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.