mary

more surfer

Based on a panel from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's 1978 Silver Surfer graphic novel.

the silver surfer

grover, with a dash of color

grover cleveland

Fun Grover Facts:

1) Cleveland is the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms (1885–1889 and 1893–1897) and therefore is the only individual to be counted twice in the numbering of the presidents (he's #22 and 24).

2) President Most Likely to be Confused with Detective Andy Sipowicz.

3) His first name was Stephen but he preferred to go by his middle name, Grover. I repeat, he preferred the name Grover.

4) He married Frances Folsom, the 21 yr old daughter of an old friend of Cleveland's, when he was President (Cleveland's the only President to get married in the White House). Folsom is the youngest First Lady in U.S. history, and I'm pretty sure that record's not gonna get broken anytime soon.

5) In 1893 Cleveland had a portion of his upper jaw and hard palate removed during a risky operation to get rid of a cancerous lesion on his upper left jaw--the surgery was performed on a yacht sailing just off of Long Island. The surgeons performed the entire operation inside the mouth without making a single external incision. A vulcanized rubber plate was made for the President, which restored his speaking voice so well that when he reappeared in public no one could detect that an operation had taken place.

6) In a 1905 article in The Ladies Home Journal, Cleveland weighed in on the women's' suffrage movement, writing that "sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by men and women in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence." Not a very good pick-up line, that.

frozen tree

james garfield

Fun Facts about James Garfield:

1) He juggled Indian clubs to build his muscles.

2) Garfield was a minister and an elder for the Church of Christ (Christian Church), making him the first—and to date, only—member of the clergy to serve as President. He is also, to date, the only Representative to be directly elected to the Presidency, and was the last President to have been born in a log cabin.

3) The 2nd U.S. President to be assassinated, Garfield was shot in July 1881 and died that September, having been in office for only six months and fifteen days.

4) Alexander Graham Bell tried unsuccessfully to find the bullet with an induction-balance electrical device which he had designed--it wouldn't work due to interference from the iron frame that Garfield's bed was on (this reason wasn't discovered until later, as iron frame beds were quite uncommon at the time).

5) Garfield would wail like a little girl and immediately run to the highest nearby ground whenever anyone said the word 'Chickamagua'. Afterwords he would claim no memory of such incident.

lbj

Fun Facts about Lyndon Johnson:

--He is one of four people who served in all four elected Federal offices of the United States: Representative, Senator, Vice President and President.

--Several historians consider Lyndon Johnson the most effective Senate majority leader in history. He was unusually proficient at gathering information. One biographer suggests he was "the greatest intelligence gatherer Washington has ever known", discovering exactly where every Senator stood, his philosophy and prejudices, his strengths and weaknesses, and what it took to break him.

--Johnson chose not to run for re-election in 1968, due to a combination of the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and Robert Kennedy's bid for the Democratic nomination (which the popular Kennedy probably would've won over the incumbent Johnson).

--Although he wasn't as obsessed with pants and pants-changing as Chester A Arthur, Johnson did prefer to have his pants custom-made for him.

post layout/pre-ink

warren g harding

Fun Facts about Warren G. Harding:

1) He died of a sudden heart attack not quite three years into his Presidency.

2) Was the first U.S. President to ride in an automobile to his inauguration.

3) His brief administration is chiefly remembered for the Teapot Dome Scandal, a messy tale of bribery, fraud, and federal oil reserves.

4) Like any good President, he had a secret mistress.

5) The G stands for Gamaliel...yes, Harding was actually a Noldor Elf (also known as Golodhrim or Deep Elves) who left the Undying Lands of Valinor to follow Feanor in his quest for vengeance against Melkor the Enemy. It it unclear how Harding managed to escape the Valar's Prophecy of the North, which pronounced the doom of the Noldor exiles, and somehow survived thousands of years past the Fourth Age of Man.

i am biggest: the origin

When I was a wee lad my parents would let me leave out food for Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, and after I went to bed they would then leave a note, ostensibly left by said magical sprites, for me to marvel at in the morning (and they would get rid of the food, as if it had been eaten--always leaving little crumbs behind as evidence). When I was very very young they would write out a note from me to Santa/Bunny that I would place by the plate of food.

I've still got a note to the Easter Bunny from, oh, sometime in the late 1970's...for some reason, after filling in my name in the note, I then scribbled the non-sequiter-ish "I am biggest" at the bottom. I made some mini-comics in the 1990's using that as the title, and it carried over to this blog. I just find it funny.



A drawing of the Easter Bunny, from the back of the note: