MONK #1: traditionally, what do horses eat
MONK #2: traditionally? roofs
rooves?
roofs, all kinds
MONK #1: and their faces are typically
MONK #2: human eyes and human faces stretched into a long horse oval, yep
MONK #1: horses are also mostly the size of dogs right
MONK #2: mm
MOSTLY
but only if they’re facing backwards
MONK #1: which one
the dog-horse
or the horse-dog
MONK #2: oh it’s neither of both
MONK #1: ok thanks
MONK #1: okay but if there’s not a dog around, how big are horses
MONK #2: well that depends
are they going uphill or downhill
MONK #1: one of each
MONK #2: okay then however the size of whatever’s riding them is what size they are
MONK #1: thanks
MONK #2: also they have the same facial expression as whatever’s riding them, it helps them concentrate
MONK #2: when it comes to drawing a knight on horseback
just remember two simple artistic principles and you’ll never go wrong
1. no knees
2. pointed beak-feet
MONK #1: okay
MONK #2: if you have trouble remembering that
just remember how once you get on a horse your knees disappear
MONK #1: right
MONK #2: and your feet turn into claws
and that should help you remember
MONK #1: right right
MONK #2: also it’s VERY appropriate and good to bring a baby with a full head of hair to a battle
MONK #1: horses are how much just blanket?
MONK #2: mostly blanket, maybe 90%
or a cape or a gown if you can’t find one
MONK #2: also to make war more interesting a lot of people like to make sure their horses are blind before they get started
MONK #1: really?
MONK #2: just cover their eyes up with gold or blood or anything
MONK #1: where does the violin go
MONK #2: mm?
MONK #1: when two knights battle one another, where do you put the violin
MONK #2: over whoever is getting stabbed the most
MONK #1: really
not on the other one?
MONK #2: no
that one gets the cat
MONK #1: how about one-on-one combat, how does that work
MONK #2: one of you breathes fire but mostly you just talk it out
[Images via]
I will miss you so much, Monk #2
Monk #2 will live on inside each of our hearts, forever.
I will miss so much about the toast, but the monks in particular! I cried with laughter when I first found them.
Me too. I take comfort in imagining him riding off into the sunset on a long horse oval.
Every time one of these series goes up it breaks my heart all over again.
Can we please have, like, an coffee table book or something archiving like the entirety of the Toast?
/is still sobbing internally at the thought of losing all of this wonderful beauty
I think I’ll miss Monk #1 even more. The world in front of him is full of so much wonderment and mystery, and he approaches it with such trust.
I love Monk #2, but I want to marry Monk #1 when he grows up.
What? What’s happening? Whaaaaaat?
Maybe the real treasure was the monks we made along the way.
Kinda surprised a publisher hasn’t commissioned a Two Monks explain Art book yet
Would buy this in a hot second.
Sadly I suspect it is because the rights to reproduce all these fab manuscript illuminations would bankrupt the project.. WHICH SUCKS, because this is the platonic ideal of a coffee table book over which to giggle.
Pretty sure medieval art is in the public domain.
I don’t know much about art IP, but… is it possible that the rights to the images are owned by whoever owns the actual work?
Photographs are not, though. And institutions that preserve them have varying policies on reproduction or giving permission to take additional pictures. Sometimes it is free if it is for an educational thing (dissertation for example), but almost always if it is for something commercial that will make money, the fees are quite high.
I for one have learned quite a lot about both monks and art from this series. One vote for “educational”!
Add a short educational article about medieval art in the front. BOOM! Educational as fuck.
Medieval art historian here…would write that article…just sayin’.
Wouldn’t they be in the public domain? They are over 70 years old
Yeah but I think you often need to pay museums or archives for high-quality images of them. I have a friend in publishing who deals with that a lot, although she’s not in the US and norms might differ.
I would buy two of these. One for me to enjoy and one to foist upon strangers.
MONK #1: horses are how much just blanket?
MONK #2: mostly blanket, maybe 90%
Oh, this is going to make drawing horses so much easier!
Wait, no it isn’t, I can’t do clothing folds either.
Oh bless you for giving us one last Monks Inventing Things. Someone really needs to pick this up as a book. Would buy.
This will be the coffee table book by which former Toasties will identify each other. Then there will be a secret handshake to confirm.
