I was thinking of calling this “Fractured Fairy Tales”, but that name was already taken, and this is more of a fable anyway. But it is no doubt fractured.
But there are a lot of words in this fable, so without further ado, I give you… um, I didn’t give this fable a name so you will have to make up your own.
Hopefully it is all readable.
*Please click on pictures to see a larger version*
I’ve never liked Valentine’s Day. I didn’t like it when I was single and I don’t like it now that I am married. It’s like it makes you feel bad when/because you DON’T have a “significant other” and it makes you feel bad when you DO by making you feel you always have to “one-up” your previous Valentine’s Day gifts and events/ideas. And Valentine’s Day marketing and advertising does nothing to help that in either situation.
That said, here is my one and only Valentine’s Day episode of Gralen and Jeddy. It is kind of nonsensical(I know, like which of my cartoons are not?!) because it starts with Jeddy and his girlfriend sitting on a park bench already with love in their eyes, and cupid has to come along and steal Jeddy away from her.
Hey, I thought Cupid’s job was to help bring people together not split them up! And they were already together as it was.
Ah well, it is better to have loved and lost(to Cupid of all people), than never to have… been made into a silly comic strip.
Like the title says, You Can’t Fix StCupid. Enjoy, and for what it’s worth, Happy Valentine’s Day! 😉
*Please click on photo to see it better*
First off, I would like to apologize. I tried, I really tried, to fix the condition that this episode of Gralen And Jeddy is in, because it is really horrible. But there is only so much that photo editing software can do, and I tried it all. There are small stains, probably what looks like a chocolate candy bar, and larger ones, which knowing me was probably chocolate milk. But those things, plus the fact that it was made with my usual habit of scrunching a lot of words together, makes it virtually unreadable(you should see the original BEFORE I “fixed” it). So thus, I will be transcribing the dialogue for this one.
It starts with Gralen and his son, Jessy, leaving a church service. Jessy then asks Gralen: “Gralen(don’t ask why he calls his dad by his first name), do you sometimes doubt God?”
To which Gralen replies: “Well, sometimes Jessy, even though you are not supposed to. And I think if you ask other people if they do doubt God, I think they’ll say no.”
Jessy: “Well, I am going to see. Bye!”
Gralen: “But wait…!”
The next panel consists of Jessy running around all over the neighborhood asking people if they doubt in God, with dotted lines marking his path, á la Family Circus.
Gralen: “Well, what did they say?”
Jessy(winded): “They all said no. Whew!!”
Gralen: “I told you they would. And what if I ask if you wanted to go jogging?”
Jessy: “I’d say no!!”(Falls over)
Gralen: “Ha Ha. Well then, let’s go home.”
Jessy: “I’m with you!”
Hmmmm, I wonder how many people would say “no” to Jessy’s question today.
In the mid-1980’s – and after the rousing success of my “other” comic strip, Collamer(you know, the Gralen And Jeddy spinoff that I quit drawing after two episodes) – I decided to branch out once again with another comic strip. This time focusing on another interest of mine at that time, space aliens.
I had long been a sci-fi fan, so making a comic strip about aliens coming to earth was right up my alley, and it seemed like a natural progression from my youthful Gralen & Jeddy dino days. The future looked bright. At least for 6 episodes. It was a promising start, but like many of my endeavors, I just didn’t know where to take it next. This in fact was my last attempt at drawing a new comic strip. I had bandied about an idea a little later about a strip with two ninjas – one good and one bad – but it never got past the initial drawings of the two main characters.
The “Whizzets” strips themselves are pretty self-explanatory, and hopefully readable, so I won’t add any sub-titles or descriptions and will just lay them out in their full glory. Note however, their name changes from “Whizzits” with an “i”, to “Whizzets” with an “e” after the first two episodes. Don’t know why I changed it. But I guess nobody likes “zits”. On another note, notice the sideless steps lowered down to the roof from the Whizzets’ spaceship in the fifth episode. Yeah, I was a fan of the movie, “Flight Of The Navigator”. Hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. 😉
So without further ado, here are the six episodes of “The Whizzets”. I hope you enjoy them, and have a Blessed Christmas!
