Category: Cartooning

Fritz Lives

The giant of fantasy illustration is gone. Frank Frazetta, one of the most influential and imitated commercial artists of the 20th century, a singular and unique force in his craft, died Monday.

From comic book stories, to ghosting L’il Abner Sunday strips, to magnificent paintings for paperback book covers, Frazetta set a standard of such high caliber that, although he may have had contemporaries, he had no peers.

Figure drawing. For Frazetta, that was the thing. He loved drawing men and women. The human form, imbued with an innate fierceness, and an undeniable animal sexuality. Sometimes he drew the inhumanly human form!

Let the work speak for itself. First, some pencil drawings. A quick sketch done for a friend, using a pencil stub on cheap paper…

… and a couple of tightly-rendered samples for Flash Gordon.

Next, here are some works in pen and ink. A sketch for a John Carter of Mars book cover…

… and a Johnny Comet Sunday comic strip.

Finally, what Frazetta is known for best. His oil paintings. Two Conan the Barbarian paperback book covers…

…and higher-quality scans of the paintings. You’ll definitely want to click these to enlarge. Note the changes that Frazetta made to the original version of Conan the Buccaneer.

The original for the painting on the left, for Conan the Conquerer, sold last year for $1 million.

IRONy at the movies

Iron Man 2 is out, and while watching it in IMAX yesterday I couldn’t help but thinking it’s ironic that we’ve gone from this…

…to this, because by the time I was in high school, reading comic books was decidedly not cool. It’s amazing to me that the Marvel Comics I loved as a kid in the 60’s have become the basis for widely popular and hugely successful major movies.
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The second Iron Man movie has been getting mixed reviews. My capsule comment is there’s an incredibly stupid drunk party fight in the middle, but other than that it’s absolutely terrific, if you can stand the usual mayhem of excessive explosions at the end. Here is the Boston Globe’s take on Iron Man 2. I agree with everything they say, but I don’t take as many points off as they do for the movie’s failings.


P.S. There’s a kicker after the end credits that has me a bit worried about the upcoming introduction of Thor, and how well the character will translate to the semi-reality of the big screen.

Saturday Morning Beatles

Ah, Saturday morning TV in the 1960’s. A sublime mixture of awful-to-pretty good cartoons. During the Summer of Love, 1967, Marvel Comics featured this centerfold ad for ABC-TV’s “America’s Best TV Comics”. The Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man were being introduced, having not been a part of the syndicated Marvel Super Heroes cartoon series from the year before.

The Beatles first appeared as cartoon characters on US TV in 1965. I don’t know exactly how Brian Epstein cut the deal. It’s explained in a book called Beatletoons, by Mitchell Axelrod, that I have on order. I have a fondness for the cheaply-produced Beatles cartoons, but it’s been said that John Lennon, persistent curmudgeon that he was, disliked them. This photo of Lennon contemplating some layout drawings seems to back that up.

The third season of the show would be the last to include some new material. The video player has a healthy helping of ‘Beatoons’ from the second and third seasons. Use the scroll bar to see the playlist.

Two of the titles — Eleanor Rigby and Nowhere Man — were later animated again, with strikingly different interpretations, for Yellow Submarine. It’s hard to believe that some of the people who worked on the Saturday morning cartoons were also involved with Yellow Submarine, but you’ll find some fab bits of surreal creativity in there.

By 1967 the Beatles looked nothing like they had in 1964-65, yet their character designs didn’t change. The producer of the series, Al Brodax, more than made up for that with Yellow Submarine.

One of the animators was Ron Campbell, who sells new renderings of Beatles cartoons. In this video clip, Campbell is interviewed by Joe Johnson, who hosts the Beatles Brunch radio show.

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Popeye… stoned sleeper agent?

My first favorite cartoon character was Popeye. I never cared for spinach as a kid, canned or otherwise, but that didn’t stop me from loving the Fleischer Popeye cartoons.

I was in an ice cream-candy shop with Carol and Eric this weekend, and I spotted boxes of Popeye ‘candy sticks’. They’re what used to be called candy cigarettes.

These ‘candy sticks’ look like reefer joints! What if those aren’t spinach leaves in that can, but marijuana? Maybe that explains why Popeye is senselessly punching his own shadow on the back of the box. He’s stoned!

But look closely on the side of the box, made by World Confections, Inc., of Brooklyn, NY, and you’ll see writing in Arabic!

Have Islamic extremists put Popeye under their influence? Is he in fact a drugged sleeper agent? Why hasn’t Glenn Beck said anything about this?