Twin Cities Book Fair

Today's Twin Cities Book Fair was looking pretty tempting -- I had heard M.T. Anderson, author of Feed and the Octavian Nothing books was going to be part of it. But I wasn't sure I would make it over there.

Then I had an email from a woman named Louise, who Googled cartoonist Chris Monroe and found my blog. She let me know that Chris was going to be on a panel at the Book Fair.

So I did go for the afternoon. Of course, I forgot to bring along my copies of either person's books for signing. Oh, well.


Here's Chris with illustrator L.K. Hanson after the panel discussion.


M.T. Anderson morosely, but charmingly, discussed the future of the book and the narrative in the age of the ebook, interweb and gaming.


After 40 minutes on topic, his session ended with a question from the audience: What's the first nursery rhyme he remembers? He answered that it wasn't a nursery rhyme, but a song his father sang him about Anne Boleyn wandering the Tower of London. I think I was the only person in the audience who sang along to the chorus. ("With her head tucked underneath her arm / She walks the Bloody Tower! / With her head tucked underneath her arm / At the Midnight hour.")

I couldn't resist buying a few books, of course. I've been meaning to read James Howard Kunstler, who was also at the Fair, so I picked up his titles that were for sale and got them signed, for good measure.


And the International Cartoon Conspiracy was selling the four-part False Witness! comic book series, which describes Michelle Bachmann's rise from school board to legislature to Congress to Fox News.



The Book Fair is sponsored by Rain Taxi, the Twin Cities' best-known literary review.

Chris and the Koalas

It's been too long since my last Chris Monroe post. Her Violet Days comic last Friday is a great example of a cartoonist playing stupid. Plus, it's about the Koala Bear Kare diaper-changing tables, a subject dear to my heart.


(Click for a larger image)

What a surreal world it would be if people were taking care of koalas on the Koala Bear Kare changing tables. Maybe we'd all get a chance to roll one around, snuffle it, and adore its unbelievable cuteness.

Kids' Cookbooks a la Chris Monroe

I promise not to post any more of Chris Monroe's "Violet Days" after this. But this is such a great example of her strip, and how she uses it to unearth pop culture memories from her childhood...which, of course, resonate with the part of her audience that is older than 35 or so.


Of course, my family had a cookbook just like this. It had a yellow cover and cool 60s-style illustrations (as well as funky color photos). I found a copy of it at a used bookstore a while ago.


I think I remember that photo of the cottage cheese with the ice cream cone hat.


The ham drawing makes me think of the time my oldest sister made O'Blarney Beef and Potatoes (the potatoes were dyed green with food coloring). We all made fun of her.

I have to admit, the last frame makes it clear to me that Chris and I are not exactly the same age, since I think Steak Ums and the Fry Baby came out when I was in college.

Violet Days: Love Hurts

Today's Violet Days strip by Chris Monroe was both fun and educational (click to see it larger).

Who knew that the over-wrought, mid-'70s ballad called "Love Hurts" wasn't originally by Nazareth? And even more unimaginable was that the song was actually written by a duo of rockabilly songwriters in 1960, and first recorded by the Everly Brothers.

Chris runs it down with her usual style, including a final wag of the finger to Nazareth for changing the lyrics. How stupid is that, anyway -- "Love is like a flame, burns you when it's hot" instead of "Love is like a stove, burns you when it's hot."

What did Nazareth have against kitchen similes, anyway?

Chris Monroe, Goddess of the North

Cartoonist Chris Monroe creates one of the most idiosyncratic and supremely local cartoons on earth: Violet Days.

Based in Duluth, she often writes about memories from childhood and weird details from Minnesota and Wisconsin. Last Friday's strip (in the Star Tribune) was a fine example of all of the above:




A bunch of her strips are collected in a book, called Ultra Violet: Ten Years of Violet Days. I highly recommend it.

Chris Monroe Honors Thanksgiving in Her Own Way

It's been too long since I did a Chris Monroe post, so here is her Violet Days strip from last week, in honor of Thanksgiving.







My favorite part: Milton Glaser's mom in the lower right corner of panel 4.

Chris Monroe, Now Online

I've written about Minnesota cartoonist Chris Monroe many times, but I've never been able to link to her work online. That has finally changed: Her home-town newspaper, the Duluth News Tribune, has recently begun posting her weekly comic "Violet Days" on their website.

Here's one from the past few weeks:


The whole archive is here and can be checked weekly for the latest with much larger images than I have shown here. Finally!

