I happen to have a Jeopardy! header for the blog right now, because of Larissa Kelly’s big return for the Tournament of Champions, and by happenstance today’s Doonesbury refers to Jeopardy!
Category: Cartooning
Feeling Rand-y
I’ve had my fun knocking the silly pseudo-philosophy of romance novelist Ayn Rand, and last night Stephen Colbert spent six minutes taking on the Rand Illusion.
Legendary comic book artist Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man and creator of Dr. Strange, has been a follower of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism for over forty years. This drawing is from a story he drew last year. The woman bears an unmistakable resemblance to Ayn Rand, which is ironic because the character is a villain.
Picture This
Newspapers and magazines are laying off staff, and those that remain are writing articles on how to survive a layoff. Print media is in big trouble, and was long before the recession. As I highlighted over two years ago, the writing was on the virtual wall as far back as 1972.
One of the things that keeps me reading the printed page are the pictures that don’t make it to the online version of articles. One example is this photo by Jonatham Kantor for a recent Newsweek article, using a Peanuts Band-Aid to illustrate the claim that vaccinations have led to an increase in autism in children.
It’s a clever idea, but do you see the medical mistake?
Motion Picture Funnies
Rotoscoping is an animation technique that’s been around since 1914, when it was patented by Max Fleischer. It’s done differently today, of course, but the underlying idea — taking live action footage and making it look like a drawing — remains the same.
I can’t think of an instance where the Disney studio used it while Walt was alive (the integration of live action and animation doesn’t count), although film was often used as an animation guide by Disney artists. Disney was wise to stay away from rotoscoping, because, like anything, it can be overdone and/or misapplied as was the case with Ralph Bakshi’s mostly awful version of Lord of the Rings.
The distinctions between comics and cartoons and live action movies with digital effects are now so blurry as to be indistinguishable. In the future will still picture comics even exist as anything other than a niche, and for movie storyboards?
The Peanuts Motion Comics I talked about a couple of posts ago were done in Flash animation that obviously required no live action for reference. (They’re fun, by the way, and were based on 1964 comic strips that were some of the best material Sparky Schulz ever wrote.) Marvel Motion Comics are done in a similar way, but they’re much more detailed, of course, and they display the darker tone that everybody now associates with Marvel Comics.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/MAR/MarvelMotionComics.flv 480 360]
The first serious full-length movie to go all-out with Flash animation is Waltz with Bashir, which is brilliantly realized, but was obviously based upon live action source material, despite claims to the contrary that I’ve read. I’d also suggest taking a look at the clip from “Men in Black” (not the Will Smith movie) that I posted a couple of years ago.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/MAR/WaltzwithBashir.flv 480 270]
As I said, rotoscoping and its variants can be overdone. The ad agency that produced the new series of Charles Schwab commercials seems to have jumped on the Flash animation bandwagon, but it’s a misuse of the tool. This creepy image is supposed to make nervous investors feel more confident in a brokerage firm? Yuck!
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/MAR/CharlesSchwab.flv 480 270]
Good Grief! More Roku
Back in November, I expressed an interest in the Peanuts Motion Comics, done in Flash animation (like South Park and Spongebob), and available on iTunes. I don’t have iTunes, but today, Roku added Amazon Video on Demand to its streaming digital player, and for $8.99 I bought all ten of the Peanuts Motion Comics. I’ve taken my first step — well, my second — into a larger world of streaming video, on TV, free of the computer.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/MAR/MotionComics.flv 320 212]
BTW, I have my WiFi glitch with the Roku all fixed. It was a DHCP problem with the FiOS/Actiontec router. I tried adjusting the lease period, etc., but ultimately the solution was to use the WiFi access point of a spare router — a D-Link DI-624 — and it’s now working AOK.
R. Crumb’s Underground, Upstairs
Strangely, you have to go upstairs to see the R. Crumb’s Underground exhibit at the Mass College of Art in Boston.
Robert Crumb original art isn’t often available for public scrutiny, and not everything at this show — which runs through next Saturday, March 7 — is original. There’s a good mix of material, very nicely presented, with almost none of Crumb’s overtly pornographic stuff — which is good, considering that today was Family Day at the gallery.
In the photo at the right, facing left, is my old friend Morris, who showed me R. Crumb comics when we first met, 38 years ago. One of the niftier examples of Crumb’s work at the exhibit is a collection of thread spools he decorated with faces. That’s Morris looking into the case.
This is the sort of drawing that I suppose most people who know of R. Crumb associate with him, but it’s actually representative of only his earlier work, and is fairly atypical of what he did starting in the 70’s.
Here’s a relatively early appearance of Bill Griffith’s character Zippy the Pinhead on an R. Crumb cover from 1975.
