Author Archives: STWALLSKULL

About STWALLSKULL

Learn more about Stwallskull here: http://www.stwallskull.com/blog/?page_id=2

BIG FUNNY SHOW OPENS THIS FRIDAY (August 7th, 2009) IN MINNEAPOLIS!

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If you enjoy this site and you live near the Twin Cities, you won’t want to miss the BIG FUNNY show my friends and I have been putting together over the last number of months. It opens this weekend, and it is going to be spectacular.

The show premieres BIG FUNNY, an oversized 48-page newspaper of comics by 45 different artists, inspired by the funnies sections of yesteryear. The gallery show features original art from the publication, numerous antique comic strips (some over 100 years old… many which have been featured on this site… they all look better in person), a retrospective of unknown cartoonist William Ede, and an old cigarette vending machine rigged up to sell small boxes of little funny mini-comics. Hope to see you there!

THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY IS COUGHING blood and gasping on its deathbed. Newspapers lost their relevance a long time ago, and with internet media blossoming they can no longer compete. Readers and advertisers have moved on.

Unfortunately, newspapers are taking their beautiful bastard child, the newspaper comic strip, with them.

Today’s newspaper comics are much-maligned… and deservedly so. Today’s small strips, with mostly predictable, safe themes and bland characters are a pale shadow of what newspaper comics were in their wild and colorful youth.

110-or-so years from their birth, it’s been a good run. Let us not mourn the death of the

newspaper comics… rather, let us have a wake to celebrate what they once were, and to build something new.

The International Cartoonist Conspiracy, Big Time Attic, and Altered Esthetics gallery are collaborating to produce an oversized newspaper comics section like they would do it today if they still did it like they did it in the old days.

It will be called BIG FUNNY, and it will be both.

The paper will premiere at a show at Altered Esthetics in August, featuring some of the original art from the paper, along with historical comics pages from the dawn of the last century.

BIG FUNNY Website.

City Pages A-List Review

Optical Sloth review

Poopsheet Foundation review

Newsarama review

Drawn Review

Amy Crehore’s Little Hokum Rag review

Photo gallery of the little funny sideshow


Can’t make the gallery show? You can buy copies of BIG FUNNY here.

Opening Reception
August 7, 2009 7pm-11pm
ALTERED ESTHETICS
1224 Quincy St NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413

SHOW RUNS AUGUST 7-29, 2009

GALLERY HOURS:
TUESDAY & THURSDAY 1pm-7pm, SATURDAY 1pm-5pm

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! Tim Sievert’s Intrepideers and the Brothers of Blood : June 18th, 2009

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STWALLSKULL'S HEY! KIDS! COMICS!

TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM:

My friend Tim Sievert (author of the wonderful graphic novel That Salty Air) has an excerpt of his fun adventure comic The Intrepideers featured today in a 9-page excerpt on the topshelfcomix.com site.

INTERESTING LINKS: Pocket Cartoon Course at Scary Terry’s World & Good Time to Donate to The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library: June 17th, 2009

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TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM:

On his Scary Terry’s World blog, cartoonist Terry Beatty has posted a wonderful little instructional booklet from 1943 called Pocket Cartoon Course. If you can identify the artist who drew it, he would like to know. Go check it out!

Terry has apparently been digging through his collections and plans on sharing more cool old stuff… like this great Nell Brinkley cartoon, for example.

ALSO OF NOTE:

Allan Holtz at the Stripper’s Guide blog notes that now is a very good time to give to The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library, which, by all accounts, has the most fantastic collection of comic art in the world:

The Ohio State University’s Cartoon Research Library has been given a $1 million gift by Jeanne Schulz (widow of Charles) for the renovation of a desperately needed larger facility for their ever-expanding holdings. This is great news. Even better, though is that Jeanne has pledged up to another $2.5 million dollars in matching funds for other donations to the library. In other words, for every dollar you give, Jeanne will match it with a buck of her own. Everything you can afford to give will go twice as far!

Here is a video on the subject, with a glimpse at their incredible holdings:

What are you waiting for?

Read more about this opportunity on the Stripper’s Guide blog here.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! Danno’s Manly Tales of Cowardice : May 27th, 2009

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STWALLSKULL'S HEY! KIDS! COMICS!

TODAY’S FEATURED LINK:

My good friend Danno (aka Staplegenius aka Dank) has recently started a blog at staplegenius.com that he is posting his hilarious comics to on a daily basis. Danno is one of the fastest and funniest cartoonists I know, so hopefully he will keep up the pace! He is currently serializing his comics series Manly Tales of Cowardice, featuring Fleming Hazmat… go check it out!

INTERESTING LINKS: Mars Attacks! May 27th, 2009

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TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM:

The Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog has posted some nice scans of the complete series of the notorious and gleefully gruesome Mars Attacks! cards painted by Norm Saunders and Bob Powell (the inspiration for the Tim Burton movie of the same name), as well as the roughs for the cards drawn by Wally Wood and Bob Powell.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! The Fox and the Crow at The Crosseyed Cyclops! May 8th, 2009

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STWALLSKULL'S HEY! KIDS! COMICS!


TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM:

The Crosseyed Cyclops has a big stack of issues of DC’s series The Fox and the Crow available here. The series was based on characters created by Frank Tashlin for Columbia’s Screen Gems cartoon series (you can see some of the cartoons here).

