Here’s an example I scanned of Bub, He’s Always to Blame from 1905 by Everett Lowry. This strip would appear to be very influenced by Swinnerton, specifically his Little Jimmy (which I’ve featured here previously).
Click the image to view the full strip.
Here is another example of Everett Lowry’s Bub, He’s Always to Blame at Shorpy.
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“The Good Duck Artist,” Carl Barks excelled at both short humor comics (his ten-pagers in Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories) and longer adventure stories… in fact he did both better than just about anyone else in comics at the time he worked (using the pseudonymn of “Walt Disney”).
I have examples of both types of stories today… on the adventure side of things, Rodney Bowcock’s Comics and Stories brings us the Donald Duck classic The Gilded Man.
On the short humor strip side, courtesy of the Fortress of Fortitude we have Donald Duck in Silent Night, doing battle with his ongoing next-door nemesis in the 10-pagers, Neighbor Jones. Although drawn in 1945, this story was initially rejected for violence, and was not printed until decades later.
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This report from the Drawn and Quarterly blog on a speaking engagement by Seth and Chris Ware in Waterloo, Ontario includes photos of the gorgeous miniature city that Seth has built (“Dominion City,” not Palookaville)… I would love to see that in person. Click the above image to go see the large photos.
Zander Cannon, Kevin Cannon, Danno Klonowski and myself were interviewed by Britt Aamodt this evening (December 14th) on KFAI’s Wave Project about cartooning. The show will be online for the next two weeks. You can hear the interview here.
Note: The broadcast mp3 begins with the Somali Oromo radio show that preceded it… it starts at 1:38 in the file.
Boy, this has to be my most unwieldy list of links yet… so many links, I actually had to break it into two posts, as WordPress seemingly can’t handle one post that big. So much good stuff, I’m not going to even attempt to summarize the highlights. In fact, I’m going to start dealing with these huge lists of fun comics in a new way… rather than emphasizing the highlights, I’m going to choose one random item to talk about. This should prevent me from talking about Herriman, Wolverton, Kelly and the rest of my ‘usual suspects’ every time I see their work, and hopefully highlight some more obscure treasures.
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My friend Tom Kaczynski has been posting a lot of wonderful work from his sketchbook on his Transatlantis blog lately. I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot of back issues of the fantastic MOME anthology from Fantagraphics lately on the bus, and Tom’s work really stands out in there, which is saying a lot, as he is among excellent peers.
Going on a tangent speaking of MOME, boy is it a great anthology, and it keeps getting better… I’ve got to hunt down the issues I’m missing when I have the scratch. I’d put it somewhere in my top five comics anthologies of all time. It really sets a different tone from any other comic anthology series I’ve ever read… it is a rare thing for an anthology to really feel like it has a unique voice and aesthetic of it’s own besides the voice of its individual artists (Weirdo and Raw being two other examples of this), and MOME definitely does. It regularly features wonderful work from Tom, Eleanor Davis, Zak Sally, Jim Woodring, Paul Hornschemeier, Gabrielle Bell, Al Columbia and many, many other excellent cartoonists… and has introduced me to a lot of wonderful artists I was not previously familiar with, which is one of the best things an anthology can do. If you have the cash, it looks like you can get the first ten issues bundled at a deep discount from the Fantagraphics website.
I just haven’t had time for much blogging lately… so sorry for the lack of updates. I hope you’ll find this blog worth following in spite of the feast or famine nature of the postings.
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My good friends at Big Time Attic and Puny Entertainment recently completed this hilariously wonderful promotional cartoon for Big Time Attic’s new genetics graphic novel, The Stuff of Life (in collaboration with Mark Schultz).
Go here and here to see some interesting “making of” information. I can’t wait to read the book. The pages I’ve seen are stunning. I’m guessing this will probably be the prettiest educational comic ever made… and seeing this video and knowing the work of Big Time Attic, it will probably also be one of the most entertaining ones.
Here is a big gallery I just posted of images from the previously mentioned Hot Ink: Comic Art show at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, currently showing until January 4th… at which point the Museum’s lease runs out, leaving them with an uncertain future. One can only speculate that this directly had to do with their decision to deface their walls with Soapy the Chicken comic strips. You can read reviews of the show here and here. Click the image to go to the gallery.
The show features the work of:
Big Time Attic
Kevin Cannon
Zander Cannon
Will Dinski
Tom Kaczynski
Reynold Kissling
Lars Martinson
King Mini
Tyler Page
Evan G. Palmer
Brittney Sabo
Zak Sally
Barbara Schulz
Tim Sievert
Andy Singer
Tom Spence
Steven Stwalley
You can visit the gallery here:
Minnesota Museum of American Art
mmaa.org
50 West Kellogg Blvd.
St. Paul, MN 55102
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The ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive presents Maxfield Parrish’s lush images from The Arabian Nights. Click the above image to go gawk.
This is a short cartoon from 1938 by George Pal advertising Philips radios. Special effects pioneer George Pal was the king of what is known as “replacement animation” in the world of stop motion animation.
Replacement animation is an extremely labor intensive process (in the already inherently labor intensive process of animation) where different elements of an animation puppet are removed and replaced with another similar item in a slightly different pose. A single character can potentially have hundreds of replaceable elements in different poses.
It is very common for this technique to be used with character’s heads… Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas is a good example of a very-well done puppet with replaceable facial poses.
The Phillips Broadcast animation is remarkable in how much of it is done with replacement animation… the heads are replaceable on all the characters… but so are entire bodies. The shapes distort and transform wonderfully with the kind of physical exaggeration generally only seen in hand-drawn animation.
It boggles the mind how much labor must have gone into this short film. It has to be seen to be believed. It is truly a masterpiece of stop-motion animation.
Note that it is REALLY, REALLY worth your time to go and view this cartoon at a higher resolution with much more brilliant color here on the Europa Film Treasures site (unfortunately that version is not embeddable on this website).
WARNING: This cartoon contains racial depictions that many will find offensive. If this sort of thing bothers you, you may not want to view it.
Go here to check out the George Pal DVD set George Pal – Flights of Fantasy
on Amazon, which contains this and many other cartoons.
