Christmas in July

Wherein we witness the many ways the once-exalted brand of shawn turner illustration®™ — this flounder-eyed man-child, this innocent updated Opie — has been corrupted for nefarious and questionable gain.

Just this half of 2015 alone!

Against his will, Poor li'l Logo©® (as we like to call him around the office) has been twisted and manipulated, sliced and diced, discolored and stained, all to make some ephemeral point, now lost to time.

Everything the mark has stood for — whatever the heck that was — has been washed down the gutter.

The shame!

On the up side, I get to trot him out, trussed and polka-dotted, for your amusement, like little gifts you weren't expecting.

You're welcome.

 First, he was shorn and torn of spectacles,
to reflect the real me. He lost the handsome too,

if you ask me.

 He was made to reflect the state of his creator's
constant confusion over the Interwebs …

And its intrusion. 

By the way, my email is now 96 percent junk,
and the weirdest kind of junk now. The spambots and phishers
have decided I'm old. The sex peddlers have withered away, so to speak,
and in their place are advertisements for all the various drugs to
combat old-guy diseases; for the lawyers I can get to sue
people for my becoming old; for the arctic secret that frees me from crow's feet;
for the products I can use to sealmy garage floor, since I'm old
and have nothing better to do; for enticing travel packages that would enable me
to go to Ireland and Puerto Ricoonce I'm done sealing the garage floor;
for on-line college degrees as I open the second chapter of life;
and for warnings about the end of days ushered in by Obama
the Antichrist, since I'm old and scared and more likely
to buy that particular brand of snake oil.

I have to click carefully through the morass lest I delete actual,
real emails from real people, with important stuff to say to me.

Of course, the first half of the year has signaled the return of the Giants,
full of hope and bluster and street cred. They won three
World Series titles in five years, and all the marketing blathered about four.

I didn't bite. Just bring on the games, I decided.

I'm not greedy for another championship.

Just bring on the games, I said.

Oh, my! I know I said I wasn't expecting the Giants to
win another championship, I also wasn't expecting them
to lose all their existing rings in a fire sale.

They limped into the season.

Then they got better. Hot. Best-in-the-League hot for a while.

 This is my mood now. The Giants have limped along the last month,
having lost eight of the last nine games. Key players got hurt (a malady
that absolutely no other team in Major League Baseball has had to suffer)
and remaining players got worn out from covering the slack.

I'm trying to enjoy the season for enjoyment's sake.

Just win a few more, Giants. Boy, the

All-Star®™ break couldn't be coming at a better time.

Poor li'l Logo©™ has become the poster child for
my angst, from childhood fears and how man-children
like the creators of MAD®™ Magazine saved me
from those fears.

 And adult angst over the mad, mad, mad, mad, maddening world,
wherein ideas and beliefs, no matter how puerile, like the cartoonists
of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, become some madman's justification to kill you.

Angst over political discourse, and the realization that someone in a suit,
with a U.S. flag lapel pin, can declare the sky is falling,
without any care for facts, and many, many others will believe that
so-called leader.

By the way, the sky is falling. Can't you feel it?!

It hasn't been all bad, of course. PlL™® (our nickname for the
nickname of Poor li'l Logo®™, when we become too tired to say
"Poor li'l Logo™®©") got to swim, like me.

And have fun, like me, when I got to read stories to students.

And celebrate, if half-heartedly, slow advances in the human endeavor:
Progressive thinking in the Boy Scouts, realistic thinking among
drought-stricken Californians, and the inevitable heartbreak of baseball.
(PlL™® worked hard that day!)

 

Poor li'l Logo©®™!

What's next?!

I Was a Teenage Wedding Announcement Illustrator*

* It was post-post-post teen age, and I did it once.

It'll be a cold day in Hell …

You know someone, who knows someone, who thinks they know someone who might be getting married and heard about you through someone and is this something you think you can do? I have just revealed to you the secret of how freelance illustration works.

I bring it up now because I'm locked in the umpteenth cage match with myself over illustration style and whether I should have one.

I don't think I have one — some who know me say I have a certain way of addressing subjects through illustration, though I'm not quite sure what that means — and after the last dust-up with myself, close as the outcome was, I stand firm:

I don't want a style.

