Category Archives: WONDERS AND NOVELTIES

THE CARTOON CRYPT: Monkey of the Week, March 30, 2007: Simon the Monk in Monkeydoodle

Posted on by
Reply

THE CARTOON CRYPT

Whoops, I thought I had published this on March 30th, but I just saved it… here it is now. Our monkey of the week for two weeks ago!

I knew nothing about this cartoon previous to finding it on youtube, but finding it is like finding lost pirate treasure. It is awfully bizarre and interesting, and it stars a monkey in a fez, so it is right up my alley. It’s pretty amazingly raunchy for the time period, too… monkey boobies are prominently featured. It’s made by Les Elton and is from 1931.

I’ve never heard of Mr. Elton previous to this cartoon. Googling for Mr. Elton brought me some interesting information about him at the Stripper’s Guide blog, and, even better, more lost pirate treasure… a series of pretty amazing comic strips he did called “Jack Daw’s Adventures.” Comics historian Allan Holtz, who is the guy who does the wonderful Stripper’s Guide blog, believes this strip is the very first syndicated adventure strip featuring a continuing character… and he has reprinted about 50 of them on his site. A panel sample can be seen below.

The Tradio: Pentel’s Fountain Pentel Replacement

Posted on by
1

I wrote the other week about my love of the Fountain Pentel, and how I was about to acquire a replacement for it from Wet Paint.

I have now purchased it and tried it out, and it is a wonderful thing!

The new Fountain Pentel actually isn’t called a Fountain Pentel… it is called a Tradio. The flexible tip is the same as the one on the Fountain Pentel (although it is black instead of white)… it gives you great versatility in the thickness of the line you are drawing depending on how much pressure you apply. This is what really sets it apart from other pens.

Other than that the Tradio is quite different… and quite an improvement over the previous model.

Unlike the Fountain Pentel, the Tradio is a refillable pen. Although I was hoping this might mean I could fill it with whatever ink I wanted to, this is not the case. The refillable cartridge is quite large and enclosed… and it includes a new nib. Essentially, the refills are the whole pen, minus the case. You could, if you were inclined, just buy the refills and use them as pens… not that I recommend it, as it wouldn’t be very comfortable to hold.

The refills aren’t terribly cheap, but they are very comparable to the price of a Fountain Pentel when they were still manufactured.

One of the major problems with the old Fountain Pentel was that it was essentially a felt tip, and the tips would often dry out and kill the pen. So far, that problem seems to have been eliminated with the Tradio… the ink, which is free-flowing liquid rather than ink soaked into a felt tip mass (as was the case with the Fountain Pentel), flows smoothly and easily.

The ink is also seems to be blacker than the ink in the Fountain Pentel… hopefully this means I won’t experience the fading issues I had with the ink in the Fountain Pentel, although I won’t know the answer to this for years.

All in all, the Tradio is a wonderful and relatively inexpensive pen… I can’t recommend it highly enough. You can order one from Wet Paint here (which I believe is currently the only North American distributor for these wonderful pens).

Brook Benton: Mother Nature, Father Time

Posted on by
Reply

This ineptly-filmed surreal wonder is a scopitone, produced for a video jukebox of the same name. Here’s a blog featuring many more. Thanks to Mark Martin’s Jabberous blog for pointing this out!

What’s A Scopitone?
It’s a “Film Jukebox” invented in France in the early 1960’s (from surplus World War II airplane parts!) and also the films (the precursors of todays music videos) which played on it.

The Fountain Pentel, and Why I Love Wet Paint

Posted on by
3

I’ve been using the Fountain Pentel as my pen of choice for many years, and I love them… The Fountain Pentel has a unique plastic nib which bends to draw a different thickness of line depending on how much pressure you apply. They are fun to use, and like no other pen I’ve ever experienced.

I actually bought a gross of them in the 90’s as I was afraid they would stop making them, as they were always a hard to find pen. My supply of this unique pen is dwindling.

