Zach Franzen's Blog
May 26, 2023
Charlemagne
Charlemagne is a man you might not know much about. If you flip through a recent big, bright, colorful synopsis of world history—the type of book on display at bookstores—it’s doubtful you can discover even a paragraph about this great man. And yet we are all debtors to his legacy. Here are a few facts so you can know him better.
Charlemagne was a great leader, and storytellers used him for centuries as a symbol to inspire people. The most famous tale is The Song of Roland, written by Turold around 1100 A.D., 300 years after Charlemagne died. Just as his grandfather, Charles “the Hammer,” stopped Muslim slavers in the south, Charles the Great stopped Saxon threats from the north. He ruled an area that stretched from France through Germany, North Italy, and Serbia, uniting regions for the first time since the Classical era. His renewed dedication to learning also protected his people from ignorance and heresy. Total Hero.
The post Charlemagne first appeared on Heroes Legends and Curiosities — Zach Franzen.
The post Charlemagne appeared first on Heroes Legends and Curiosities — Zach Franzen.
May 25, 2023
Dinner Joke
The Hamilton Zoo had a problem. Mumbo, the gorilla, was too ill to entertain the crowds that came to see him, and he was the biggest attraction. Something had to be done. The zoo’s directors enacted a risky plan.
They paid a man named Frank Johnson $200 to wear a gorilla suit and act like Mumbo. And, every day, Johnson performed just like a gorilla. He was so successful that attendance grew, encouraging Johnson to give more exciting performances.
One day he swung from a branch that stretched over the lion’s pit. The audience gasped as Johnson’s grip failed, and he fell into the lion’s pit. “Help!” “Help” Frank cried, terrified. The lion leaped on the intruder and lowered his head. “Quiet, you fool,” the lion whispered, “Do you want to get us both fired?”
The post Dinner Joke first appeared on Heroes Legends and Curiosities — Zach Franzen.
The post Dinner Joke appeared first on Heroes Legends and Curiosities — Zach Franzen.
May 24, 2023
Bowleg Bill
Bowleg was 8 feet 4 inches tall and lived and worked in Laramie, Wyoming. But one day, he found himself on the east coast near a fishing port at precisely the wrong time in history.
You see, this was a time when whaling ships were hard to crew. So, captains hired “crimps” to recruit sailors in taverns with an easy manner, a free drink, and a few drops of knockout potion.
Two crimps noticed Bowleg Bill straight away. He loomed over everyone in his cowboy hat, holster, and boots. After the knockout potion took effect, the crimps dragged Bill to the wharf and installed him on the deck of Sawdust Sal.
The Sal’s captain, a bloodthirsty man with a quick temper, paid the crimps their fee and stroked his whiskers with satisfaction. “I expect hard work from this Goliath,” he said. His first mate, Saunders, muttered in agreement while admiring Bill’s cow-punching outfit: chaps, holster, and hat.
The captain noticed Bowleg’s gun, “Remove that gun from his holster, just in case.”
Bill awoke surrounded by water. “Must’ve flooded last night,” he said with a yawn. “Any of you seen a chestnut horse tied up around here? He don’t like the wet.”
“You!” yelled the first mate from across the ship, pointing at him with a steel pin called a marlin spike.
“Up, you great lump!” shouted the mate. “There’s nowhere to go. You’re stuck as a sailor on the Sawdust Sal. So hop to your business, or I’ll crack your nut with this spike, see?!”
Bowleg Bill didn’t quite understand all the words this man yelled, but he did catch the tone—and didn’t like it. He reached for his gun, but his holster was empty. The first mate charged, and Bowleg grabbed him and bent the spike out of his grasp, tossing it overboard. “You should be polite to a man askin’ ’bout his horse.”
The Sawdust Sal’s crew rushed to the aid of their first mate, and Bowleg was brawling before breakfast. He repelled the sailors until they were slap out of courage. Then, suddenly, the captain’s snarling voice broke out over the deck!
“What is this mutinous display!?” he roared, brandishing a pistol. “Saunders, clap this mutineer in irons and put him down below.” But Saunders didn’t move, nor did the other sailors who lay on the deck coughing and wheezing. The captain ran his eyes over his devastated crew, and Bowleg Bill pulled out a whopping great six-shooter. It was a spare he kept in his boot.
“You the foreman?” asked Bowleg Bill.
“I am the captain,” said the captain, with a tiny bit of uncertainty in his voice.
“You best put that parlor piece away,” said Bowleg, “and turn this boat around to port while you’re at it.”
