Suicide Owl

Cool Birds Don't Look at Explosions:

Suicide Owl is another character for our hypothetical family web comic that my younger son hatched during our long morning subway ride to school. I was not able to extract many details about this owl, besides the fact that he is a Barn Owl and wears bandoliers filled with bullets.

My older son has been very taken with the trailers for the upcoming movie "Suicide Squad," and has insisted that we watch it with him. I asked his younger brother whether perhaps this owl has some relationship to the Suicide Squad. He said no and seemed annoyed by my suggestion that the character might be derivative.

Lacking any other details or character information, I decided to put an explosion behind the owl, because, you know, everyone looks much cooler when backlit by an explosion. While idly googling for an appropriate explosion image, I tripped over the "Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions" meme.  Think about the many scenes in  movies and TV where the badass guy (almost always a guy) walks calmly away from a fireball without looking back, flinching, or apparently, getting any shrapnel in the back. ( Buzzfeed has a compilation.)

And, like so many other things, I missed the point of origin for the title of the trope. The  "Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions" song was performed by Andy Samberg(as Bruce Springstein), Will Ferrell (as Neil Diamond) and J.J. Abrams (as himself wearing a weird shirt) at the 2009 MTV movie awards and features many clips of of cool guys ignoring conflagrations if one is willing to sit through the video.

The Suicide Owl should be at least as cool as Wolverine, the Joker or Jason Bourne..... so his feathers probably won't catch on fire.

(We've had a few background explosions here on the napkins... although not as many as I thought. Perhaps I have missed a few.)

Battle Bears Coco Loco Huggable

Any picture can be improved by adding a cool explosion.

My older son told me yesterday, "please no more Star Wars and dinosaurs napkins!"  He said, "I know they are good drawings, but I don't want any more!" I did note the compliment buried in there. But I am aware that the kids are always happier when I draw cartoon characters exactly the way that they look on the TV show or the video game.

The "Coco Loco" is one of the Battle Bears "skins" for the Huggable. I drew it just the way it looks on the Battle Bears Wiki.

I did nonetheless indulge in some creative license with the background explosion.

Liō and Stitch

Intergalactic troublemakers separated by only one letter:

There can never be enough of the Liō comic as far as my kids are concerned.  Our Liō books are constantly off the shelf and in backpacks, in beds or generally underfoot. Mark Tatulli's strip is mostly wordless (I see that the official term is "pantomime") and follows the adventures of a little boy as he hangs out with pet monsters, zombies and aliens.  Punchlines are often macabre and sometimes involve mass destruction. 

It seemed like he would have plenty in common with Stitch, another one of my kids' favorite creators of mayhem.  I briefly considered drawing them blowing up the moon together, but decided to put them in space with a less disturbing explosion.

Just in case you are not the parent of Disney-saturated kids and are wondering about the "separated by one letter" statement above: "Lilo and Stitch" was both the title of the first Stitch movie and the ensuing TV series.

....And yes, of course the idea for this image was generated by my sleep deprived brain being unable to distinguish between the words Lilo and Liō. 

Kung Fu Hedgehog

We recently spent an afternoon at a local paint your own made-in-china slipcast ceramic tchotchkes shop. Ansel painted a red headband on a cartoony cute hedgehog and dubbed it "Kung fu hedgehog." For whatever reason, "Kung Fu Panda" was never a huge success with our kids, but now the Kung fu hedgehog concept is just hysterically adorable.

I borrowed a Bruce Lee pose and backdrop although the kids don't really know Mr. Lee from, well, a hedgehog.

Secret Agent Guy Who Is Not Tom Cruise

Ansel wanted me to put a guy that he has been drawing lately on today's napkin: a sort of Robinish person dressed in black with dark glasses that he calls the Secret Agent Guy.  He wanted me to work from one drawing in particular- a very large one done on a white board in our apartment.  He told me to be sure to add the sunglasses because he had mistakenly left them off because the hair was in the way.

I am not sure exactly what is going on with the second character on the right in his drawing.  I think he is a bad guy and that the stuff around his head is a result of receiving a punch from the Agent (stars and birds or such)  Is he farting an evil green fart also?  I did not ask.

My version ended up looking very Cruise/Mission Impossible, which was certainly not my goal.  I had briefly considered looking for something Mission Impossible like for the background, but instead borrowed the cliche macho action hero background explosion from Wolverine's movie.  Ansel does not even know of the existence of the MI movies yet, nor of Mr. Cruise for that matter.