I have always enjoyed the adventure of finding a solution through illustration, which is what illustration means to me, visual problem solving, visual storytelling (a concept reinforced through a fun mini-course I'm taking).

Problems require different solutions, stories travel different paths. So must illustration, I've decided.

Soaring boar

The little devil above begged a style I hadn't drawn until that moment, a look that must have bubbled up from years of looking at art and imagery and unconsciously cataloging it.

The friend of a friend of friends who were getting married wanted an announcement supporting the idea that nobody could possibly believe these friends would ever marry. But they did. So, Hell froze over (Beelzebub skiing), and pigs flew, and water flowed uphill.

The newly wedded couple made a little folded booklet of these three images — no words, just a spot illustration on each panel, for which I was immensely grateful — and the final panel announced the theretofore impossible wedding.

Given a do-over, I would have
created something different
here. It doesn't fit the style
of the other two. With another
chance, I'd like to convey better
water flowing uphill.

The couple wanted simple black and white, and this job might have come before I had a handle on computer graphics, so I went to brush and ink and a simple figurative look emerged, dictated largely by the brush and the small size in which the illustrations would be printed.

So what's the problem?

Glad you asked: The problem is that so many of the big names in illustration — the illustrators other illustrators stare at and slobber over and deride in silence over our drawing tables — have distinct styles.

Some risk all by having two — two! — styles, but the biggies stick with one.

The guy I always consider in this internal debate is James Yang. Everything (OK, almost everything) is drawn the same way: Humans with flat half-moon or rounded rectangle shapes of color, squarish bumps or triangles for noses on the side of the head shape, line and circle for the nostrils, long ellipsoid eyes, simple mounded shapes for body. Primitive and immediate. Texture and patterns added; occasional suggestion of 3D or perspective, but only occasional.

Yang gets a lot of colossal work solving visual problems with the same tight menu of elements, and more power to him. My jealousy is misdirected because his success has much to do with marketing and promotion and experience and reputation and the James Yang brand.

I could list many, many illustrators with distinct style — and a shorter list of illustrators with two styles — but you don't want that.

Nor would any fellow illustrators reading this want it, because it may reinforce the unwarranted notion that one style is sacrosanct.

My issue is really more about marketing and promotion and experience and reputation and brand; I want to turn the idea on its head, that I have no style (which many would agree) but the breadth to solve many problems in many ways.

My challenge: Build a better megaphone.

Bald-faced liar

This lie has run deep for too long. Time to confess:

This is not me:

I know I've said it's me, said it so many times even I believed it.

And I know you've wanted to believe it, hanging as you do on my every deathless, breathless word, my genius for insight and especially prevarication.

At one time it was me … the man-child with the uncombable hair … the glasses as big as Charles Nelson Reilly's, bobbing on my bulbous nose since 10th grade shortly after I lost — and then miraculously found — Danny Juenke's towering pop fly in the fog while I played centerfield. The fleshy lips measured in hectares, the clown ears, the flounder eyes, the JC Penney back-to-school reversible polo shirt.

All these things, though true, were not immutable. Of course I believed otherwise when I made it the symbol of my business, the first image most people encounter when they wonder what I'm up to.

Change happened. The glasses came off some five years when I realized contacts were not the torture devices I had feared, with their sharp edges slicing my eyeballs, or sticking permanently, or pulling out my corneas when I took the lenses out for cleaning.

None of that happened, of course, and the change opened my eyes, literally, to the wonder of swimming open waters. Occasionally I wear glasses, but they are small-lensed; they look like the glasses of someone who actually cares how he looks.

As of last week, the hair has gone, and I look really look like this:

(The same cross-eyed thousand-yard stare, the same Brezhnevian eyebrows, I can assure you. The same sartorial sophistication. I haven't gone crazy, for goodness' sake. Just bald.)

In my corrupted Thoreau-ic simplication of life, I stopped trying to comb recalcitrant hair, so I have been getting it cut short in the last year. Corrupted, of course, because at the same time I began wearing loafers because I didn't want to tie laces, and putting on my button-down shirts like T-shirts to save time, I have also been growing facial hair, wasting all that savings in shaving.