Moving away temporarily from Gralen and Jeddy episodes to showcase another of my odd, random cartoons. This one I did probably in the late 80’s to early 90’s. It’s hard to tell because of my habit of not dating my cartoons. Maybe I could have them carbon-dated to be sure, or maybe the amount of yellowing of the paper could unveil their age to someone who knows how to read that sort of thing.
Anyway, this cartoon continues the “hot summer” theme of my last posting. I either drew this cartoon based on all the hot, summer nights I spent as a child(we didn’t have air conditioning. Not that it didn’t exist, we just didn’t have it) as a way to bear it, or else I drew it to fondly remember those hot, summer days.
Since we lived in Wisconsin(and still do), it could very well be the latter. Since summer here lasts only about 3 months.
In a good year.
For those of you who remember telephone booths(and phones with cords), this episode of Gralen & Jeddy might make more sense. At least a wee bit more.
What doesn’t make any sense is my drawing of a road runner that looks like it is part-duck and part-rooster. You’d think with all those years of watching Looney Tunes cartoons, I’d have done a better job of drawing one.
Note: You’ll notice another masterful job that I did of placing my pseudonym over my real name. I seem to be getting worse at that for some reason. 🙂
In this episode of Gralen & Jeddy, Jeddy’s dialogue bubble wants some “alone time”, so he devises a plan to act all droopy so Jeddy won’t use him to talk. Yes, apparently cartoon dialogue bubbles can exist without the presence of the ones who use them for speech. Let’s just hope they don’t all revolt.
I don’t know where Jeddy was that he didn’t need his dialogue bubble. You would think he would want his bubble around most of the time in case he needed to say something. I suppose, maybe he was in the bathroom, or he went to visit a monastery.
Note: Yes, I am going to write the words under the panels, as there are many, and as was my usual style back then, I packed a lot of them into small spaces. Maybe I needed bigger dialogue bubbles. …Or maybe I just should have learned to write smaller.
Another note: Never mind the ghost image of Gralen in the first panel that I didn’t erase enough. He jumped his cue, I guess.
I have nothing against rich people. Heck, sometimes I wish I was one of them. I don’t besmirch any rich person. Most rich people got that way by having an idea or dream, putting some hard work and/or savvy into it, and taking some initiative to see that idea/dream through.
Yes, some people got rich simply by being the heirs to their family’s hard work and initiative, so what?! I say “Good for them” just as I do when someone hits it big on the lottery. We all have different lots in life. That’s… life.
Now, rich, snooty dogs are another story! Who likes a Cardigan wearing, pipe-smoking, uppity dog who takes a leak on someone’s car and makes the car’s owner clean it off, as in the first cartoon?
But come to think of it, there must be a whole lot of dogs feeling pretty high and mighty nowadays, what with having their owners follow behind them scooping up their “business”. I guess this cartoon was a little ahead of its time.
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The second cartoon deals with another puzzling aspect of this Gralen & Jeddy Comic Strip – and that is the number of talking dinosaurs seeming to roam around the world. You would think that Gralen would be an anomaly, but apparently he has a number of relatives still roaming the planet, as evidenced by his rich cousin from Texas showing up at his door, unannounced. I guess he wasn’t rich enough to own a cell phone. Or else it, like everything else he had, was just too big to fit in his car.
This episode of Gralen & Jeddy went a long way for a joke. A Loooonnnnnnggggggg way. All the way to California, in fact.
You’d also have to wonder how Gralen could afford to even buy a mansion in California(and why he would just to put on a party in the first place).
This was one of those episodes where I thought up a punch line, and then tried desperately to find a logical way to build up to it.
I should have tried harder. 🙂
*In case you hadn’t noticed, I added captions under the panels since they were kind of hard to read.
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