About Adam
Adam Blatner is the putative "author" of World of Almost-Real and associated books.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Adam Blatner's Many Parts--indeed, what you see is only a small selection! These, however, do reflect some of the imagined roles and favorite cartoon characters who have enlivened (infested?) his psyche over the last 60+ years. In truth, he--also known as "I" (since I am admittedly the author of this description)-- am closer to what might be called a "multiple personality order." (This is a play on the condition that in the 1970s was called "multiple personality disorder," since renamed dissociative identity disorder—and in the 1950s, just a split personality. The point is that it's not having many roles that one plays that is a problem, it is having an absence or weakness of a superordinate managing function, the part that makes the multiple parts of the self an orderly dynamic rather than a dis-order.) Indeed, I've come to a point where I find people are most real and also dynamically vital when they have a rich role repertoire. Anyone who is only one person, one role, or who identifies primarily or overmuch with just one role, is a fool.
I play not only a wide range of ordinary social roles (some of which are mentioned in my biographical notes on this website), but in addition, a goodly number of playful fantasy roles. Many of these have been expressed in part as cartoon characters I've created. These characters have their own back-story, so to speak, and symbolize not just a character that can play in stories, but a blending of archetypal functions that, even when played simply in drawing them, or acting them out a bit at Halloween, still lend a measure of extra depth and resonance to life. (To learn more about some of the "characters" in the various inside coat pockets of the drawing above, Click Here. Or you can access some of these by going to the cartoon section at the top.)
The activity of cartooning offers that interesting benefit. It's a bit like a novelist, especially one who re-works the same general cast of characters into a series of stories. (I'm thinking right now of the little town and the people who play their parts in a series of mystery detective stories by Lillian Jackson? Braun, with a major detecting role being played by a psychic cat.)
Some of my cartoon-doodles go further and express whole complexes of intuitions that are again playful, yet on another level serious. Some have claimed that true art seeks to show people things that ordinary language cannot describe. I have a sense about the rich eventfulness and complexity involved in the simplest-seeming of everyday events, and that this richness resonates also with the true nature of the Sacred dimensions of existence. It is a celebration of life, a kind of visual poetry to draw these figures.
My cartoon-doodles also express a parallel sensibility, one that honors the unfolding of imagery through the spontaneity of the pencil and pen, the way ideas and images can carry hints beyond the conscious intention or range of types of awareness of the artist. I allow these drawings to surprise me as they emerge as figures, revealing ideas that I hadn't noticed there at first or even after several viewings.
Similarly, a contemplation of the characters drawn lead to an unfolding interaction of drawings and half-contemplations, in which their qualities and stories become more elaborated. Subtle artistic, playful, and philosophical ideas mix in these unfolding identities.
I have an intuition that there are tens of thousands, perhaps millions of kids out there, who might well resonate with this mixture of the child-like, fantasy, and philosophically portentous elements. What if any of it were true, even indirectly? It's a bit of fantasy, science fiction, and satire comic book (such as MAD magazine), all mixed up.
For more about some of Adam's other little characters, click here.
Click here: Further Autobiographical Notes.
Click here: Adam's Cartoon-Bio, or how he came to create his many characters.