Here are the first three pages of MortalMan. Page 1:
Page 2 is a redo of a page from the original MortalMan in 2003, but it’s one of best pages from my history, and now it’s in color.
Page 3 is me drawing from memory the high-school-hangout diner from my youth (I used a reference from the sign–I’m not that good).
More when I have more!
Here’s a few more work-for-hires I did over the years. The first one is the most recent, from 2022, when my former roommate, Will, asked me to design a pair of avatars for his baffling username “Rocks in my Socks.”
Next, in 2014, my sister, Rachel, hired me (don’t worry, she got the family discount) to design a logo for the annual charity scavenger hunt she participates in, GISHWHES. I don’t recall the theme, and I’m not sure I want to.
In 2012, Michele paid me to make her look awesome in the desert, which I did.
And finally, in 2012, Whitney asked me to help her design a logo for something SCA/pirate-related. I feel like I did a great job with this one (I also designed a business card and a flag), but I’m not sure they used it.
I was told under no uncertain terms will I be allowed to include the first 3 lines of “I’m Too Sexy” in my upcoming novel. The reason I given is that the music industry is insanely litigious. They gave me several examples of the charges they’ve levied for the use of even “one lyric” (I assume they mean line because a lyric is a word). Note that I didn’t say “musicians” are so litigious. It’s the people who own the songs, which is not them.
I wrote Right Said Fred personally and asked them for permission to use the lines, and their assistant told me that to talk to the licenser. Now, “I’m Too Sexy” is not a work of art. The lyrics are uninspired, and the beat is childishly simple. It’s catchy, though, and most importantly, the brothers who make up the band wrote, performed, and recorded it. It’s their song. They don’t own it.
National Comics, which would one day become DC Comics, bought the rights to Superman from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster for a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars is worth a lot more than in the forties, but even then it was incredibly cheap. Superman launched an entire genre. Even before comic book movies became mainstream, the work of superhero creators inspired the movies. Remember the scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Lando leads Han, Chewy, and Leia into banquet hall with Darth Vader? That scene happened over a decade earlier in The Fantastic Four:
Jack Kirby, the artist of that scene (and cowriter; without going into detail, the Marvel method of storytelling leaned a lot more on the artist than the writer, contrary to what Stan Lee’s hype machine will tell you), did not get to keep his own art. Timely, which became Marvel, got to sell it at auction, and Kirby didn’t get a dime. This went on until the seventies, when Kirby and Neal Adams and other artists fought tooth and nail for the right to own what they created. Likewise, in the nineties, Todd McFarlane was the superstar artist whose work was selling literally millions of copies of Spider-Man comics. Marvel went nuts selling merchandizing with his art. McFarlane got nothing. (He rounded up other superstar artists to form Image Comics, in which creators were allowed to keep their creations until they didn’t want to do that anymore and did the same thing.)
Sorry I’m hitting you with the comic book history, but it’s all I really know. I know that Disney and the Creator’s Syndicate (which owns Peanuts, among its extensive catalog) are so litigious, they will send cease-and-desist and even subpoenas to daycare centers that paint Charlie Brown or Mickey Mouse on their walls. Every time I see a place with a Garfield hanging around, I wonder who’s going to squeal on them and bring in the lawyers.
All of this goes back to my book. It’s set in 1995, and while “I’m Too Sexy” was released in 1991, it was still fresh on our minds at that time. My twenty-seven-year-old work friend told me the song was a banger when I mentioned it to her, but in the nineties, it was kind of annoying. Really, really catchy, but annoying. The people I hung out with hated the song, myself included, and hearing the acapella “I’m too sexy for my love; Too sexy for my love; Love’s going to leave me” meant we were in for a very difficult three-to-four minutes. One of my friends thought it made him cool to play that song in the Kristy’s every time he came in. (For reference: if most of the people in Gallup, New Mexico were Power Rangers, Krristy’s would be the juice bar where everyone hangs out.) It was not cool. In fact, we all kind of hated him.
Kristy’s is a major setting for my novel, and a character does the “I’m Too Sexy” thing. I happens repeatedly, but I can easily edit the subsequent uses out. That first use, though, is supposed to capture the despair those first three lines brought in me every time I heard them. Why the fuck can’t I use those twenty-one words without paying out a fortune?
Greed. That’s all.
Music is ingrained in us, from catchy ad jingles to that guy whistling on the elevator. We sing the lyrics to ourselves or other people all the time. It’s a part of our lives, and denying writers the right to use these words is denying us the right to properly chronicle how we live, how we talk to each other. My novel is about teenagers, and what do teenagers care about if not music? That used to be the first question I’d ask of anyone I met when I was that young, even before learning their name: “What kind of music do you listen to?” How does that count as “Fair Use?”