Looking recently for replacements, I discovered that, horror of horrors, my premonition was accurate and they are no longer sold in the US… in fact, I couldn’t even find an image of the Fountain Pentels I use online, they are so out of date. Here’s one for you I just scanned:

Fortunately, in St. Paul we have Wet Paint, the world’s greatest art supply store. I contacted Tim Jennen, the marketing manager and buyer for Wet Paint (who also happens to be a member of the Conspiracy) and let him know about my dilemma.

Tim has a passion for hunting down obscure art materials, and he just emailed me some good news shortly after my inquiry:

Hi, Steve—

I’m still hoping to bring in the regular Fountain Pentel at some point, but I have brought in a different version of this pen that I found—the Tradio Fountain Pentel, which is refillable. Here’s some info on it:

Tradio Fountain Pentel TRJ50

Tradio Fountain Pentel

A fountain pen with the perfect combination of style and performance. A flexible plastic nib creates a variety of line widths, from thick to thin, depending on the angle and pressure applied. The innovative, see-thru free-flowing system delivers a consistent ink flow for smooth, effortless writing from the first stroke to the last. The ergonomic barrel design provides added comfort and writing control. Black ink. Uses Pentel’s MLJ20 refill in black.

TRJ50A-A


The pen is $10.00, but on sale during our Make Your Mark sale through the end of April at $8.50. The MLJ20 refill is $3.95.

The next time you’re in the store, check it out!

———————-

Tim Jennen, Marketing Manager/Buyer
Wet Paint: Artists’ Materials & Framing

Refillable! This is very exciting news to me, as my major gripe with the (disposable) Fountain Pentels I’ve used is that they fade with age… hopefully the ink in the cartridges is non-fading, or I can figure out a non-fading ink solution for this. I can’t wait to try one… I’m gonna try and make it over to Wet Paint this weekend, and I’ll give you a comparison to the disposable models once I try this out.

So now Wet Paint is apparently the only US supplier for two of the greatest cartooning tools ever created… the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen and the Fountain Pentel. I believe they are also the last place left that you can buy supplies for gocco screen printing machines, which are quite wonderful.

If you’re looking for a specific art supply and can’t find it anywhere, contacting Wet Paint is a good bet… they have an online store with their wares as well, so you don’t have to live in the Twin Cities to get a hold of these wonderful tools. Their prices are great too… we’re very lucky to have them in the Twin Cities.

THE CARTOON CRYPT: Betty Boop in Snow White (1933)

Posted on by
1

THE CARTOON CRYPT

Another one of the Fleischer Brothers’ best cartoons… this one is their (pre-Disney) version of Snow White. It doesn’t follow the Snow White story closely at all… not that the Disney one does either… but in this one the story is a largely ignored framework on which to build some cartoon craziness… sure, there are some dwarfs in there for about fifteen seconds, a witch and a magic mirror… there’s also a dragon with three duck heads on it’s head. The highlight is when Koko the Clown is transformed into an eerie spectre singing and dancing Cab Calloway’s St. James Infirmary… it may just be me, but besides being funny, I find this scene genuinely chilling as well… it makes the hair stand up on my neck. Stare in the face of your own mortality in the empty eyes of Koko the Clown…

Woozlebeasts and Upside-Downs

Posted on by
Reply

Peter Maresca of Sunday Press Books (publisher of the recent gigantic Little Nemo book I mentioned previously), is planning on including a variety of strips in his upcoming book reprinting Winsor McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze. These include J.P. Benson’s The Woozlebeasts and Gustave Verbeek’s The Upside-Downs, both excellent and bizarre strips. He is looking for some help locating some strips for this reprint… help him somebody! Here is what he posted to the Platinum Comics Group:

Call to all Winsor McCay collectors!

