THE INCREDIBLE FATMUNKEY AND JESSE SLOAN

2 Characters = 1 Person

n A Nutshell…Or In Banana Peel

FatMunkey.com is all about products, created by Jesse Sloan (A.K.A., FatMunkey) that are fun and relaxing and mentally stimulating. It's about puzzle books and activity books and card games and digital images and, coming soon, paintings and prints, and other cool stuff that springs forth from my feeble imagination.

FatMunkey is poised for a mission to bring you good things and good times. No worries! It’s all just fun!

I am FatMunkey and FatMunkey is me. That’s the long and short of it. If you don’t want to read anymore, feel free to stop now. Go buy a puzzle book.

Relax.

If you want to know a bit more about me and FatMunkey, read on.

What FatMunkey Makes Now

Books. Puzzle books, trivia books and even some fiction. Find them all on my Amazon author page, with the puzzle books gathered on the puzzle books page.

Games and cards. My newest creation is Ikonology, a 78-card deck that plays as a poker deck, reads as a tarot deck and works as a solitaire game and an oracle, all at once. Curious how a tarot deck turned into a poker deck? Read the story behind the design, or look up what every card means, starting with the Major Arcana.

Art. Paintings and prints are on the way, starting with an Etsy shop. When it opens, the link will be right here.

Opening The Banana Peels

For some reason, thinking about writing this page put me in mind of the opening line of Richard Nixon's autobiography, RN:

“I was born in the house my father built.”

While that isn't literally true in my case, it does ring true in my heart because, at least figuratively, I was born into my father's world (house).

Not My Life Story!

Don’t get squeamish on me now! I have no intention of telling my life story here! But it is a page “about” me (and FatMunkey) so I have to begin somewhere. But be forewarned! No one has ever accused me of being an overly brief writer!

My earliest memories of Dad are slap-dab in the middle of the 1970s. It was the age of Scooby-Doo, Fred Flintstone, Leave It to Beaver, I Dream of Jeannie and the oh so cool, Fonzie. One of my favorites was Grape Ape. As far as I was concerned, the coolest man on earth was my Dad.

He was a single father, which was rare for that era. I grew up surrounded by him and his friends. He was an ironworker who traveled from one major construction site to another for the first twelve years of my life. As a result, we were hardly ever in one city for more than six months to a year. I was always the new kid on the block and I was an only child. Most of my playmates were Dad’s ironworker buddies. So, I learned at an early age how to entertain myself.

My Introduction to Puzzle Books

The first time I saw a puzzle book, I was, perhaps, 6 or 7 years old. My Dad was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, listening to the radio and circling words in a book full of letters. Of course, I was curious. I also remember my curiosity getting the better of me. When Dad took a nap that afternoon, I got that book and made some circles of my own. He wasn’t pleased with my results! After my scolding, he sat me down and showed me how a word search puzzle worked.

By the time I was 12, I was hooked on puzzles and games of all sorts. Dad was a ruthless games player himself. Many parents would play a game with a child and let them win occasionally. Not my Dad. He made me fight for every victory!

Other Influences

Another aspect of being that only child, stuck in a world full of rough and tumble ironworkers, was that I had a lot of time to burn on my own. When I wasn’t working on puzzles or playing on my Atari, I was watching television and reading comic books.

Television was, as I alluded to earlier, rooted in the 1960s and 1970s re-runs. Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes classics filled my Saturday mornings and my after-school-mind. Shows like:

Tom and Jerry
Scooby-Doo (“Herro, Raggy!”)
Huckleberry Hound
The Jetsons
The Flintstones (“Yabba Dabba Doo!”)
Jonny Quest
Space Ghost
Bugs Bunny (“What’s up, Doc?”)
Elmer Fudd (“Kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit…”)
Roadrunner and Coyote
Foghorn Leghorn
Marvin the Martian

Comic books were also a favorite for me. I remember reading every Archie & Jughead book I could get my hands on along with Green Lantern, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, X-Men and, well, the list is nearly endless.

So, you will see in my artwork (book covers, card designs, paintings and elsewhere), there is a strong influence of cartoons and even comic books of the time.