Political Cartoons: America On The Brink of War 1916

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great info on the history of animation told through the careers of great cartoonists.


Politics is on everyone's mind today, so here are some more rare political cartoons from the collection of archive supporter, Marc Schirmeister. These three articles come from the January, 1916 issue of Cartoons magazine. They paint a vivid picture of the United States on the brink of entering a World War.

SEASON OPENS FOR PEACE DOVES





UNCLE SAM IN EUROPEAN CARICATURE






IN THE STORM CENTER OF EUROPE







See our previous post on this subject... Cartoons Magazine January 1916

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
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The State of Cartooning: Newspaper Comics

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.


David Apatoff's collection of newspaper comics got me to thinking about the sorry state of cartooning today. I don't think most people realize just how far the market for cartoons has fallen over the past few decades. Newspaper comics are the clearest example of how quickly a once vital artform can go the way of the dodo bird. This weekend, take a close look at your local Sunday funnies. Compare them to these comics from nearly 70 years ago. Keep in mind that this is just an average Sunday from an average newspaper of the time period. I think you'll be shocked at how different it is from what passes for comics in today's papers.


Until I had a chance to look through David Apatoff's collection and actually see a complete Sunday comics section, I had no idea how huge and diverse the Sunday comics section was in the past. Not all these comics are classics, but even the worst of them are more interesting than the crop in current papers. It's a crime how lousy newspaper comics have become.


Here are some statistics to think about, courtesy of Mike Fontanelli's research... At the time this newspaper comic section was published, Li'l Abner had a circulation of over 80 million, and Capp made $200,000 a year from the strip- not counting licensing and other ancillary income. At that time, the population of the United States was 145 million, and adjusting for inflation, Capp's salary in 2008 dollars would be 2.2 million dollars a year. Capp's cartoon was read every day by more than half of the United States, and he made much more money any modern day print cartoonist makes from his work. But Capp wasn't alone. Chic Young made $5,000 a week from Blondie. Milton Caniff, Chester Gould, George MacManus, Hal Foster... all of these men made MUCH more than the typical cartoonist today does, and their work was seen and enjoyed on a single day by more people than current artists can hope for in a decade. The difference in scale is mind boggling.


This week, I had the opportunity to spend an afternoon chatting with Ralph Bakshi. I can't seem to shake one comment he made when he visited the archive and saw what we were doing here. Ralph said, "Cartooning is in jeopardy." He explained that artists who would have become cartoonists in the past are going into other fields, because the market for cartooning has deteriorated so much. In the past, a cartoonist could do a newspaper strip, or contribute one panel gags to magazines, or do spot illustrations for advertisements, create comic books or make animated cartoons. Today, every single one of those branches of cartooning is struggling for survival. There are animated cartoons today that are neither animated, nor cartoons. The comic book business is suffocating under the weight of an unsupportable business model. Magazines rarely run cartoons, and advertisements are usually just Photoshopped collages. Some markets, like newspaper comics may not survive at all. It's clear that if you're determined to become a cartoonist today, you can expect to be swimming against the current.


It's difficult not to be depressed. I'm not sure what can be done to reverse the trend. I can only hope that this website will act as a catalyst to inspire the artists who truly love the medium to create something totally new and exciting. We can only hope that artists will stick with the art of cartooning and build up a totally new market on the internet, because that's our best hope for the resurgence of cartooning. Perhaps today's hard work and sacrifices will spawn a market for cartoons that replaces and surpasses all the old models. I sure hope that happens, and I'm doing what I can to see that it does.


I hope you cartoonists out there understand what I'm saying... I'm not saying that there are no good cartoonists and no good cartoons today. I'm saying that the market for cartooning has been allowed to dwindle down to nothing. That isn't good for the business of cartooning or for cartoonists who want to make a living drawing. I'm reminding you here that there was a time when cartoonists didn't think small or settle for being boxed into a "niche market". To them, becoming successful was the goal, and they didn't consider that to be the same as "selling out". The aimed straight for the mainstream with a variety of challenging, well drawn comics, and they hit it big. Let's find a way to do that again.

The New Orleans Times Picayune
First Comic Section
Sunday, June 25th, 1939






Second Comic Section






Third Comic Section





For more great newspaper cartoons, see... Milt Gross Sunday Pages and Dailies Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven; Chic Young's Blondie, Rube Goldberg's Side Show; George Lichty's Grin and Bear It, Cliff Sterrett's Polly & Her Pals Part One, Part Two and Part Three; and Harrison Cady's Birds' Eye Views

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
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Cartooning: Jimmy Swinnerton

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.


Today, in David Apatoff's great blog Illustration Art I read the amazing life story of pioneer newspaper cartoonist Jimmy Swinnerton. David's article is titled, Jimmy Swinnerton At The Dawn of Comic Strips, and it's well worth reading.

David's vivid history lesson inspired me to dig into our collection and post some more examples of Swinnerton's pioneering genius. These images were donated by Jonathan Barli of Digital Funnies. Jonathan contributed thousands of high resolution scans of rare newspaper comics two years ago, and we are just now finishing up processing the images for inclusion in our database. Jonathan offers CD-ROMs of Swinnerton's Little Jimmy and Canyon Kiddies for sale, and I highly recommend them. Make sure to click through the link and visit his site.

As I always say when I post newspaper comics... if you're one of those folks who don't click on the images because you don't think it's worth the time it takes to read... YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE MISSING!








Here are some illustrations by Swinnerton from the late 20s...










Many thanks to Jonathan Barli and David Apatoff for their great work!

For more great newspaper cartoons, see... Milt Gross Sunday Pages and Dailies Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven; Chic Young's Blondie, Rube Goldberg's Side Show; George Lichty's Grin and Bear It, Cliff Sterrett's Polly & Her Pals Part One, Part Two and Part Three; and Harrison Cady's Birds' Eye Views

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
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Pinups: Bill Wenzel and Stanley Rayon's Girlie Cartoons

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 9 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great pinup art.


You might remember our post a few weeks back on the girlie cartoons of Jack O'Brien and Milo Kinn from the pages of Booby Traps and Nuggets. Today, we have more fun for you.

Time is a strange thing. Some parts of history are written about and analyzed endlessly and are passed down to future generations, while other aspects are totally forgotten. Sixty years downstream from when these cartoons were created, very little information about the artists who made them has survived.

BILL WENZEL
Bill Wenzel is the best known artist in this batch, working here under the pseudonym, "Candace". Fantagraphics recently published a collection of his work, and GoofButton.com posted scans from a late sixties collection of his cartoons, titled Tender Loving Care. Here, we get a rare chance to see Wenzel's rough alongside the finished ink...












STANLEY RAYON
All I know about Stanley Rayon was that he lived and worked in New Orleans. Does anyone have any more info on him? Although his drawings are pretty primitive, they do have that spark of fun that makes post-War girlie cartoons so appealing.





Let me know in the comments if you would like to see more of these.

If you enjoyed this post, see... Jack O'Brien and Milo Kinn's Girlie Cartoons, Eldon Dedini Part One, Part Two (video interview!) and Part Three, Jack Cole And Other Great 50s Playboy Cartoonists, Jack Cole Valentine, Little Annie Fanny Takes A Trip, Kurtzman & Elder's Little Annie Fanny, More Little Annie Fannie, Biography: Jack Davis, Early Erich Sokol Cartoons, A Passel Of Sokol, and More Sokol, Doug Sneyd and Phil Interlandi, Early Interlandi Playboy Cartoons and Meet Doug Sneyd.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
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Pinups: Jack O'Brien and Milo Kinn's Girlie Cartoons

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 9 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great pinup art.


Sometimes I think I must have the best job in the world...

Today some nice folks who had Googled up this website stopped by to offer us some material to digitize that they had rescued from a relative's garage. They had a laundry basket full of 1940s magazines and a big stack of original inks from a 1947 girlie cartoon magazine, colorfully titled Booby Traps and Nuggets. My jaw hit the floor when I started going through the artwork. Here is a part of cartooning history that has been largely overlooked- especially by me. But not any more!

The artwork is quickly executed and sometimes a bit funky... and for good reason. On the back of each ink is the amount the cartoonist was paid for his work. The prices range from $3 to $5. You would have to work pretty doggone fast to make a living at that rate! I have to admit, I don't know much about these artists. So I'm going to present them a couple at a time with the little I do know and see if any of you readers out there can help fill in the blanks about their careers.

JACK O'BRIEN

Jack O'Brien lived in Los Angeles, and if this photograph is any indication, he was an alumni of UCLA and had a cute little daughter. In the 1960s, O'Brien drew the Sad Sack comic books, he came up with a beatnik character named "Cool Cat", and he created the G.I. Juniors line of comics for Harvey. If you know anything else about O'Brien, please post to the comments below.











MILO KINN

All I know about Milo Kinn is that he lived in Seattle, Washington. I'm guessing he was married, (based on the pretty dingle ball curtains!) and it's clear that he didn't mind drawing the exact same pretty girl profile over and over. In fact, he seems to have a lot more fun with the "broads" than he does with the "babes". Anyone have any more details on him?





Let me know in the comments if you would like to see more of these.

If you enjoyed this post, see... Eldon Dedini Part One, Part Two (video interview!) and Part Three, Jack Cole And Other Great 50s Playboy Cartoonists, Jack Cole Valentine, Little Annie Fanny Takes A Trip, Kurtzman & Elder's Little Annie Fanny, More Little Annie Fannie, Biography: Jack Davis, Early Erich Sokol Cartoons, A Passel Of Sokol, and More Sokol, Doug Sneyd and Phil Interlandi, Early Interlandi Playboy Cartoons and Meet Doug Sneyd.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
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Cartooning: Cartoons Magazine January 1916

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great info on the history of animation told through the careers of great cartoonists.


Yesterday, Archive supporter Marc Schirmeister stopped by with a treasure trove of information on the early days of cartooning. A big stack of Cartoons magazines from the WWI era through the late 1920s. These magazines are amazing... they include articles about Pat Sullivan, George Herriman and Winsor McCay, editorial cartoons from around the globe, and incredible advertisements for correspondence courses in cartooning. Here is a sampling of editorial cartoons, divided by subject matter from the January 1916 issue, along with an article from the Portland Oregonian titled...

THE MODERN CARTOON
When it is declared that there are nowadays no great cartoonists or illustrators, it ought to be recalled that the conditions controlling the art of newspaper caricature and pictorial lampooning are not what they were fifty, or twenty, or even ten years ago. Let us go back no farther than Thomas Nast, who was the most famous, and usually regarded as the greatest of all American cartoonists. Mr Nast's first and only notable work was with Harper's Weekly. During the Civil War, a tremendous episode in our history, he began his work. No one who has examined the usual political and personal caricatures of that day can fail to recognize their wretched and brutal character- miserable as art productions and savage in spirit and expression. Mr. Nast did much to make the profession of caricaturist respectable. His talents as an artist were considerable, but his insight into affairs, his understanding of the motives of men, and his ability to give them pictoral form are the real secrets of his power.


There was no rival for Thomas Nast. He was alone in a field practically untilled. He rarely drew more than a single cartoon a week, and it is easy to see that he had ample time for the study of events and for the full play of his genius. To a great extent the weekly drawing of Nast was inspirational, for undoubtedly he was a man of temperament as well as a student of current history. He was not called upon for a daily offering, and was therefore not oppressed by the exacting and remorseless grind of daily journalism.

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES OF 1916






When Thomas Nast left Harper's Weekly, after years of remarkable service to his employment and to the cause of truth and decency in public affairs, he made no impression through his contributions to the newspapers. His vogue was gone. He died a heartbroken man. It is an open question whether he might not have sustained his great reputation if he had remained with Harper's. In his latter days other caricaturists had come to the fore and Nast and Harper's no longer enjoyed a monopoly in that line.