As many already know, I will be publishing two reprint books this year. After the full-size, Sundays with Walt and Skeezix the second project is a full-size volume collecting all of McCay’s color Sammy Sneeze pages. I’m putting Sammy on just one side of each page, and the other side will feature whatever monochrome strip appeared on the back in the 1904-05 newspapers. Strips include the Woozlebeasts, Upside-Downs, and McCay’s own Hungry Henrietta.

My problem is that not all of my Sammy collection is from the New York Herald, the only paper to put Henrietta on the back. As a result, I am missing Hungry Henrietta pages.

I could substitute other strips, but obviously the best thing to do is have the complete Henrietta. Anybody out there know the whereabouts of Herald sections from 1905? Or another source for Henrietta (Jan-July1905)? My usual contacts along with the SF collection at OSU have all come up short. Exciting prizes offered as a reward!

Thanks for helping out with the hunt!

Pete

Searching for some images to post with this, I made an awesome find… nonsenselit.org. It is a site offering, among other wonders, a complete online version of J.P. Benson’s Woozlebeasts 1905 book collection along with various Woozlebeasts strips, and reprints of Gustave Verbeek’s Loony Lyrics of Lulu, Tiny Tads (courtesy of Barnacle Press), and Easy Papa (courtesy of the Stripper’s Guide)… no Upside-Downs there, yet. Additional strips offered at nonsenselit.org include Peter Newell’s Naps of Polly Sleepyhead (along with a lot of other great Peter Newell stuff), Helen Stilwell’s Laughable Looloos, and other very interesting stuff, like this 17 foot long unfolding panorama by Aliquis called The Flight of the Old Woman Who Was Tossed Up in a Basket… wow.

In addition to all of this they also have a fantastic blog called A Blog of Bosh… I don’t know how I missed this site previously, but I sure am glad I found it!

Verbeek’s Upside-Downs is a pretty amazing strip. The strips have six panels which you read right-side up, and when you get to the last panel you flip it over and read the same panels upside-down to conclude the strip. To do this successfully once would be impressive… Verbeek did a whole series of them. To see an example I just blatantly stole out of Nemo #10 (I’m pretty sure this is “fair use”), click on the image below… then click on the strip example that comes up when you’re ready to flip it over. Nemo #10 reprints 16 of these ingeniously inventive strips… copies of the wonderful Nemo magazine can still be found at reasonable prices on Ebay.

The Woozlebeasts offers an array of marvelous and funny fantastic creatures. These strips (along with Verbeek’s The Terrors of the Tiny Tads) seem to me like a direct predecessor of two of my favorite cartoonists, Basil Wolverton and Dr. Seuss, although I have no idea if they were influenced by the Woozlebeasts and the Tiny Tads or not. Here is an example from the book on the nonsenselit.org site… click it to go view the entire book at nonsenselit.org.

Pyongyang by Guy Delisle

Posted on by
Reply

After reading Guy Delisle’s wonderful book Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea last week, running across this animation was quite amusing. It’s the cutest piece of animated propaganda for a militaristic totalitarian society you’re ever likely to see.

Don’t miss Pyongyang… it is Delisle’s story of a trip he took to North Korea on a gig supervising animation for a French studio. His experiences in Orwellian North Korea are bizarre, chilling, and frequently hilarious (a nice combination of effects). Delisle is an excellent cartoonist, with a keen eye for observation and a great sense of timing. Pyongyang is the first thing I’ve read by Delisle, and I’ll definitely be hunting down the rest of his works.

Bajrang Bali

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s the trailer for Bajrang Bali, a wonderful Bollywood movie telling the tales of Hanuman, the monkey god, from the Ramayana. As with most depictions of the glorious iconography of the Hindu religion, it is it colorful, wild, and utterly bizarre to my western eyes. The no-budget special effects are definitely part of the charm… it’s kind of like an alternate-reality Sid and Marty Krofft show, something like what would happen if HR Pufnstuf and Sigmund the sea monster were gods. You can buy it here on DVD for $10… and I think I got my copy even cheaper, so you may want to shop around. I highly recommend it.