Chris Monroe, 1993

Check out this 1993 illustration by Chris Monroe, which prefigures the work she did in Monkey with a Toolbelt:


(Click to enlarge substantially and see the kinds of detail that make the Monkey books so fun to see.)

It's neat to get a glimpse at an artist's evolution.

Chris Monroe and the Escaping Monkey

As I wrote earlier, Duluth cartoonist Chris Monroe last year wrote and illustrated Monkey with a Tool Belt, a picture book about an escaping primate. She recently used her weekly Violet Days strip in the Star Tribune to bring us a three-part series about a real monkey that may have been the inspiration for Chico Bon Bon.

Click on the images to see them at a readable size.






I wonder if Oliver's exploits will increase tourism in Tupelo?

Monkey with a Tool Belt

I'm generally not a huge fan of picture books (reserving my age-inapproriate reading to juvenile and young adult novels), but when I heard cartoonist Chris Monroe had written and illustrated one, I had to check it out.

Monroe's reputation is not only unsullied, but expanded -- Monkey with a Tool Belt is more fun than a barrel full of furry prehensile-toed mammals. The story focuses on the eponymous Chico Bon Bon, who lives in the coolest of multilevel treehouses and uses his tools to help his friends make fun new toys.

Two items Chico made were a go-kart for Go-Go the gorilla to transport the skunks...

and a small roller coaster for the local chipmunks.

But Chico's life of good works is interrupted when a selfish organ-grinder captures him to replace his other monkey, who "had run away earlier that week with the help of several circus tigers."

(I love that image. Let's hear it for interspecies cooperation!)

Chico, of course, manages to outsmart the organ grinder with the help of his tool belt, but not before he is taken on a riotously circuitous ride on the back of the organ grinder's bicycle through a detailed watercolor landscape. Ending up at the circus, he quickly uses his noggin and his tools to find a way out of the box he is trapped in.

Then he takes the bus home (of course!) and settles into his treehouse for a good night's sleep, dreaming of all the things he's going to create next.

Monroe strikes a perfect balance between a compelling main character, a story with a beginning, middle and an end, and the kind of artwork that will keep kids (and parents) interested through multiple readings.

And she even manages to conclude with Chico going to sleep -- making it a good bedtime book as well.

A Violet Ice Cream Sundae

Chris Monroe schools us on the origins of the ice cream sundae:


(Click the image to see it larger.)

Oddly enough, I have been to both the towns Chris describes.

Two Rivers, Wisconsin, proudly proclaims itself the Birthplace of the Ice Cream Sundae, and has created a small museum around the topic at the historic Washington House (right across the street from the Hamilton Wood Type Museum).

If you make it to the Washington House, be sure to go upstairs and see the second floor ballroom.


Photo from Flickr by J. Steven Conn

Despite the fact that Ithaca is very near my home town in upstate New York, I never knew it claimed to be the birthplace of the ice cream sundae until I read about it in Violet Days. I tend to think of Ithaca as the home of Cornell University, Moosewood Restaurant and Greenstar Food Co-op.

In keeping with its place in the world of academia, Ithaca has done a lot more historical research to prove its claim. Some of its residents created a song called "Two Rivers, Puh-leeze" (sung to the tune of "Moon River") to make a musical argument for their town's ice cream primogeniture. Favorite lines: "Two Rivers, why live in denial?" and "without sundae proof your claim's melting away."

To be fair, it was Two Rivers residents who composed the first song, sung to the tune of "On Wisconsin" (the lyrics can be found near the bottom of this page). But I have to admit, the Ithacans' lyrics win the cleverness competition.

Chris Monroe Does It Again

The woman is brilliant. All my loathing for Bratz dolls and what they represent rolled into six little panels. (Click on the image to see it larger.)


I was lucky enough to get a copy of Chris's collection of Violet Days strips, Ultra Violet, which now appears to be out of print (only one used copy available at Amazon). Gee, and mine is signed, too. (Not gloating, no, not me.)

But it looks like she has a new children's book out called Monkey with a Toolbelt. Now I know what to get the kids for Christmas!

Hodag Redux

I was just checking out the Museum of Hoaxes website, taking a look through their photo gallery, and came across this photo of a hodag!


The caption reads:

This picture, and ones like it, appeared on many Wisconsin postcards during the first decades of the 20th century. It shows a creature called the Hodag cornered by men with pitchforks. The Hodag is a supernatural beast native to Wisconsin. It has the head of a bull, the back of a dinosaur, and the leering features of a giant man. Its legs are short, its claws are long, and its tail is spear-tipped.

