If you’re just joining us, this is part 3 of a 5-part series. You may want to go back and read part 1 and part 2 if you haven’t already.
Following the success of The Book, it became evident that a sequel was needed. At the start of seventh grade, I began work on The Book II. In this book you can definitely see an improvement in my artistic skill, although a lot of my ideas were getting stale by that point. I also reduced the number of armies, but I don’t recall the extent of that reduction.
First up is page 13 of the second book, which takes place aboard a pirate ship. For this battle and this battle only, you got to see pirate sticks. Unfortunately there were no ninjas in this book, so there is no ninja vs. pirate action. In this drawing I broke the fourth wall... with a cannon ball. Doesn’t that make your eyes hurt! Do you still refer to the barrier between the image and the viewer a fourth wall when it’s a drawing and not a play/movie/tv show? You can also see the censored profanity that I first started using in this book, coming from the guy who just killed Flipper. And check out the guy getting delicately split in half by a machine gun. That must have taken skill!
Next up is a drawing from the bad taste department. This one took place at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. You can clearly see some censored worty dirds in there. Notice the social commentary here: the press is blocking the road, preventing emergency workers from getting to the building. That’s a powerful metaphor or something. There’s also a reference to Beverly Hills 90210 and its overuse of sex. At least, I think that was something the show was known for. I’ve never actually watched it. I have however watched Nickelodeon’s What Would You Do?, which is also referenced here. Notice even more social commentary on the inefficiency of governmental organizations (in this case, the FBI, who only just now determined that this was caused by a bomb). And apparently the local news stations are KILL and KKKI. Which I assume was meant to be pronounced KKK-1. Since that would be a really bad call sign for a television station. Get it?
For today’s final image, I present the one that would have been most likely to get me expelled from school: a drawing of my middle school. With the principal standing out front. And she’s about to become the victim of a drive-by. While she says “stop the violence.” Yeah, I think they might have overreacted to that. Can you tell by the not-one-but-two “a.k.a. Hell On Earth” banners that I wasn’t extremely fond of my time spent in middle school? This drawing, like the Oklahoma City drawing, was one where I spent a lot of time drawing the background, but then never drew the stick men fighting.
I’ve also blurred out the name of someone I didn’t like. Contrary to what you may interpret, this person never actually did anything to me, at least not physically. Actually I never really got into fights. I mean, I’m clearly not a violent person. No, I’ve blurred out his name because I have no idea what he’s like now: I haven’t actually talked to him since probably around the time I drew this. I’ll let go of the past because I realize now that he was probably a jerk back then because he had crappy parents that treated him just as badly, if not worse. He’d already gotten more than he deserved for the things he did, before he even did them. The sad thing is that odds are good he’s in a prison right now. Or that he has a kid or three that he cares for about as much as his father cared for him. But I hope not. Wherever you are, blurred-out-name-guy, this post goes out to you. Here’s hoping that you’ve done more with your life than the statisticians, politicians, sociologists, and economists would predict. Maybe you even graduated high school in my class, in which case (if you’re not in prison) I might see you at a reunion sometime down the road. No hard feelings, okay?
Join me tomorrow as I take a look at World ‸Stick War III: The Book and Bookstix IV: The Next, Next, Next, Next Generation.