Last month bald patches showed up like sinkholes on the back of my head. Alopecia, my wife told me, having consulted the Internet. Alopecia, the skin doctor confirmed; a decidedly non-pattern baldness for this male. A fun game at home was when Nancy would announce how big the patches had grown.

"I can fix that right away," the doctor said. Steroid cream and it's cured, she said.

My Major League career teetering in tatters, I said:

"Actually, I was thinking of a different route," and explained my plan to shave my head.

The doctor looked perplexed. "Then what can I do for you?" She seemed to need a problem to solve, and I guess shaving oneself bald didn't strike her as a solution.

"You already did it," I told her. As long as the bald patches didn't signal some malady more urgent, then I felt free to widen the patches into a whole.

"You mean, shave it bald?!" the haircutter asked last week. "You mean, all of it!?"

"We ask seven or eight times when someone wants his head shaved," said the receptionist. "We want to make sure you're sure."

I was sure. Reasonably sure. Somewhat sure.

Off went the hair, two minutes tops. Home I went to make myself a hat of shaving cream and scrape  it off with a new razor.

Swimming friend David, long bald by choice, recommended shaving with the grain. He also recommended not going out in public for three or four days after, but I hoped that wasn't necessary.

Maybe I'll stay like this, maybe not. Already I'm waffling.

At least it's been like an archaeological dig; I have gotten to see what lay all my life beneath the mass of knotty hair. My head has corners, which I've always suspected by feel, but there they are; not as pronounced as I had feared, worn pyramids from a forgotten civilization.

But my hair also hid a lot of little red bumps and discolorations, only one of which I could feel, the one I warn haircutters about when they wander that neighborhood with a razor.

As long as I'm being truthful: My first thought seeing my reflection was Dustin Hoffman in makeup as the 121-year-old Jack Crabb in "Little Big Man."

And I make sort of a bad imitation of Walter White from "Breaking Bad," which I didn't see 'til the deed was done and the mirror near.

David tells me to get some sun and the blotches won't frighten onlookers so much.

(rubbing newly bald pate to think this over …) 

My head is a bit too small for my body, and the lack of hair worsens the proportions. That's one feature I still hope is mutable, hair or no.

But the bumps and spots …

(more rubbing, more cogitating)

Besides, baldness clashes with my lazy lifestyle. Hunting around for streaks of stubble on the back of my head, while somehow not scraping the many bumps into bloody streaks — let me tell you, it isn't pretty. Nor does the process go quickly.

So what's the point? Good question.

Maybe it was just do to it once and move on. Maybe I'll grow it into a Bob Haldeman/Roger Maris/Johnny Unitas flattop on the way back out. Maybe I'll slink back to the skin doc and ruin myself on steroids.

Until then, some insights from the newly shorn:

• Baldness attracts any cool breeze. Good for summer. Probably disastrous for winter.
• My head is always moist, which is weird. Maybe I've said too much.
• A bald head is not smooth, or I'm not doing this right, which is highly probable. Shirts do not pull slickly over my head like they used to, but stick like Velcro®™©. Hats put up a fight before coming off.
  
  It's a non-slip surface. I could put a coffee cup up there, or a smart phone if I had one, and it would stay all day, within reach and ready to use.
  
  Interesting fact: Geckos stick to walls by first shaving themselves bald.

• Fantastic scientific fact for swimmers: Your cap catches a great deal of water, conservatively half the volume of whatever body of water you're swimming. Your hair absorbs that vast quantity somehow. But without hair, the water spills in torrents from your cap, drowning small villages down slope.
  
  In the name of decency, ye who are about to be bald for whatever reason: Be careful where you remove your cap. Stand beside the body of water you just left; return the water to its rightful place.
  
  At least don't do it in the car.

The Three (Hundred) Faces of Shawn

Somehow it happened. Three-hundred posts passed through this blog. This is No. 300.

My apologies for every single one.

Yet who am I to ignore this milestone?! Who but I would note it?! So I celebrate with faces and musings from 2013. Again, my apologies.

Unsure from the start what this blog was supposed to be, I reach this milestone still unclear. I think it was to be an easy way to showcase my art, but much of my art requires explanation so I wrote about it too. Some of my art defies explanation but that hasn't stopped me from trying.

