Posts Tagged ‘cartoons’
“He offered alternative facts”*…
When reach exceeds grasp (in both senses of the word), from @ryanqnorth in Dinosaur Comics.
* Kellyanne Conway (defending Sean Spicer)
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As we have it our way, we might we might send an amusing birthday verse to Ogden Nash; he was born on this date in 1902. A poet best known for his light verse, Nash wrote over 500 pieces published, between 1931 and 1972, in 14 volumes. At the time of his death in 1971, he was, The New York Times averred, “the country’s best-known producer of humorous poetry.” The following year, on his birthday, the U.S. Postal service celebrated him with a commemorative stamp.
- Candy
Is Dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.- “Reflections on Ice-Breaking” in Hard Lines (1931); often misattributed to Dorothy Parker
- It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant…- “Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man” in The Family Album of Favorite Poems (1959)
“Animation isn’t the illusion of life; it is life”*…
A unsung pioneer…
A decade before Walt Disney Productions came into existence, making its name synonymous with animated films, there was another pioneer of the art form — Lotte Reiniger.
Reiniger’s filmmaking career spanned 60 years, during which she created more than 70 silhouette animation films, including versions of “Cinderella,” “Puss in Boots” and “Hansel and Gretel.” She’s perhaps best known for her 1926 silent film “The Adventures of Prince Achmed,” a fantastical adaptation of “The Arabian Nights” that was among the first full-length animated features ever made [and the oldest still in existence]…
Beginning with “Prince Achmed,” she also created an early version of the multiplane camera, which gave two-dimensional animation a hitherto unexplored depth, movement and complexity. She called her device a tricktisch, or trick table…
More of Reiniger’s work: The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and a Nivea commercial (1920).
More of Reiniger’s remarkable story: “Overlooked No More: Lotte Reiniger, Animator Who Created Magic With Scissors and Paper” (gift article) from @nytimes, and on Wikipedia.
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As we sit with the shadows, we might recall that it was on this date in 1935 that Mickey’s Garden was released. Directed by Wilfred Jackson, it was the second Mickey cartoon produced in color and the first color appearance of Pluto. It is also, notably, the first short on which Ollie Johnston (a cleanup artist at the time, ultimately, one of Disney’s “Nine Old Men“) worked.
“All good things must come to an end”*…
Rusty Foster reports that…
Matt Bors announced that The Nib is shutting down after its retroactively ironically themed final issue, “The Future.” “The Nib has published more than 6,000 comics and paid out more than $2 million to creators.” It will be replaced by: nothing, just another void where independent cultural criticism used to be…
Today in Tabs
The Nib will be online through August; you can still enjoy it’s extraordinary offerings (and buy its issues) until then. Happily Rusty’s Today in Tabs continues– one hopes for a long, long time…
[Image above: from KC Green‘s “This Is Not Fine,” on The Nib]
* Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
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As we bid a fond adieu, we might recall that it was on this date in 1844 that inventor (and celebrated painter) Samuel F.B. Morse inaugurated the first technological competitor to the post when he sent the first telegraph message: “What hath God wrought?” Morse sent the famous message from the B&O’s Mount Clare Station in Baltimore to the Capitol Building. (The words were chosen by Annie Ellsworth, the daughter of the U.S. Patent Commissioner, from Numbers 23:23.)
