The rest of the 370 B illustrations

I thought I'd show the whole Masback illustration, uncropped, along with the backside of the index card I originally drew on, which is something to behold, indeed. First, the uncropped "front" side:

There're a few things of note on this: first of all, I seemed to be nursing a fixation with morphing words together, thus the Kabuki mask-like item swinging from a pendulum becomes a "Japopsicle," the character Linus from the "Peanuts" cartoons riding a tricycle becomes "Linucycle," and Snoopy with bared fangs transforms into "Snoopitbull," which is, of the three, my favorite. There's a reference to Adam and the Ants in the upper left-hand corner (not a bad ant, I must say), and a reference to ZTT Records, the label the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood was on. I had a friend from high school who attended CSULB who was a big Frankie fan - it was from him (Mark Medina, if anyone cares) that I learned that "ZTT" stood for the equally obscure "Zang Tumm Tumb," which is probably a means of insulting someone's mother in some other language. The jumbled together words spell out "Dali and the Melting Clocks," a bit of nonsense possibly uttered by Randy Stonehill on one of the tracks on Phil Keaggy's masterful album "Sunday's Child." The letters "S D" were on the index card before I began writing on it, and sharp-eyed readers may be able to discern different two-word names and places I could come up with: Susan Dey, San Diego, Santo Domingo, and Steve Dangaran, who had been my youth pastor in high school.

Sheesh, there's a lot going on here! From the top left, we have the disembodied hand of Mickey Mouse getting ready to bop the head of the "Dudester" character, whom I've been drawing since 11th grade. To the right of Dudester is "Moonface," a cigar-chomping floating alien head with bug eyes I first drew in 5th grade sitting next to my best friend, Stan. Going down a bit and to the left is a bow that has been plucked, sending an arrow down to the lower third of the right-hand side of the card, impacting into...something. Up below Moonface is "Squiggle," drawn the same time as Moonface, also in Mrs. Merriman's 5th grade class at long-lost Benjamin Rush Elementary School in Los Alamitos. To the right of Squiggle is Maynard, a little character drawn on all the notes my first girlfriend gave me, back in 8th grade. Her name was Laura, but, oddly, she went by the name Lollie, and she must've been a glutton for punishment back in the early 80's with all those "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, get your adverbs here!" chants. A cross-eyed version of Maynard sits between a bucolic scene of either two little houses with high-peaked roofs or two simply enormous beer bottles sitting in a valley as the sun rises behind them. To their right (past Maynard) is an iteration of Moonface I drew once and only once, a weird little creation I dubbed "Punkball," for his baseball stitches, I suppose.

The bottom left corner is devoted to Madonna Lee Roth, circa 2035. Don't ask me what that means. I have no clue. I do love the bugs jumping out of her wig, though.

To the right of her is Abraham Donald Martin Van Lincoln, Esquire, DDS, M.Div. Once again, no friggin' clue. He is somewhat in the style of Mad Magazine artist Don Martin, whose name appears in the middle of this fellow's title, but, other than that, I'm lost.

That's it for now - I'll keep my eyes open for any other weird little illustrations from my past.