Category: Cartooning

Keep on Truckin’

Keep on Truckin’ © R. Crumb

This post isn’t about the Grateful Dead, and it isn’t about Robert Crumb, but there is a cartooning connection. It was a surprise for me when it came up in this “Fresh Air With Terry Gross” podcast. I recommend listening to the entire interview, but if you don’t want to wait to find out, listen to enough of it to get the gist, then jump to about 24:00.

Revisionist History

One of the features I get with my $15/year GoComics subscription is “Tom the Dancing Bug” by Ruben Bolling. That’s a pseudonym, by the way, so he isn’t the son of Little Archie cartoonist Bob Bolling. His undergraduate degree is in Economics (yeah!) and he attended Harvard Law School. Bolling excels at on-target absurdist interpretations of current events. Click to enlarge, of course.

The Master of Big Foot Cartoons

1950 saw the introduction of three of the most successful and longest-running comic strips of all time — “Peanuts,” “Dennis the Menace,” and “Beetle Bailey.” Sparky Schulz passed away in 2000, Hank Ketchum died a year later, and Mort Walker stopped drawing today.

“Big-Foot” in this context means a style of cartooning, and not a tall, hairy creature that roams the wilderness! Forty years ago I visited the Cartoon Museum that Walker had at that time in Port Chester, NY.

Chicago’s Animated Frames of Reference

I was born in Evanston, Illinois, bordering Chicago. Evanston was where Stephen Colbert attended Northwestern University, and where his sometime collaborator J.J. Sedelmier was born. On Facebook, Sedelmier recommends a new Web site, still under construction, about an illustrator and animator from a hundred years ago.

Edwin G. Lutz wrote a book on animation that was used as a reference by Walt Disney at the start of his slightly successful career, as explained by Sedelmier at this link. Note that animation insider J.J. refers to Mike Barrier’s book about Walt Disney, rather than Chicago native Neal Gabler’s much more widely read biography of Walter Elias, who was likewise born in Chicago.

(I strongly encourage reading Michael Barrier’s wonderful book, “The Animated Man” University Of California Press 2007. I’ve used Barrier’s book to put together a brief sketch of Disney’s early years.)

Despite the success ten years ago of “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination,” and Gabler’s other books, he has been struggling financially, as featured on the PBS Newshour in 2016.

The Failure of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism

https://youtu.be/ACkiKVtF3nU

I have watched this installment of “Frontline” three, or maybe even four, times since it first aired in 2009. If anything I think it goes easy on Bill Clinton, by not pointing out that at the end of his administration he agreed to ending the Glass-Steagall Act.

Mr. A by Ditko

Steve Ditko’s take on Ayn Rand’s philosophy deals with good vs. evil in terms of violent criminal activity, as you would expect from a comic book creator. As covered in the Frontline documentary, former SEC chairman Alan Greenspan adopted the extreme free market aspect of Rand’s Objectivism, as you would expect from an economist.

I like to think the fictional Mr. A would agree with me that what the Wall Street banks did by taking advantage of deregulation to commit legal fraud, in both its intent and the outcome of ten years ago, was corrupt and evil. Therein is what I see as the inherent irony of Ayn Rand’s philosophy.