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Bunkbed Mishaps: The Flintstones’ Mark Russell Reveals Deeply Personal Political Cartoon Book

by #AI April 4, 2023 · Automatic

Writer Mark Russell has developed a reputation for writing some of the most clever and subversive comics on the stands, from DC reboots like The Flintstones and Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles. But it turns out that Russell also has some experience as an artist, too. He’s been spending decades drawing political cartoons, and that body of work is being showcased in a new collection called Bunkbed Mishaps.

The roughly 100 cartoons collected in Bunkbed Mishaps were created over the course of 30 years, beginning long before Russell made his comic book debut writing 2015’s Prez. The book also includes several essays, as Russell reflects back on his life and career in a sort of memoir format. Get a taste of what’s included by checking out the slideshow gallery below:

“I’ve been a writer of comic books for less than ten years, but I’ve drawn cartoons all my life,” Russell tells IGN. “So I thought it would be a good time to show people the part of the iceberg that’s been floating underwater all this time.”

IGN can also exclusively reveal one of the essays featured in Bunkbed Mishaps:

The Beginning

I want to tell you, briefly, how I got started drawing cartoons. Or, more accurately, why I kept drawing them.

I’ve drawn cartoons for as long as I can remember. Most kids draw cartoons, I suppose. But, at some point, they’re smart enough to give it up. They get distracted by sports and school dances and wanting to seem normal and the drawing just sort of vanishes. For a while, I stopped, too. But I kept coming back to drawing, even though I was never particularly good at it and the older I got the weirder a thing it seemed to do.

Drawing was always encouraged in our house. My dad worked as a manager at a wood products company in Springfield, Oregon and he often brought random things home from work. Stained glass door inserts, wood scraps, plywood squares, etc. One time he brought me a fully constructed pair of wooden stilts. I began walking around the neighborhood on my new stilts and unwittingly started a short-lived trend. If you lived on our street during the summer of 1981, you probably saw me and one or two other neighborhood kids, clunking down the road on our stilts.

But mostly what my dad brought home from work were reams and reams of green and white ruled computer paper. This became my drawing paper. I started out copying Peanuts characters or creating my own off-brand Peanuts characters. One day, Dad noticed that I was drawing, so he started bringing me reference material. Picture books and catalogs, mostly containing pictures of rockets and aircraft and spaceships. So I started drawing those, too.

For pretty much my entire childhood, my dad worked as a middle manager at the wood products company. But he was born in England and came to this country in the 1960s, which saw an unprecedented exodus of scientists and engineers from around the world to this country to help with the Space Race against the Soviet Union. My dad was, by training, a metallurgical engineer and, in fact, had worked for the sub-contractor that made the heatshield for the Apollo 13 project. The life of a wood products manager seemed snoozy and unglamorous by comparison. One time I asked him why he gave up engineering.

“I couldn’t handle the drinking,” he replied enigmatically.

I never had too much in common with my father, but for whatever reason, we both felt it was important that I draw. So he kept plying me with computer paper and books filled with B-2 bombers and Boeing 747s. And I kept drawing them.

When my dad came home from work, I would usually show him whatever I’d drawn on the computer paper. He was never effusive in praise. Or in anything. He lived his life mostly inside himself. I don’t think he ever said anything nice about any of my drawings. He’d look at them, nod, and then hand them back to me. The important thing, apparently, was not that they were any good, but simply that the drawing continued. I think he sensed, as I later would, that part of ourselves is lost when the drawing stops.

And the drawing would stop. I too came to the age when I was more interested in school or sports or hanging out with friends to draw anymore. After a while, the flow of computer paper stopped. An unused stack of it just gathering dust on top of his large metal desk in the study.

When I was eighteen, I moved out of the house. I was packing my stuff and anything else I thought might come in handy for life on my own. I dug through the drawers of my dad’s oversized metal desk, looking for pens or calculators or whatever I could find that might be useful in the life of an unready adult. But there, in the bottom drawer, I found a small notebook. Its pages yellowed with age, it had to be decades old.

I opened the notebook to find drawing after drawing. Cartoon animals and people, all drawn by my dad. Until that moment, I had no idea that he had ever drawn anything.

The next day I left home forever.

Bunkbed Mishaps is currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter. In addition to the book itself, backers can earn additional rewards like original art and prose books from his pre-comics career.

Russell is also about to debut the third volume in his satire series Second Coming at Ahoy Comics.

In other comic book news, Marvel Comics has finally revealed G.O.D.S., the long-awaited next major work from House of X writer Jonathan Hickman.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.

Author: Jesse Schedeen. [Source Link (*), IGN All]

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