Post-Washington Post

Ann Telnaes quit The Washington Post after a cartoon idea she submitted was rejected by the Editorial Page Editor. The cartoon is on Ann’s Substack post about her resignation.

https://anntelnaes.substack.com/p/why-im-quitting-the-washington-post

The rejection served only to widen the cartoon’s exposure, of course. The paper seems to be on a downward slide since Marty Baron retired.

At this point, Bezos may as well sell the Post for whatever he can get for it. If he hangs into it, and the editorial content starts turning in Trump’s favor, that will be the end.

Oh, look! Someone else is wearing Audio-Technica ATH-M20X headphones.

My take on the cartoon is that it’s far from the best work by Telnaes. The idea behind it is more obvious than it is clever. I would have rejected it for relying on the old “bags of money” symbolism.

Speaking of Belgium

Some of the early installments of Tintin by Georges Remi, aka Hergé, are racist. The Nazis allowed Remi to work undisturbed in German-occupied Belgium, leading to his arrest as a collaborator after the war. The case was later dropped.

The Adventures of Tintin, from 1991-92, is a mostly faithful cartoon adaptation of the books, minus the objectionable material. Some enterprising person has made the series available online in its original aspect ratio. Some other copies are zoomed and cropped to distraction.

The Less Than Fantastic Four

(I was going to publish this months ago, but then Archive.org was hacked and taken down. Now that it’s been restored I can embed the site’s videos again.)

Jonny Quest was a big deal for me, and a lot of other young animation fans, when it appeared on ABC prime time TV in 1964-65. I have both the DVD collection of the series and the Blu-ray set, which restored Doug Wildey’s name to the closing credits.

I used to sign my name that same way, enclosed in a box like a TV screen. The series is included with HBO’s MAX streaming service.

After Jonny Quest, Space Ghost in 1966 was a big step down in animation quality for Hanna-Barbera. On the plus side, the art generally stayed on model with Alex Toth’s character designs. A year later, it was all too obvious the budget had been cut even more for The Fantastic Four.

The only way, that I’m aware of, to see the FF cartoons today is on Archive.org. Whoever transferred them from the old Boomerang cable channel did as good a job as anyone could do.

Alex Toth’s character designs are very good, but the animation rarely does them justice. Nonetheless, I’d like to see these cartoons given a proper restoration and presentation.

Mostly, I’m interested in the episodes that are adaptations of the original Marvel Comics stories. The groundbreaking Kirby/Lee/Sinnott “Galactus Trilogy” from FF #48-50 is crammed into a single episode. It’s #14 in this playlist.