When I wrote this novel a year and a half ago, I had come to terms with Right Said Fred. Their one-hit wonder was a classic by that point, and I had begrudgingly accepted that. Even though I haven’t exchanged a word with the asshole who heralded himself with that song like it was fucking “Hail to the Chief,” I kind of love his chutzpah in retrospect. But after talking to three lawyers and Neil Gaiman (relax, it was on Tumblr), and now the legal department of my publisher, I kind of hate it again.
If he’d had the right, would Fred have approved of my use of the lyrics? I don’t know. The characters’ reaction to them isn’t positive. But I can use the title, so it doesn’t matter anyway. I have to rewrite the paragraph or the entire passage so I don’t just say, “She heard the first words of ‘I’m Too Sexy’ and slammed her head down on her book.” I’m too good a writer for that, all so some rich douchebags can charge me a thousand dollars or more for their use, douchebags who have never a created a thing in their lives except enough money to buy a yacht. I am so mad right now.
I’m too sexy for this bullshit.
Squirrels are assholes. They’re the only animal that sounds like they’re swearing when they make their “cute” little animal noises. I’ve heard stories about them stealing food out of people’s hands when they have lunch in the park. They watch. They wait. And in 2006, they went to war with me.
The first salvo began at our house in Bloomington, Indiana, when I was living with my wife. We had floor-to-ceiling windows that opened at the bottom, onto our front porch, and it was a warm enough day that we did just that. A squirrel descended from one of the majestic oak trees in our front yard to enjoy his tasty acorn on our porch, right out front of the open window. At the same time, we had three young cats, aged six, six, and two. They parted the vertical blinds and crouched, so tense I was worried they’d spontaneously combust, staring, glaring, and chattering in that way that they think is imitating wildlife. I don’t have the heart to tell them it actually sounds like a cat chattering. Eventually the squirrel strutted away, and they were so wound up afterwards, they started their own little war that permanently damaged parts of the house.
They weren’t done with us. I don’t know if this was the same squirrel. (I know, it’s speciesest to say, “They all look alike, but they do.”) This time, Kate ordered to get rid of it before the cats exploded. I grabbed our porch-sweeping room and stepped outside. An ordinary squirrel would have run away at that point, but this was no ordinary squirrel. This was personal. I poked it, and it didn’t move. So I charged it, and it fled. When I chased it to a tree that it shimmied up, I figured it was over. It was not. It circled the trunk and swung back over, inches from the bristles of my broom, swearing at me. After enduring the verbal abuse long enough, I backed away and retreated inside. Later, a friend would ask me what I would have done if it had jumped onto the broom. “I would have screamed in a very unmasculine manner, dropped the broom, and retreated inside.” I didn’t add that I’d probably go to the bathroom in my pants.
Then there was the kamikaze squirrel that jumped in front of my car one day. That “crunch” haunted me for years. I’m certain that instilling guilt in me was the purpose of that admittedly heroic sacrifice.
But the war climaxed one beautiful spring day when I left for work. Our porch wasn’t much of a porch, per se, but rather a concrete landing with a couple of chairs for smoking cigarettes and a canopy. That morning, when I stepped out from under said canopy, breathing in that pollen on a perfect sweater day, and a squirrel landed on my head. I screamed, and the squirrel screamed and scrambled off of my skull, leaving behind a scalpful of scratches.
It failed to kill me, which I’m not sure was its goal. I think it wanted to intimidate me. Well done, squirrel. After that, the hostilities ceased. I see them, munching on their snacks—a lot of them snacks left behind by the litterers that live in our neighborhood—planning their next move. Luckily, there are no trees near my new apartment (there’s a beautiful neighborhood about a block southeast, though), but I can never relax. I know they’re out there, watching me. Waiting.
Happy National Squirrel Appreciation Day! Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Something I’ve always wondered about was where the supplemental lyrics to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” came from. I never hear them on TV (that doesn’t mean they’ve never been on TV), but I’ve been hearing them since I was too little to remember. Nowadays, you can’t sing “You would even say it glows” without someone appearing out of nowhere and adding, “Like a light bulb!” Where did it come from? How do I hear it from New Mexico to Oklahoma to Northern Virginia with few differences? And even if there are slight differences, the tune and rhythm is the same. I think this would be a better documentary than another one about Ted Bundy, so Netflix, call me.
However, that’s not why I gathered you all here. You are here because a chat conversation today revealed to me just how weird this schoolyard song was, and that it, from what I can tell, did not leave Woodall Elementary in rural Oklahoma. I’m calling upon you because, if you can identify the song, you would put to rest a mystery I’ve been living with for over thirty-five years.
