J. Lennon - The Funnies

The third possibility was that my father was aware of the inchoate weirdness of cartoon biology, and just wanted to get it out in the open. Of course the skeleton looked strange; it had to, and he had simply pointed this out in a witty sort of flourish.

I decided that the second and third possibilities were compatible. Why not? I felt like I was making progress, understanding the strip through my father’s eyes. I flipped over my sketch paper and moved the ink drawing to the right side of the table, then cracked my knuckles, ready to go on to the copying.

First I outlined my mother’s head: one quick loop, and I’d start filling in. But as soon as the pencil left the paper, I knew it was all wrong. Something about the chin area. I should have fleshed it out a little. I corrected it without erasing: still not enough. The next line was too much. I scribbled the entire thing out and drew another line.

This one was better. I added hair without too much trouble, then tried eyes.

Terrible.

I erased them and redrew them, this time more slowly. Just little oval dots underneath quick, straight dashes, like notes between lines in a musical staff. And above them, eyebrows like fermatas, wide and expressive.

Awful, completely awful.

I drew another head, then another and another. I couldn’t get any as close as the second one had come. I filled the page with aborted heads, then flipped it back over and wedged some more in among my earlier drawings. Finally I took out a fresh sheet and got the head and hair on my third try, then drew and erased the eyes a dozen times, until I had worn the paper through. I tried eyes only, never got them. I did twenty noses, each one perfectly fine, perfectly believable, but not one of them my cartoon mother’s.

I gave up on Mom and worked on Lindy. Mom was in three-quarters profile, but Lindy faced front. I did her head easily, then attacked the mouth. It looked bad. I did a few more, then redrew the head, but now that was off. I did this for about three hours, and refilled my glass as many times, until soon I was drunk and could barely keep myself from sprawling facedown on the drawing board.

Which in fact I did, with a sickening slump, my nose mashing into the gashed, galosh-scented surface. My mouth marshaled its drool, which had begun to trickle between my cracking lips, when a creepy déjà vu struck me, and I bolted upright, sending the thread of spittle sizzling onto the lamp.

What was that all about? I wasn’t so crocked that I couldn’t imagine how I must have looked, laid out agape over my scribblings: like Carl Mix, helplessly infarcting in the humid summer dark. It was time to quit for the night.

On Saturday morning I swallowed another handful of aspirin and called Brad Wurster. Outside, it was a beautiful sunny day, but despite the open sliding doors off the kitchen, none of this brilliant light seemed to be getting into the house. It filled me with renewed despair. The phone rang over and over, and just as I was about to hang up, a groggy voice came on the line.

“Yeah.”

“Is this Brad Wurster?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Tim Mix. Carl’s son? I’m taking over the Family Funnies and I’m supposed to take lessons from you.”

This time there was a short delay before he said “Yeah.” Both of us waited after that.

“Well,” I said, “I wanted to set up some kind of schedule. When do we start? Do you have a studio I should come meet you at?”

“We start Monday,” said Brad Wurster. His voice was gravelly, and to say that this was an understatement was itself a considerable understatement. He sounded like his throat was so coated with scabs and lesions that it might seize up at any second and eject itself through his mouth, like a transmission abruptly shifted from fourth to reverse.

“What time?” I said, pen poised above a pad that had the name of a psychoactive drug printed on it.

“Seven,” he said.

“Seven?”

“Seven to noon, Monday through Friday. Then you’ll go home, eat lunch and practice until six. Weekends are yours, but only a fool would skip drawing, especially someone who has so little time as you.”

“Better practice weekends…” I said, scribbling. “Okay, where are you?”

“Three-thirty-one Church, apartment A, New Brunswick. It’s the door in the back. Not the one with the devil painted on it, the one with the cut glass window. Knock and enter. Do not, under any circumstances, let the cats get out.”

“Oh, no, I won’t.”

“Good. I want you to prepare drawings. Give me about twenty sketch pages, that Wolff paper your dad uses. Cover them with Family Funnies characters.” “Family Funnies” sounded, on his tongue, like a fraternal order of concentration camp doctors.

“Twenty pages.”

“At least. Have a good weekend, Tim Mix.”

“Oh, hey, sure,” I said. But he had hung up.

* * *

I couldn’t go out to the studio, not so soon after my dramatic failure and collapse of the night before, so I decided I would try to clean the house. Our house was laid out along fairly simple lines; the living room and dining room were at one end, the bedrooms and bathroom at the other. There were only five bedrooms, so for the first five years of her life, until Rose moved out, Bitty didn’t have her own. Instead, she was shuttled from room to room depending on the prevailing mood of the family: who was pissed off, who was happy, who should be rewarded (by not having Bitty in his or her room), who should be punished. She was never with our parents, though, unless she was unusually calm and happy, which is perhaps why she still liked them today.

Once, there was a Family Funnies television special. My father drew all the backgrounds and storyboarded the animation, but the inking and character drawing was done by other people — the only time he ever loosened his grip on the reins. Besides the obvious oddness of hearing someone else’s voice come out of my own cartoon mouth, there was something weird about this special. It took several viewings for me to piece it together: the house.

While some rooms, the kitchen and dining room, for instance, were the same in the daily strip as in real life, almost every other setting was purely opportunistic. If a gag required that Bobby and I had to watch television across a huge, empty room, then that room appeared in the strip without regard to the real house. If Lindy had to sit under a spreading chestnut tree, then a grove of them sprung up in the yard. If Bitty wanted to swim in the pool, a pool yawned instantaneously open. The TV special, it turned out, was so packed with recycled gags from the dailies that a huge amalgamation of appropriate settings had to be created for it, all of which existed in the same imaginary space, in the same half hour of television time. The resulting house was massive and impossible, riddled with paradoxes the way a pine board is riddled with knots.

When I was eighteen and a college freshman, I mapped it. I stayed up all night getting high, rewinding and replaying the videocassette and rendering a rough architectural drawing on newsprint. There were at least thirty separate rooms, many of them occupying the same physical space; some seemed to have no connection at all to the house, emptying into hallways that didn’t exist. This ridiculous house was ten thousand square feet, easy, not including the free-floating rooms. My drawing looked like Frank Lloyd Wright through a kaleidoscope, a sort of prismatic Prairie School. I sent it to my father, with a giant hazy question mark superimposed over the whole thing, and never heard about it again.

Plotting my cleanup, I couldn’t help but see the imaginary house superimposed upon the real one, with all the attendant dirt of two dozen extra imaginary rooms. The task seemed all but insurmountable. My only recourse was to doggedly slog through each room armed with cleaning supplies, and apply them liberally to every visible object.