RESTLESSNESS IN INDIA






Who looks nowadays to an American weekly for cartoons? Yet it is true that in Great Britain the cartoon remains the particular posession of the weekly, and it is the same in Germany. There is a wide difference however, in the German and British methods, for the Briton seeks to make of his cartoon an elaborate work of art, and the German confines himself to simple lines and memory impressions. The Englishman often uses models and excels as a draughtsman. The German burlesques his subject, and strives for humorous and grotesque effects. There is no real American school, as there is a British school and a German school. But there are thousands of American cartoonists giving the public their daily output, and making their appeal on every possible subject of human interest.

CARTOONS FROM JAPANESE PUNCH





There is now no Thomas Nast of American journalism. Under our conditions, it is doubtful there could be. But there are a great many fine artists drawing good cartoons and excellent cartoonists making pictures that could by no stretch of the imagination be called sound art. On the whole, the average is very high, and certainly an irrepairable loss would be suffered by journalism if the services of the cartoonist were to be dropped. The cartoon has come to be an effort to editorialize in a picture the current daily feature of the news or of public thought.

PORK BARREL POLITICS





The old cartoon- the Nast picture- was a complex affair, always with a central theme, but with many figures and contributing or incidental suggestions. Now it is different. The modern cartoon is a simple thing, with one idea. It requires no study to understand its meaning or to comprehend its scope. It can be absorbed at a glance. It may not be art, but it is something even better...

It is the symbol of truth.

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If you would like to see more from the pages of Cartoons magazine, let me know in the comments. Whenever I put up this many pages at one time, I wonder whether anyone is actually reading this stuff! Let me know if I should scale back my postings to more bite sized bits.

If you found this post to be interesting, see the... W. L. Evans Cartooning and Caricature Course Brochure, Lesson One and Lesson Two, Preston Blair and John K's $100K Animation Drawing Course, Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics, Part Two: How To Get Ideas / Studies of Comic Strips, Part Three: Single Panel and Sports Cartoonists, Part Four: Editorial Cartoons & Comic Books, Part Five: Sketching, Part Six: Magazine Cartooning and Part Seven: Magazine Cartooning (continued); Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Part Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Part Five: How To Animate, Willard Mullin on Animals.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

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Pinups: Little Annie Fanny Takes A Trip

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 9 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great pinup art.


Today, we continued to work our way through the collection of Playboy magazines that we have been digitizing for the past year or so. Here are two more "Little Annie Fanny" episodes from late 1960s Playboys. If you missed our previous posts on this classic series by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder, see the links at the bottom of this post.


The first story up features some great work by a cartoonist we recently profiled, the master caricaturist, Jack Davis. Check out his great crowd scenes on the third and fourth page. Also remarkable are Kurtzman's brilliant layouts for the first two pages (you can feel the pitch and roll of the ship!) and the Mad magazine style final bird's eye view.






The second story up is a different type of trip, with a psychedelic "op art" touch and a full page downshot crowd scene for the climax. The "Little Annie Fanny" series was probably the most elaborately drawn comic strip ever!





Check out these great "Little Annie Fanny" collections at Amazon.com!

As always, let me know in the comments if you'd like to see more about the great cartoonists of Playboy.

If you enjoyed this post, check out our articles on Kurtzman & Elder's Little Annie Fanny, More Little Annie Fannie, Kurtzman Comic Books, Biography: Jack Davis, Early Erich Sokol Cartoons, A Passel Of Sokol, and More Sokol, Jack Cole And Other Great 50s Playboy Cartoonists, Eldon Dedini Part One and Part Two (video interview!), Doug Sneyd and Phil Interlandi, Early Interlandi Playboy Cartoons and Meet Doug Sneyd.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
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Education: W L Evans Course Brochure

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great art instructional material.

We received a surprise in the mail today- a gift from archive supporter, Mark Anderson. Mark is a magazine and greeting card cartoonist who lives in the Chicago area. He ran across a treasure in his travels, and picked it up to donate to the collection of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive. It's a promotional brochure advertising the W. L. Evans Course in Caricature and Cartooning. Shaped like a miniature artist's portfolio, and packed with great vintage cartoons and sales information, this brochure completes our collection of the W. L. Evans Course.

You might remember that we posted a couple of lessons from this series late last year. (Lesson One and Lesson Two) A complete set of lessons was donated by Marc Schirmeister. This brochure completes the set and this wonderful collection will now find a place of honor in our museum. Many thanks for thinking of us, Mark and Marc!

THE W. L. EVANS COURSE (1913)
Promotional Brochure

A cartoonist is a power. His audience is the boundless public. He is talked about. His work is admired in society. He meets the most prominent people, and becomes personally acquainted with them. He is a critic of the world's happenings.

And he receives a large salary for his work.

If you found this post to be interesting, see... The W. L. Evans School of Cartooning and Caricaturing Lesson One and Lesson Two

Also see... Preston Blair and John K's $100K Animation Drawing Course, Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics, Part Two: How To Get Ideas / Studies of Comic Strips, Part Three: Single Panel and Sports Cartoonists, Part Four: Editorial Cartoons & Comic Books, Part Five: Sketching, Part Six: Magazine Cartooning and Part Seven: Magazine Cartooning (continued); Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Part Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Part Five: How To Animate, Willard Mullin on Animals.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
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Comics: Virgil Partch's Wild, Wild Women Part Four

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.


It's been quite a while since we posted any comics from Virgil "Vip" Partch's greatest collection of cartoons, The Wild, Wild Women. If you missed our previous postings on this wonderful book, see Virgil Partch's Wild, Wild Women Part One, Part Two and Part Three.
















Let me know in the comments if you'd like to see more by Vip Partch.

For more examples of Virgil Partch's genius, see Virgil Partch's Wild, Wild Women Part One, Part Two and Part Three; Here We Go Again and Man The Beast.

Also see... George Lichty's Grin and Bear It; Milt Gross Sunday Pages Part One, Part Two and Part Three; Basil Wolverton's Powerhouse Pepper; Jim Tyer Funny Animal Comics; and Milton Knight's Great Brown Pericord Motor.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
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Pinups: A Passel of Sokol

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 9 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great pinup art.


Today, we continued to work our way through the collection of Playboy magazines that we have been digitizing for the past year or so. Here is a batch of cartoons by Erich Sokol. We start out with a biographical feature on the cartoonists who worked for Playboy in the mid-1960s.



Next up is a Sokol feature that highlights his remarkable ability to caricature...




And a pile of Sokol cartoons from the late 1950s through the early 70s. Check out the wide variety of colors, the attention to light and the skillful composition in these cartoons...










As always, let me know in the comments if you'd like to see more about the great cartoonists of Playboy.

If you enjoyed this post, check out our articles on Early Erich Sokol Cartoons and More Sokol, Kurtzman & Elder's Little Annie Fanny, Jack Cole And Other Great 50s Playboy Cartoonists, Eldon Dedini Part One and Part Two (video interview!), Doug Sneyd and Phil Interlandi, Early Interlandi Playboy Cartoons and Meet Doug Sneyd.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

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2007 Review: 6 Milton Caniff

As the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive completes its second year in operation, it's time to review the accomplishments of the past year. Here's a countdown of the ten most important subjects we've covered in 2007. See if your list matches mine. (View the complete list.) Click on the links to read more on this topic.


From Milton Caniff And Norman Rockwell In Coronet Magazine September 11th, 2007
NUMBER 6: MILTON CANIFF

This year, we were very fortunate to be able to digitize and share artwork from the estate of comic legend, Milton Caniff. Archive supporter, John Ellis is producing a series of DVDs of the classic TV series, Steve Canyon, and generously agreed to share his research on Caniff and Steve Canyon with the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive.


Milton Caniff in his studio ca. 1947
(click for a larger view)
Ellis shared his thoughts about Caniff with us in our first post on the subject, Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon Dalies...

Milton Caniff has been referred to as "The Rembrandt of the Comic Strip", and oft by himself as "an Armchair Marco Polo", but in fact this whirlwind of a comic strip innovator and writer was essentially a sincerely nice man who loved to draw. Yes this gentleman born in Hillsboro Ohio in 1907 created and drew Terry and The Pirates from 1934 to 1946, which absolutely set the standard for the adventure comic strip. True, he raised the bar with Steve Canyon, which unlike Terry, he owned lock stock and barrel from the first daily strip in January 1947 through to June 1988, the final installment published shortly after his death. Absolutely he worked rain or shine, seven days/strips a week for 54 years, even from his hospital bed, the deadlines never ended.

From Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon Dalies March 28th, 2007
In his article, "Detour Guide For An Armchair Marco Polo" from Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Caniff writes...

There has been a tendency recently for artists to automatically assume they cannot write their own stories because they see so many double by-lines. I contend that any man who can invent pictures can invent situations and dialogue. In fact, it should be easier for the artist to pilot his own action because he is not likely to write himself into one of those undrawable dilemmas in manuscripts about which illustrators have complained for years.

Milton Caniff with Jack Benny from
Milton Caniff- A Remembrance May 30th, 2007
Caniff's nephew, Harry Grant Guyton shared some of his memories of his "Uncle Milt"...

Of course Milton Caniff was a stickler for accuracy, but his fans were eagle-eyed. I was with him at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. He climbed into the cockpit of a fighter plane (an F-104 I believe), and spent maybe five minutes in it. That evening, he used it in Steve Canyon. He had committed the control panel in that cockpit to memory, and months later when the strip was published, he received numerous letters saying that had Steve been flying as high as Milt implied in the strip, one of the gauge readings was wrong.

From Milton Caniff And Norman Rockwell
In Coronet Magazine September 11th, 2007
MORE CANIFF ARTICLES

• Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One March 6th, 2007


• More Steve Canyon Dalies May 30th, 2007


• Parody- Steve Crevace in Whack! Comics May 8th, 2007


• Comic Artists At Work: People On Paper (MGM/1945) April 19th, 2007

John Ellis promises more great material on Milton Caniff in the coming year. You can find out information about the Steve Canyon TV series at his blog...

Steve Canyon on DVD

Go To Number 5 on the list of Top Ten Subjects of 2007

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

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2007 Review: 8 Writing Cartoons

As the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive completes its second year in operation, it's time to review the accomplishments of the past year. Here's a countdown of the ten most important subjects we've covered in 2007. See if your list matches mine. (View the complete list.) Click on the link to see more on this topic.



NUMBER 8: WRITING CARTOONS

One of the best things to happen to animation in the past few years is the growth of blogging among animation professionals. Topics that used to be discussed only in obscure trade journals or at private symposiums are now discussed publicly on the internet, where participants from all over the world can benefit from the exchange of information.

One of the principle catalysts for discussion on the net is John Kricfalusi's blog, All Kinds of Stuff. A series of John's posts on writing for animation created a wave of comment across the "blogosphere". A prominent cartoon scriptwriter vehemently disagreed with John's opinion that cartoons should be written by cartoonists, not scriptwriters. But when he was asked to name his favorite golden age cartoon writer, the scriptwriter was unable to come up with a single name... This isn't particularly surprising because THERE WERE NO CARTOON SCRIPTWRITERS prior to 1960.

Many people working in animation today have very little idea of how cartoons were made in the first half century of the medium. But Walt Disney was happy to tell you how he wrote his cartoons...


And it was the same at every other golden age animation studio...


Here's the Terry-Toons writers at work...


And a "script" for an MGM Tom & Jerry cartoon...


And a page from the "script" to Max Fleischer's Mr. Bug Goes To Town...