The song, and I am not making any of this up, goes like this:
Yo momma, yo daddy, yo greaaaaaaaasy granny!
You got a hole in your pants, you got a big behind, like Frankenstein
You’re gonna beat beat beat down Sesame Street.
It was sung to me as kind of an acapella funk rap. The part where you’re introducing your relatives goes pretty slowly, like a train warming up. The rest of it chugs along at top speed.
I have no idea what this is. When the class clown who taught it to me was confronted by a teacher who said, “Where did you get that song, mister?” his answer was “Sesame Street.” Which is funny, but it is probably not accurate.
I don’t even know why I remember it, but I do. Is it from a song? That’s a possibility because I was not up on music in the eighties, unless it was by “Weird Al” Yankovic. And yet, I’ve never heard this song. Is it just a weird schoolyard thing? I have not heard it in any schoolyard I’ve been to, and anyone I’ve asked about it has usually given me a concerned look.
If I had the finances, I’d do a documentary about this, as well, but it would probably be lots of shots of people being puzzled by me singing to them. I’d be asking questions that would baffle them, such as, “How do you respond to the allegations that your granny is greaaaaaaasy?” Or, “Do you believe that this alleged hole in your pants might be related to your behind matching Frankenstein’s in size?”
Anyway, that’s why you’re here: does this ring any bells? Is this a song I’m not familiar with? I recently found out that accusing someone of having a “big ol’ butt” came from a song. I hope you have some answers.
There’s one possibility I hadn’t considered, and that’s that the class clown made it up whole cloth. Somehow, that would be the best origin for this strange little rhyme.
The guy renting out the room in his apartment in Jersey City had double-booked a roommate interview. Unemployed, I sat on a couch next to a professional (a doctor, if I can remember back twenty-five years) who was well groomed, while I looked like I had just rolled out of bed. Things were grim, until I saw his bookshelf.
See, televangelist Pat Robertson had written a “novel.” I am by no means a fundamentalist Christian, or even a Christian at all, but I had actually read this book. (I’d accuse it of being ghost-written, but ghost-writers are professionals, and this book was not.) The late nineties were the End Times, and I was getting a kick out of people being freaked out about it. Ironically, I read every book I could find about the coming apocalypse. All the fiction books had a henpecked president and his lesbian, Satanist wife, who may or may not be the Beast. They got old after a while.
I pointed at the book and said, “I’ve read that!”
The guy looking for the roommate said, “What did you think about the ending?”
I said, “It was a great twist!”
The room was mine.
I lived there six years, then another four years in the home Kate had purchased before I moved in, and the next five years in a series of private and corporate apartments that Kate took care of, until the government took care of everything and set us up in a compound in Doha, Qatar. From there, we bought a condo with my father-in-law’s money.
After that, I lived in the apartment Nicole had been renting out for years, until we moved together to a two-bedroom. Even though we are both on the lease, Nicole did most of the work. It’s privately owned by a single landlord. We paid an application fee, a security deposit, a month’s rent, and a small pet fee. It couldn’t have been easier.
My new apartment, owned by a corporation and subsidized by HUD, requires proof of employment and a month of pay stubs, a signed twenty-five-page lease, Newcastle’s photo and medical records, an account with the electric company, two lease addendums, a loading-dock reservation, one month’s rent (pro-rated), an amenities fee, a pet fee, a security deposit, a pinch of paprika, and renter’s insurance (but not the policy I already have).
I turn forty-eight this year, and I’ve never lived alone. I’ve been insulated from this process, so I had no idea what a hassle it was. I move on Friday, but I can’t pack until Tuesday. It’s okay, everything here belongs to Nicole. I left my marriage with my clothes, my note-, sketch-, comic, and just plain books and some art supplies. I’ve acquired some furniture and some organizational equipment that had one job and failed, and a huge number of toys, mostly Doctor Who related. That’s it. It will take ma a day to pack. And then, it will be Newcastle, me, and a pile of stuff to sort through. Finally, I’ll be able to start MortalMan.
This is a pretty huge adventure I’m embarking on. I feel like, after all this time, I’m finally a grownup.
In high school, Pilot Precise pens were the Cadillac of writing instruments. They were hard (for us) to find, but they were as close to fountain pens that we’d get at that age. The most exciting thing was to get a new color. Black and blue were great, but there was also red. Red was pedestrian compared to green. Or freaking purple. When I was journaling back then, I collected pens to represent the rainbow, substituting black for yellow, and finding an orange felt-tipped pen. Those were the days.