Put me before a keyboard and you can't shut me up. I do my best talking out of my fingertips, with time and isolation and a handy dictionary and a delete key.

The face — that Opie pie face, the logo for my business — was born of innocence. It's my actual fifth grade class photo. You laugh, perhaps, but let me suggest the indignity of lugging a hoop around your head all day long at school; let me further note the prescience of eyeglasses, which I didn't need until high school (a blog post for another day). Maybe now you're impressed, or you feel bad for me.

It was a burgundy-and-white world back then.

The face became an easy tool for my rants and raves and low trivia. It's my big-nosed barometer, from which you can know my mood without all them wordy words.

From the look on my face, for example, you could tell the tragic arc of the San Francisco Giants, my team, as it lost Opening Day when Dodgers starting pitcher Clayton Kershaw hit the go-ahead home run.

Optimism held steady for a few months …

But then the Giants could do no right and my face lost its structure. As the Giants melted down the stretch, so did I. Finally I had to grieve and let go.

Among you faithful who read this blog, fewer faithful read the baseball posts. Maybe you're bored with baseball. Maybe you're not a Giants fan. Maybe you rightly know the waste of time and energy in caring so much about something that wastes so much time and energy and money.

More of you read when I spout off, without reason or right, about What the Hell's Wrong with Things.

About our government. About our place in the world. About our collective insanity or apathy.

About our helplessness.

Were I judged as a news reporter, I'd have fired myself by now: I rarely follow up my rants, rarely find closure.

When a young man shot up Sandy Hook Elementary School before Christmas last year, I shot my mouth off and literally painted my blog blood red with indignation, then again when I got mad at how nothing was being done.

Nothing is still being done and I've stopped writing about it. Nothing except people are still being shot and killed, and still at schools. A student allegedly shot three students leaving a high school in Pittsburgh, Pa., just yesterday.

Last month, a teenager brought a gun to school in Sparks, Nev., two hours away, and killed a teacher, wounded two students, then killed himself.

The killings go on, nothing gets done about it. My words didn't help.

The country spies on you and me and the rest of the world. I took many words to conclude, "Whatcha gonna do?" It ain't the country of our constitutional ideals. It ain't even our country. It's the country of who holds the money and the information. My words don't help.

Syria enraged me, as you can see. The death, destruction and displacement of Syria and its people is what should really be enraging me, but instead it was the possibility that our country would ensnare itself in yet another war following Syria's alleged use of chemical weapons.

Then a too-good-to-be-true thing happened, and Syria agreed to inspections and eventual dismantling of its chemical weapons supplies.

I had moved on already. Maybe good news creeps me out. Maybe I don't believe it. Maybe something else got my attention.

Like the government shutdown. I vented a good bit of patriotic rage over that, and defended the Affordable Care Act, the straw dog over which government services, research, care and recreation came to a halt.

It turns out the Affordable Care Act may in fact be made from
straw and suckage, stitched together with false promises and 20th Century technical know-how in a 21st Century world. The Web site's continuing to get better, the government keeps saying. Sometimes you can't keep your health care plan, the president is saying, even though he promised you could. (Breaking news, apparently: You can keep your old plan!)

Three coders working from four desks in San Francisco, meanwhile, just created a buy-your-plan Web site in three days.

I wrote about swimming or some such instead. Busy busy, you know.

The only real-world issue I followed through to the end was Scouting's relationship with gays in the ranks.

Scouting moved a massive millimeter this year, allowing Scouts who are gay to join, but barring adult leader who are gay. Because being gay is a youthful indiscretion that a 10-mile hike will sweat out of you? I dunno. I remain perplexed but prepared to trot my likeness out next time Scouting's glacier of decision nudges forward.

Three-hundred posts, all personal, many trivial, maybe a couple phoned in but the rest written with a shard of my soul. Each a welcome to my little world of illustration and side gigs and swimming and the stuff that's been part of me. Some days I simply shared something you might like.

Thank you — and condolences — for reading any and all.

A toast: To 300 more. I wonder what they'll be about.

Liam Turner photo