Baby Yoda Breastplate

Cringeworthy Pop Culture Combination:

(which seemed obvious to me... but my son promises we will lose even more followers than usual)

Now that I am more or less liberated from trying to make a small child happy at a school lunch by drawing on a napkin, I can focus on producing napkins that make adolescents cringe. 

Cringing is a term that is definitely compelling to the contemporary adolescent mind, compelling in a way that I can’t quite grasp. 

One of our sons eagerly follows “make me suffer” on reddit, which is definitely a cringe fest.

But nothing makes one suffer more than the embarrassing behavior of one’s parents during one’s adolescence. 

But, beyond tormenting my sons: let me be honest, when I saw the promotional materials for the upcoming Wonder Woman movie, featuring this fetishized, neon, 80’s style, close-up of the breastplate of her “Eagle Armor,” the universe whispered “Baby Yoda” in my ear. 

My apologies. Unfollow at will.

Deadpool Goes Full Winnie The Pooh

Deadpool Goes Full Winnie the Pooh

Amid the avalanche of pop culture references in Deadpool 2, there is a memorable one to the honey loving denizen of the hundred acre wood.

The reference comes up after Deadpool has been torn in half and is home regrowing his lower body as a pair of toddler legs with adjacent little kid anatomy.  Like the name checked bear, Wade is only wearing a shirt.  And there is also a “Basic Instinct” reference. I’ll leave it there.

Yes, so very inappropriate for family viewing.  That was the point of course.

But I find the display of male body parts in a mainstream movie in a non sexual (and non violent) context to be not entirely a bad thing. 

I realize this may not be a popular sentiment. There is a thicket of gender issues here that I will resist wading into today. But suffice it to say, while the Deadpool film franchise certainly prides itself on boundary pushing, it troubles me less than most R rated action movies as it is not so steeped in misogynistic imagery.

For the napkin, of course the pants had to be on, so the Pooh reference had to be shifted a bit....but the DeadPooh possibilities are there... My kids were not big Winnie the Pooh fans back in the day. (They preferred Curious George)

But, like most small children, they did enjoy reclining on the couch without pants. 

Easter Bunny Kaiju and Gypsy Avenger

Perhaps I was too busy prepping Easter eggs for the Sunday morning hunt to make the lapine Kaiju and giant robot on this napkin look....well...giant.

Or, maybe my subconscious just knew that they were action figure toys and not towering monsters.

After seeing “Pacific Rim Uprising” and “Ready Player One” in one week, I’m not sure I can handle spectating on (or even imagining) any more giant CGI robot/monster battles during the next few days. 

Laughing Unicorns from Gravity Falls and Star vs the Forces of Evil

Celestabellebethabelle and Pony Head share a laugh at how seriously uncool those non unicorn persons are.

“Star vs the Forces of Evil” has filled some of the “Gravity Falls” shaped hole in our younger son’s tv viewing heart.  

Both shows have a large and inventive cast of non human creatures (the Bearicorn and the Multi-Bear, to name only two examples)

And Unicorns.

Unicorns that might be described as the cool alpha girls of their respective environments.

When I was a preteen, (and definitely not an alpha girl) I loved drawing unicorns and rainbows, using every marker in the box. Now an aging crone, I just want an opportunity to draw startling yet anatomically correct horse teeth. 

Scooby The Venomous Bat Hound

I may have had a bit too much exposure to Scooby Doo last weekend.

My sons are almost always up for a viewing of a Scooby Doo movie. For those of you who are blissfully unaware of the developments in the Scooby Doo empire since the original television series in the late 60’s and 70’s, there has been a lot more since. 

A whole lot more.

There have been an endless number of films in recent years (and I am not talking about the live action remakes) Scoob and the gang have been paired with everything and everyone from LEGOs to Kiss, to Batman to the WWE. And more movies are coming all the time.

I can’t say we have watched all of them...but perhaps all of them that the kids know about.

It is not exaggerating to say that I loathed the show when I was a kid....yes back when the original series was being broadcast, I am that old. I particularly disliked the munchies-stricken Shaggy and his similarly scraggly chin haired dog. 

