Chalkboard Drawings: The “Mario” Edition

I draw a picture of myself on my classroom’s chalkboard everyday. I collect those pictures as camera phone photos and post them on Sundays. See the rest here.

After a long and lengthy debate, I decided to kick off the year with a weeklong tribute to Super Mario Brothers, in all its’ various incarnations… or at least, the ones I enjoyed when I was growing up. I kind of felt like I was drawing the same thing four times this week, but I really liked the way the brick ground ended up looking.

chalkboard photo post: new year, new drawings

I debated long and hard as to whether I wanted to continue posting my chalkboard doodles for the upcoming school year. After three years solid of Sunday postings, I’ve done just about every character or situation I can think of. Further, I often draw the EXACT same drawings, year in and year out. It’s the nature of the job. Just as I teach Romeo & Juliet to every new group of Freshman, I’ll continue drawing myself as various superhero characters on the blackboard.

I’ve decided to keep posting these however, because… quite simply, they’re popular. I understand very little about “site views” and all that jazz, but when I do look at that widget, these are always amongst the most viewed of my posts… and that includes the comic. Over the past six months, a number of these have become popular on the website Pinterest. I know less about Pinterest than I do about site views, but if people are liking something I do well enough to share it somewhere, I should probably keep doing it.

Anyway, here’s the first drawing of the year. I decided I wanted to go big for the first week so I designed an elaborate Welcome piece for the Class of 2016 which took up the entire space of the classroom’s chalkboard.

I have to be honest- this was a larger undertaking than I anticipated! I thought I’d only need a half an hour to draw this beast, but it took double that when you figure in the sketch planning I needed to do to fit in as many characters as possible. I tried to run the gamut of cartoon characters that I found interesting and were relevant to someone who’d be in 9th grade this year. The only one I might have missed the mark on is Yakko Warner, but as established this summer, the characters are making a huge comeback, if only with my sons in our house.

chalkboard photo posts: the all nintendo edition

thrift store finds: rejected finds!

There are times that I go thrift store shopping and I buy things I think will be fun to write about for a Saturday post here, only to get home and realize that there isn’t much I have to say about those purchases. They’ll usually end up going right back to the thrift store and I’m out a couple of quarters… but what the heck, let’s clean house with a couple of quick Rejected Thrift Store Finds.

now you’re playing with power

Here’s a comic that IS a Thrift Store Find!

…and then I felt like I had to do an explanation as to why this was such a cool find for me:

Strangely enough, I currently have a subscription to Nintendo Power for my classroom. It’s a little less biased than I remember, to the point where they do give out bad reviews now and then.

a top ten of random thoughts

We’re in finals week here, which means lots of proctoring tests. Since I’m not drawing, I thought I’d take a second and post some random thoughts and links, very few of them teacher related. Proceed with caution.

1. My arm is feeling MUCH better, as is the rest of my doughy, unattractive body. I’m going to give drawing a go tonight and hop to be on track with posting new comics next week. Thanks to all for the kind words, comments, e-mails and the like.

2. I found this interview with writer Kelly O’Rourke on Halloween Fans that may be of interest to some readers here. You may remember her from this Thrift Store Finds entry I did a few weeks ago about the strange YA series based on John Carpenter’s seminal horror masterpiece. She sounds like a cool lady!

3. Also, I found out in that interview (and subsequent searches on eBay) that those Halloween novels go for a ridiculous amount of money on the secondary market. We’re talking like, $50 bucks per book! Of course, that price is contingent on being able to find someone who is willing to spend $50 bucks on a YA Halloween novel… but it sort of cracked me up that two books I found in my thrift store and paid less than a dollar for could potentially net me $100 dollars. I felt like I was on a low rent version of Antiques Roadshow!

4. Similar update: Remember when I wrote about The Superman Story a few weeks back? Well, it turns out that you can read the entire thing FOR FREE if you click over to Google Books here. It’s not the most enjoyable way to experience the book, but the scans are big and clear, and it’s a fun story.

5. Ellen and I finally took a tentative step into the early 2000’s by signing up for Netflix. I used to have a subscription myself, but when the DVDs started piling up for months at a time, it was cut from the budget. We’re enjoying the Watch Instantly feature of our subscription like crazy. In the past few weeks I’ve been taking in a lot of stand up comedy specials that I’ve been meaning to see for a long time… Ellen’s been re-watching TV shows she used to enjoy when she lived in England… and Elliot’s become obsessed with the PBS animated series Arthur.

6. Internet Pal Tyler Stafford just put out a great comic book! Dead Man’s Dream (and Other Stories) can be yours for the low, low price of $3.50. I just received my copy and it’s great. Tyler has this weird, techno-organic style that’s a joy to look at. See some samples and buy the book here.

7. Some other books I’m currently reading: Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and J.A. Miller (This is a re-read, honestly… but such an amazing book), The Bachman Books by Stephen King (I’m currently in the middle of The Long Walk), The Tomb of Dracula Omnibus 2 (A $100 hardcover collection of the 1970’s Marvel series… goofy fun), and I am slowly making inroads with The Book of Lost Things by John Connelly. Looking forward to the summer so I can perhaps finish one or two of these.

8. I’m not much of an online video game player, but like most people my age, I’ve become totally enraptured by Super Mario Bros. Crossover, wherein you can play through the original Super Mario Bros. with one of five classic Nintendo heroes including Mega Man, Simon Belmont, Link, Samus from Metroid, and the guy from Contra. If you recognized any of those characters, you would probably enjoy giving this game a looksee.

9. I recently discovered the WordPress feature which allows you to see the terms that people used to find my comic in a search engine and they’re weirdly fascinating to me. Things you’d expect are at the top of the list, terms like romeo and juliet comics, chris pearce comics, and other likely phrases… but then there’s just weird ones. Like, someone found this blog by doing a search for pretty horse pictures. I can only assume they found me because of this She-Ra painting I posted.

10. Oh wow, Disney and BOOM! Studios are doing a Darkwing Duck comic book! I’ve always thought that Disney’s leaving a lot of money on the table when it comes to the animated characters that comprised their Disney Afternoon block of programming in the Nineties. I was 10 years old in 1991 and fairly obsessed with Darkwing Duck, Talespin, and Ducktales, and they finally seem to have decided to cater to my nostalgia. BOOM! has a great track record with licensed characters (their Muppet Show comic book is easily one of the best comic series I’ve read in the past year) so I’m definitely going to give this a try!

warp whistle

This is a stupid sketchbook drawing that I liked enough to ink, scan, and color.