I am not an artist. I’m sure this is a refrain voiced by any and all who do cartooning. And I’m sure this a refrain voiced about cartoonists by those who adhere to their rather narrow definition of what an artist is.

To me, cartooning is the ultimate form of two-dimensional creativity. I picture when I say this, someone drawing ants all over Van Gogh’s sunflowers, a moustache on Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, or a smiley face on Cezanne’s still lives. This (to me) isn’t defacing art but rather adding a comic twist. I’d like to think that if the “real” artists who did the original paintings saw these kinds of overlays, they’d laugh.

And what about graffiti artists? There are good graffiti artists and bad graffiti artists, just like there are good and bad cartoonists.

Me, what brings this to mind is the reappearance of the Bacon Family, who for years have remained out of mind, out of sight. I most likely came up with them when I lived in Milwaukee and was in graduate school. The entire family surfaced when I began attending meetings. And over the years, they appeared on the pages of notebooks, of all differing kinds.

The past few years the Bacon Family has become a visible presence in mine, and the lives of those who sit near me, at BLBP meetings. They are a form of what Robert Brooke, an academic writer, calls “the underlife.” He surmised that in classes, there are always those students who in their own odd and distinctive ways, make their identities known to one another. Note sharing is the example that I best remember.

There is now a Bright Lights Book Project underlife, and I am leading the fray. Me, the founder of the program, I’m doing this. Yesterday all of the above came to mind. The meeting was long, and our beloved board president began micro-managing us by having us raise our hands when we wanted to speak. The problem was that those who previously were long winded remained long winded. And the wait to be called upon (at least to me) seemed interminable. Also, there was no need for micromanagement since the two who needed to be micro managed were not at the meeting.

I also disagreed with the beloved board president about pending financial decisions.

What to do? Draw, baby, draw. The Bacon Family members surface on BLBP Meeting agendas. And the more constrained I feel conversation wise, or the more nonsensical the conversations are, the better the cartoons. If, say, I can, a few minutes after drawing a cartoon, return to it and gaffaw, I know I’m on to something. My best yesterday was “Rambo Bacon meets Peter Pan.”

I could not help myself. I passed on one of my drawings to our IT consultant, and he drew another member of the family, who he labeled “The Baconator.” Now another character has surfaced, one who is going to give the more subdued members of the Bacon Family a run for their money.

My characters are not serious. And I am not a serious, focused cartoonist, otherwise I would now have produced several books, the first being titled, “A Flash in the Pan: The Bacon Family Fries in their own Grease.”

Maybe I will gather up the dregs of this, my underlife musings, and put together a book. Maybe, just maybe.

Next: 69. 3/11/24: A Conversation with Hrimfara