Busytown, Where's Waldo, and Killscapes

In my younger days I was obsessed with Richard Scarry’s Busytown. I was also really into Where’s Waldo - not so much in finding Waldo but in the mass of the people and things happening in the art. Same with Busytown - I loved all the animals driving cars and baking and playing sports. It was bizarre to me. I was also really into Goldbug and Lowly Worm. I loved the art and the warmth of the drawings. It felt like a magical and fully realized world. Both Busytown and Waldo very much inspired me to draw but my scenes weren’t of soft creatures having fun and baking pies but of total and random violence. Folks falling into meat grinders and carnivorous plants. Folks impaled, shot, dismembered. You get it. It was art I didn’t need to think about. I could just draw and that was it. And that type of approach to drawing very much moved me forward in my creative life. It was all something I could just do and not worry about. When I look back at these murderscapes of cartoony character killings and dying, I see the first glimpses of so many FAL characters. I also see the feel I wanted for FAL (one element of that feel), a scary world full of violence and ridiculous ways to die. Cartoonish death by robot hacksaw blades. Being impaled by another person. The image here is an ancient version of a murderscape I did in early high school.