Chagal4's Blog

We should have been Charlie sooner… but how were we to know? They’d been dancing for years…out on the edge of the floor. Listening to music of their own. Laughing in the corners, drawing pictures on the walls. Sometimes they were funny, sometimes they were scary. They laughed at everybody and cried about the crazies. There was a madness loose in the world and some of us took it too seriously…stared at our hands…ranted at the darkness spreading like a stain. Charlie laughed with a pen and ink…We wondered, was that wise? How were we to know?

Can three assholes kill a country…by shooting cartoonists…What? Is that even sane? When I was six years old all I wanted to do was be a cartoonist. They were my heroes…they invented my heroes…they drew my heroes so that I could see them. Their heroes battled evil. I couldn’t imagine anything more honourable…It seemed such a…gentle…profession. Sitting with a pen and ink, at a table, inventing worlds. I drew on school books, on my bedroom wall, on scrap paper. I thought Prince Valiant was real. I was amazed about Wonder Woman’s glass plane. Mandrake the Magician and the Green Hornet guarded the door to my sleep. One day I woke up and I wasn’t a kid anymore. Damn! They were gone.

I kept drawing of course. And I wondered where they went…the cartoonists. When I found them again they were a different tribe. Oh, there were lots of gentle souls…cute little pieces of cleverness tucked into nooks in magazines…smiles. The New Yorker is full of them. I can always find a smile there. But out there on the edge there were ravers and ranters…Artist cartoonists, exploring, searching, driving their work into far out fantasy worlds and France had the best of them. A magazine called Heavy Metal. These people took the same drugs as me…ate the same food…loved the same music. And they had a culture…knew each other, shared work, competed.

Flat out political?…Hell, I don’t know…maybe some. Charlie was…is.

Out there on the edge…dancing…dancing…spinning…laughing and dying. Cartoonists are still my heroes.

We should have been Charlie sooner.

We should have known.

This entry was posted on January 9, 2015 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.