And this fragment of a storyboard from Warner Bros by my pick as the greatest cartoon writer of all time, Warren Foster. Check out the link below for a complete storyboard by Foster from the pilot episode of The Yogi Bear Show.


Story: The Greatest Cartoon Writer Of All Time March 27th, 2007

We've posted other great examples of visual storytelling this year as well...

• Alvin Show Pilot Board September 21st, 2007


• Clair Weeks' "Banyan Deer" Storyboard August 12th, 2007


• Ren & Stimpy "Big House Blues" Sequence 03 January 11th, 2007

After the first of the year, I'll have some more storyboards to post.

Go To Number 7 on the list of Top Ten Subjects of 2007

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
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Education: W L Evans Course Part Two

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great art instructional material.

Want to learn to cartoon the way Elzie Seegar, the man who brought Popeye to life did? How about Chester Gould, the creator of Dick Tracy, or Hank Ketcham the father of Dennis the Menace? They all learned to draw cartoons with the W. L. Evans correspondence course. A while back, we posted Lesson One. Here is lesson two. If you'd like me to post more, show me you are using this material by posting your lessons on your website or blog.

THE W. L. EVANS COURSE (1916)
Lesson Two







STUDENTS: Print this stuff out and USE IT!

If you found this post to be interesting, see... The W. L. Evans School of Cartooning and Caricaturing Lesson One

Also see... Preston Blair and John K's $100K Animation Drawing Course, Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics, Part Two: How To Get Ideas / Studies of Comic Strips, Part Three: Single Panel and Sports Cartoonists, Part Four: Editorial Cartoons & Comic Books, Part Five: Sketching, Part Six: Magazine Cartooning and Part Seven: Magazine Cartooning (continued); Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Part Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Part Five: How To Animate, Willard Mullin on Animals.

Many thanks to Archive supporter, Marc Schirmeister for sharing this with us.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

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Cartooning: Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part Seven

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great info on the history of cartooning told through the careers of great artists.

Magazine Illustration by Jan Balet (See Lief Peng's Flickr set for more images by Jan Balet.)

We continue our series of posts on Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning with the second part of the section dealing with Magazine Cartooning... I'm afraid I don't have much information on these artists. If you can contribute a fact or two, please post them to the comments below.

MICHAEL BERRY
Michael Berry contributed pretty girl cartoons to Pictorial Review, Esquire, Liberty and The New Yorker.






JOHN RUGE
John Ruge's elegant girl drawings appeared in Colliers in the late 40s and Playboy in the early 50s. His comic about an Irish Setter named Clancy was also popular.




RALPH STEIN & STAN HUNT
Ralph Stein was the author of a collection of pinup girl art titled The Pinup From 1852 to Now. He wrote the Popeye newspaper comic in the 1950s, and was an avid classic car enthuiast. Stan Hunt was a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He attended the New York School of Art and apprenticed under Willard Mullin. He passed away in 2006 at the age of 77.




RICHARD SARGENT
Richard Sargent contributed images to Pictorial Review and The Saturday Evening Post.




JAN BELET
Jan Belet was a childrens book illustrator who also did artwork for several women's magazines.




RICHARD TAYLOR & FRANK OWEN
Richard Taylor was a cartoonist for The New Yorker and Playboy. Frank Owen was a cartoonist for The Saturday Evening Post He was the one who came up with the original story idea for the Disney's cartoon, Morris, the Midget Moose.



THE IMPORTANCE OF CARTOONS IN ADVERTISING
By Don Herold


A STUDY IN LAUGHS



ROY DOTY

Over the past half century, Roy Doty has been a cartoonist and illustrator with over 60 children's books to his credit. He was awarded a Reuben by the National Cartoonist Society in 2006. See RoyDoty.com to see what he's up to lately.




Many thanks to Marc Crisafulli and David King for sharing this great book with us.

If you found this post to be interesting, see... Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics, Part Two: How To Get Ideas / Studies of Comic Strips and Part Three: Single Panel and Sports Cartoonists, Part Four: Editorial Cartoons & Comic Books, Part Five: Sketching, and Part Six: Magazine Illustration

Also see... Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Part Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Part Five: How To Animate. Also, see... Willard Mullin on Animals.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Comics: Felix Answers The Deckter Challenge

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.


Here are more great Sunday pages from the collection of Marc Deckter. This sequential run of Otto Messmer's Felix the Cat was brought to you through the generosity of Archive Supporters B. Paul Husband and Christopher Peterson.


Many thanks to everyone who has gone out of their way to support the archive this year. We're making great strides, and it's all because of you.















For more great comic strip action, see... Otto Messmer's Felix The Cat 1932 and Felix In Mother Goose Land; Milt Gross Sunday Pages and Dailies Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four and Part Five and Part Six; Chic Young's Blondie, Rube Goldberg's Side Show; George Lichty's Grin and Bear It, Cliff Sterrett's Polly & Her Pals Part One, Part Two and Part Three; and Harrison Cady's Birds' Eye Views

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

Stumble It!

Comics: More Great George Lichty Grin And Bear It Comics

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.


Here are more great comics by George Lichty donated by Archive supporter Christopher Lopez. Lichty was one of the comic page's longest working artists. His style changed little over the years. Compare the examples below from the late thirties to the Sunday pages from the 50s we posted a couple of months back. Lichty's distinctive free flowing lines were a staple of the funnies for over half a century. He may have drawn slouches, but I think you'll agree, as an artist, he was no slouch himself!



Here (thanks to Joseph Campana) is the entry on Lichty from Martin Sheridan's Comics And Their Creators...




1939 DAILY STRIPS






1937 SUNDAY PAGES















Thanks Christopher!

If you enjoyed this post, see Byrne's Complete Guide To Cartooning feature on George Lichty, Our First Post On George Lichty's Grin And Bear It, Virgil Partch's Here We Go Again, The Wild Wild Women and Man The Beast; Milt Gross Sunday Pages Part One, Part Two and Part Three; Basil Wolverton's Powerhouse Pepper; Jim Tyer Funny Animal Comics; Cliff Sterrett's Polly & Her Pals Part One, Part Two; Part Three; Harrison Cady's Birds' Eye Views; and Milton Knight's Great Brown Pericord Motor.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Comics: Felix The Cat In Mother Goose Land

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.


Recently, Marc Deckter shared his collection of Milt Gross Sunday pages with us. That gift just keeps on giving... the back sides of the Milt Gross pages featured Otto Messmer's classic Felix the Cat!


You might also remember our recent posting of 1932 Felix The Cat Sunday pages. Messmer was one of the most influential cartoonists of all time, in both comics and animation. John K called Messmer "the founding father of the American style of animation".


Here's a batch of Sunday pages from late 1930 and early 1931. They deal with Felix's visit to Mother Goose Land. Enjoy!









Many thanks to Marc Deckter for sharing his great collection with us! There's a great book packed with Felix strips... It's called Nine Lives To Live: A Classic Felix Celebration. Pick it up at Amazon. You'll be glad you did.

For more great comic strip action, see... Otto Messmer's Felix The Cat 1932; Milt Gross Sunday Pages and Dailies Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four and Part Five and Part Six; Chic Young's Blondie, Rube Goldberg's Side Show; George Lichty's Grin and Bear It, Cliff Sterrett's Polly & Her Pals Part One, Part Two and Part Three; and Harrison Cady's Birds' Eye Views

If you enjoyed these comics, you owe it to yourself to check out Digital Funnies. Jonathan Barli is hard at work on an important project- documenting and restoring early cartoons and comics in digital form. He offers a wide variety of fascinating material for sale on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM. Please take a moment to visit the Digital Funnies website, and let him know that the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive sent you.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

Stumble It!

Education: W L Evans Cartooning And Caricaturing Course Part One

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great art instructional material.


I don't normally post twice in the same day, but today is special. Cartoonist, Marc Schirmeister stopped by to donate the granddaddy of all cartooning courses to the archive- a stack of 19 mail order cartooning lessons by W. L. Evans.

In 1913, Elzie Segar, aged 18 began a correspondence course headed up by the Cleveland Leader cartoonist, W. L. Evans. The course cost a dollar per lesson and it took Segar a year and a half to complete the 20 lessons. By 1917, he had landed a job penning the "Charlie Chaplin Comic Capers" and "Looping the Loop" strips. In the ad above, Segar is quoted as saying, "I'm getting along fine, and it's all your fault."

Decades later, Segar made mention of his early education in his strip, Thimble Theater. In 1934, his character, Sappo took the W. L. Evans Cartooning Course and delighted readers with cartoon drawings made from letters of the alphabet. Segar wasn't the only cartoonist who got his start with this course. Chester Gould of Dick Tracy fame was a graduate of the W. L. Evans course, as was Dennis the Menace creator, Hank Ketcham.

Here is the first lesson that got these great cartoonists started on their career path. If there is interest, I will post more of this landmark course.








THE PLATES




STUDENTS: Print this stuff out and USE IT!

If you found this post to be interesting, see... Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics, Part Two: How To Get Ideas / Studies of Comic Strips and Part Three: Single Panel and Sports Cartoonists, Part Four: Editorial Cartoons & Comic Books, and Part Five: Sketching and Part Six: Magazine Cartooning; Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Part Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Part Five: How To Animate. Also, see... Willard Mullen on Animals.

Stumble It!

Comics: Virgil Partch's Wild, Wild Women Part Three

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.



Today, we continue with Virgil "Vip" Partch's greatest collection of cartoons, The Wild, Wild Women. Notice how clear the staging is, the beauty of the line and the strength of the posing and expressions.
















For more examples of Virgil Partch's genius, see Virgil Partch's Wild, Wild Women Part One and Part Two, Here We Go Again and Man The Beast. Also see... George Lichty's Grin and Bear It; Milt Gross Sunday Pages Part One, Part Two and Part Three; Basil Wolverton's Powerhouse Pepper; Jim Tyer Funny Animal Comics; and Milton Knight's Great Brown Pericord Motor.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Comics: Otto Messmer's Felix The Cat 1932

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.


You might remember our earlier posts featuring the work of Jonathan Barli at Digital Funnies... Dudley Fisher's Right Around Home and Harrison Cady's Boys Life Bird's Eye Views. Jonathan was kind enough to donate a large portion of his collection of meticulously restored scans of vintage comic strips to the Archive, and many of them are for sale on CD-ROM at his website. I encourage you to scoop up all of his collections. He's got a treasure trove of great comics!


Today we feature the depression era comic strips of Otto Messmer. Felix the Cat was the first really famous cartoon star and his popularity is due in large part to Messmer's creativity and craftsmanship. Messmer was a quiet man who eschewed the limelight. For many years, Pat Sullivan took the full public credit for Messmer's work. After Sullivan's death, Messmer quietly continued to pen the Felix strip until 1954.


John Canemaker wrote an excellent book on the history of Felix titled, Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Cat. It's currently out of print, but if you see it in a used book store, snap it up. It's one of the best books on animation history.

Here are a selection of Felix Sunday pages from 1932...







These fabulous scans of original Sunday pages were provided to the Archive by Jonathan Barli of Digital Funnies. Jonathan is hard at work on an important project- documenting and restoring early cartoons and comics in digital form. He offers a wide variety of fascinating material for sale on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM. Please take a moment to visit the Digital Funnies website, and let him know that the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive sent you.

Read how Felix the Cat became a Cultural/Historical Landmark in Los Angeles this week.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

Stumble It!

Comics: Virgil Partch's Wild, Wild Women Part Two

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.



Today, we continue with Virgil "Vip" Partch's greatest collection of cartoons, The Wild, Wild Women. If you missed any of the articles linked below, make sure you check them out. They're all packed with great cartooning.

















