Another spooky cartoon to get you in the mood for Halloween… I love the abrupt ending of this one. If you want more spookiness, check out my ongoing list of spooky cartoons.
Read more about this cartoon on The Big Cartoon Database.
This cartoon, along with almost all of Ub Iwerks cartoons made for his own studio, are available on the excellent DVDs The Cartoons that time Forgot Volume One
TODAY’S FEATURED ITEMS:
Too many great items to feature them all this time around… here are some of the highlights…
The ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive gives us some wonderful examples of (the only cartoonist listed in the dictionary) Rube Goldberg’s Side Show sunday strips, a great hodge-podge of interesting and funny features that was the home for his famous Inventions. Click the above image to go there.
My friend Kevin Cannon brings us the first seven pages of his wonderful new Sloth Force Seven minicomic which I got at FallCon this weekend. Click the above image to view it.
Another marvelous and particularly funny Jim Woodring image. Click the image above to go look at it.
Comicrazys gives us more of the extremely obscure Flip the Frog Annual series. Click the image… you know the routine by now, don’t you?
Here is the Minneapolis Cartoonist Conspiracy Jam from October 2008 that I participated in as usual. Note that anyone can participate… just show up the first Thursday of the month at Diamond’s Coffee Shoppe in Minneapolis with pen in hand. Click the image to download the fairly large pdf (thanks to Kevin Cannon for scanning and posting these!)
Mattias has been on a roll producing amazing illustrations of fantastic buildings… he just completed a series of five particularly fanciful "vehicle" buildings.. Click… image…
More rare Harvey Kurtzman from Those Fabuleous Fifties! Click the above image to go there.
Summertime is one of the weaker Ub Iwerks ComiColor cartoons, in my opinion, but it features the return of Old Man Winter, who was in the cartoon Jack Frost that I posted the other day. It was definitely influenced by the Disney series of season-based Silly Symphonies… because Iwerks directed Springtime (1929) Summer (1930), and Autumn (1930) for them. It also features a very racy scene for the time of silhouettes of trees turning into silhouettes of rotoscoped dancing ladies. In spite of some very good moments, this cartoon is greatly weakened by having only one design for a centaur, and reusing the animation of him relentlessly.
Read more about this cartoon on The Big Cartoon Database.
This cartoon, along with almost all of Ub Iwerks cartoons made for his own studio, are available on the excellent DVDs The Cartoons that time Forgot Volume One
Another great Ub Iwerks ComiColor cartoon, featuring the Big Bad Wolf… this comes three years after the immensely popular Disney Silly Symphony version of the Three Little Pigs, which had also spawned a number of sequels, including one also titled The Big Bad Wolf. This Wolf would seem to be pretty influenced by the Disney one. I would guess that is likely to be why the original title of this appears to have been Little Boy Blue, even though Little Boy Blue is a fairly minor character in this cartoon. This cartoon really stars the Big Bad Wolf and the Scarecrow featured in the cartoon Jack Frost which I posted the other day.
Read more about this cartoon on The Big Cartoon Database.
This cartoon, along with almost all of Ub Iwerks cartoons for his own studio, are available on the excellent DVDs The Cartoons that time Forgot Volume One
A great ComiColor cartoon from Ub Iwerks… my daughter Esther’s newest favorite. It has a fun soundtrack too… note the scarecrow Cab Calloway tribute, presumably influenced by the Fleischer Betty Boop cartoons Snow White (1933) and Minnie the Moocher (1932)… the scarecrow even appears to be rotoscoped a bit, I suspect. The soundtrack is by the one and only Carl Stalling… he really got around in the 30’s. I’ve extracted the soundtrack as an mp3 which you can download here. Right time of year for this one too, as the leaves begin to turn…
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that this cartoon appears to feature the same bear family that is ruthlessly abused a year later in the previously mentioned cartoon The Three Bears.
Read more about this cartoon on The Big Cartoon Database.
This cartoon, along with almost all of Ub Iwerks cartoons for his own studio, are available on the excellent DVDs The Cartoons that time Forgot Volume One
John Adcock continues to post great stuff on his Yesterday’s Papers and Yesterday’s Papers Archive blogs, and brings us more strange ghosted daily Katzenjammer strips… these ones are utterly free of character, style or artistry, and ran under the title The Shenanigan Twins (apparently due to WWI anti-German sentiments… the old title returned soon after the war), still under Rudolph Dirks credit. The “gags” were presumably just lifted out of some old joke book… backgrounds are nowhere to be seen… hardly any violence either. Even the German ach-cents are gone! These strips are bland before their time, and would be right at home on a modern comics page.
He also posts a Katzenjammer strip he suspects is pencilled (not inked) by Frederick Opper, which seems very likely…
That’s not all! Here is a well done Mutt & Jeff clone called Hitt & Runn… apparently four-letter names ending in double letters is a crucial part of the ingredients to making a successful clone, even if the names are totally improbable.
And some rare, crude, very early E.C. Segar…
And more! Just go to his blogs and check them out.
Barnacle Press brings us another great list of greatest hits… Ten Particularly Odd Comic Strips from Barnacle Press. The Handy Man From Timbuctoo makes the list, naturally. Click on the below image from the bizarre Goops to go there.
Get out your crayons! Comicrazys manages to dig up ANOTHER Flip the Frog coloring book! Where do they find this stuff? I gotta print these for my daughter…
And, finally, Karswell at The Horrors of it All brings us World War III With the Ants from Captain Science #6… this story has some great, inventive layouts. The artist is apparently unknown… can anyone identify the artist (in their comments?):
So much great stuff… way too much to look at. I take a couple weeks off from this stuff, and the length of this thing just gets ugly. I don’t know what to feature today… Wolverton obscurities? Fox & Crow comics? More Herriman? Walt Kelly? Arch Dale? I’d feature the Chris Ware link the Comics Reporter pointed me to, but the resolution is terrible.
How about a Flip the Frog comic? Flip the Frog? He had comics? I guess he did… presented courtesy of Comicrazys, click the image below to see it.
But then there’s the ASIFA – Hollywood Animation Archive, doing amazing work as usual. Not only do they deliver the goods, but they do it with big, gorgeous scans. Some choice old newspaper funnies featuring Cliff Sterrett, Milt Gross, Clare Briggs and more are there today. Click the image below to go drool over them.
Those are sure great, but I gotta point to this as well… an inked version of the Wally Wood Spawn of Venus story I ran the pencils for previously, thinking they had not been inked… Courtesy of the Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog. Click on the image below to view it.
Only two of Ub Iwerks’ Flip the Frog cartoons were made in color, and one of them was the first one, Fiddlesticks, seen below. I’ve always preferred the early Flip design to the later one… he looks much more like a frog, and much funnier. I would guess the design was changed so it would be easier to animate him turning his head… the designs are so different they don’t even resemble each other. If you want to see the later design, check out the coloring book posted at Comicrazys. I’ve also posted a number of Flip the Frog and other Ub Iwerks cartoons previously that can be seen here.
Note the apparent Mickey Mouse rip-off late in this cartoon… since Ub Iwerks created Mickey Mouse a couple years before this was made, it hardly seems like a rip-off, though.
Read more about this cartoon on the Big Cartoon Database here.
A fun Ub Iwerks take on The Three Bears versus the villainous burglar Goldilocks.
Read more about this cartoon on the Big Cartoon Database here.
A particularly strange Flip the Frog cartoon in which our hero gets plastic surgery.