As a parent, I have come to mostly amicably tolerate those meddling kids. Mostly because, well, there are much worse things out there to watch. (Although I do detest the contemporary incarnations where Velma is dolled up. Or even worse, where she and Shaggy are a romantic couple.)

But after my younger son watched several Scooby movies back to back last weekend, I felt my old hatred come creeping back.

Thus we have a napkin with a evil looking Scooby (I had already drawn him with three heads as Cerebus, so I had to try something else.) 

I couldn’t just make him look malicious and get away with it, so I dressed him as Batman’s companion, Ace the Bat hound. Ace was my younger son’s obsession during his preschool years. 

I borrowed the composition and style from a

“Batman Venom” cover by José Luis García-López. This is a paperback that collects “Legends of the Dark Knight” issues 16-20 and tells the story of how Batman falls apart physically and morally while taking a performance enhancing drug... kind of like my state after watching too much Hanna Barbera. Just kidding.

(And check out how nicely the shell pattern on the napkin lines up with Scooby’s mouth, or don’t...I can’t reasonably expect anyone else to be interested in that sort of thing...)

Sith Plague Doctor

Plague Doctor Mask modeled by our soon to be 11 year old son.

Mask mostly fabricated by his glue gun incompetent mother from a patten by lostwaxoz.com.

Sith light saber courtesy of the Star Wars universe.

Pomeranian Cthulhu

"It seemed to be a sort of monster...of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive"

-H.P. Lovecraft

Our younger son still wants a dog, desperately...and it must be a Pomeranian despite shedding and allergy issues.

But perhaps a mixed breed?

Tentacles don't shed.

Cthulhu waits dreaming......

Skylanders Skyrim Mash up

Skyrimlanders. Or is it Skylandrim?

The younger set takes on The Elder Scrolls and Spyro the Dragon faces the Dovahkiin

Our sons might be too old for Skylanders, and technically too young for Skyrim. 

But we are all pretty confused at this point about what is age appropriate.  

Our older son claims that he has been playing Skyrim in a mod that turns all the dragons into Thomas the Tank Engine, but I have not personally observed this.

If there is one for Thomas, there should definitely be a Skylanders mod for the Elder Scrolls, but I don't know if such a thing exists. Although purple Spyro would seem to be the Barney of the Skyrim dragon universe. I considered drawing the "Dark Spyro" version of the character, where he looks more serious in black and silver. 

But I decided if I were going to mash up the two games that Spyro should be in his more colorful, child friendly form. 

Portuguese Water Dog

"I should have been a pair of ragged claws..."
Or just one big claw and a happy dog on a beach...

We had a lovely trip to a friend's house out on Long Island last week.
We got to hang out with his dog and see thousands of lopsided fiddler crabs scuttling around furiously (fleeing from us of course) on the tidal beach.

Not that the dog and the crabs were the only highlights of the trip.
In all honesty, the dog was not pleased to be on the beach on that particular day. And the crabs didn't want to hang out with us any day, ever.

But they were the only two features of the trip that I could readily combine into a silly drawing that somehow seemed appropriate to me. (Maybe just me?)

Thanks so much for letting us stay at your cool house Alex!

Actual Atlantic Marsh Fiddler Crabs (Uca Pugnax):
From the web, demonstrating the one oversize "cheliped" on the males:

And from my video of the mass crab flight from the scary humans:

Snake Clowns

Snake Clowns: More frightening even than family.

It was of course inevitable that we would see the Batman LEGO movie. I was surprised that we were able to wait a couple weeks to do so. My younger son and I did have an opportunity to see it earlier, but his older brother forbade us to see it without him. (So the younger brother and I had to go see "The Great Wall" instead. More on that later...if I have the fortitude)

Lego Batman is definitely worth seeing if you have had excessive exposure to all things Batman and Lego. It has a fine sense of humar about the Venn diagram intersection between the two fandoms: Adult Fans of LEGO meets Underage Fans of The Dark Knight. The movie is full of jokes both for people young enough to play with plastic bricks and people old enough to remember that "The Condiment King" was a real DC villain. That said, my kids, DC connoisseurs that they are, were already aware of Condiment King, but they seem to have aged out of actually playing with their collection of 10,000 Legos.

