The Meaning of Life


 

Here at last are the four concluding pages of “Raccoons On The Moon”, or, as the Windsongs of Jupiter prefer to call it: “The Raccoons Search For The Meaning Of Life”.  The Windsongs of Jupiter are real sticklers for accuracy, since the Raccoons spent only one page of their story on the Moon, the Windsongs want the story retitled so that “True Truth” will be proclaimed and the Raccoons will be worthy of knowing the Meaning of Life. The Windsongs’ definition of the Meaning of Life on page 19 is a real “Shaggy Raccoon” argument, leaving the masked Space Explorers dumbfounded. Note the mixture of expressions in page 19’s second panel as the Raccoons either stare at the reader, or furtively glance at each other.  I love Cathy’s timing as page 20 leads off with Virgil saying: “Well, THAT was FUN!” It adds irony to the story’s finish as the Raccoons return to the Moon’s surface.  I hope you liked Cathy Hill’s Mad Raccoons and that you will look forward to another one of their unpublished stories coming soon to the Catblog.

 

Felix this time originally appeared in newspapers from 7-10 through 7-16-1933. Felix and Danny conclude their “midget league” baseball season, and Danny’s family go off on a summer vacation without Felix. I love the poignant panels in the 7-14 as Felix contemplates a lonely summer without the family. Danny comes back home to pick up Felix and packs him in a bag to smuggle him in to the boarding house where the family is lodging.  The Sunday page features Danny and Felix watering an Elephant to earn Circus passes. The Elephant is dry as the Mojave and drinks the landscape to the sandy dregs. 

Here’s Dudley Fisher’s Myrtle from 4-11 to 4-17-1949. All the dailies are devoted to “Wilbur”, the family’s wacky goldfish. Wilbur doesn’t get along with anybody, not Sampson, Myrtle’s Pop, Slug or the local bird family. The 4-16 has the best Fisher timing of the week, since goldfish are “harder to give away than kittens”, Pop dumps poor Wilbur in the river. A panel later there is a knock at the door, and Wilbur comes bouncing in! The Sunday page is the usual visual feast as the family dusts the household carpet for spring cleaning.

The Kat this time is from 9-20 to 10-2-1943. The first batch is mostly odd gags, but the 9-24 and 9-25 refer to Brazil, which was a hot topic during World War Two, what with the Good Neighbor Policy being in effect and all. But what is that creature in the 9-25 with the head of Krazy Kat and the body of a spotted cat? It is a species of Brazilian wildcat called “Oncilla”, “tigrillo” or “tigrinas” depending on which part of the country they come from. They are smaller than a Margay, which is a pretty small wildcat. Garge must have been a student of cats worldwide, both wild and domesticated, to come up with a gag like this one. In the 9-27 to 10-2 batch, the gags are all about plants and flowers, such as a shrinking violet that throws stones at Krazy’s “bean” and a sunflower that rises and sets and says “Bong Swar” to Krazy. But the most obscure reference is to the tomato (or “to-mah-to”) as a “Love Apple”. “Love Apple” is derived from the Italian word for tomato, “pomodoro”, which the French freely translated as “pomme d’amour” or “Love Apple” in English. The “to-mah-to” is a reference to the Fred Astaire 1937 movie “Shall We Dance” and the song “Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off” (you say ‘tomato’ and I say ‘tomahto’). Maybe Garge liked that movie and built the 10-2 gag around the song?

KURT’S CORNER    Here’s another little remembrance of my dear brother Kurt, who passed away in January. That’s us in the faded and worn photograph of 1956. Probably taken in the backyard of our family house in Crestwood, Mo. 701 Hutchins Drive. The house is still there today, I wonder if that tree is still there? The Mickey Mouse Club TV show was a never-missed event every weekday afternoon, and we had all the gear, Mickey ears, shirts and Kurt is playing a Mouse Ge-Tar. The photo looks blue because it was faded nearly pink and I flipped the color so you could see it better. You can tell that Kurt had a very irreverent attitude from a very early age. He is obviously “Putting It On” as you can tell by the little sneer on his face and the sassy tilt to his head. Even his fingers have attitude as he strums a guitar that was really a wind-up music box. It seemed the entire neighborhood of kids came in to our living room each afternoon to watch the Mouse Club with us. We must have had one of the few TV sets, and poor Mom had to serve beverages and cookies to the hungry little Mouse Clubbers. We all loved Annette and thought that Jimmy Dodd was like a minister with his little aphorisms in song form. Of course they built Jimmy a REAL Mouse Ge-Tar full size! But my favorite feature of the Club was the old black and white Mickey Mouse cartoons. For some reason they fed in to Kurt’s and my fascination with everything “old” and “antique”. We were fascinated by the very primitive and bottle-nosed Mouse that was in the old cartoons. I guess the Disney Studio wasn’t concerned with the original dotted eyes Mickey appearing alongside the exceedingly cute and almost child like Mouse that headlined the Club TV shows each day. We used to have fights over which of our toys was the oldest, and sometimes even such things as spoons and salt shakers entered into the “antique” debate. Disney dominated our lives in the late 1950s, we both had Davy Crockett hats and Kurt and I were Civil War buffs so “The Great Locomotive Chase” really excited our imaginations. Fess Parker traded in his Crockett hat for an engineer’s cap in that one.

Last time I posted one of Kurt’s “Mickey Mark” cartoon drawings which I believed to be the last one he ever drew. I was wrong, the one reproduced here is really the last, he sent it with the 2018 Christmas card. It’s a celebration of Mickey’s 90th anniversary. I love Kurt’s caption as he refers to the Mouse being a “corporate symbol, a pawn of copyright extension (just look up the Sonny Bono Copyright Act), a union busting rodent (probably a reference to the Disney strike of 1941)”. I don’t know what the little female mouse means by “Sparta-Mouse”, although it might be a misspelling of “Spatha Mouse”, a special computer mouse for gamers. But “you have delusions of grandeur” was a favorite phrase of our Mother, whenever Kurt or I got too ambitious and dreamed too big for her taste. She probably got the phrase “delusions of grandeur” from a psychology book or newspaper article and took it to heart. For some reason, neither Kurt nor I ever forgot that phrase or Mom’s use of it at times when we could have used a word or two of encouragement. 

I wish I could have talked about Kurt’s last Mickey Mark cartoon with him, but what turned out to be our last telephone conversation was filled with the usual nonsense and Kurt’s sidesplitting and VERY irreverent imitations of Linda, his girlfriend of many years. Kurt really did love her, but he also loved to make fun of her, as he made endless fun of Mom and our Grandma Katie. I can’t begin to tell you how much I would give to hear him do his “fussy female” voice one more time.  Perhaps there will be more Kurt’s Corner features in our next edition. Many Meows until then.

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