{"id":1434,"date":"2013-09-28T10:37:20","date_gmt":"2013-09-28T18:37:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=1434"},"modified":"2013-09-28T10:37:20","modified_gmt":"2013-09-28T18:37:20","slug":"morbid-humor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=1434","title":{"rendered":"Morbid Humor"},"content":{"rendered":"

I generally try to accentuate the positive<\/a>, as the song lyric goes, but when I was younger (and still, a little) I cultivated a degree of morbid humor. I liked the characters of the cartoonist Charles Addams and the gross stuff in the EC horror comics line<\/a>. In my own fantasy-art I have imagined various little troll-like and monster critters, which over time I\u2019ve transformed on the whole from nasty to cute.<\/p>\n

I confess that as a teen I too used to like sick humor and drew horrible pictures of hellish monsters\u2014they were prevalent in the comic books of my early adolescence, and also ugly is easier to draw than beautiful.I drew horrible characters because they were satisfying, they were easy (it\u2019s always easier to draw messed up faces than symmetrical pretty ones, creatures, too), and they had a pre-goth \u201cshock\u201d value to them. Epater les bourgeoisie<\/a>. I still have a slight streak of this and at least appreciate it to some degree. <\/p>\n

I recently discovered a book in our library titled Billy Fog and the Gift of Trouble Sight<\/a><\/em> (by Guillame Bianco, 2012). From the synopsis on the website: \u201cLike some other kids his age, Billy Fog has to wear glasses. But Billy has the gift of \u201cTrouble Sight,\u201d so when he takes his glasses off, he sees all the things that other kids can\u2019t\u2014ghosts and ghouls, vampires and monsters, a world of darkness and danger and above all the thing that kids aren\u2019t supposed to see: death. Is Trouble Sight a gift, then, or a curse? A new kind of graphic novel\u2014part storybook, part fable, part gazetteer and bestiary of the horrible and fantastic, inspired by the likes of Tim Burton and Lemony Snicket.\u201d I\u2019d add also the work of Edward Gorey, an odd and little known book titled \u201cFungus the Bogeyman,\u201d and the whole fun of Halloween.<\/p>\n

The Billy Fog<\/em> book is a \u201cdark\u201d story of a morbid and slightly sadistic little boy coping with the death of a pet cat. He has a \u201csickened\u201d sense\u2014play on the phrase, \u201csecond sense.\u201d \u201cGrown ups are murderers\u2014they killed the kids they used to be. They have no imagination; it scares them.\u201d Finding the world boring, he fills it with fantasy\u2014and in his case, morbid fantasy. I didn\u2019t really like the story, but I did like the \u201canarchic bestiaries\u201d the author created. I couldn\u2019t help but wonder if the boy\u2019s melancholy character-structure reflects the boy\u2019s attempts to cope with the existential fear of death, including a bit sadism (especially towards his little sister) as an identification with the aggressor, and his melancholy as a masochistic self-punishment for that sadism.<\/p>\n

One of the creatures the creatures in this book is a half-human sprite that lives at the bottom of a puddle, a \u201cpuddle princess.\u201d In keeping with his bestiary of vampires and ghosts and all, the author-artist creates a whole back-story of the puddle princess\u2019 birth and her relation to other creepy-crawlies. Since I make up critters in my cartoon-art, I rather liked this. <\/p>\n

But also I\u2019m becoming aware of the indulgence in negativity as a way to cope with vulnerability, and turning away from it more. So \u201cdark\u201d stories have come to vaguely annoy me, as do all kinds of bad news and causes that need my money and participation. Still, I notice both sides deep in there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I generally try to accentuate the positive, as the song lyric goes, but when I was younger (and still, a little) I cultivated a degree of morbid humor. I liked the characters of the cartoonist Charles Addams and the gross stuff in the EC horror comics line. In my own fantasy-art I have imagined various […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,15,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-favoritethings","category-play-and-spontaneity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1434"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1434"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1435,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1434\/revisions\/1435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}