“Why, y-y-you—!” sputtered the captain.
Then Bowleg squinted and looked down his barrel, “And to show you I’m serious—”
CRACK!
Bowleg’s bullet took off the right side of the captain’s mustache.
“Mr. Saunders!”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Turn the Sal back to port, immediately!”
“Aye-aye, Captain,” said Saunders.
And before the day was out, Bowleg was back on land atop his horse. But in the following months, he returned to sea with his cowboy ways to ride bucking mackerels and talk with mermaids.
The post Bowleg Bill first appeared on Heroes Legends and Curiosities — Zach Franzen.
The post Bowleg Bill appeared first on Heroes Legends and Curiosities — Zach Franzen.
April 1, 2023
Pancake Town
One Saturday at breakfast, I told a story about pancakes. My daughters liked it so much we recorded a “radio play” of it. Then, I added some drawings, and now it’s a video for you to enjoy!
The post Pancake Town first appeared on Heroes Legends and Curiosities — Zach Franzen.
The post Pancake Town appeared first on Heroes Legends and Curiosities — Zach Franzen.
September 24, 2020
Smelling Like George Washington
One of my birthday presents this year was soap. My wife bought me No. 6 soap from the Caswell-Massey company. It is the same soap George Washington, John Adams, and the Marquis de Lafayette used. The scent profile is strange. It smells medicinal, woodsy, and a little floral, and I’ve grown to appreciate it. This morning I used the last wafer-thin bit. As I sit here smelling like the 1700s, I can’t help but notice how wide the imagination is.
The imagination transcends dragons and unicorns. Think about it. Our imagination is so elemental that without it we couldn’t even call a door a door. We’d have to call it a rectangle of wood (or a collection of atoms). Concepts and categories are unavailable to us without the imagination’s ability to group particulars into universals. An ignited imagination will not only lead us through literature, but also through history and theology—not only through Narnia and Middle-Earth, but also through Valley Forge and Galilee.
For the past few months, my showers made me think about the mythic heroes of our American Revolution. Sharing something as pedestrian as a brand of soap with some of our nation’s founders makes them come alive in my imagination. These concrete details are more than trivia. They are often the starting point of a desire to learn.
In 1789, George Washington traveled to his inauguration on a barge. Onlookers followed in a number of smaller crafts. Thirteen men dressed in white rowed the barge, and George Washington smelled like I do now. While I can’t share the smell of soap over the internet, I can share some interesting details about him. Maybe one of them will provoke your imagination and give you a renewed appreciation for this great man.
Seven Steps to a Better Bedtime Story
Here’s another post I wrote some years ago for the Storywarren blog…
There is a calico cat that treads about our backyard like a fancy hobo. He’s scrawny and haughty both. I did this picture after a conversation my wife and I had about him.
If you are the parent entrusted with bedtime story duties, perhaps you might conjure up a journey for him and see where he goes.
Those who struggle with meandering bedtime stories might consider picking up a book like Brian McDonald’s, Invisible Ink. He lists seven steps to a better story. These structural helps are:
1. Once upon a time…
2. And every day…
3. Until one day…
4. And because of this…
5. And because of this…
6. Until finally…
7. And ever since that day…
These steps can help you organize events into causally related story moments.
They can turn this interaction:
SON: Dad, can you tell me a story?
DAD: Sure, um. I skipped breakfast this morning and went to lunch early. The End. Get some sleep.
Into this:
SON: Dad, can you tell me a story?
DAD: Sure.
One day when I was a child I discovered I could eat three meals a day.
And every day I ate a meal in the morning, a meal in the afternoon, and a meal at night.
Until this morning. My alarm wasn’t set properly and I overslept and missed the first meal.
And because of this, I was hungry all morning.
And because of this, I held my stomach, sighed heavily, and scowled at my co-workers.
Until finally, I could bear the hunger cravings no longer, and I got in my car, drove to Panera, and devoured all kinds of meat and bread.
And ever since that glorious meal I have forgotten how to scowl, rediscovered the mysterious art of smiling, and most important of all, I have taken pains to set my alarm properly so that the hungry monster unleashed this morning might never rise again.
The End.
SON: Wow.
DAD: Get some sleep.
SON: Impossible.
The second scenario is entirely plausible.
If you do end up telling a story about a cane-toting, necktie-sporting, top hat-wearing cat, drop me a line and let me know how it went.