One of their favorite moments in the movie was the scene where Alfred tells Bat/Bruce that he has to overcome his worst fear. Bruce shoots back, "Snakes??!!" Then, "Clowns??!!" And finally, "Snake Clowns!!!" Alfred is talking about the fear of being part of a family again, but Batman retorts, "No, it's Snake clowns! And it's your fault for putting that idea in my mind!"

My rendition of snake clowns was not particularly successful, probably overly influenced by my uncomfortable childhood relationship with Bozo the Clown on TV...but perhaps they are a little bit more frightening than the LEGO version?

If you haven't seen the movie yet, you can watch the video clip where Batman reveals that his greatest fear is snake clowns, and that it is all Alfred's fault

Yogi Anchovy Member of the Mafiosi with Porky Porgie Welsh Corgi

One Fish, Two Fish....

Just when you thought I might be done with the PuppyMonkeyBaby drawing series....

I suppose it really should have been Yogi Bear's head rather than that of a spiritual leader, but I already used the cartoon bear's head in another drawing in the series, so I had to make do with a human....

And Anchovies are a lot smaller than Porgies, so the relative scale is not very accurate.

Robby Bobby Holly Hobbie Visits with Rosie Josie Bela Lugosi

Robot Romance:

Robby the Robot hails from the 1956 film "Forbidden Planet." When I started this drawing, I realized that I had confused "Robby"with the "Robot" in the 1960's TV show "Lost in Space" ("Danger Will Robinson!") Although, as it turns out, the two robots were designed by the same person.... and Robby made an appearance on "Lost in Space" battling the other Robot. (The many things one can discover on Wikipedia when one should be sleeping.) At any rate, perhaps it is not just my addled brain that has conflated the two.

I don't know if police officers in Great Britain are still commonly called "Bobbies." As long as I am wallowing in references from my childhood in the 1970's, I am going to guess that my first "Bobby" references date from my horrified viewing of "The Benny Hill" show, a smarmy vaudevillish sketch comedy show that, Wikipedia tells me, ran from 1955-1991 in 140 countries. I saw bits of a few episodes in the 1970's and, puritanical midwestern girl child that I was, found the Britishness peculiar and the heavy handed "double entendre" jokes totally appalling.

And then there is Holly Hobbie.  I found the Holly Hobbie character back in the 1970's rather appalling also, although for totally different reasons. Again, according to Wikipedia, the human artist and author Holly Hobbie sold the annoyingly cute, rag dress and giant bonnet wearing girl character that became known as Holly Hobbie to the American Greetings company back in the 1960's. The Holly Hobbie franchise was quite popular during my childhood, there were cards and dolls and dresses and a whole sort of style embraced by my peers, or perhaps by their mothers.  At the time, I thought any fashion that entailed the wearing of long patchwork dresses was bad news. Many years later, Holly Hobbie the human went on to author and illustrate the "Toot and Puddle" series of books which are really quite nice, so I have moved past my dislike of her namesake franchise.

As long as I am endlessly harping on my gender political hang-ups regarding 1960's and 70's pop culture... here we also have Rosie the Robot from "The Jetsons" (originally 1962-63) and Josie from "Josie and the Pussycats" (1970-1) These two shows troubled me during my childhood also, but I suspect I've already said enough on this topic for one post.

As far as I know, I did not have any childhood problems with Bela Lugosi's gender politics. His name just happened to rhyme.

The Harry Canaries

Harry•Canary•Woodland-Fairy and Harry•Canary•Little-House-on-the-Prairie
They don't look like they are feeling lucky.
(PuppyMonkeyBaby drawing #16)

An explanation starting with what is probably the most obscure element: the canary on the right is DC Comics' Black Canary. She was one of my favorite characters back when the kids were watching "Young Justice" despite being clad in a strapless top and no pants, More than just a screamer,  she was smart and somehow able to defeat Super Boy in hand to hand combat. Based on a Google search yesterday, I gather that Black Canary is also a character in the current TV show "Arrow." I borrowed the black jacket from that show as the blue blazer she wore in "Young Justice" looked a bit too much like it belonged with the Laura Ingels Wilder style skirt on the bottom.

