An editorial cartoon last week, by Jeff Stahler.
Personally, I think Congress has no business investigating steroids in Major League Baseball. Another waste of time and taxpayer money was the 1954 Senate investigation into comic books and their claimed cause-and-effect influence on juvenile delinquency.
If I were to select one Anime title to show someone as an introduction to Japanese animation as it’s done today, it would not be something by Hayao Miyazaki. It would be Makoto Shinkai’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days. I consider this film to be an exemplary work of the highest quality and artistry, exploring elements of science fiction, fantasy, technology, politics, romance, and friendship, with deftness and subtlety. I blogged about it many months ago, but the pre-Flash video embedding no longer works, so I’ll have to do a fresh transfer of a choice scene.
Shinkai’s follow-up to Place Promised is 5 Centimeters Per Second: a chain of short stories about their distance. Eric has wanted me to blog something from it for a while, and now that the DVD is about to be released in America, I will. The final part of the movie includes this musical montage of flashbacks. Seeing it shouldn’t spoil your enjoyment of the movie. I transferred this video from the Japanese DVD.
[flv:/Video/2008/MAR/FiveCentimeters.flv 448 252]
Progress! Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis has been read in Dubuque, IA. The Telegraph Herald has a review. Now that the book has received attention in Dubuque, perhaps this means we’re getting closer to the end of its lifespan. The reviewer questions nothing in the book, and in fact he concludes that the book had a positive effect on his view of Schulz.
I gained an even greater appreciation of the man who drew each and every one of the 17,897 “Peanuts” comic strips. He was a genius, yet filled with anxieties and insecurities. As one of my personal heroes, there’s something reaffirming to know that even people like Charles Schulz are only human.
He also says,
Perhaps the biography’s greatest controversy comes through a revelation that Schulz had an affair near the end of his first marriage.
A little more online research would have led him to realize that Schulz’s affair is actually one of the less controversial aspects of the story, because it was on the table for inclusion from the outset. I would have added a comment to the review, but it required an online account, and I have enough online accounts.
In another month or so, Monte Schulz’s essay in The Comics Journal should be making its appearance. In the meantime, there’s a rather tense exchange over at Cartoon Brew between Monte and someone who had some input in Schulz and Peanuts. Start reading down from this link. You may want to scroll up first, for a fun online reunion Monte has with an old friend, before reading the more uncomfortable parts.
I’d like to emphasize that all of this is about a syndicated cartoonist. No matter which side of this discussion about the biography you’re on, it’s amazing that the creator of a comic strip merits such attention. In generations past, such a thing would not have happened, with Walt Disney being the only exception. As a medium, cartooning and comics have come a long way.
This seems to be the gist of what Hillary Clinton is telling Barack Obama.
Previously on DogRat, I featured the Garfield parody Lasagna Cat. Now I would like to draw your attention to a site that was pointed out by my friend tastewar, Garfield Minus Garfield.
As the English like to say, “brilliant.”