“I would say lenguage is that we may mis-unda-stend each udda”*…
Long-time readers will know that your correspondent adores George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (c.f., e.g., this post: the remarkable Chris Ware on the modern relevance of the seminal strip). Today, Amber Medland on Krazy Kat‘s huge resonance with Modernists throughout its run…
The Kat had a cult following among the modernists. For Joyce, Fitzgerald, Stein, and Picasso, all of whose work fed on playful energies similar to those unleashed in the strip, he had a double appeal, in being commercially nonviable and carrying the reek of authenticity in seeming to belong to mass culture. By the thirties, strips like Blondie were appearing daily in roughly a thousand newspapers; Krazy appeared in only thirty-five. The Kat was one of those niche-but-not-really phenomena, a darling of critics and artists alike, even after it stopped appearing in newspapers. Since then: Umberto Eco called Herriman’s work “raw poetry”; Kerouac claimed the Kat as “the immediate progenitor” of the beats; Stan Lee (Spider-Man) went with “genius”; Herriman was revered by Charles Schulz and Theodor Geisel alike. But Krazy Kat was never popular. The strip began as a sideline for Herriman, who had been making a name for himself as a cartoonist since 1902. It ran in “the waste space,” literally underfoot the characters of his more conventional 1910 comic strip The Dingbat Family, published in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Evening Journal. Hearst gave Herriman a rare lifetime contract and, with his backing, by 1913 the liminal kreatures had their own strip. Most people disliked not being able to understand it. Soon advertisers worried that formerly loyal readers would skip the strips and miss the ads. Editors were infuriated by devices like Herriman’s “intermission” panel, which disrupted the narrative by stalling the action…
For [E.E.] Cummings, who, with his flagrant anti-intellectual stance, privileged what he called “Aliveness” above all else, Charlie Chaplin was the only artist to rival Herriman. But technology disrupted both Chaplin’s and Herriman’s idiosyncratic work. At the introduction of sound in film in 1927, Chaplin said that the “spontaneity of the gags had been lost,” but what he really lost was his control of time. Sound erases distance; there was no longer a delay in which the incongruity between seeing and comprehending could bloom. In his essay “What People Laugh At” (1918), Chaplin noted “the liking of the average person for contrast and surprise in his entertainment.” Both Herriman and Chaplin orchestrated meticulously timed, silent dialogues between images and words. Slapstick—a word that originally referred to two pieces of wood joined together, used by pantomime clowns to make loud noises—is, in their work, a deliberately clumsy cleaving of the relationship between words and images. If people could explain themselves, there would be no time to revel in ludicrous situations, as when in The Kid, Chaplin, caressing the hand of a policeman’s wife, is accidentally caressed by her husband…
The unsung Modernist: “E. E. Cummings and Krazy Kat,” from @ambermedland in @parisreview.
Enjoy Krazy Kat strips here.
* Krazy, to Ignatz (Herriman one-upping Wittgenstein…)
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As we praise percipience, we might recall that it was on this date in 1948, in the Bugs Bunny cartoon “Haredevil Hare,” that Marvin the Martian made his debut.
“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories”*…
Mel Birnkrant is a successful toy designer, creator both of items that succeeded in the toy market (e.g., the Outer Space Men and Baby Face), and (with his wife Eunice) of the output of “Boutique Fantastique,” handcrafted “‘authentic reproductions’ of antique toys and music boxes that never existed in the first place” (or, as The New York Times put it in a review of a show of their work at the Cooper Union Museum, “antiques that never were”).
But he is probably as well known– at least in the circle of aficionados of which he is a part– as the force behind The Birnkrant Collection of Mickey Mouse & Comic Characters, unique in both its breadth and it depth…
The Birnkrant Collection of Mickey Mouse & Comic Characters was christened “MOUSE HEAVEN” by our good friend Kenneth Anger [Kenneth Anger… Kenneth Anger!] many years ago, long before he made his film of the same name. Although, the Collection encompasses the vast expanse of Comic Character Imagery, beginning at the Turn of the 20th Century, right up through the early 1940s, and is about much more than merely Mickey. The title “stuck”, and over time, in my own mind, it came to include Everything!
…
A collection, like this, can only happen, once in a lifetime, and by some twist of fate, that lifetime happened to be mine. For better, or for worse, the likes of it could never be amassed again. So this is it, about as good as Comic Character Collecting gets. To duplicate what you are about to see would require just three things: 1. Infinite resources. 2. A Time Machine, you’d have to be there, either living from 1890 to 1945, or be in attendance at all the great flea markets, antique shows, and toy shows on the East Coast, for the past 50 years, and be able to run faster than me. And, finally, 3. You’d have to BE me. All this only looks haphazard, actually, its unified by a single vision. Everything here is related, It all goes together, in a way that few perceive.
…
I’m not a historian. My interest in the items I collected all my life was always purely Visual. They are simply, flat out, Works of Art to me. So don’t expect a history of the various characters they portray. As interesting as that may be, it was never what interested me. What I learned, along the way, about the various comic characters and their creators was purely secondary. That scant knowledge was only used as clues to help me find more of the same. Thus, my commentary, as we go along, will serve only one purpose, I will strive to help you see these Works of Art as Works of Art. But, be forewarned, you’ll learn little of their stories, and who they were, historically. It’s all about the way they look to me. These Icons are the Graven Images of would-be Gods and Goddesses, in the Comic Character Pantheon. I will present them as Iconic Idols, worthy recipients of Idolatry, and spare you the theology…
Take the online tour of Mouse Heaven. And then there’s Anger’s film…
* Walter Benjamin
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As we wander in wonder, we might recall that it was on this date in 2009 that 12 year old Catherine Ralston was named Easy-Bake “Baker of the Year” for her “Queen of Hearts Strawberry Tart.” The Easy-Bake Oven is, of course, a working toy oven that Kenner introduced in 1963, and which Hasbro still manufactures. Indeed, more than 16 million Easy-Bake Ovens (in 11 models) had been sold.
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