As for the Harrys: (Harries?)
For some reason that I cannot discover, my sons are almost phobic about the idea of seeing any of the Harry Potter movies. They also adamantly refused to listen to me read the first book to them. I've seen parts of several of the movies over the years on TV after the kids' bedtimes, but we remain mostly a Hogwarts-deprived household.  My younger son guessed that the Harry Potter head in this image was Velma from "Scooby Doo" which does not say a lot for my drawing. He told me that he could not recognize Mr. Potter because I had neglected to draw his forehead scar. Somehow, I don't think that was it.

Unsurprisingly, the kids have not seen "Dirty Harry," but thanks to the magic of YouTube and various memes, they do know who he is, more or less. When I asked my older son about Dirty Harry, he said, "Are you feeling lucky?"

The woodland fairy is a generic concoction. I considered making the legs Tinker Bell-like, but decided that would be too boring. I wanted to draw some leaves I guess.

My sons have never seen "Little House on the Prairie," nor read any of the Laura Ingels Wilder books. The books were among my favorites at some point in my childhood. I remember that I was very disappointed and lost interest in the series around the time the Laura character got married, but that was many volumes in. These books are among the many that I have not managed to share with my sons. I could not even get them to listen to the "Chronicles of Narnia," so it seems unlikely that they would sit still for a description of churning butter.

There was some protest on Instagram about a previous image in this series that mixed genders- Bambi and Blondie. Just for the record, most of these have been determined by the sound of the rhyme more than any specific commentary beyond visual juxtaposition.

Hardcore Attack on Titan

What's better than a combination of two super violent things that you're too young to see?

After stumbling across the trailer for "Hardcore Henry," our younger son was utterly convinced that he has to see the movie. He is nine and the movie is rated R, so I afraid that I will unable to help him satisfy this need in the near future.

The preview definitely looks like a frenetic first person shooter style video game brought to life. And brought to video with significant difficulty, apparently, as the camera had to be mounted on actors' faces while they performed a remarkable number of extreme stunts.

R rated movies are a touchy area for us lately as the younger brother was furious when he found out that his brother had seen the R rated "Deadpool" movie courtesy of a friend's parents. While my husband and I immediately regretted authorizing this outing when we saw the movie ourselves, the 13 year old has at least been mature enough to restrain himself from quoting choice bits of dialogue from the movie at the dinner table.

I am not optimistic that the 9 year old would be so reserved. In principle, he does not accept the idea that the four year age difference between him and his brother should matter when it comes to such things.  And in practice, unfortunately, it often does not: If the 13 year old is playing a video game in the living room, then his 9 year old brother might as well be playing it also.

But this does not mean that I am taking a 3rd grader to see "Deadpool."

There is more than one "Attack on Titan" movie out there, and those movies may be age-inappropriate as well. As these films are still difficult to see in the United States, it is unlikely that our kids will have an opportunity to see them in the near future even if they are not rated PG..

Age-inappropriate violence aside, I am afraid that the main problem with a first-person-shooter-style portrayal of the Survey Corps fighting in "Attack on Titan" would be the intense motion sickness brought on by all the physics-defying flying around with "3-d maneuver gear."

At least that would be the case for me. Maybe I am just too old to watch that sort of thing.

Blondies

Bambi•Blondie•Origami

takes a stroll with 

Blondie•Zombie•Mahatma Gandhi:

(Another drawing in the PuppyMonkeyBaby series)

Bambi's Blondie is from the "Blondie" comic strip- as in Dagwood and Blondie Bumstead, a newspaper comic strip that, remarkably enough, has been running since 1930 until the present. (The strip was also adapted into 28 low budget movies produced from 1938-50.) I read the strip in the morning newspaper during my childhood and always found Blondie's cartoon "shapely" figure and housewifely charms very disturbing.