For more examples of Virgil Partch's genius, see Virgil Partch's Wild, Wild Women Part One, Here We Go Again and Man The Beast. Also see... George Lichty's Grin and Bear It; Milt Gross Sunday Pages Part One, Part Two and Part Three; Basil Wolverton's Powerhouse Pepper; Jim Tyer Funny Animal Comics; and Milton Knight's Great Brown Pericord Motor.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Comics: George Lichty Grin And Bear It Orgy!

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.


Archive supporter Christopher Lopez saw our feature on George Lichty a month or two back and decided to donate a big stack of vintage Grin And Bear It dalies and Sunday pages. I grew up with George Lichty's cartoons in the funnies every day, and as a kid, I didn't give much thought to them. But seeing his work from a wide range of years is a revelation. At first glance, Lichty's drawings appear sloppy, with formulaic oafish characters with their jaws agape. But look closer... His compositional sense and skill at putting across a visual gag is remarkable. There's nothing sloppy about his use of perspective either. His lines seem to be alive!


Along with the batch of comics, Christopher included an article on Lichty from 1952. It mentions a feature in the Saturday Evening Post titled "Does Lichty Really Hate People" (does anyone out there have a copy of that article we could scan?) and offers some choice tidbits on Lichty's working habits and lifestyle...

He works best in a crowded, noisy newspaper office. His desk is heaped so high with old drawings, discarded captions, letters he has forgotten to mail, cigarette stubs and fan mail that ever fourth day the janitors are ordered to dig through the debris just to make sure that Lichty is still alive and breathing.

Lichty has a few happy passtimes... He likes to putter around the house. When in doubt he lays little brick walls that wind aimlessly around the Lichty garden. He also plays the bass drum, sometimes at home, but more often as a member of the Guckenheimer Sour Kraut Band, a unique musical institution that he says is perpetuating a dying art form. He is not certain what the art form is, but anyway, he admits it is dying.

Now if that isn't a great description of the life of a cartoonist, I don't know what is!

Lichty was one of the comic page's longest working artists. His style changed little over the years. Compare the examples below from the late thirties to the Sunday pages from the 50s. Lichty's distinctive free flowing lines were a staple of the funnies for over half a century. He may have drawn slouches, but I think you'll agree, as an artist, he was no slouch himself!



Here (thanks to Joseph Campana) is the entry on Lichty from Martin Sheridan's Comics And Their Creators...





1939 DAILY STRIPS






1937 SUNDAY PAGES
















MID 1940s DAILY STRIPS











1950s SUNDAY PAGES











Thanks Christopher!

Check out the fascinating link between Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs and George Lichty in John K's All Kinds of Stuff.

If you enjoyed this post, see Virgil Partch's Here We Go Again, The Wild Wild Women and Man The Beast. Also see... Milt Gross Sunday Pages Part One, Part Two and Part Three; Basil Wolverton's Powerhouse Pepper; Jim Tyer Funny Animal Comics; and Milton Knight's Great Brown Pericord Motor.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

6.3.09
.

Stumble It!

Cartooning: Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part Six

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great info on the history of animation told through the careers of great animators.


Thanks to Clarke Snyder for this great Hurst ad.
We continue our series of posts on Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning with the first part of the section dealing with...

MAGAZINE CARTOONING
Introduction by Charles D. Rice


PERRY BARLOW
Perry Barlow worked along side a star-studded group of cartoonists at The New Yorker which included, among others, James Thurber, Peter Arno, Gardner Rea, Charles Addams, Whitney Darrow Jr, Sam Cobean and William Steig. From its inception, The New Yorker was, as its founding editor Harold Ross described it, "a reflection in the word and picture of metropolitan life". The images were equal with the words, and this magazine contributed greatly to the development of cartooning. Here, Barlow discusses his ideating process for a Halloween cover.




WILLIAM VON RIEGEN
Von Riegen was featured in our previous post from this book, Part Four: Sketching. His gesture drawings were greatly admired.



EARL OLIVER HURST

Earl Oliver Hurst has been profiled extensively at Shane Glines' excellent Cartoon Retro site. Hurst was primarily a "pretty girl" cartoonist whose work appeared in Colliers, True and American Weekly. His ads for Jantzen are particularly popular among current cartoonists. If you would like to see more, there is a great book on Hurst at Amazon... The Art Of Earl Oliver Hurst







KURT STOESSEL
H. Kurt Stoessel was born in 1909 in Germany, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. He was an illustrator and art director for several national magazines including The Atlantic. He lived and worked in Boulder, Colorado his entire career, and passed away on this day in 1984.






FRED COOPER
You may not know the name of Fred Cooper but you certainly have seen his work. He was a letterer, poster designer, illustrator, cartoonist, writer and teacher. Leslie Cabarga describes him as the original "clip art" artist- his "big head" cartoon characters were seen in dozens of magazines of the teens and twenties, and continue to be in use to this day. For more on this influential cartoonist, see Allan Holtz's tribute in Strippers, and Cabarga's book The Lettering and Graphic Design of F.G. Cooper



GLUYAS WILLIAMS
We mentioned Gluyas Williams in an earlier post on Collier's Magazines From the 1930s. Williams was one of the most prolific and influential cartoonists of the 1920s. His work appeared in The New Yorker, Colliers and Life. Robert Benchley wrote, "I believe that Williams' drawings will be preserved for expert contemplation both as data on the manners and customs of our day, and as graceful and important examples of its art." For more great work by cartoonist Gluyas Williams, see David King's gluyaswilliams.com



ROBERT OSBORN
Robert Osborn was a cartoonist whose style influenced the UPA artists greatly. He worked with John Hubley on the film, Flat Hatting, which is available for download at Cartoon Brew Films.



BARTOLI
Bartoli's ink drawings appeared on the covers of quite a few issues of Holiday magazine in the late 40s and 50s. I haven't been able to find out much information about him. Perhaps someone out there knows and will post some biographic info on him to the comments below.




Many thanks to Marc Crisafulli and David King for sharing this great book with us.

If you found this post to be interesting, see... Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics, Part Two: How To Get Ideas / Studies of Comic Strips and Part Three: Single Panel and Sports Cartoonists, Part Four: Editorial Cartoons & Comic Books, and Part Five: Sketching

Also see... Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Part Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Part Five: How To Animate. Also, see... Willard Mullen on Animals.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Comics: Virgil Partch's Wild, Wild Women

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.



Virgil "Vip" Partch is one of the greatest cartoonists who ever lived, but the simplicity and directness of his style belie its sophistication. Born in 1916, Partch studied under Rico LeBrun at Choiuinard Art Institute, before joining the Disney studios as a story man. His influence can be seen clearly in the Donald Duck cartoon "Duck Pimples". Partch worked at Disney for four years, until his stay there was cut short by the strike in 1941.



Out of work, Partch submitted some one panel cartoons to Colliers, and they were published. This began a fruitful career as a magazine cartoonist. Throughout the 50s, he published small collections of his cartoons, grouped by themes. "Bottle Fatigue" dealt with the spell of alcohol, "Here We Go Again" was a collection of cartoons dealing with Army life, and "Wild, Wild Women" and "Man The Beast" dealt with the battle between the sexes. Partch's cartoons are absurd, visually delightful and wicked. Most of all, they are unique.



As I said before, Vip's style is so streamlined and simple, it's easy to overlook the depth of thought beneath the surface of his cartoons. His compositions always read beautifully with clear silhouettes, appealing shapes and interesting negative spaces. The lines define a solid form and simple visual clues indicate rock-solid perspective... His drawings never seem flat, no matter how stylized they are. There's a wide variety of ways of depicting different facial expressions and expressive personality that is obviously observed from life. It doesn't get better than this!



Partch's greatest book was "Wild, Wild Women". Check out these beautiful drawings. Here's yet another example of stylized cartooning done right.















For more examples of Virgil Partch's genius, see Here We Go Again and Man The Beast. Also see... Milt Gross Sunday Pages Part One, Part Two and Part Three; Basil Wolverton's Powerhouse Pepper; Jim Tyer Funny Animal Comics; and Milton Knight's Great Brown Pericord Motor.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Pinups: More Of Kurtzman and Elder's Little Annie Fanny

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 9 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great pinup art.



Little Annie Fanny by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder was a mainstay of Playboy magazine for decades. From 1962 to 1988, they produced 100 episodes, assisted by guest artists like Jack Davis, Russ Heath, and Al Jaffee. This crack team also worked for Mad magazine and Hugh Hefner's short-lived humor magazine, Trump.



Here are three great stories from the late 60s. In particular, pay attention to Elder's hilarious "micro gags" in the backgrounds of the third story. They're even funnier than the Bond parody playing out in the foreground!















As always, let me know in the comments if you'd like to see more about the great cartoonists of Playboy.

If you enjoyed this post, check out our first article on Kurtzman & Elder's Little Annie Fanny. For more info on the great Playboy cartoonists, see these posts... Early Erich Sokol Cartoons and More Sokol, Jack Cole And Other Great 50s Playboy Cartoonists, Eldon Dedini Part One and Part Two (video interview!), Doug Sneyd and Phil Interlandi and Early Interlandi Playboy Cartoons.

Check out these great "Little Annie Fanny" collections at Amazon.com!

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Pinups: Early Sokol Playboy Cartoons

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 9 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great pinup art.



Over a year ago, we began our series of posts on Playboy cartoonists with a feature highlighting Erich Sokol. Sokol was arguably the most gifted artist who ever worked for the magazine, with a keen eye for all of the elements of good drawing- composition, clear silhouettes, original color harmonies, interesting staging and a keen sense of light and shade. There's a lot to be learned from these masterful cartoons. His style evolved as time went by, and his images became more and more beautiful. This group of cartoons is arranged in a more or less chronological manner. Compare the first one from the mid-1950s to the last one from a decade later, and you'll see how much he progressed...













Let me know in the comments if you'd like to see more about the great cartoonists of Playboy.

For more Playboy cartoons, see these posts... Erich Sokol, Jack Cole And Other Great 50s Playboy Cartoonists, Eldon Dedini Part One and Part Two (video interview!), Kurtzman & Elder's Little Annie Fanny, Doug Sneyd and Phil Interlandi and Early Interlandi Playboy Cartoons.

If you're a fan of Playboy artists like Cole, Dedini, Wilson and Sokol, you will want to get this great collection of cartoons, Playboy: 50 Years- The Cartoons. Check it out!

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Cartooning: Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part Five

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great info on the history of animation told through the careers of great animators.



We continue our series of posts on Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning with the section on the fundamental skill that at is the root of all pictorial art...

SKETCHING
Introduction by Gene Byrnes


WILLIAM VON RIEGEN
"William Von Riegen, with his studies of figure drawing, claims that this type of exercise gives him a looseness and freedom of line that he couldn't get in any other way. Von Riegen is an outstandingly talented young man in the field- an especially fine artist." -Gene Byrnes






FINE ARTISTS
In this section, Byrnes does a fine job of clearly showing the link between fine art and cartooning.




HEINRICH KLEY
"Heinrich Kley as a pen and ink artist is in a class by himself. I know of nobody who ever had the freedom of line with a pen that could compare with Kley's. Each of his drawings is a little masterpiece." -Gene Byrnes







ROGER VERNAM
"Roger Vernam's animals are good examples of on the spot sketching. In his book published by Harper, entitled Drawing People For Fun, he sketches people from all walks of life." -Gene Byrnes



GORDON GRANT
"Gordon Grant, the world renowned marine artist, whose work appears in dozens of art museums, works in oil, watercolor, and pen and ink. Whenever he has any spare time, he uses it to sketch. His sketches on the following pages were taken from his private sketchbooks and were done on a trip through Brittany. They were accomplished with a fountain pen and no preliminary pencil work." -Gene Byrnes






HOWARD BRODIE
"Howard Brodie's portrait sketches were done in Germany when he was an artist correspondent with the United States Army. His drawings of the G,I. the battle scenes, and the action that he portrayed while he was in the Army have made him famous." -Gene Byrnes



FURTHER READING
In his blog, Temple of the Seven Camels, Mark Kennedy has been offering sage advice to beginning animators about the value of carrying a sketchbook with you wherever you go. Make sure to read the whole series...