A secret handshake where everyone’s hands are the wrong size for their bodies and don’t have opposable thumbs, I assume.
And also there’s a large rabbit.
That looks like a human with a rabbit body.
It is next to a woman with the head of a rabbit, and fish are falling from the sky.
The hands have to be that size to make space for the solmization markings:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/…
Also, musicians do not have bones in their arms. Their hands just come out of the base of the neck.
The absurdity of medieval art will never get old for me. I think I will probably hear the 2 monks in my head whenever I look at any tapestry for the foreseeable future.
The Two Monks have changed my art gallery mentality forever.
Horses: mostly cloth, yes.
(no, this isn’t mine and I would not do this)
… WHY
Allegedly to keep them clean the night before a show, but given these hideous monstrosities are made of fleece, they are useless for that purpose as the poo just soaks straight through them.
Wouldn’t that be very warm for the horse, which is probably used to sleeping without fleece pyjamas?
Mostly the people who use these would have their horse in a less extreme version of these anyway overnight. I use a no-fill waterproof rug for mine the night before a show as mine are normally naked over the summer.
But yes, you do see people asking on tinternet ‘why has my horse rubbed and scratched and destroyed its lovely fleecy pyjamas’ who do not want to hear ‘because it’s not a boil in the bag ready meal, it’s a horse’.
And if they do that in winter, the horses start to shed terribly, yes? Humans are weird.
There really is a stock photo for everything!
Wow, I certainly was not expecting this new phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe…
Captain America: The Foals Avenger
Captain America: The Whinny Soldier
Captain America: Civil Horse
Civil War Horse
CIVIL HORSE
sometimes they wear wetsuits. For water battles.
That’s the amphibious brigade.
Prototype for the second Hunger Games movie.
How on God’s green earth do even get that thing on and off? Skinny jeans have always given me problems and I only TWO legs.
There are zips. I think
Thank you for an explanation. However, wouldn’t zippers irritate the leg skin?
(This has been a totally rhetorical question.)
I along everybody else will so miss this site. Where else could I ask this?
I assume they would be double layer zips, like you get on people wetsuits.
(Sharing obscure knowledge is fun!)
Sharing is fun. Writing as a person who has waded into the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico, but would never volunteer to submerge herself – showers for the win – such arcane knowledge really comes in handy when doing crosswords.
Nonono – that’s for water polo.
It’s an easy mistake to make, but THIS is for water battles:
That is a very streamlined horse.
A water polo pony?
Water polo team?
OMG it’s so cute! I did not know they make horse jimjams
How patient must that animal be.
Hey! If you have thatched roofs on your pergolas then you’re just asking for passing horses to eat them!
Yeah I can definitely see a horse deciding a thatched roof would make a great snack.
Dude: WTF horse, can we get moving?
Horse: hold up, I found a pregnant cape with a letter inside while I was eating this roof.
I was wondering what that was.
This was excellent as usual, but can I just say. The guy with the first horse who is just looking at it like “can’t you see i am TRYING to PRAY here” is worthy of comment.
Some solid facial expressions in this one!
HOW is he getting stabbed like that?
The sword is just threaded very gently through the front part of his chest…by the guy standing directly behind him. There’s definitely some Escher Girls stuff going on there.
Blanket horses have become extinct, but you can use gift wrap to achieve a similar effect.
“There should be four of those on a standard horse” made me totally lose it.
Ditto Blanket Cats – easily achieved
If I tried that, it would end in blood and tears.
i was all like, why you do this to horse? and then they explained everything perfectly in the video description.
one of you breathes fire but mostly you just talk it out
is an excellent description of all interactions with one of my more difficult coworkers.
A) Bless you for giving us a last Two Monks post. Bless you, Saintly One.
B) I once asked a friend with both a Fine Arts degree and an profound interest in horses to take a look at the medieval illustration I was essay-ing about that one time, and her reaction was basically: these people have never seen horses before and should be tarred and feathered.
I quoted her in my essay.
God, I love Two Monks. <3
horses are also mostly the size of dogs right
“Look, a pony!” – me, on the street, having seen a greyhound, or just a particularly large golden retriever
To be fair this is Not Inaccurate re, say, Great Danes. A friend of a friend has one that is apparently SMALL FOR A GREAT DANE and he could not find a dog-coat that fit her and so bought her a GOAT COAT.
