Tumeyland

I sing now to you a tale of a family and their doodle-toons. A grubby, stained, mostly used small pad of paper sat by the phone in the kitchen. One day, I drew and colored a cartoon on it, like so: If it looks like the man has his hand in his fly, that's my ineptitude at drawing hands, and is unintentional. Anyway, I found I liked the pad. So I drew a few more cartoons. The little green figures you see in the lower right-hand corner are the vestiges of when the pad was first used by me to make a rudimentary animation flipbook. The next time I picked the kitchen notepad up, I saw that my wife, the artist Claire Mack had added a fantastical drawing: I followed suit with a Groucho mushroom, of course: Claire added a celestial scene: One day, our teen-age daughter, Olivia, added some of her own cartoons: To which, I responded with this very strange fellow, Lemon-Head: The final three pages in the pad are by Claire,...