The Adventures of Johnny Applepix

  I did a lot of creative writing during my years in high school. Much of it was the adventures of Rob Boozakis and his pals in Clemont High School, which I wrote under the guise of Hobart Pumpernickel. (You'll find a recounting of Hobart's creation and an early example of his work here.) Prior to Hobart's debut, however, a lot of my creativity combined writing with my somewhat limited skills as an artist.

  While I was still in elementary school, I had produced a "Sunday comics section" for the entertainment of my parents and my brothers. It featured strips like "Andy and Jojo," "Peter Groundhog," "Dat's Grownups" and my attempt to draw Superman.  I drew them, colored them, and delivered one each Sunday for a few months. For the most part, I think I recycled jokes from other comic strips and joke books that I read.

  In seventh grade, my friend Billy and I spent part of the summer drawing a collection of Rube Goldberg-esque cartoons. As I recall, he had a plastic stencil that had beakers and coils and other "scientific" equipment that we used to make these inventions. Included in these drawings was a character who had a nose the shape of a potato and three hairs sprouting from the top of his head. He eventually got a name -- Penelope Jones (yes, I know Penelope is a girl's name, but he was a boy nonetheless) -- and ended up "starring" in a couple of notebooks' worth of gag cartoons that I drew.

A recent drawing of Penelope Jones. He hasn't changed in fifty years.

  By ninth grade, the world of Penelope Jones had expanded to included superheroes like Superduck and Batduck (who were not ducks; in fact, both had the same type of potato nose that Penelope had), secret agent George P. Wombat (who was not a wombat, but did have a different kind of nose), and Penelope's brother Schnooky Poo (whose face was never seen, so we have no idea what his nose looked like). I had advanced beyond single-panel gags by this point and was writing and drawing comic strips of their adventures.

  In the fall of 1966, a new character appeared, inspired by one of the classmates of my brother Richie. The lad had a mole/birthmark on his face and my brother started calling it an "applepix." No one recalls where he came up with that name for it, but that's how Johnny Applepix got his moniker. It wasn't long before I started drawing comic strip adventures of Johnny, beginning with one in which the applepix starts to grow and takes over his entire head. In the course of seven pages, Johnny is mistaken for the master criminal Boscofinger, falls into a time tunnel that takes him to the near and far future, and is even mistaken for Richard Kimble's one-armed man.

Johnny's troubles begin when his entire head turns into an applepix.

   Johnny's other adventures have him trying to win a free sweatshirt from a local radio station, attempting to collect a reward by capturing an escaped fugitive, and turning into a master criminal after he breathes in gas from a meteor.

 
   In all, there are seventeen pages of Johnny Applepix Archives, all drawn in a single marble notebook. Only a few people ever saw them, but of those who did, more than one said, "Gee, Bob, you should be doing comic books." Who could have guessed...

Alex's Weekend Visit

   Alex celebrated his parents' eighth wedding anniversary by spending the weekend with Gamma and Gappa, allowing Mommy and Daddy to have a stay-cation. One of the hits of the visit was the "Truck Tunes" video, which he requested numerous times by pointing at the TV and asking for "More trucks." Alex is a particular fan of backhoes and dump trucks.

"Don't move or I'll bubble you!"

   Also on hand for the visit was Aunt Sammi (in town for a wedding), who, knowing Alex's love of bubbles, brought him a Bubble Gun.

  And the beautiful weather allowed for plenty of time to play outside in the sandbox, as well as to look, up in the sky...! (It was a plane.)

 There was also a lot of time to sit and read (mostly books about trucks). "Backhoe!"

Gotham

  Over in his blog, my pal Bob Greenberger has his comments about Gotham, the show that wants to be for Batman what Smallville was for Superman. You can take a moment to go there and check it out. I'll wait.

  I'm sure there are things in the show that annoy or anger regular fans of the Batman comics being published today. What those fans don't realize is that the show's producers really don't care about making the 50,000 of them (if there still are that many) happy.  They are aiming at the millions of people who have seen the movies.

  So the rather heavy-handed introductions of Oswald Cobblepot (who walks like a penguin) and Selina ("Call me Cat") Kyle are for movie fans to be able to point to and say, "Hey, I know who that person is going to become." More astute ones will also recognize Ed Nigma, Harvey Dent, and Ivy. But they have no frame of reference for characters like Harvey Bullock and Renee Montoya, so however they are played in the show, well, that's who they are.

  That's not to say there aren't some Easter eggs for the longtime comics fans. For example, the waste treatment plant that is to be built near Arkham Asylum. Somewhere down the road, a two-bit criminal calling himself the Red Hood -- or perhaps just some nondescript member of a criminal gang -- is going to fall into the toxic waste there.

  All that said, Gotham is much more like the early years of Dick Tracy than a superhero adventure. Gangsters who are just a bit over the top. Crimes that are too outlandish for CSI or NCIS or even Criminal Minds. And a hero who sometimes has to fight the system in order to do his job.

  And if you're going to do a series about a city that grows up to be Batman's home town, it's probably the way to go.

Swimsover 2014

Columbus Day weekend is usually the end of the pool season for us, so Swimsover has come a few days earlier this season. I had my last swim last week when the water was still about 75 degrees. Then we had an overnight temperature earlier this week that went to the low 40s and that was enough to take about ten degrees from the pool water, too much for the solar panels to replenish during the day.
So I wrapped up the season with a quick dunk on Tuesday and another on Wednesday. Yes, I'm probably crazy, but I always try to squeeze that one more day out of every pool season. And now the cover's on, the floats and rafts and "temperature team" are stowed away... and we'll look forward to First Dunk 2015 sometime next April.

The Bestest Series

  With the elimination of the Washington Nationals from the playoffs last night, we have yet another season in which the teams with the best records in the American and National Leagues do not make it to the World Series. Instead, thanks to the pile of playoff series that have been concocted, we may see -- in the best case -- the second best team in an AL (Baltimore) against the third best team in the NL (St; Louis) or -- in the worst case -- the fourth best team in the AL (Kansas City) against the fourth best team in the NL (San Francisco), with a couple of other combinations also possible.

  I became a baseball fan way back when there were only eight teams in each league and the two with the best records met in the World Series. It was not about winning a short series at the end of the season; it was about winning over the long haul, from April through September.

  But Major League Baseball, like the NFL, NBA, and NHL, is all about making money. And so we have layers of playoff games, supposedly to keep the fans in many cities excited and interested, but mostly to get more fannies in those more-expensive post-season seats.

  So here's my suggestion to MLB: Go right ahead with the current system of getting two teams into the World Series. But after it's all over, take the two teams with the best records and let them play a "Bestest Series." They could play a game or two in each of their home cities and then, like the Super Bowl, play the finale in a predetermined locale.

  There's more money to be made here, MLB. Think about it.