Austin Kleon

WORKING ASS BACKWARDS

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Most cartoonists wait til the final stage of their process to pull out the ink and the brush.  Not me.  I like to get out the brush early in the morning, and do my rough sketches in sloppy ink.  There’s something about the brush, the way it can cover a lot of surface in a really short period of time, that helps free me up and go wild.

These are a couple preliminary sketches for an album cover I’m going to do.  They’re probably stupid things to post, because they’re so abstract you can barely tell what’s going on…but what the hell.  It’s November.

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A HALLOWEEN TREAT: GHOULARDI SAYS, “STAY SICK! TURN BLUE!”

“As I got older…I kept thinking, ‘What is this Ghoulardi thing? What is it? What? What?’ We went back to Cleveland once when I was 14 and we were mobbed at the airport by people chanting ‘Ghoulardi! Ghoulardi!’ And when I do interviews anywhere in the country, constantly, constantly, people who are enamored of my father or who grew up with him bring him up or even thank me for Ghoulardi!”

– PT Anderson, interview with the Toledo Blade, 2000

WMFU’s Beware of The Blog! beat me to the punch:

Cleveland’s most legendary horror host was unmistakably Ghoulardi. He was only on the air for about three years (63-66), but he left an indelible impression. His real name was Ernie Anderson, and after retiring Ghoulardi, he moved to Hollywood and become a legendary voice-over artist (he was the voice of The Love Boat, the Carol Burnett Show, and pretty much every top 40 radio station). He is also the father of none other than director Paul Thomas Anderson, who pretty much based the Philip Baker Hall character in Magnolia on him.

But most importantly, Ghoulardi used that booming, commanding voice to unleash an anarchistic spirit. Rather than just play bad movies and make jokes, he began setting up blue screens and dropping in random images over the top of the film, or making strange noises over the soundtrack. And things weren’t any better outside of the movie, where his set could be pure chaos. He was topical, he was funny as hell, he was just plain weird, he WAS the counterculture invading the average middle-American’s television. Nobody that saw a Ghoulardi show ever forgot it, and in a way he shaped the weird climate of Cleveland in the late 60s and early 70s. David Thomas of Pere Ubu was one of his disciples and describes watching his show as such:

“Everyone who saw Ghoulardi will tell a favorite story – like the night he set off a egregiously large home-made explosive device sent it by a fan – he was always setting off fireworks and blowing up things in the studio – and quite clearly off-camera crew were telling Ghoulardi not to light it up and you could see people running across the studio, the camera abandoned to skew off balance, pointing at the floor, and then the entire room was stunned senseless for some minutes… live… smoke, curtains on fire, people stumbling around…”

Read more about Ghoulardi.

And of course I have to note that my future father-in-law (two months!) wrote the book on Ghoulardi (literally), and that you should buy it:

PAUL WAS AN APOSTLE, JUDAS WAS AN APOSTATE

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Greetings from GRE-studying hell! For the next two weeks, your humble entertainer will be busy learning obscure words. Words like “adumbrate,” “bedizen,” and “calumniate.” (He admits, he has only made it past the letter “C” in his Hit Parade.)

To keep his sanity, your humble entertainer will still be scratching and posting pretty pictures, and might even continue giving those pictures silly mnemonics titles, like: “chary is to be wary!,” “asperity is severity!,” and “a minister prone to cozen, a congregation hozen!”

And if text and links are what you’re looking for, go see Jessa at Bookslut. She’s been killin’ it lately.

COPYING

“I think copying someone’s work is the fastest way to learn certain things about drawing and line. It’s funny how there is such a taboo against it. I learned everything from just copying other people’s work.”

– Lynda Barry

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This is my copy of some of the panels from a 1930s Gasoline Alley strip that Frank King drew in the style of a woodcut. I superimposed my own characters. Supposedly, Chris Ware loved this particular strip so much that he tore the page out of the Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics book and had it mounted on the wall of his studio.

Mine’s a library copy, so I can’t go that far.

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