Gee, and I thought Chris Monroe was at least partly making it up!

Egg Hunt Update

Chris Monroe's cartoon in Friday's Star Tribune...



...reminded me of last year's egg hunt debacle, sponsored by Valley Creek Church. It featured eggs dropped from a helicopter and many parents breaking the rules to hunt for the few eggs containing coupons for iPods and Wii gaming systems.

The Valley Creek bombardiers were not deterred, though, carrying out another event this year. It looks as though they made some major changes -- requiring preregistration to limit the number of kids, having separate fields for each age group with kids wearing color-coded wristbands by age, and, I'll bet, doing a better job of enforcing the no-adults-on-the-field rule. (Short video and story here.)

Still doesn't make a lot of sense to me to promote Christianity this way, but at least they created fewer second-grade goths this year.

The First Day of Christmas

When I dug out my office about 10 days ago and found a bunch of old comics, I also found a couple related to Christmas, so I've been saving them to post when it became appropriate:

The second one is by Duluth's own Chris Monroe.

Since then, a couple more with Christmas themes have run on the Star Tribune op-ed page, so I have old and new cartoons for Christmas Eve 2022 to get my mind off of everything else…

…or I guess it would be more honest to say, these new cartoons tie Christmas in to everything else.

 

Not Politics at the 2019 Fair

Following up from yesterday's post about politics at the 2019 Minnesota State Fair, today it's just the nonpolitical goodness.

But still with crop art.


This exquisite birdhouse was made by Elinor Davies, who entered in the under-age-12 category. If you zoom in, check out her key cards and the great detail in the roof and sides. Elinor has a gift for crop art and I look forward to seeing a lot more from her!


Charlotte Ferlic made a love note to our newly named state bee, the endangered rusty patched bumble bee, Bombus affinis. I forgive her for the quote marks and the errant capital "a" in affinis.


I don't think there was a title on Kristin Schroeder's catzillas. Pretty great color use in this one. And check out those kitty paws.


Christy Klancher made a croppie out of crop art. Ha. The fish is pretty cool, but it's really the wood grain on the plaque that makes it. (Hint: that's not wood.)


Amateur Brittanie Karkula brought a classic folk art style to her illustration of local personality Fancy Ray McLoney.


Sarah Anderson won a special ribbon for her dyed grapefruit, and I can see why. Most of what you see there is oats. The "seeds" are pumpkin seeds and the rinds and pith are hulled millet and quinoa.


Theresa Linihan's "Persephone of Minnesota" is a vase or a planter. The face is nice, but the thing that made me include it here is the use of pine cones as hair.


And this, by Dan Lindquist, is the topper. Even if you're not a Game of Thrones fan, zoom in on this one just to appreciate the simplicity of the illustrations and the way the various crops are used as texture. Lindquest even got a second ribbon for the beauty of his key card.

Well, finally, that's enough crop art!

Nearby in the horticulture building, I was pretty taken with this arbor:


It's made from arched steel hog panel fencing and wood, with straw bales at the base on one side as a growing medium. The dangling squash (or melons or cucumbers) are a beautiful way to do vertical gardening.

Inside the Creative Activities building, I saw a lot of great stuff, but I have just a few photos to share. I love these decorated cookies:


They were only fifth place and the other were very nice as well, but I think Nicole Kennedy's were the best. She even illustrated not just the monarch chrysalis and caterpillar, but also the egg, which you can barely see. And she has a wood lily!

Among all of the school-age artwork, the thing that almost always grabs me the most are the house models made out of cardboard. This house by a 9th grader (shown front and and back in two photos) won a top prize:


Its mailbox has come apart, I guess. But the newspaper is still outside the door.


The details inside were deft and the color palette sophisticated.

This house, made by a 7th grader, is fun. Check out the that second floor deck, and the crazy roofline:


I try to imagine whether I would have entered a house into the competition if I had grown up going to the Minnesota State Fair. I think I might have.

In the Fine Art Show, I saw three notable pieces:


This stunning dress is made from bicycle inner tubes.


It's been a long time since Duluth's Chris Monroe had a piece in the show. This one is called "Lucky Ducks."


I am a sucker for mosaics, so this one, titled "Betty!", made me smile.

Finally, here's a shot that's classic State Fair:


You can't go wrong ending with rainbow unicorns.