Cartoon Studio
Welcome to the Cartoon Studio of Michael the Mouse
The point of this section I think is to give you a glimpse of things I'm working on.
About Me
I suppose I ought to tell you a little about me - Michael the Mouse. I'm not Mickey Mouse. I don't even look like him or like his work very much, but people do assume things. If I had his money, do you think I'd be living in a small hole like this? No, I'd have a hole as big as Invercargill. Now that's a real hole.
Influences
I always wanted to to draw comic books and I'd have to say that after all this time the best ever drawn are still the old Asterix books. It's a shame that the industry is so formulaic. I search for something special but do not find.
As a youngster, I also had a subscription to Buster comic which was also good. The work of Ken Reid always had a special magic.
Gilbert Shelton's Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers are fun and Robert Crumb was cool in that he had complete artistic freedom, underground and uncensored and at his best he drew stories like the Death of Fritz the Cat. He also found visions I consider spiritual insights into the world such as seeing us turning into men with big feet and small heads stomping smaller people. I see many guys who snigger like Mr Snoid as if their conscience is always bubbling up and overflowing their delusions of domination and leadership they work so hard to brainwash themselves with in their self-affirmation double-think exercises in the mirror, making their eyes water with uncontrollable gloating paroxysms that say "I know something you don't about my plans for you".
But in a sense he was censored by a peer pressure of the scene he was in, assimilating him into the corruption, just the way The Man wanted him to be, drawing the same old images of violent sexual decapitation (just like Hollywood terror movies only less stupid). I wouldn't be able to show much of his work to children without feeling guilty and having to explain to them that back then, people were searching for new answers to life blah blah and sometimes making mistakes, taking too much drugs and um, how do you explain why a person would get excited by lopping a breast off with a meat cleaver? If that were natural and healthy, of course all the females would be in body bags and there would be no human race. I just have to remember to hide my R. Crumb comics with my stash of Playboys (which I need for life drawing purposes of course).
Picasso's Bulls
Picasso once drew a sequence of eleven bulls that became successively caricatured. I've created a little animation of them, below. I hope you like them. I think bull four is rather a handsome bull.
A Fibonacci Sequence of rectangles
The following is a bit of fun, and as they get bigger, these rectangles approach a perfect golden rectangle which renaissance artists considered perfectly æsthetically pleasing.
|
8
13 |
13
21 |
21
34 |
34
55 |
55
89 |
89
144 |
144
233 |
233
377 |
Dinner at the Sullivans'
This cartoon was inspired by the music world. The only thing they seem to teach at music schools nowadays is that "only the self-promotion matters". I get that from music graduates, some of them more qualified than me, so it must be true, right? Basically, to be a musician, you have to throw any musical skills you ever had out the window to rush out to become a self-salesman from Hell - but hang on, didn't you just throw your wares out the window? Doesn't matter. Ya gotta jostle and pose and drink with the right people in the scene, lying any line to take and rape and take.
It's a wall of sycophancy you gotta to bash your head against and if it isn't working for you, you simply "aren't working hard enough". Music itself, you see, is just a tinkering with toys, not hard work (Remember also that classical music is run by the same record companies and ticket sellers, so it's no better, just less honest about it).
The trouble is, it makes you as obnoxious as all Hell, so if you then do get your ugly face on the tv, you CERTAINLY won't be one of the few that break even, not after all the middle-men have taken their million bucks of payola and "independent" promotion. You simply need a rich daddy to be impervious to the desperation. There aren't many honest jobs at all, let alone ones with a spare time to make music in.