Fox and Crow started their comic book career in the pages of DC’s Real Screen Funnies, but were popular enough to eventually graduate to their own series, which ran until 1968.

In spite of their popularity they are mostly forgotten today… which is a shame, because their comics (and cartoons) are usually wonderfully executed and frequently hilarious. I don’t know much about the creative teams on these books, but Don Markstein’s Toonopedia credits them primarily to artist Jim Davis (obviously not the Jim Davis of Garfield fame) and writers Hubie Karp and Cecil Beard.

Read more about Fox and Crow on Wikipedia.

Read more about Fox and Crow at Don Markstein’s Toonopedia.

EXTRA! EXTRA! STWALLSKULL JOINS OPRAH ON TWITTER! : May 5th, 2009

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EXTRA! EXTRA!

STWALLSKULL JOINS OPRAH ON TWITTER!

I tried Twitter a while ago, and didn’t really know what to do with it… I talked about Loring Park wildlife:

# Saw Iron Man last night. It was surprisingly good, considering Iron Man is one of the least interesting major characters in Marvel Comics.9:05 AM May 21st, 2008 from web

# In Loring Park today saw a crane trying to fish while getting harrassed by pack of typically agressive Red-Winged Blackbirds.1:04 PM May 21st, 2008 from web

# Red-Winged Blackbirds are the nazi skinheads of the bird kingdom, right down to the armbands.1:04 PM May 21st, 2008 from web

# Also seen in Loring Park today… mama duck with 11 ducklings! Congratulations to Mrs. Duck.1:05 PM May 21st, 2008 from web

# I don’t understand the appeal of Twitter.3:18 PM Apr 16th from web

I thought Twitter was just for people who liked to spend their time repeatedly pushing teeny-tiny cellphone buttons until they made letters. So I ignored it.

Now that Oprah’s using it, though, that’s all changed. I’m all over it.

You can follow me 140 characters at a time on Twitter here. You can follow Oprah here, so get on that already.

Mostly, you will just get the same stuff you get here. Only 140 characters at a time. I’m going to keep it up until someone develops an application that posts 4 characters at a time, which is all we really need, anyhow.

Thanks much to Amy for encouraging me rethink this!

(An aside… I grabbed the above creative commons licensed photo off of Flickr to use, and after grabbing it realized it was taken by Alan Light, founding editor of the Comics Buyers guide. You can see fun old comic convention photos by Mr. Light here and here, and some photos he posted of cartoonists here. I’m sure there are a lot of other interesting things to be found in his flickr sets.)

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Walt Kelly’s Brownies : May 5th, 2009

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TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM:

Another great issue of Four Color from Cool-Mo-Dee… Walt Kelly’s Brownies. I posted a link to another issue of Brownies that Cool-Mo-Dee posted the other day as well. Walt Kelly is easily one of my top ten favorite cartoonists of all time… he is endlessly inventive, uproariously funny, and his drawings are always gorgeous. His skill at character development and dialogue is unsurpassed in comics.

In spite of his popularity, very little of his non-Pogo work has been reprinted. I’m optimistic this might change soon for some reason… partially because there are two thick books of children’s comics coming out soon that will inevitably dazzle people’s eyes right out of their sockets.

One is edited is edited by Craig Yoe and is called Golden Treasury of Krazy Kool Klassic Kids’ Komics and one is edited by Art Spiegeman and Francoise Mouly called The TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics.

The books are going to feature a LOT of wonderful neglected childrens’ comics by a LOT of great cartoonists… in addition to Walt Kelly: Carl Barks, John Stanley, Sheldon Mayer, Basil Wolverton, George Carlson, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Frank Frazetta, Dr. Seuss, Syd Hoff, Jules Feiffer, Dan DeCarlo, and presumably a lot more. Since Kelly is one of the best, and has an enormous body of work for children that has never been reprinted, I hope it inspires a complete reprinting of this work over the coming years.

Note that in addition to having an eagerly-awaited complete Pogo reprinting in the works, Fantagraphics books has also been reprinting Kelly’s wonderful Our Gang comics (3 volumes released so far and a fourth on the way). This is currently the only Kelly work other than Pogo in print. Let’s hope that changes soon.

Click the Brownies cover above to go download the comic book. Kelly also had some of the most consistently beautifully colored covers on his comic books.

INTERESTING LINKS: Scalia’s Privacy Invaded: May 5th, 2009

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Happy Cinco De Mayo!

TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM:

Boing Boing had a post today about some brilliant students who, in reaction to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia questioning the need for more privacy protections, have provided Scalia with a 15-page dossier documenting his personal information.

His class turned in a 15-page dossier that included not only Scalia’s home address, home phone number and home value, but his food and movie preferences, his wife’s personal e-mail address and photos of his grandchildren, reports Above the Law.

Wouldn’t it be great if someone performed the same service for all the Supreme Court justices, congresspeople and senators? I imagine it would change a lot of minds about the necessity of legal privacy protection (at least for those in political office).

Pictured above, some guy on the left with Scalia on the right, in one of the numerous photos you can find of the ugly bastard on flickr… this one picked for it’s creative commons license which allows me the right to post it here. They are watching you, Mr. Scalia.