Rebel Without A Qualm: The Counterculture of Gratitude
Here’s an old post I wrote for Storywarren some years ago…
I recently read an article urging Christians to be more countercultural. By countercultural I think the author meant that Christians ought to get arrested more often and sing “in your face” anthems at their parents and/or capitalists. Of course, we know that a protest culture isn’t precisely counter to our culture. It’s as mainstream as a discontented child screaming and grasping in a Toys-R-Us. Still, Christians ought to be more countercultural, and certainly this extends to our artistic and creative offerings. One way to push back at our culture is through the simple elevation of gratitude.
Christians see gratitude as essential to happiness, but in our Freud and Marx influenced culture, gratitude is the undignified badge of surrender. Dissatisfaction is seen as the way to rally the masses to overthrow corrupt Western power structures and bring in the Utopia. Gratitude (much like a Norman Rockwell painting) is perceived as an obstacle for vital social change.
But it isn’t.
Gratitude frees us from a preoccupation with self and makes us take pleasure in the good gifts of our Creator. Furthermore, it gives shape to our desire to help the oppressed. One could go on, but the point is that gratitude is a necessary element to human happiness, it pleases God, and is underrepresented by our culture.
Let me give you an old-school Dorothy Aldis poem written for children in the 1950s that assumes the pleasure of gratitude. See if the assumptions in this poem don’t strike you with a pang of rightness.
Aldis assumes that the reader treasures the smell of flowers and the smell of cookies, then she suggests that the reader make room in their circle of gratitude for ironing smells.
If I may steal a theme from Chesterton, it is magnificent to look at the world through a telescope but it is also magnificent to look at the world through a microscope. Tolkien tempered his orc battles and giant spider threats with meditations on the Hobbit’s love of good tobacco and food. Lewis tempered his fantastical never ending winter with the domesticity of the Beavers’ tidy house. Jane Austen novels, The Little House on the Prairie books, Henry and Ribsy, The Moffats, Frog and Toad; all these stories assume the pleasures of gratitude, and the reader gets to enjoy them by proxy.
Thankfully, these books are still widely available, and if you want to provide your children with an emotional affirmation of the statement “be grateful,” then you might think about importing these values from earlier literature. That’s not to say they are totally absent from contemporary writing, but they are mostly absent.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that a poem that zeros in on the appreciation of ironing aromas and the glory of domesticity elevates gratitude. Gratitude is essential for children who will one day build and preserve a society. It is absolutely unessential for those children who wish only to deface society.
The Angel Knew Papa And the Dog cover
I had the privilege to do the cover for the Rabbit Room re-issue of Doug McKelvey’s book The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog.
This book is excellent and a beautiful read. Doug spoke about the book a little over the phone before I started the sketches. He mentioned something about the book’s frontier quality and the previous cover had a Little House on the Prairie vibe. Doug is a lyricist and he makes sentences that are nice to hear. Many families who like Little House also enjoy this book as a read-aloud. I guess that kind of stuck in my mind, and so I did these rough sketches.
Doug immediately told me to forget the Little House on the Prairie thing. He suggested something more consciously symbolic feeling–something stylized and dramatic. I did these two.
He seemed uncertain, but I didn’t like them. I managed to convince him that a simpler approach might work better for online sales. Amazon and other sites have small thumbnails of the covers and it’s often good to have an image that can reproduce well small. He told me that he liked an image I did of Freya.
He liked that she was stylized and thought she communicated a metaphysical reality. He wondered if the girl’s anatomy could be slightly caricatured.
I gave him some options and he liked the blue one.
This was the one I took to final. This project was a pleasure and I’m happy to have been a part of such a lovely book.
February 1, 2018
2017
Can’t believe 2017 is already over. Here are some things I did this past year.
I continued doing freelance this year. Below is the cover for the latest installment of the Green Ember series, Ember Rising.
I also did around 20 interiors.
Heather and Picket spend a lot of time separated, and it was difficult to come up with a scene that included them both in the same space. My wife talked me through the composition above, which ended up working great.
I got to do another cover for a Green Ember Prequel, The Last Archer.
I did this cover in a week, while I was working full-time and also teaching. I’m pleased with how it turned out.
I also had the chance to Illustrate Doug McKelvey’s beautiful book, The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog.
This is a beautifully written book and I’m happy to have played a small part in it.
I also continued working at BJUPress illustrating textbooks. Here is a sampling of some illustrations for the upcoming British Literature Text:
Here are a few from the Textbook Stories of the Old Testament
And here are a few from a 5th grade Reading Story.
As I mentioned earlier, I also taught a digital illustration class at Furman University. It was a full year. Glad it’s over.
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