In 2010, long after I’d learned to draw, I found a four-pack of Pilot Precise pens at the Government Printing Office, where I was temping. I swiped them out of instinct, but I wasn’t sure what I would use them for. I didn’t journal—I didn’t do much writing in general, and when I did, it was with real fountain pens. I put them in the Box of Misfit Writing and Art supplies.
Along the way, Nicole bought me a set of thirty Stabilo Art Pens. They were regular pens, not brushes, so I tried a little cross-hatching. After a few tries, I was able to create works of art like this:
My mind returned to the Pilots. I only had four colors: black, blue, red, and green, but even with a limited palette, I knew I could create art. Best of all, I had a character I’d never get tired of drawing, and red, green, and blue were her colors. I have a dozen of these drawings, and some of them are really awful (most of my drawings are awful—you’re only seeing the good ones), but here are a few of the best.
(I did this one yesterday)
Concerned that the four-pack was going to run out of ink (it’s not even close), I splurged on a ten-pack. In addition to black, green, blue, and red, it has magenta, purple, light blue, light green, yellow, and orange. I took them for a spin.
It’s been good to stretch myself out after working so solidly with watercolors while making Polterguys. These pens are indulgent, but they’re a lot of fun. It brings me back to the school days when Severian and I would hang out in the back of class, writing all over our notebooks, and being unbridled in our creativity.
Sometimes a bad day doesn’t have to be a bad day forever. New Year’s Eve started really poorly, the kind of poorly that could have carried over into the new year. I won’t get into any specifics because they’re none of your business, but my life is going to change drastically, possibly as soon as this month.
I spent the afternoon kind of shock, but one of my oldest friends got my stunned text and helped talk me through it over the phone. I’ve worried that I don’t have many friends anymore because everybody has a life, and many of them were pushed out of my life while I was married. However, everybody I reached out to got back to me as soon as they read their texts, and I was able to process the events of the day.
The reason I didn’t have a bad day was because I got to hang out with the Nerdy Couple, a husband-and-wife duo I can trace back to Bloomington, Indiana. They had with them their Delightfully Weird Friend and another friend I could only describe as unhinged.
I told them all about my morning while trying not to editorialize (while editorializing), and after that twenty-minute conversation, we talked about Star Trek, the Star-Trek-adjacent fic I’ve been posting on AO3, but haven’t updated since October. We talked a lot about Star Trek. Nerdy Husband told me that there is a novel with some information on how Sarek and Amanda Grayson got together (a question that’s been plaguing me for a while), and we all agreed that the Kirk of the original series is actually a thoughtful, diplomatic man and not the horny cowboy everybody remembers him as (thanks, in no small part, to the JJ Abrams movies).
From there we gorged ourselves on sushi, cupcakes, and (for me anyway) Adderall and coffee before playing Cards against Humanity and observing ourselves becoming horrible people. I shared my favorite pick-up line (“You remind me of my pinkie toe: you’re small, cute, and I’m probably going to bang you on my coffee table later.”) which matched the tone perfectly. My bedtime is 8:00, though closer to 7:30 lately, so by ten o’clock I was feeling loopy, which only helped me win a few rounds. Taking breaks to show each other TikTok videos and to share horrifying medical stories, we wrapped it up in time for the ball drop. Delightfully Weird Friend dominated, followed by Nerdy Husband. The rest of us weren’t even close.
That’s how I’m going to remember New Year’s Eve 2023. It was the year I became an artist again and illustrated two-and-a-half comics. I saw Romania, which was awesome, and I kicked my marijuana habit. Newcastle came down with hyperthyroidism and arthritis, but once we put him on treatment, he’s incredibly healthy (for a cat who has those ailments plus kidney disease and cardiac failure). I finally made a new friend, at work, and we text each other all the time when we’re not being productive or going out to coffee. I lost the hearing in one of my ears, but yesterday it came back. I did put on a lot of weight, which I’m not happy about.
This year I’m going to illustrate the MortalMan story I’ve been dreaming about since 2000. I even picked up a new art board to do it with. At some point, I’m going to move to a new apartment, and I’ll be living solo for the first time in my entire life. I have a plan to take my weight off. Other than that, my year will be wide open.
This has been a very matter-of-fact post, but that’s because I’m probably going to hop back into bed shortly. Once upon a time I spent New Year’s Day nursing a hangover, treating myself to a greasy breakfast, and watching bad TV, sometimes with a girlfriend, sometimes with my sister, and sometimes alone. This year I’ve spend most of my morning in my pajamas, drifting in and out of sleep and reviewing my first round of proofs while Newcastle cuddled me. I cannot be happier at this moment. Twenty-four hours ago should have ruined me, but it failed. I’m filled with as much chill and hope as I’ve ever had.
May your year fill you with chill and hope.
Jeremiah Murphy 