For the next couple of days D.F. Rogers and I will be at the Big Apple Con in — where else? — the Big Apple. I hope to finally meet Mark Evanier in person. Dennis and I also hope to talk to comic book artist Joe Sinnott, just like we did 30 years ago! I’m traveling light, and won’t be taking a laptop computer, so unless the hotel has more than just Wi-Fi hot-spots for Net/Web access, my next post will be sometime Sunday.
Category: Cartooning
The Complete ‘Dream of the Rarebit Fiend’
Long before the cartooning innovations of Charles M. Schulz, there was Winsor McCay. Preceding his masterpiece, Little Nemo In Slumberland, McCay drew a comic strip called Dream of the Rarebit Fiend that I featured very early in this blog’s existence, here and here (sorry, the video isn’t embedded).
McCay the artist dominated the industry, but McCay the man was dominated by his wife Maude. The portrait of Maude is how she looked when she met McCay. They had a whirlwind romance and eloped in 1891. If Maude looks young, that’s because she was 13. Some accounts give her age as 14, while others say she was still briefly 12 after she ran off with McCay, who was 10-12 years her senior, depending on Maude’s true age. McCay made phenomenal amounts of money for a time as a cartoonist, animator and vaudeville performer, while Maude spent his money and allegedly took lovers. There were public difficulties, such as the account published in The New York Times on December 23, 1914 (click image to enlarge).
A new, complete collection of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, is available for the modest sum of $133 US. The Boston Sunday Globe has a nifty slideshow about it that you can watch by clicking here. The video player has a Rarebit cartoon by McCay, called ‘Bug Vaudeville’. Be prepared, however, because it’s long, repetitive and tedious.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/NOV07/Rarebit.flv 400 300]
The Michaelis Method
My buddy D.F. Rogers points out that the synopsis of David Michaelis’ biography of N.C. Wyeth isn’t all that distinctly different from that of his biography of C.M. Schulz.
For forty-three years, starting in 1902, N.C. Wyeth painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and murals, as well as illustrations for a long shelf of world literature. Yet despite worldwide acclaim, he judged himself a failure, believing that illustration was of no importance. David Michaelis tells the story of Wyeth’s family through four generations — a saga that begins and ends with tragedy — and brings to life the huge-spirited, deeply complicated man, and an America that was quickly vanishing.
After a lot of furious flipping through various portions of the Michaelis biography of Schulz, I am now slowly and deliberating reading it front-to-finish. Yes, Schulz was complicated, but in the book “complicated” does indeed seem to mean the same thing as “negative.” By definition, a single significant aspect of someone’s personality isn’t what makes them complicated.
Schulz Dirt Bike Riders Rider
I got a laugh of out Monte Schulz’s comment about his brother Craig that’s in a previous post.
I just wanted David Van Taylor to tell a more complete story and to give some clarification to a story my brother tells regarding “us” riding our dirt bikes on the roads and not being bothered by the cops — none of us except him either owned or rode dirt bikes, and David only used that clip to “show” how pampered we were back then, and privileged, neither of which was true.
The reason it’s funny to me is my brother rode dirt bikes, but I never did. I would have the same reaction as Monte if my brother said “we” in a way that sounded like a reference to our family, rather than to his friends. Here’s Craig on a dirt bike.
“Through Little Boxes”
At the moment, the header for this blog is this picture. I stitched it together from a couple of scanned images. It was inspired by a poem that Monte Schulz wrote, that was published in Happy Birthday, Charlie Brown, in 1979, as ‘Peanuts’ headed into its 30th year.
I salute you,
Speaker to the world
Through little boxes.I applaud the four little squares
A world watches and laughs with, mornings.
And I share the fortune
You grant us,
Allowing a peek through four little windows
Into your world each day.I cherish the wisdom lessons
and the story telling.
And always I treasure
The laughter,
Greeting every new morning.Speaker to the world
Through little boxes:
I salute you.— Monte Schulz
Chopin’s Étude No. 3 in E, Op. 10
Once again I am grateful to Monte Schulz for his input. In my previous post he correctly identifies the music to Jo Stafford’s song ‘No Other Love’ as being by Frédéric Chopin. It is Chopin’s Étude No. 3 in E Major, Op. 10. Here is a recording of the complete piece.
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Nov/Chopin.mp3|titles=Chopin’s Étude No. 3 in E Major, Op. 10]