Redtree Times

One of the great things about the internet  is being able to, with a few clicks, come across things and images that have been stored away in your memory for a very long time.  The characters that lived so vividly with you as kid come back to life the second you see them, taking you back to specific memories associated with them.  For me, many are cartoon characters and other highly visual creations, all influencing my eye.  I probably shouldn’t be admitting that. 

Maybe it’s simple nostalgia but there’s something kind of comforting in seeing these icons from your past for just a moment just to know they’re still there.  Many have never left, such as the eternally grinning Alfred E. Neuman from  Mad Magazine or the icon of all kid icons, Snoopy,who holds a special place in my memory.  Snoopy was the first thing I really learned to draw well.  A kid on my school bus, Tom  Hillman, who was a couple of years older and a drawing whiz, showed me the basics of how Snoopy was put together with a few simple circles and ovals and a curved line here and there.  It seemed like magic and I was hooked.  I drew Snoopy everywhere.  I particularly liked drawing him when he was in the character of one of his alter egos such as the World War I pilot battling the Red Baron, or Joe Cool who was definitely the Big Man on Campus.

Mad Magazine also provided a wide variety of other imagery from the their wonderful parodies of current TV shows and movies to their great back covers that you had to carefully fold to reveal it’s true content to the regular strips such as Spy Vs. Spy, with its Cold War characters trying to off one another in every issue.

Ed “Big Daddy” Roth was in his heyday in my youth and his Rat Fink character was the hero of young boys everywhere.  There was a sense of anarchy  and chaos in his drawings that really appealed to kids in the 60’s.  I think every kid wanted to sit in one of his crazy hot rods for just a minute and feel the tires screeching and the heat from the flames blowing out the side pipes.

There are so many more images I could show.  Great cartoon characters.  Great characters from kid books.  Advertising icons.  All littering my memory and still living somewhere on the web.  If you want to just look…