Memories
I admit to being a fan of movies about the Old West. I don’t watch them from a cowhide armchair in a room decorated like a Montana steakhouse or anything, but I enjoy the genre. There are definitely good and bad ones, though.
When my longstanding good buddy, Cliff Harris, tossed me this pun idea, I immediately thought of the movie poster from The Alamo, produced and directed by none other than John Wayne. A quick Internet search brought it up and I suddenly realized that, even though I love these kinds of movies, I’d not seen this one since I was a child, probably about ten years after its release in 1960. I liked it then, would I like it now?
No, I would not.
Aside from having enough historical inaccuracies to embarrass even Mel Gibson, it’s just a poor script and a lot of cardboard performances. Don’t get me wrong, I watched the entire thing and thoroughly enjoyed the badness of it, but in my humble opinion, John Wayne was not particularly talented at being anything other than John Wayne, whom, lucky for him, moviegoers happened to like. Put him behind the camera, though, and you’ve got a Trump-in-the-Whitehouse kind of situation, except people don’t die because of it.
Anyway, I enjoyed diving into the old movie poster (below) as reference for this cartoon. As a young artist of perhaps 12, I was fascinated by this kind of realistic illustration style and hoped with all my might that I’d one day be able to draw and paint that well. After five decades of daily practice, I can now smile at the low bar I was setting for myself. (Not that my cartoon is better than the poster—you can’t really compare different genres like that. I only mean that I now see that the poster illustration isn’t as great as I thought it was as a kid.)
I confessed above that I enjoy the Old West as a film genre, and that’s likely very obvious to anyone who is following my graphic novel, Peyote Cowboy. In the writing stage, I tried to be fairly historically accurate about most things but I quickly realized how much more I know about the Hollywood version of the Old West than I do about its actual history. But since my story is in the style of magic realism, the accuracy isn’t important enough to the plot to warrant pausing the project while I go off and become a historian of the American Old West, so I’m galloping forth half-cocked, to mix a metaphor martini. In fact, in many ways, my story actually plays off the familiar Hollywood tropes, and so taking a step away from that would necessarily diminish some of the fun.
I’m posting Peyote Cowboy serially as I illustrate it, posting one episode each week, and it’s free to anyone with Internet access. I’m not too far into it yet, so there’s still time to catch up in just a few minutes. Sign up here for an email alert when I post a new episode. Go here if you’d like to see me on video describing how the story came to me. (scroll down a bit once you get there)
I know I natter on a lot about this but I really can’t accurately express how thrilling this project has been for me and how much I’m enjoying sharing it with folks.
Equally difficult to express is what a wonderful partner Wayno has been in Bizarro! Let’s see what delectables he has left for us in the cartoon cookie jar this week, Jazz Pickles…
Do you recognize the album in his hands? If so, you might be an audiophile like Wayno, or, as he puts it, a “music nerd”. Wayno is definitely that and he’s got lots of interesting backstory about this cartoon. Have a look at Wayno’s weekly cartoon blog post but don’t forget to come back!
For those of you cutting these cartoons out and pasting them in a scrapbook, label this one #36 in the Chimps With Difficult Questions series.
I’m guessing there are some peyote cactuses in the area.
I can’t help but wonder about that picture on the wall.
Do NOT even ask what’s in those to-go cups.
Over on Wayno’s weekly blog post about this batch, he reports that the Dutch word for glove (handschoen) actually translates to “hand shoe”. One of my fave things about Spanish is that the word for “toe” translates to “finger of the foot”.
Well, Jazz Pickles, the cartoon turnip truck has come to the end of the road and we’ve all fallen off. Thanks for riding along with the rest of us rubes. If you like our work and want to help us keep doing it, please consider having a look at some of the links below.
Until next time, buena suerte amigos!
BIZARRO SHOP We have new stuff in the shop that’s fun and cheap!
…King Features Subscription + archive access
…Signed, numbered, limited edition prints and original Bizarro panels