egypturnash | Me And My Arrow (Reply)

When I was four or five or so, my father brought home a promo copy of an album from the radio station he worked at. It was called "The Point!", and it was the story of this little kid born in a town where everything had a point on it - except for him. Exiled for this difference, he roamed the Pointless Forest and had strange things happen to him. The story was told in narration and song. The lyrics to these songs were strange in places, mournful and oblique and resonant; some of them chased around the back of my head for my entire life, surfacing at odd moments.

There were very, very Seventies drawings in the short book bound into the album jacket, relating to the story. I always wondered if this came from a film but never knew for sure.

Until yesterday, when a post came up on Metafilter about it. I watched the whole thing last night and this morning. Strange, meandering, at times painful to watch. What an odd little artifact from my childhood. Turns out it's just as old as I am; the movie first aired on TV in 1971, the year I was born.

I almost did the yiffy furry thing and drew Oblio fucking Arrow, but decided to play it straight instead. Visually, this is inspired by the film's designs, but I went my own way - I really didn't think that the squat, crammed-together design of Arrow fit the name, or the kind of kinetic image I wanted to do. Oblio and Arrow, running through the angular "Pointless Forest", to an uncertain destiny.

I'm not sure if the "hey man it is totally awesome if you want to march to a different drummer" message of the film had any effect on me. That sort of gently nonconformist theme ran through lots the kid's media of the seventies, especially the stuff done in the Peter Max/Milton Glaser kind of style that this film was in, and which I mostly gave up on referencing by the time I finished this drawing...