Carrying A Sketchbook Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four


...And don't miss his posts on Ronald Searle's Secret Sketchbook Part One and Part Two; and Ken Anderson's Africa Sketchbook

If you don't have The Drawings of Heinrich Kley in your library, get over to Amazon right away and order it. As Gene Byrnes says, no cartoonist should be without this book!

Many thanks to Marc Crisafulli and David King for sharing this great book with us.

If you found this post to be interesting, see... Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics, Part Two: How To Get Ideas / Studies of Comic Strips and Part Three: Single Panel and Sports Cartoonists, and Part Four: Editorial Cartoons & Comic Books

Also see... Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Part Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Part Five: How To Animate. Also, see... Willard Mullen on Animals.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Pinups: Early Interlandi Playboy Cartoons

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 9 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great pinup art.


The internet never ceases to amaze me... I was working on this post, featuring early examples of Playboy cartoons by Phil Interlandi, when I took a break to check my email... A message had just come in from Interlandi's daughter Carla, filled with great info for our Cartoon Hall of Fame entry. I'm going to let her tell you about her father...

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PHIL INTERLANDI
By Carla Interlandi Armstrong
Phil Interlandi was a veteran freelance magazine cartoonist whose work appeared in national magazines ranging from Look to Better Homes & Gardens but most notably in Playboy, where he was a mainstay for decades. A longtime resident of Laguna Beach, CA, Interlandi sold his first cartoon to Playboy in 1955. "He had an acerbic wit." said Michelle Urry, Playboy's cartoon editor. "He just ran roughshod over all the sacred cows. He didn't care about the taboos."



The Chicago-born son of Sicilian immigrants, Interlandi showed artistic ability at an early age, as did his identical twin, Frank, who later became a syndicated political cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times. During World War II, Interlandi joined the Army at 17. He drew cartoons for The Yank, the Army newspaper, and was later a prisoner of war in Germany, a subject he didn't like to talk about according to his daughter, Liza Stewart.


After the war, Interlandi and his twin brother studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Interlandi worked a number of years in advertising before becoming a full-time freelance magazine cartoonist. A year after he moved to Laguna Beach in 1952, his twin followed. The inseparable brothers were part of Laguna's colorful cadre of cartoonists that grew to include Ed Nofziger, John Dempsey, Don Tobin, Roger Armstrong, Dick Shaw, Virgil Partch and Dick Oldden.



Following Phil Interlandi's lead, the cartoonists began a midday ritual of taking a break from their drawing boards and meeting in the bar at the White House restaurant on Coast Highway. "That was the first bar I walked into in Laguna," Interlandi explained in 1982, "and it became a habit."



Interlandi illustrated a number of books, including Art Linkletter's Kids Say the Darndest Things, and I Wish I'd Said That, in addition to Dick Van Dyke's Faith, Hope and Hilarity: The Child's Eye View of Religion and Ed McMahon's The Barside Companion.



He was really just a marvelous artist," said New Yorker cartoonist Sam Gross, who had known Interlandi for 30 years. "He also really knew how to draw good looking girls and yet make the cartoon funny."



Phil Interlandi passed away in 2002 at the age of 78.



Thanks to Carla Interlandi Armstrong for the insights about her father's life and career.

For more Playboy cartoons, see these posts... Erich Sokol, Jack Cole And Other Great 50s Playboy Cartoonists, Eldon Dedini Part One and Part Two (video interview!), Kurtzman & Elder's Little Annie Fanny, Doug Sneyd and Phil Interlandi.

If you're a fan of Playboy artists like Cole, Dedini, Wilson and Sokol, you will want to get this great collection of cartoons, Playboy: 50 Years- The Cartoons. Check it out!

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

3.26.09
.

Stumble It!

Comics: People On Paper (MGM/1945)

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.

ASIFA-Hollywood Board Member, Bill Turner was watching TCM the other night when he spotted a program that he knew would be great for the Archive...


This is a 1945 MGM short subject that shows the top newspaper cartoonists of the day at work in their studios and homes. Bill instantly recognized several cartoonists that we've featured here on this blog in the past few weeks. (Click on the picture to see our article.)


Milton Caniff
(Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon)


Hal Foster
(Prince Valiant)


Chic Young
(Blondie)


Al Capp
(Li'l Abner)
But that's not all... The film also includes footage of Bud Fischer (Mutt & Jeff), Frank King (Gasoline Alley), Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), Dick Calkins (Flash Gordon), and Harold Gray (Little Orphan Annie). There's even a little bit of animation of Li'l Abner at the end! Check it out...


"Passing Parade: People On Paper" (MGM/1945)
(Quicktime 7 / 24 megs)

PLEASE NOTE The text and media files on the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Blog are not to be duplicated, redistributed or hosted on other websites without the prior written permission of the Board of Directors of ASIFA-Hollywood.

Thanks to Bill Turner for taping this for us!

For more on newspaper cartoonists, see... Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics, Part Two: How To Get Ideas / Studies of Comic Strips, Part Three: Single Panel and Sports Cartoonists and Part Four: Editorial Cartoons and Comic Books

Also see... Cliff Sterrett's Polly & Her Pals Part One, Part Two and Part Three. Also see... Milt Gross Sunday Pages Part One, Part Two and Part Three; and Rube Goldberg's Side Show.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Cartooning: Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part Four

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great info on the history of animation told through the careers of great animators.



EDITORIAL CARTOONS AND COMIC BOOKS
We continue with the section on editorial cartoons and comic books from Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning. This installment features a gallery of Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoons, features on C. D. Batchelor and Bill Crawford, and a cursory look at how comic books were edited.

EDITORIAL CARTOONING
By C. D. Batchelor
Clarence Daniel Batchelor started as a staff cartoonist at the Kansas City Star. He worked as a freelance illustrator for a time before joining the New York Daily News in 1931. He worked there for 38 years as an editorial cartoonist, He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 for the accompanying cartoon of a young man labelled "Any European Youth" being propositioned by a skull faced whore representing war, captioned... "Come on in, I'll treat you right! I used to know your Daddy." (Click on the image to see at a larger size.)








WILLIAM CRAWFORD

As I went to Google to research this blurb on editorial cartoonist Bill Crawford, the first listing I found was a short article in today's New York Times. Sadly, Crawford passed away yesterday of pneumonia at age 68.

Crawford was a master of the medium. He was awarded the National Cartoonists Society awards for best editorial cartoon of 1956, 1957, 1958 and 1966; he was awarded the Silver T-Square Award in 1977; and he served as president of the organization in 1960. His cartoons first appeared in the Newark News, and later were syndicated to over 700 newspapers around the country. He is survived by his wife, Claire, as well as a son and daughter.




COMICS MAGAZINES
By Whitney Ellsworth
Whitney Ellsworth started out as an assistant artist at King Features, working on strips like Dumb Dora and Tilly the Toiler. He was chief editor at DC Comics during the golden age of Superman, Batman, The Spectre, and The Green Arrow- but Superman was the series he was most closely involved in. Ellsworth wrote many of the story outlines for the comic books, and in the early 50s, he wrote the pilot episode of the Superman TV serial, Superman Meets The Mole Men. He retired in 1970.





It's interesting to compare the editorial script to the finished artwork provided here. The only thing the artist used was the basic situations, a few details and the dialogue. The staging of the panels and the pacing of the action from panel to panel had to be completely reworked to function visually. It's surprising that Byrnes gives this section on comic books such short shrift. Ellsworth focuses on the technical and editorial aspects of the comic book business, and barely mentions the artists who actually create them. Perhaps if Byrnes had gotten Joe Shuster, Bob Kane or Jack Kirby to write this section, it would have been a different story.

Many thanks to Marc Crisafulli and David King for sharing this great book with us.

If you found this post to be interesting, see... Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics, Part Two: How To Get Ideas / Studies of Comic Strips and Part Three: Single Panel and Sports Cartoonists

Also see... Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Part Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Part Five: How To Animate. Also, see... Willard Mullen on Animals.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Pinups: Jack Cole And More Great 50s Playboy Cartoonists

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 9 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great pinup art.


Today, we continue our series of posts on the great cartoonists who worked for Playboy magazine over the years. Today, we feature artists from the late 1950s. Starting with...

JACK COLE
More than any other artist who worked at Playboy, Jack Cole was most responsible for establishing the tone and style of the single panel full page cartoons that appeared in its pages His watercolor technique was loose and free, but the overall impression was brilliantly planned out and remarkably expressive.

Born in 1914 in New Castle Pennsylvania, Cole was a self-taught artist. At age 17, he bicycled across the country to Los Angeles and sold the story of his odyssey, along with his own illustrations, to Boy's Life. After graduating from High School, he moved to New York and took up work in the comic book business. He moved up through the ranks at Harry A. Chesler, Centaur Publications and Lev Gleeson on a variety of crime and action comics. In 1940, he assisted WIll Eisner on The Spirit, ghosting the strip when Eisner was drafted during the War. He is best known though, as the creator of the Marvel superhero, Plastic Man.

In 1954, Cole began selling one panel "girlie" cartoons to various magazines, and his work caught the attention of the editors of the fledgling publication, Playboy. For the next few years, Cole's cartoons appeared in every issue, until his untimely suicide in 1958. Here are a few of Cole's beautiful watercolors from the late 1950s...







JACK DAVIS
When you think of Jack Davis, you probably think of his work with Harvey Kurtzman at Mad magazine, his covers for TV Guide, his advertising work and movie posters, and perhaps the Little Annie Fanny comics he painted for Kurtzman at Playboy. But you don't normally think of him as a one-panel cartoonist. Here's a rare example...



CHARLES W. MILLER
I don't have any info on Charles W. Miller. His tighter style is closer to the illustrators who worked for Colliers in the late 1940s than it is the washy, stylized work of Dedini, Sokol or Cole. But he was obviously a very accomplished artist- check out the sophisticated lighting in the second example for proof of that. If you know details of his biography, please post to the comments below.




AL STINE
Al Stine is still living, painting and teaching in South Carolina. In fact, he recently started doing editorial cartoons for the Anderson South Carolina Independent Mail. His masterful transparent watercolor technique really sets him apart. If you enjoy his work, drop him an email through his website- AlStine.com. It would be nice if someone out there would interview him and collect the info for our Biopedia Page.



Let me know in the comments if you'd like to see more about the great cartoonists of Playboy.

For more Playboy cartoons, see these posts... Eldon Dedini Part One and Part Two (video interview!), Erich Sokol, Kurtzman & Elder's Little Annie Fanny, Doug Sneyd and Phil Interlandi.

If you're a fan of Playboy artists like Cole, Dedini, Wilson and Sokol, you will want to get this great collection of cartoons, Playboy: 50 Years- The Cartoons. Check it out!

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

3.5.09
.

Stumble It!

Cartooning: Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part Three

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great info on the history of animation told through the careers of great animators.



SINGLE PANEL COMICS AND SPORTS CARTOONISTS

We continue with the section on two column panel and sports cartoonists from Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning (1950). Here are step by step descriptions of the creation of panel cartoons by George Clark and Lichty; as well as an article on Robert L. Ripley and features on sports cartoonists Pap, Howard Brodie and the great Willard Mullen.