Really not inaccurate; I was once riding a 14h pony on the road (about 140cm tall), and a woman passed us with a Great Dane that was about the same size.
I met this magnificent beast over the weekend, and I’m not convinced he isn’t a horse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonberger
I mean, if the dog is Sansa (or Mozart, the English mastiff belonging to one of the people who manages the complex where I work).
MONK #1: really
not on the other one?
MONK #2: no
that one gets the cat
Laughed into my silent open-plan office then suavely covered it by pretending I was clearing my throat. I am the James Bond of reading the Toast.
This, too, was the part that did me in.
That top horse is obviously eating that roof with a side of blanket though. Blanket napkin?
Please let there be a home for Two Monks post-Toast. <3
horses are also mostly the size of dogs right
or sometimes cats
That cat’s disbelieving look is marvellous.
What if all medieval people were seriously riding Lil’ Sebastians into battle and that’s why they drew it that way.
Or Kate Beaton’s Fat Pony!
Aw, I’m glad that Blanket Horse also has a lovely red pedicure.
Blood of your enemies is a great conditioner to keep the hooves in good shape.
It’s like the Pope of Horses, with its little red shoes!
I am now imagining the monks retiring to go sit under their own vine and fig tree. Except the fig tree is tower-sized and the vine looks like a rope and there are tiny improbable cats climbing it.
Teach us how to say goodbye, monks. Please.
Oh lord, combining the end of the Toast with Hamilton. Open the flood gates, here come the tears.
I combine EVERYTHING with Hamilton. It’s pathological at this point.
my queerest, librarian
with a comma after queerest
I’m putting that on my business cards now.
Well that caused just about the most demented sounding giggle I’ve ever made.
Careful which tree you sit under! Mildly NSFW.
I just kinda got wet eyes again and now I’m going to put on the cast recording and listen to it all day.
I want the cast recording to Two Monks.
Ok, but to paraphrase Jake the Dog trying to stretch into horse shape: horses are hard!
So give those monks some credit.
“also it’s VERY appropriate and good to bring a baby with a full head of hair to a battle”
Ooooh, THAT’S why Cheshire brought her baby with her on all her assassinations in Young Justice.
I’m pretty sure the knight who breathes fire has an attack squirrel on his head.
And that is literally Everything That’s Right of Squirrels. The rest of them is just wrong.
Love!
(It’s St Cuthbert’s horse eating straw from the thatch of a shepherd’s hut and dislodging a round of cheese that the shepherds had stored there. Because Cuthbert was hungry and had just prayed to God for food.)
So God’s just giving away people’s food without asking? Dick move, God.
Fascinating! Thanks for chiming in. I love how the toast has large reserves of both whimsy and actual fact.
What are those discs in #2? They can’t be mini pizzas, right? They certainly look like mini pizzas.
And guy on the left in #3 is the sidekick-iest of all the sidekicks that have ever existed.
I assumed the discs in #2 were proto-frisbees for the dog.
This medieval art consistently makes me feel better about my own drawing abilities.
TBH I don’t think I could do better than most of these.
Ditto, but at least I feel like if my drawings are ever found, posterity may another Mallory who can give others the same joy these give me!
It looks like blanket horse knight is coming home from the horse store and hasn’t bothered to take the brown paper wrapping all the way off.
Horse store: Excellent choice, sir. Will you ride it home, or shall we wrap it up?
Knight: I usually ride them home, but this one one seems so nice… go ahead and wrap it.
(two blocks later)
Knight: I can’t wait. I’ll just unwrap it a little and ride it the rest of the way home.
Sometimes when I am stuck in traffic, I narrate the thoughts of all the morons in the road as if they were Two Monks driving or merging or using a four way red blinker and it balances my humors nicely.
MONK #1: That car has a blinking light.
MONK #2: Yes. You must line up perfectly next to them.
MONK #1: What?
MONK #2: The light tells us where they want us to be. Hurry up to meet them.
MONK #1: Okay. But now they want to follow us.
MONK #2: Slow down.
MONK #1: Okay. Now they are going fast again. And yelling.
MONK #2: They are telling us that we are good driving partners.
