparison.

If you are less than familiar, Space Jam is about the classic Looney Tunes characters (Daffy Duck, Gabby Goat, Benito Mussolini, et ar) challenging tiny space aliens to a regulation non-tune, non-alien basketball game with the fate of all mankind at stake (obviously; why play at all otherwise?) and then getting Michael Jordan’s help to win the game when the aliens suddenly became much taller, indicating inherent prowess at transferring balls to baskets. It made no sense, but people treated it like it was normal, and it made a few hundred millions of dollars in profit. It did so well that its lone billed human, Michael Jordan, appeared in advertising for MCI, a totally unrelated telephone company that he already had an advertising contract with, beside the looney tune characters for years afterward. It no longer even mattered that Jordan was the most dominant, well known basketball player, if not general sports-man in the world. He was just some man who talked to Tweety Bird on a yellow cartoon telephone from inside an adobe illustrator document.

The first few ads had him open with an aside to the camera “MCI Five cent Sundays helps me keep up with my Space Jam buddies,” and apparently that was supposed to be enough explanation. Let us not debate whether he means Space Jam the movie or Space Jam the incident or even Space Jam the fruit paste preferred by astronauts*, because he didn’t even mention space jam after that.

There was no need to say “by the way, I, Michael Jordan, a basketball player, am talking to these cartoon animals with heads three times the size of mine who do not play basketball –and oddly enough, men with guns who want to kill them– about telephone service because a previous media spectacle established that we know each other and the topic of their hunter-prey relationship does not come up.” That at least one of these spots showed Jordan playing golf instead was not strange enough by that point to stand out. He got 2 million dollars a year to do those ads that made no sense. When the renamed, post-merger MCI variant Worldcom filed for bankruptcy 2 years before the end of Michael Jordan’s contract, he sued the company for the 4 million dollars from ads he wasn’t even going to make. That could have been, gosh, 6 more minutes sitting on a green foam block recliner pretending Elmer Fudd is telling him about great weekend calling rates. It is a wonder they stayed in business considering their customers were only paying five cents for each.

The writing and voice work are, of course, horrible. I am so accustomed to associating those traits with Looney Tunes produced in my lifetime that I almost forgot it was worth mentioning. To his credit, Jordan makes every effort to be as watered-down and dull as they are so to not make them look bad. Mr. Jordan, we are giving you two million dollars. The least you can do is SELL this performance. You need to act like you really don’t care that a giant rooster doing an impression of a radio character your fans’ grandparents probably don’t even remember is in your grass-floored apartment. The sound of that depressed iris-wipe at the end will haunt me for years.

Anyway I think there is a great deal of potential here.

Howdy. I’m John Cena, muscular famous person and part time parasitic twin. Verizon’s pay-as-you go plan helps me keep up with the Flintstones and Scooby Doo, even though they live in different time periods from each other and are less plausible than my finishing moves. Also if you make less calls than you prepaid for you still need to make a minimum monthly payment so you might as well get a normal calling plan. Yumdinger fruity pebbles support the troops.

*I lifted that line in its entirety from this 2003 page because nobody is ever going to read it again. Since that time I have still not seen Space Jam. I had an opportunity to view it in 199x but declined because it seemed like such a ludicrous idea. These days I thrive on ludicrous ideas, now that all my opportunities to get good use from them have passed, and I feel inclined to seek out and view the film. If it kills me, this message is here to explain what happened.

page 2 of part 3 of this is now available. In fact it has been available for a few days but I was trying to implement a new website for reasons that will probably not amount to anything.

I had not designated the beginning of part 3 as that when I did it, but I do not expect another good beginning point in the near future and I imagine it is good to have one now and then.

The new display system is sort of working. It is now possible to remark on individual pages and for me to upload bigger pages that will be reduced to fit smaller viewspaces without causing scrollbars. That may not be necessary, but I spend much of my life seeking out the least-necessary things to do.

And did I not say it would be the last real-inked drawing last time? Maybe I will mean it this time.
I had to give it in and start drawing on it in photoshop with blendy color mode on. Staying inside lines I was not totally sure of seemed silly, and having to make new lines seemed wasteful when it would be easier and look better to simply use colors. In a sense I reneged on my renege. I rereneged. Or perhaps I merely neged.

I tried out having bigger drawings, also. I am not certain it is an improvement. The nemitz-half in the large drawing looks especially pummel-worthy, however, which is always important for me to maintain. However, this passage is ultimately irrelevant. Maybe when I am dead somebody else can “arrange” the drawings I did so that they are more functional and meaningful, like Rimsky-Korsakov did with Night on Bald Mountain, originally composed by someone whose name I forgot. That will be me, the person everyone forgets or never knows to begin with.

I draw in my sketch-book a great quantity of dumb beasts and imps just loafing about, since I ran out of ideas years ago. Here are two of them that do not belong together placed as if they do. You may freely make up your own story because I probably will not!

Oh what’s that? No time to stop. I have to transport this stupid meeply animal in its personal private basket. All it probably does is meep! It probably meeps all day every day. And I have little doubt that it is EXTREMELY stupid.
This reminds me of a drawing I made long ago showing a full sized person holding a tiny camel in one hand while saying “the world’s smallest camel!” The camel said “Yoderhunt.” That is just the noise that camel makes. The meeply creature the camel was being displayed to exclaimed “my name is Yoderhunt!” Not impressed that the camel is the smallest in the world, only that it could say yoderhunt. It has nothing to do with the picture I showed today but I hope you will agree that I was reminded of it regardless, and that it is too dumb to draw twice or spend the whole day scouring my various sketchbooks in search of.

I already took a picture of THIS, though. When I searched my hard drive for reproduced camel drawings out of sketchbooks I found no others. It is almost stupider! Why does it exist? Why did I make certain to digitally preserve this? What did I think I would use this for? I will never put this anywhere!