Category: Cartooning

Look! Up in the sky! Listen! Up in the Fresh Air!

Terry Gross on Fresh Air interviews Larry Tye, author of a new book about Superman and the men who created the character.

Tye apparently isn’t essentially a comic book fan, which is perhaps a good thing. I don’t know yet how he portrays Siegel and Shuster, the creators of Superman. In recent years it’s become apparent that there was a lot to not like about writer Jerry Siegel the man, and Joe Shuster drew sleazy fetish illustrations, perhaps out of financial necessity and/or an interest in the genre. There’s a Fresh Air segment about that, too.

He’s Mighty Sore!

At the request of Mark Sinnott, I scanned a picture of the original, unedited cover to Journey Into Mystery #83 that his dad, Joltin’ Joe Sinnott, inked over Jack Kirby’s pencil art, for the first appearance of The Mighty Thor. Hover over the color picture to see how the illustration looked on Joe’s drawing table. Click here to see the scan I’m sending to Mark.

A point of particular interest to Silver Age comic book fans is the fact that the figures of the alien stone men were removed (undoubtedly at Stan Lee’s direction) during post-production, after Joe had inked them and turned in the finished job. Later, another comic book inker, who I shall not name, took it upon himself to sometimes erase background figures from Jack Kirby’s penciled pages, rather than ink them.

The Tappet Brothers close up shop

What the heck is going on with Boston radio? Steve LeVeille retired today and now the Car Talk guys, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, have announced that they’re quitting. I’ve been listening to their on-air antics for more than 20 years. Cartoonist Jimmy “Arlo & Janis” Johnson is a fan of theirs, and some years back he even wrote ‘Click and Clack’ into the strip.

Why they fought

During World War II the English, minus Alfred Hitchcock who had left for America, somehow managed to not only make movies, they made some truly outstanding ones. I am particularly fond of the films that showed life on the home front. One of them is This Happy Breed, by Noel Coward and David Lean, and another is Millions Like Us, by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder. The latter film has a funny surprise in it for animation fans, because it uses Raymond Scott’s tune Powerhouse in a factory scene.

[flv:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Video/2012/Millions.flv 400 300]

That double turntable setup with a single tonearm is neat. Powerhouse became a fixture in the Warner Bros. cartoons starting with Porky’s Pig Feat, as seen in this post from about a year ago. Porky’s Pig Feat was released on July 17, 1943, and Millions Like Us was released in the UK on November 5, 1943, so it would seem likely that somebody involved with the making the film had seen the cartoon.