TWO COLUMN PANELS
Two column panel cartoons are a staple of newspaper comics today, even though the width of the standard column has shrunk. As the size decreased, artists were forced to reduce detail. Daily strips are so small now, it's hard to do anything wider than a medium closeup in every panel. The two column panel cartoon has become the last bastion of cartoons with any kind of detail at all. Here, Gene Byrnes covers a few of the most popular single panel comics from the late 40s.




GEORGE CLARK
The Neighbors
George Clark was born in Oklahoma. He began drawing at a very young age, and by 16 years old, his cartoons were appearing in the Daily Oklahoman. His first syndicated cartoon was "Side Glances", and in 1939, he created the one panel comic he is best known for, "The Neighbors". Clark's gags were inspired by quiet observation of people in soda fountains and railroad stations. He would photograph situations, street scenes and expressions to incorporate into his drawings. The family in the comic was loosely based on his own wife and children.

He would create all of his comics for a week in one marathon session. He wrote, "It takes me at least six hours to warm up. I sit there trying to work and wondering what I've been doing all these years that it should still come so hard to me." When the ideas started flowing, he would work nonstop for up to 12 hours straight to complete the six cartoons for the week. He commented on the grueling process by saying, "When I'm trying to think of ideas for cartoons and they won't come, I think it would be wonderful to paint landscapes, with no gags in them."




LICHTY
Grin & Bear It


George Lichty was one of the most famous and highly paid one panel cartoonists in the newspapers. He created the cartoon, "Grin And Bear It" in 1932, and it ran every day for many decades. When asked to what he attributed the popularity of his wonderful lummoxes with names like "Bascomb Belchmore" and "Senator Snort", he replied, "From little acorns mighty oafs grow."




LARGE PANEL COMICS
When newspaper comics were at their zenith, whole pages were sometimes devoted to a single comic. Other comics would be half pages. Interspersed throughout the comics pages were quarter and third page single panels that depicted scenes and panoramas filled with gags. Today, each comic is so small, it's lucky if it can put across a single gag. A lot of the richness and depth of view has been lost.




ROBERT L. RIPLEY
Believe It Or Not
Robert Ripley was unique among cartoonists, because he truly lived his strip. Ripley travelled the world in search of the odd and unusual, which he featured in his daily newspaper comic. He passed away in 1949 at 56 years of age.



SPORTS CARTOONISTS
PAP
Thomas "Pap" Paprocki was referred to as the "Rembrandt of the sports pages". Born in 1902, he began his artistic endeavors at age nine, when he took painting lessons from an artist near his home in New York. A gifted athelete, it was natural that he would gravitate to being a sports cartoonist. In 1932, he began working for the Associated Press, where his column and drawings ran for over three decades. Check out the meticulous planning he put into his work.





HOWARD BRODIE
Howard Brodie worked as a sports cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle. During WWII, he became a combat correspondent, creating illustrations of GIs in action that made a huge impact on readers stateside. He was a decorated veteran, and also served as a combat artist in Korea and Viet Nam. In the 50s and 60s became a courtroom artist, famous for his ability to capture the drama and detail of the proceedings in his quick powerful sketches.




WILLARD MULLIN

Willard Mullin has been featured in this blog before in reference to his work on the Famous Artists Cartooning Course. He grew up in Los Angeles, but like most newspaper cartoonists of his era, he moved to New York in 1934. He worked for the New York World Telegram for over thirty years, where he created the iconic caricature of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the "Brooklyn Bum". Mullin eventually became a respected illustrator for Time, Life, and The Saturday Evening Post. Although sports cartooning is pretty much a dead artform, Mullin's work is timeless and will live on long after the game has ended.




Many thanks to Marc Crisafulli and David King for sharing this great book with us.

If you found this post to be interesting, see... Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics Part Two: How To Get Ideas / Studies of Comic Strips

Also see... Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Part Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Part Five: How To Animate. Also, see... Willard Mullen on Animals.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Comics: Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon Dailies

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about comics.


Today, we have an exciting post for you... original artwork by Milton Caniff for the Steve Canyon newspaper strip.


Archive supporter, John Ellis is working with the family of Milton Caniff on a DVD release of the live action Steve Canyon television series, which debuted in September of 1958 on NBC. In searching through the family's collection of memorabilia, John stumbled across a batch of original inks of daily and Sunday pages that the family didn't realize that they had. The estate of Milton Caniff has generously allowed the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive to digitize the material for inclusion in our cartoon database.


John Ellis has been doing considerable research into Caniff and Steve Canyon. I asked him to write a few words about Caniff...

Milton Caniff has been referred to as "The Rembrandt of the Comic Strip", and oft by himself as "an Armchair Marco Polo", but in fact this whirlwind of a comic strip innovator and writer was essentially a sincerely nice man who loved to draw. Yes this gentleman born in Hillsboro Ohio in 1907 created and drew Terry and The Pirates from 1934 to 1946, which absolutely set the standard for the adventure comic strip. True, he raised the bar with Steve Canyon, which unlike Terry, he owned lock stock and barrel from the first daily strip in January 1947 through to June 1988, the final installment published shortly after his death. Absolutely he worked rain or shine, seven days/strips a week for 54 years, even from his hospital bed, the deadlines never ended.

Milton Caniff in his studio ca. 1947
(click for a larger view)

But beyond the art and dedication, what is true is that I've never heard an unkind word in his regard. His nephew Harry Guyton can't even remember Milton ever losing his temper. My friend David Haft, who produced the NBC Steve Canyon primetime TV series in 1958, made a comment as we watched Milton on a vintage filmclip promoting the series recently. He said "Lovely, lovely man". Happy 100th birthday Milton.

John Ellis
Hollywood, 2007

This is the first of several posts featuring the Caniff Collection. Make sure to click on the images to see high resolution versions. Caniff's amazing adventure strip from the late 40s has never looked better!
















If you enjoyed this post, see... Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One- Meet The Men Behind the Comics and Part Two- Studying Comic Strips, Dan Gordon's Superkatt, Rube Goldberg's Side Show and Alex Toth Model Sheets

STEVE CANYON TV SHOW

For info on the Steve Canyon TV show DVD, see... www.stevecanyondvd.blogspot.com

STEVE CANYON AT AMAZON

Fantagraphics has a great book on Caniff's career, and Checker has released year by year reprints of the classic Steve Canyon strip. Caniff was a master storyteller, and the first few years of Steve Canyon are examples of his genius at the height of its powers. Click on the pictures for more info.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

"Steve Canyon" is a Registered Trademark of the Milton Caniff Estate.
© 2007 Milton Caniff Estate. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

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Story: The Greatest Cartoon Writer Of All Time

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see the bonus reason on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts featuring animation art.



The other day, a discussion on cartoon writing erupted in response to recent posts on the subject in John Kricfalusi's blog. One of John's main points is that the golden age cartoons that we all regard as the greatest cartoons ever created were written by cartoonists as storyboards, not written in words as scripts. In support of his argument, he presented video clips of Walt Disney and Walter Lantz discussing the qualifications of the people who wrote their cartoons. (See also, Page 5 of the 1938 Disney Training Manual).

The scriptwriters dismissed John K's points as old fashioned and irrelevant to the current scene, while expressing respect of a general sort for the classic cartoons of the past. They claimed that it was just a matter of John's personal tastes, not a reflection on the effectiveness of the process itself. They never seemed to address the fact that prior to 1960 stories for cartoons weren't created and developed with words in script form- they were drawn. In listening to these arguments by current cartoon scriptwriters, I began to wonder how much they really knew about the process used to make the classic cartoons they expressed respect for. I posed a simple question...

Who was your favorite golden age cartoon writer?

It's a fair question- one that I've heard animators discuss and argue about on many occasions. Surely current cartoon writers would have golden age writer heros, just like animators study golden age animators like Milt Kahl or Grim Natwick...


Disney story man, Joe Rinaldi
But none of the scriptwriters participating in the discussion could name a single golden age cartoon writer. The only names they could mention were other current scriptwriters, or novelists, journalists and live action screenwriters who worked in totally different media. They had no idea who pioneered their profession and the process these people used to create cartoons for nearly half a century. To be fair, this sort of ignorance of the history of our craft isn't just limited to writers. I've heard the same sort of admissions of ignorance from producers and directors, as well as artists and animators.

Here is an example of a story by my favorite golden age story man... Warren Foster.

Warren Foster is responsible for writing many of the greatest cartoons ever made... He started as a gag man on Fleischer's Popeye series in New York, and moved West in 1938 to join Bob Clampett at Warner Bros. He wrote a string of classic cartoons... "Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarfs", "Birdy And The Beast", "Falling Hare", "Baby Bottleneck", "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery", and perhaps Bugs Bunny's most shaded performance, "Tortoise Wins By A Hare".

After Clampett's departure from the studio, he wrote for McKimson ("Gorilla My Dreams", "Easter Yeggs", "The Foghorn Legorn") and Freleng ("Ballot Box Bunny", "Bugs And Thugs", "Birds Anonymous"). Freleng said that Foster was the best story man he ever worked with. In the TV era, Foster wrote episodes of Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw, The Jetsons and The Flintstones.

Here is a storyboard by Foster from his days at Hanna-Barbera. This is a model of clarity and simplicity, designed to meet the stringent economics imposed on TV animation at the time. This is a board from the pilot episode of The Yogi Bear Show.

















WHAT ABOUT ADVENTURE SHOWS
AND COMIC STRIPS?

In his article, "Detour Guide For An Armchair Marco Polo", master comic strip storyteller, Milton Caniff writes...

There has been a tendency recently for artists to automatically assume they cannot write their own stories because they see so many double by-lines. I contend that any man who can invent pictures can invent situations and dialogue. In fact, it should be easier for the artist to pilot his own action because he is not likely to write himself into one of those undrawable dilemmas in manuscripts about which illustrators have complained for years. --Milton Caniff

Sound familiar?

I'm working on a series of illustrated articles on how cartoons were written in the "golden age". For the first four installments, see...

WRITING CARTOONS

Part One- The Gag Session
Part Two- A Continuity Emerges
Part Three- Structure
Part Four: The Rough Board

If you found this post to be interesting, see also... Ren & Stimpy: Big House Blues Part One, Part Two and Part Three / The Alvin Show: The Whistler Storyboard / Chad's Design For Television / Ren & Stimpy: Stimpy's Invention Part One and Part Two / Charlie McElmurry's Year Of The Tiger Storyboard.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

2.23.08
.

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Pinups: Eldon Dedini's Satyrs and Nymphs

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 9 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great pinup art.


You can't beat Christmas in the country.
A while back, we posted a group of Playboy cartoons by Eldon Dedini. Today, we present more of this artist's amazing work, along with a video interview of Dedini in his studio discussing how he got his start.

Eldon Dedini is best known for his magazine cartoons from Esquire and Playboy. But early in his career, he was an editorial cartoonist for local newspapers, and a story man for Walt Disney.

Archive supporter, Ken Kearney lives close to the Monterey area, where Dedini lived and worked for many years. In 2005, he produced an interview video, which he generously donated to the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive for our biographical database. Here is a clip from Ken's video where Dedini tells how he got started as a cartoonist and his experiences as a story man with Disney on Fun & Fancy Free and Donald Duck cartoons like Dumbell of the Yukon.



Eldon Dedini Interview (Ken Kearney/2005)
(Quicktime 7 / 14.2 megs)

PLEASE NOTE The text and media files on the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Blog are not to be duplicated, redistributed or hosted on other websites without the prior written permission of the Board of Directors of ASIFA-Hollywood.

