Category: Cartooning

Smarter Than the Av-er-age Songwriter

Before Bill Gates became famous, to me the name Gates meant not only David Gates of the group Bread, but the manufacturer of the broadcasting equipment at the radio station where I worked. Here’s a short air check of another guy at the station, with a bit of a song from, appropriately, David Gates.

David Gates had a string of super hits with Bread, and before that his song “Saturday’s Child” was recorded by the Monkees (and studio musicians) for their debut album. The earliest song by David Gates that I know of came on a record I played to death as a kid. Hey, it was a start!

He shoots! He scores!

Jimmy Johnson recently had an online sale of some Arlo & Janis originals. Yes, actual ink on paper, can you believe that? I decided on buying one of the offerings, but my guess was it wouldn’t sell right away. Indeed, it was still available on the last day of the sale when I bought it. What interested me is the first three panels show Jimmy was trying something different. I especially like the third panel, with the unusual angle and the drawing of the shingles and clapboard.

The strip’s year isn’t written anywhere on the original, so I penciled it on the back. With the color added by computer, the action lines in the first two panels were reversed to white.

Arlo & Janis, by Jimmy Johnson, March 14, 2018

Eddie Muller on 4-Color Noir

Kudos to Eddie Muller for his Noir Alley introduction on Turner Classic Movies to “While the City Sleeps” (1956). Based on a novel where a serial killer was a religious fanatic, the film instead blamed the influence of comic books. Muller says, “I spent my entire youth, and a lot of my adult life, reading these… and it didn’t harm me one bit.”

MAD Goes SKROINCH! FWAK! BWEEP!

The word is out that MAD Magazine will soon be no more. Two more new issues will be published, and then some reprints done up to finish off mail order subscriptions, and that’ll be the end.

Don Martin Sound Effect Stickers From MAD SPECIAL NUMBER 23 — Winter 1977

This isn’t unexpected, of course, but it’s sad to see the disappearance of yet another formerly grand outlet for great cartooning. As a matter of historical note, MAD was the last remaining vestige of what had been Entertaining Comics.