The Blondie on the right is Deborah Harry, the lead singer of the eponymous 1970's & '80's new wave/punk rock band which was a feature of my early adolescence. I can't hear "Heart of Glass" without it evoking a seventh grade dance. 

She doesn't mean very much to my sons. They were both rather troubled by the outfit I chose for her zombie body. My older son opined that it was "inappropriate for a blog that kids look at."

They do know who Gandhi is.

Jessie•Nessie•Dressy-Bessy

From the PuppyMonkeyBaby series of drawings
(Exquisite Corpse style creatures made of three stacked parts with rhyming names that end with the long "E" sound)

The "Jessie" show is a bit of a sensitive subject around here. One child is partial to it- for sociological research purposes no doubt- and the other loathes it on principle. I am more in the latter camp...but despite my aging angry feminist concerns about the show's spin on class and gender, I know there are worse things he could be watching. 

The Loch Ness monster is always popular with my sons, but I found it difficult to put a water dinosaur in the middle of the body.

I had a Dressy Bessy doll back in the 70's...yes, it was the very early 70's...or maybe even the late 60's, dear god... She was paired with a Dapper Dan doll for boys. They had zippers and buttons and shoe laces for kids to practice fastening and tying.
Dressy and Dan did not have any Velcro however.
That's mostly the fastener of choice with my kids...

Belated Easter: Bunny Mash-up

Dummy•Grundy•Easter Bunny 

bumps a hip with

Smokey•Sonny•Chocolate Bunny

Another drawing in the PuppyMonkeyBaby series.

To be specific: that's "dummy" as in ventriloquist, "Grundy" as in Solomon Grundy, Batman's oversized undead antagonist in the Arkham game and other instances, with the legs of an actual bunny...

...And Smokey the "Only you can prevent forest fires" Bear, with the body of Sonny Bono without Cher in his best 1973 blazer, atop a partially unwrapped foil covered chocolate rabbit.

If I have to explain it all, both my drawing and the references leave something to be desired. 

And The Grundy torso came out too green and Hulk-like.

Needless to say, the kids were not particularly impressed.

Judy•Doody•Call of Duty

PuppyMonkeyBaby drawing project #11

Judge Judy with Howdy Doody and Call of Duty Black Ops, I think. I have deprived my long suffering sons of all incarnations of Call of Duty. They are vaguely familiar with who Judge Judy is despite never having seen her in action. Howdy Doody was a complete unknown for them. They pronounced him "super creepy" when I showed them a picture.

Charlie•Harley•Jacob Marley high fives Snoopy•Scooby•Sleeping Beauty

Just a boy and his dog:

(PuppyMonkeyBaby drawing #10)

Peanuts meets Harley Quinn from DC's "Batman Animated" and the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge's partner from "A Christmas Carol"
...and Scooby Doo and Disney's Princess Aurora.
 
I can't really explain this.
You can see the rest of the series and read an attempt at an explanation at this link.
But it probably won't help much

Grumpy-Mummy-Playboy Bunny hangs with Grumpy-Gummy-Crash Test Dummy

Grumpies go for a low five:
PuppyMonkeyBaby drawing #8

I had a debate about the various bunny options: Easter Bunny, Chocolate Bunny, etc, but decided that I really wanted to draw the human legs rather than short furry or candy ones. This meant, however, that I had to discuss with my sons what "Playboy Bunnies" were...or are. I suppose they might still be around.

While images of women in high heels with fluffy tails profoundly irritated me during my youth, in the context of the overwhelming cornucopia of explicit images of women available online, the old fashioned Bunnies don't look too much worse than the average female superhero.  But as my sons are well aware, all those scantily clad girls do make me grumpy...or maybe just more grumpy than my usual baseline grumpiness. 

I had to swap the lower bodies between the Grumpies. I originally had the Gummy Bear on top of the Bunny legs and that made the stumpy Gummy paws look unfortunately suggestive of female secondary sexual characteristics.

We don't want this to look too weird after all.