Gnitpicking

I don’t know why this washed up on the shores of my mind today, but here it is. Back when I was in middle school I was just starting to learn how to draw, mainly by tracing Pauline Baynes illustrations or trying to copy the folds of cloaks from Brothers Hildebrandt paintings. That was for my fancier productions. But for just doodling, for fun, I came up with something only slightly better than a stick figure. This was a ‘Gnit.’

A gnit (pronounced ‘GUH – nit’) was basically a sort of a puffball, resembling a tribble. But unlike a tribble its body (which was also its head) sported eyes, a mouth, antennae, and stick figure arms and legs. There were, in fact, many gnits, scrambling over every page in every position, wielding weapons, flying planes, waving, grinning, grimacing, doing dozens of cartoony actions. A single page might be overdrawn in spare or dull moments in class. Not great art, but great fun.

Fun I shared with my friend Steve Jones (memorialized here on the Niche in Brother Silas). Anybody could draw a gnit and soon we were sharing productions where we mocked our ‘enemies’, played out corny jokes and situations, and scribbled up great battles. Steve’s dad was in the Air Force, and it was Steve who provided the slightly better-drawn planes that some gnits would tool around in. I seem to recall vague thoughts that their simple design would be easy to produce as a cheap toy, something not unlike the troll doll. Steve and I vied with each other to produce the most awful wordplay, where any -it word would be replaced by gnit. Real groaner, juvenile stuff.

Well. I still have one or two pages surviving from that time. I never made any scans of them in the old days, and ‘twere tedious to dig them out now. I suppose I could easily draw a reproduction of one, but somehow that seems to be cheating. It would lack that fine, first, carefree crudity of an original gnit. Worst of all, it would not have the ‘spirit’ of the thing, laden as it would be with the burden of decades. So I will just record the memory of it here, and of the two gnitwits whom they amused.