DEDINI IN PLAYBOY
Here is a feature on Dedini's famous "Satyr & Nymph" comics from Playboy, followed by some higher resolution images of individual cartoons...







We forgot the picnic basket!


I'd like you to meet my father,
but I don't dare. You know how
even old satyrs are!


It's not that I didn't believe in Santa Claus-
It's just that you've shattered my image
somehow...
For more info on the great cartoonists who worked for Playboy in the 1960s, see these posts... Eldon Dedini Part One, Erich Sokol, Kurtzman & Elder's Little Annie Fanny, Doug Sneyd and Phil Interlandi.

If you're a fan of Dedini, you will want to get Fantagraphic's great book, An Orgy Of Eldon Dedini. It comes with a DVD documentary called "Dedini: A Life In Cartoons" Check it out!

I'm not sure if Ken is offering these for sale, but if you would like to inquire about ordering a DVD of Ken Kearney's Dedini interview, email, kenkearneystudios@hotmail.com.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

2.10.09
.

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Cartooning: Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part Two

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great info on the history of animation told through the careers of great animators.



BLONDIE, BRINGING UP FATHER, HENRY, MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN, DICK TRACY, GASOLINE ALLEY, PRINCE VALIANT... Studying The Comics Pages

We continue with the section on newspaper cartoonists from Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning 1950. Today, there are three articles on how to get fresh ideas, Byrnes goes through the newspaper analyzing the appeal of various comic strips, and Chic Young and Hal Foster are featured.

HOW TO GET IDEAS
By Dana Coty
I don't have much information on Dana Coty (Dec. 19, 1901 - March 19, 1962) aside from the fact that he worked at Disney in the mid-30s, and was a story man at Famous Studios.



J. N. Darling (Ding)
on EDITORIAL IDEAS
"Ding" Darling was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist for the Sioux City Journal, The Des Moines Register, the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Globe. His editorial cartoons dealing with conservation causes were a staple of the opinion sections of many papers for decades. He passed away in 1962.



IDEAS FOR ADVERTISING CARTOONS
By Sam Cobean
Sam Cobean was an inbetweener on Snow White, barely surviving on $16 a week, when he joined the strikers fighting for the creation of the Screen Cartoonists Guild. After returning to work when the contract was settled, Sam realized that Disney was not the place for him and took a job as a copy boy at the Washington Post. There, he developed an interest in political cartoons. During the war, he worked in a unit producing training cartoons and pamphlets along with cartoonist Charles Addams. Addams introduced him to the editor of the New Yorker, and Cobean's cartoons appeared there for many years afterwards. In 1950, he created a book of cartoons, titled "Cobean's Naked Eye" which was a bestseller. He died in a car accident in 1951.



STUDIES OF COMIC STRIPS
In this section, Gene Byrnes analyzes the style and appeal of various contemporary newspaper comics. The most interesting thing about the strips he features is the high level of draftsmanship, and the diverse variety of styles and approaches to the medium. Newpaper comics were once considered the pinnacle of cartooning... but today, they have plunged to its nadir. Comparing Prince Valiant to Drabble or Bringing Up Father to Cathy is a depressing task. It's shameful that so great an artform has been allowed to deteriorate so far. I hope there are aspiring cartoonists out there who are willing to take up the difficult task of restoring the comics page to its rightful place in American culture again. This overview is a good place to start investigating the forgotten art of newspaper cartooning.








SUNDAY PAGES
Featuring Chic Young & Hal Foster


Chic Young was born in 1901 and began his career as a newspaper cartoonist in 1923. His first strip for King Features was Dumb Dora and in 1930, he created the strip, Blondie, one of the longest running newspaper comics of all time. He drew it until he passed away in 1973, and his son, Dean continues to write it to this day. Blondie was hugely successful and spawned film and TV adaptations.



Hal Foster was raised in the wilds of Halifax, Nova Scotia where he was an avid boater and outdoorsman. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade and began a course of self education studying sketching and anatomy. He set art aside to become a hunting guide and gold prospector, but at age 28, he decided to devote his life to a career in art. He received classical training at the Chicago Art Institute, the National Academy of Design and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. In 1927, he was contracted to do a comic strip adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes. 1n 1937, Foster introduced an original property, Prince Valiant, the most successful adventure strip of all time. Foster produced the strip for over 40 years, passing away in 1982.




Other artists featured in this section are Jimmy Hatlo, Otto Soglow, George McManus, Chester Gould and Frank King... all worthy of spending a few minutes Googling and reading up on.






The posts I present here at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive blog aren't intended to be the last word on any subject, particularly one as large and multifaceted as the history of cartooning. My hope is that you use these posts as a springboard for your own investigation. Take the names and examples I present here and start searching the web for more... scour bookstores and flea markets... and expand your frame of reference beyond just what is presented here. I wish I had a source of "hot tips" like this when I was first starting out. Take advantage of this great resource we're building.

Many thanks to Marc Crisafulli and David King for sharing this great book with us.

If you found this post to be interesting, see... Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics

Also see... Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Part Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Part Five: How To Animate. Also, see... Willard Mullen on Animals.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Pinups: Kurtzman and Elder's Little Annie Fanny

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 9 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great pinup art.



Over the weekend, an Archive Supporter stopped by to donate his collection of vintage Playboy magazines to the Archive. He mentioned that there was no need to thank him by name on the blog, his wife would be pleased that they were given away. He plans to proudly tell her that he donated his collection to a museum!

Some people have asked why we've featured Playboy cartoons by artists like Erich Sokol and Eldon Dedini. The answer is simple... Playboy employed some of the top cartoonists of the 50s and 60s. Their work exemplifies all of the attributes of good design.

Today, we are featuring the work of two giants of cartooning... Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder.

Harvey Kurtzman made a name for himself in his early years with the one page "Hey Look!" comics, as well as his work editing EC Comics' war comics. His style was detailed and thorough. His layouts and continuity breakdowns left little room for deviation. When EC decided to create a humor line, Kurtzman was assigned the job as the founding editor of Mad. Beginning as a ten cent comic book, and eventually switching to a twenty five cent magazine (to avoid review by the Comics Code Authority), Mad became a huge hit in the five years it was under Kurtzman's leadership. Much of the sensibilities of Kurtzman's work for Mad are shared by "Little Annie Fanny" for Playboy.

Will Elder worked as an artist under Kurtzman at EC and on Mad, expanding and elaborating on Kurtzman's detailed layouts. They were a great team, and the combination of Kurtzman's foreground action and Elder's background gags became a standard device for them throughout their collaborations. Other artists who worked on the "Little Annie Fanny" series were Jack Davis, Russ Heath and Al Jaffee (all former Mad alumni).

The "Little Annie Fanny" series debuted in the October 1962 issue of Playboy magazine. The comic was a parody of the Playboy image itself, vaguely based on the "Little Orphan Annie" theme, with lots of topical references and pokes at popular culture. The strip was the first fully painted comic in American magazines, and was very time consuming to produce. Kurtzman continued the series until 1988- its 100th episode- when he retired it, stating that all of the possible story ideas for the character had been exhausted.

January 1963






April 1964






March 1966




Check out these great "Little Annie Fanny" collections at Amazon.com!

We'll have more great Playboy cartoons for you soon.

If you enjoyed this post, see... Eldon Dedini Part One, Part Two (video interview!) and Part Three, Jack Cole And Other Great 50s Playboy Cartoonists, Jack Cole Valentine, Little Annie Fanny Takes A Trip, More Little Annie Fannie, Biography: Jack Davis, Early Erich Sokol Cartoons, A Passel Of Sokol, and More Sokol, Doug Sneyd and Phil Interlandi, Early Interlandi Playboy Cartoons and Meet Doug Sneyd.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

5.15.08
.

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Biography: The Father of Cartooning- T. S. Sullivant

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 4 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great biographies of important artists.



T. S. Sullivant is one of the most important cartoonists in the history of the medium. He pioneered many of the elements of anthropomorphism that we now take for granted. The general public may not be familiar with his name, but animators sure appreciate his work. (See Eddie Fitzgerald's first article on Sullivant and his second.) The influence of Sullivant's animals (along with the work of Heinrich Kley...) can be seen in many of the Disney features.

Sullivant was born in 1854, and didn't begin cartooning professionally until the age of 32. His cartoons appeared in Life and Puck during the 1890s, and in Judge around the turn of the century. William Randolph Hearst signed him to an exclusive contract in 1904, and his mastheads populated by cartoony animals appeared on the top of the Hearst comics pages until 1907. Sullivant returned to Life magazine in 1911, and remained there until his death in 1926.

Sullivant's pen and ink style doesn't really suit itself for reproduction on a computer screen, but I have made large versions available of all of these images. Just click on the picture to see it larger.


















For more on pioneering cartoonists, see... Cliff Sterrett's Polly & her Pals Part One and Part Two; Milt Gross Sunday Pages Part One, Part Two and Part Three; Harrison Cady's Birds' Eye Views and Rube Goldberg's Side Show

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

1.21.09
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Cartooning: Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great info on the history of animation told through the careers of great animators.

REG'LAR FELLERS, LI'L ABNER, FLASH GORDON, TERRY & THE PIRATES, GAGS & GALS, STEVE CANYON... Meet The Men Behind The Comics

Today, we began digitizing an important book... Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning 1950. Marc Crisafulli and David King generously lent us a copy of this amazing collection of capsule features on all of the major cartoonists of the early 50s for digitization. It's said that Ralph Bakshi learned to cartoon from this book.

In the coming weeks, I will be posting more from this book, along with a little biographical info on the featured artists. Today, the cartoonists profiled are all newspaper comic strip creators... Gene Byrnes, Jefferson Machamer, Alex Raymond, Louis Eisele, Charles Voight, Al Capp and Milton Caniff.

REG'LAR FELLERS
By Gene Byrnes
Gene Byrnes intended a career in sports, but after being laid up from a leg injury in 1911, he took to copying cartoons by Tad Dorgan and decided to take a correspondence course in cartooning. He began his career as a professional cartoonist with the help of Winsor McCay, who got him a job with the New York Telegram as a sports cartoonist around 1915. In 1917, he created his most famous strip, Reg'lar Fellers. which ran for over thirty years. He wrote several influential books on cartooning and illustration in the 40s and early 50s. He passed away in 1974.



RIP KIRBY
By Alex Raymond
Alex Raymond is best known for creating the comic strip, Flash Gordon in 1933. He was responsible for several other important strips as well, as creator or ghost artist, including Rip Kirby, Jungle Jim, Tim Tyler's Luck and Tillie the Toiler. His strip, Secret Agent X9 was created in collaboration with Dasheill Hammett. He died in a car accident in 1956.




JEFFERSON MACHAMER
Thomas Jefferson Machamer began as a staff artist on the Kansas City Star in the early 1920s, and soon moved to New York, where he secured work with the New York Tribune. He made his name with his cartoons of pretty girls in Judge magazine in the late 1920s. In 1932, his strip, Gags & Gals debuted in the New York Mirror. He continued to be active in both newspaper cartoons and magazine illustration throughout the 40s and 50s, and passed away in 1960.






LOUIS EISELE
I don't have any information on Louis Eislele. If anyone out there knows his biographical details, please post them to the comments below.



CHARLES VOIGHT
Charles Voight was known as a "girl specialist" with illustrations and comics in the New York World and Life magazine in the early decades of the 20th century. His strips included Petey Dink and Betty. He passed away in 1947.



