Poemtoons

Jeffrey Johannes

Creating pometoons was a natural outgrowth of my life-long love of comics. One of my earliest memories is of lying on my living room floor copying characters from the Sunday Milwaukee Journal: Al Vermeer’s Priscilla’s Pop, V.T. Hamin’s Alley Oop, and Walt Kelly’s Pogo. Although I was too young to understand the layers of social and political satire in Kelly’s work, I loved his images of talking animals. Walt Disney also provided me with models. In the fifties, he had every child wanting mouse ears! Don Martin of Mad Magazine fame was also influential.

So, I have always loved cartoons, and art was my favorite class in school. I majored in art education, was art editor for my college newspaper and yearbook, and created cartoons and comics for both. After college, I taught high school art and met my poet wife, Joan. My interest in poetry grew after attending several WFOP conferences and poetry readings with her. I bought a magnetic poetry set and began playing with words. I also participated in poetry workshops, and of course, Joan was always there to offer encouragement and constructive criticism. 

However, when I began writing poetry, I wondered if my love of drawing would come full circle with my new love of writing poetry. I also realized that my ideas for paintings and drawings were often inspired by my titles (words), and instead of sketching in preparation for a painting, I was writing my ideas. I also observed other poets and artists putting images with words, so I started combining my poetry with cartoons; pometoons were born! I got the idea to call my creations “pometoons”, using  the monosyllabic, misspelled form of the word “poem” and the ending of the word “cartoon” because I had read that Walt Whitman pronounced “poem" that way and because it matches the syllabic count of “cartoon”. 

What if Mother Goose was in the Canon? was my first pometoon. To enhance the humor, I added characters and dialog not in the poem. Since then, I have created more sophisticated pometoons of my more humorous poems, adding panels, writing the poems in the captions, and using onomatopoeia, such as “Kapow!” or “Splat!”, and speech balloons.

Jeffrey Johannes, Port Edwards, won the 2012 Hal Prize from Peninsula Pulse. He co-edited the 2012 Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar and the Winter 2019 Bramble with his wife Joan.