MONK #1: Ah yes. Wonderful.
MONK #1: Why is that broken line?
MONK #2: That marks the center of your car. Stray not to either side of it.
MONK #1: I see. Thank you.
“one of you breathes fire but mostly you just talk it out”
I’ve been working on this very issue in therapy.
Look can we once and for all establish whether Monk #2 is just a helpful fool or is totally trolling Monk #1? I think there are two very distinct camps in this crucial question and all I want in the waning days of The Toast is to know the truth.
I want to believe that Monk #2 is truly trying to be helpful. He’s been Monk Drawing for much longer and just wants to pass on his skills.
But let us also remember that Monk #2, by virtue of being a monk, is therefore also a Man, and is thus contractually obliged to have An Answer For Everything, Even If He Doesn’t Know It. Clearly, he is just trying to do his best under difficult circumstances.
monksplaining
I personally feel he’s trying to be helpful, but he’s overly confident in his faulty knowledge.
See, I myself am so sure that he’s just fucking with Monk 1. It’s so hard for me to read them in any other way.
I’m pretty sure Mallory confirmed in a previous post that he’s totally sincere! It made a lot of people feel better.
Damn, I really liked the way I was reading them. But I am glad to know The Truth.
Well, I do believe in the legitimacy of reader interpretation! You should continue to read them however you like. 🙂
I think of Monk #2 as being like Owl in Winnie the Pooh, where everyone, including himself, believes that he’s the smartest one in the wood/monastery. Monk #1 is more of a Pooh.
This makes sense because I identify so hard with both Monk #2 and Owl in Winnie the Pooh.
Monk #2 is a total monksplainer BUT HE MEANS WELL.
I like that giant umbrella, although the little angel on the top might make balance a problem.
After suffering today’s weather I really think my bicycle could be fitted with one.
‘neither of both’ is a GREAT new tool in my non-decisiveness tool box.
I’m mostly concerned with the fact that that knight seems to have impaled a cherub with his umbrella-spear.
The huge blanket on that very startled horse has some decent folds, honestly. Maybe they could draw inanimate objects better than living things in the middle ages.
The “dog” that is the same size as a horse is actually a tiger – the rider has just thrown a mirrored ball at the tiger and the tiger, seeing its reflection, think it is seeing its cub and is distracted from pursuing the horse and rider. I’m not making this up, check the medieval bestiary I know you all have!
MONK #1: how about one-on-one combat, how does that work
MONK #2: one of you breathes fire but mostly you just talk it out
So what Monk #2 is saying is…most disputes die and no one shoots (fire)?
Also, true story: two friends and I were wandering through the Metropolitan Museum of Art and we started making up Two Monks dialogue. Specifically, this incredibly bizarre-looking Hercules led to more or less the following:
MONK #1: hey where do people have muscles
MONK #2: literally everywhere, all over the body, and make them all bulge at once, so people know they’re there
MONK #1: oh ok
MONK #2: don’t forget those kneecap muscles, those are very important
Wow!! It’s like if a yuzu fruit and the Michelin Man had a baby
I just want to thank you for these monks. They’re like… It’s like they’re the ring in The Lord of the Rings, and I’m Gollum. Or, I don’t know, something else that fits better. I’m no good with metaphors. I just love them so much!
cosigning as a publisher, it is crazy expensive!
First off: excellent monks as usual thank you!
Second, fun fact, pointy beak feet were a thing! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crakow_(shoe)
They even made their way to armor design where supposedly they were so cumbersome as to often beak straight into the ground and pin their wearer to the spot upon dismounting.
Christ, I’m going to miss the monks.
Just in case you hadn’t seen this, here’s an article on the marginalized art of snail fighting in medieval europe.
thank you
Why do all the horses have better-drawn faces than the people?
Also, I can't wait for a situation when I can sue 'neither of both' and 'beak feet'.
Not only will I deeply miss The Toast, but I will miss the only civilized, amusing, well-cultured comments section in the entire Internet.
I just kinda got wet eyes again and now I'm going to put on the cast recording and listen to it all day.
A water polo pony?
I want the cast recording to Two Monks.
After reading these for years, I showed this one to my closest friend. She made it through a single exchange — two lines — and laughed so hard for about five minutes that she cried. I can’t wait to show her the rest.