ON THE WRITING OF CONTINUITY
By Al Capp
At the age of nine, Al Capp lost a leg in a streetcar accident. He became the youngest syndicated cartoonist in the country at age 19 with his strip, Colonel Gilfeather. He ghosted the strip Joe Palooka for Ham Fischer for a while, before striking out on his own with Li'l Abner in 1934. The strip was among the most popular of all time, entering the popular culture with Capp's creations like "Sadie Hawkins Day", "Kickapoo Joy Juice" and "The Shmoo". Capp's strip inspired a Broadway musical and feature film and ran until 1977. Capp died two years later.





DETOUR GUIDE FOR AN ARMCHAIR MARCO POLO
By Milton Caniff
Milton Caniff was born in Ohio in 1907. He took a job as a staff artist with the Associated Press in 1932, and soon inherited Al Capp's strip Colonel Gilfeather when Capp left the syndicate. In 1934, Caniff created the comic strip he is best known for, Terry and the Pirates. The series was hugely popular throughout the war years, but Caniff didn't own the copyright- it belonged to The Chicago Tribune/New York Daily News. He left the comic behind to create a new one, Steve Canyon, which spawned a short-lived television series and ran until Caniff's death in 1988.





I'll have more from this book soon.

If you found this post to be interesting, see... Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part Two: Studying Comic Strips

Also see...Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Part Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Part Five: How To Animate. Also, see... Willard Mullen on Animals.


Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

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Biography: Bob Clampett's Swimming Pool

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 4 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great biographies of important artists.

Archive supporter, Mike Fontanelli stopped by Thursday night and dropped off this TV Guide from February 17th, 1962...



It features a story on "Hollywood swimming pools", including the pool belonging to Bob Clampett...




Aren't those cutouts of the characers cool? Notice the "footprints in cement" from the characters surrounding the pool.

Thanks, Mike!

For more on Bob Clampett, see... Biography: Bob Clampett in Schlesinger's Exposure Sheet.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

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Comics: Dan Gordon's Superkatt

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.

The other day, John K posted an article in his blog about Dan Gordon. He described Gordon as a "pure cartoonist" whose characters seem really alive and motivated from within.

Gordon was an animator, story man and director on the Superman and Popeye series at Fleischer in the early 1940s. After the war, he dropped out of animation and made a living as a comic book artist, working on titles like Giggle Comics. He returned to animation in the late 1950s as a storyboard artist at Hanna Barbera, (Gordon boarded the pilot episode of The Flintstones) and on Clampett's Beany & Cecil series.

Here is an example of Gordon's work featuring Superkatt. These scans were donated to the Archive by our good friend Kent Butterworth. Thanks Kent!










For more on Dan Gordon, see Sherm Cohen's great features at Cartoon Snap.

If you enjoyed this comic, see also... Milt Stein's Supermouse Comics No. 4, Basil Wolverton's Powerhouse Pepper, and Boody Rogers' Babe Comics Part One, Part Two and Part Three.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

12.10.08
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Comics: Milton Knight's Great Brown-Pericord Motor

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.

Today, we had a visit from the talented cartoonist, Milton Knight. He brought along the original boards from one of his stories for Graphic Classics series.

Milton is an amazing artist... His work is informed by a diverse variety of influences, from Japanese art to Terrytoons. His compositions and line reflect a distillation of the New York cartooning style, while still remaining uniquely his own. I can't think of a single living cartoonist whose work in any way resembles Milton's. He's truly one of a kind.

Milton kindly agreed to let us post this entire story adapted from a short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle...

THE GREAT BROWN-PERICORD MOTOR

















If you enjoyed this story, you can find the Graphic Classics Anthologies at Amazon. Also, make it a point to visit Milton's Website.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

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Biography: Carlo Vinci

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 4 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great biographies of important artists.

If you only get information about animators from books on the history of animation, you might think that the Warner Bros directors and the "Nine Old Men" were the only important figures in the development of animation. But there are many books yet to be written about unknown artists whose achievements are right up there with the more familiar names.

Take for instance, Carlo Vinci...



Carlo Vinci's career spanned half a century. He received many honors as a fine artist before joining the staff of Terrytoons in 1933. For the next two decades, he was one of their top animators, specializing in dancing scenes...


Click to see a larger view.
John Kricfalusi describes Vinci's style as being as if Carlo invented animation himself, having never seen anyone else's animation. He was the master of the basic principles we read about in the Preston Blair book or Illusion of Life, but as you watch Vinci's syncopated, sinewy dancing scenes, you have to wonder if he didn't have a few extra principles of his own!

Carlo left Terrytoons and moved West to join his old friend Joe Barbera at MGM in the mid 50s, but soon after he arrived, the studio closed down. Joe Barbera got him a job at Disney, where Carlo animated on the Disneyland TV program. His pace was so fast, he was told to slow down, because he was producing so much quality footage, he made the rest of the animators look bad.



When Hanna and Barbera opened their own studio to produce TV cartoons, Vinci was one of the first three animators hired. He reinvented his style to work within the constraints of television schedules and budgets on shows like Ruff & Reddy, Huckleberry Hound, and Yogi Bear; but he really made his mark on The Flintstones. Every six weeks, Vinci animated an entire 24 minute episode of The Flintstones by himself!

Carlo retired at the ripe old age of 72, and passed away in 1993. We are very fortunate to have the assistance of his family in compiling a biopedia entry on his career. It includes photos, frame grabs, notes by John K and Joe Barbera, and movie files of his great film, "Mighty Mouse In Krakatoa" as well as clips from The Flintstones. Check it out...

Carlo Vinci Biopedia Entry

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

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Media: Ralph Bakshi's Phone Doodles

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see the bonus reason on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts featuring animation art.


Today, I hope you'll allow me to tell you about someone I have had the honor of working closely with. He's my hero too. If anyone ever creates a Mount Rushmore of animation, his head should be right up front, grinning with a stub of a cigarette in his mouth-- Ralph Bakshi.


I'll be doing a panel discussion with Ralph at the San Diego ComicCon this year. The subject of the discussion will be what it means to be an artist and cartoonist in today's world. Whether you're lucky enough to be able to make a living doodling, or if you still dream of being paid to create, you won't want to miss this important presentation...

Artists Only: A Chat With Ralph Bakshi
San Diego ComicCon Room 10
Saturday, July 26th, 2008
4:30 to 5:30 pm

Ralph will be appearing at other events at the ComicCon this year as well. More info on those as his schedule is finalized.


If you are an artist working in animation, whether you know it or not, Ralph Bakshi is the reason you're here. Don't believe me? Throw your mind back to 1970. Look at what the animation business had turned into... Disney was cranking out Robin Hood, a film without a single new idea. On TV, Filmation was lowering the bar so Hanna Barbera could play "quality limbo" with them. Animation was dying, animators were choosing retirement over flogging the dead carcass of the art form they loved, and it looked like it the situation would never get any better.


Enter Bakshi. With his first three films, he turned animation upside down. He showed that it wasn't just a medium for big bears with Phil Harris's voice and crappy sitcom characters in outer space. His films shocked and terrified people... they were crass and sloppy. They were made on a shoestring, and sometimes it showed. But they had something honest to say, and that got noticed. Ralph showed that animation- the most collaborative art form ever- could be an intensely personal medium.


Ralph's first three films- Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, and Coonskin- came totally out of the blue. They are the animation equivalent of Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives. Great old time animators like Irv Spence, Ambi Paliwoda and Virgil Ross were offered the opportunity to cut loose and make films that weren't just cats chasing mice and dogs chasing cats. These films dealt with what it meant to be an artist, the battle of the sexes, race relations, and the unsenimentalized realities of urban life. They were improvisational and had no rules.


These three films, made in the darkest of the dark ages of animation, offered a glint of hope for what animation could become. If all you've seen of Ralph's work is Lord of the Rings and Fire and Ice you don't know what I'm talking about here. All of the adult targeted animation you see in the US today has its roots in Ralph's example in these three films. They stirred up controversy and caused riots at screenings back in the day, but now they seem to us like they could have been made yesterday, not three decades ago- except for the fact that today's world has trouble accepting brutal honesty when it comes to politically charged topics. Ralph has never been one to pull punches.



In the 1980s, Ralph did for television animation what he did for theatrical features, blowing the lid off of CBS's Saturday morning schedule with Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures. Ralph took a chance on the ideas of a kid named John Kricfalusi, and set up the studio after the unit structure model used at Warners. Stories were written with storyboards again. (See the note from John K in the comments.) Artists were cut loose to create cartoons. Without Mighty Mouse, there never would have been Ren & Stimpy or The Simpsons. The artists who worked on Mighty Mouse have gone on to lead the TV animation industry.


Ralph is an absolute genius when it comes to spotting raw talent. He can take a kid straight out of school and turn him into a pro faster than anyone else. Every film had its "graduating class" of kids. Those kids now populate the animation business on every level, from the top Producer at Disney feature to the creative sparks at Warners. I know of Bakshi alumni who are top dogs at Dreamworks and the CGI companies too.



As a filmmaker, Ralph is one-of-a-kind. He doesn't make films for executives... he doesn't even make films for a specific audience. He makes them for himself. You can count the number of animators capable of using this unweildy medium for personal expression on one hand and still have fingers left. Ralph is one of them.


But Ralph is not only the greatest living animation artist. He is the catylist that has more than once pulled the industry out of a hole so deep people had just about given up on cartoons. For that alone, he deserves the respect of any and all animators, whether they like his work or not.


If this business needs anything right now, it's another go round with Bakshi. The era of shi-shi "distressed" animation desks complete with faux wormholes, and middle management producers driving Jaguars paid for by their bonus checks is over. That was great for the people lucky enough to hook up to the gravy train while it lasted. But times have changed. The people left standing will be the ones who REALLY CARE about the medium of animation.


You can take my word for the fact that no one loves cartoons more than Ralph. Sit down and ask him about Jim Tyer. (Ralph was Tyer's assistant...) Listen to what he has to say about Spence or Maltese or any of the other old timers he brought in to work on his films. Ralph lives and breathes animation. His drawings are imbued with the whole history of the medium. He announces his retirement every once in a while, and swears off cartoons forever, but it's in his blood. Just count the days till the bellowing voice out of the blue hollers "BAKSHI'S BACK, YOU BASTUHDS!" over the studio intercom again.



It's time for Ralph to rent a warehouse, fill it full of kids with big dreams, raw talent and lots of ideas and crank out a film. It doesn't even matter if it turns out crappy. It'll be a shot in the arm to the whole business, and it just might lead to something even better. I know I'd love to be a part of it. --Stephen Worth


Visit Ralph's web page... RalphBakshi.com.

UNFILTERED: The Complete Ralph Bakshi isn't one of those "art books" with postage stamp sized pictures floating in oceans of tasteful white space and huge text blocks of scholarly blather that crowds out the images. It's just pictures, pictures and more pictures... along with just enough text to put them in context. The book is organized to show Ralph's career from his earliest days at Terry-Toons, to his groundbreaking features, to his revolutionary TV work, to his most recent fine art paintings. Even if you think you know all there is to know about Bakshi, this book will grab you by the lapels and shake you and show you things you've never seen the likes of before. Click through the link to pick up the Bakshi book at Amazon.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

6.26.08
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Media: Virgil "Vip" Partch

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.


Today, we digitized Partch's book, "Here We Go Again" for the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive. Here are some examples from this book...












For more examples of Virgil Partch's genius, see Virgil Partch's Wild, Wild Women Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four and Man The Beast.

Also see... George Lichty's Grin and Bear It; Milt Gross Sunday Pages Part One, Part Two and Part Three; Basil Wolverton's Powerhouse Pepper; Jim Tyer Funny Animal Comics; and Milton Knight's Great Brown Pericord Motor.

I hope you find these drawings to be useful to you. If you do, please help us spread the word about the Archive by linking to us on your own webpage or blog, and do what you can to support the project.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

5.18.08
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