A blogger named Ian “iSnoop” Anthony has come up with a nifty and free service that lets you pick comic strips for delivery via e-mail. He calls it the Comic Strip Snagger. It was offline for a while, but it’s working again, so give it a try. Not every syndicate makes its comics available for this sort of access (RSS feed), but there’s still a nice collection to choose from.
Category: Cartooning
At last! Comics in the Times.
Click for full-size image.
The New York Times, which has never carried regular comic strips, ran a feature last Friday called “See You in the Funny Papers.” Credit for bringing this to my attention goes to my well-read friend Morris.
The Times being the way it is, access to the article may be iffy, so here it is. Please note that the illustration above is of Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend by Winsor McCay, which has been featured twice already in this blog, here and here.
This Week’s Comics
Lately, the fun in the Sunday comics hasn’t been in the strips, which are mostly mediocre, but with a comic-book that’s being inserted with the flyers. It features reprints of the earliest Spider-Man stories by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.
Each comic is 16 pages total, the printing quality is excellent and, hey, they’re free! This nifty promotion is from SmartSource, the coupon distributor. To see a list of all the participating newspapers, click here.
Popeye the Sailor Animan
My first favorite cartoon character was Popeye. Here’s Popeye finding himself in the totally incomprehensible world of today’s animated offerings.
This is a YouTube™ video, so if the area above is blank, don’t blame me!
Eric’s Animé Pick
[flv:/Movies/Wordpress/Oct06/pillows.flv 440 330]
Eric has us watching a totally bizarre, edgy and over-the-top 6-show series called FLCL. The most accessible thing about it for me is the music by The Pillows.
The video is a catchy Pillows song from FLCL called “Ride on Shooting Star.” Use the embedded audio player to hear the song with much better sound, in stereo.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/Japan/Pillows.mp3]More Early Days
See a previous post for two trailers to the Animé title, The Place Promised in Our Early Days.
Here are two scenes from the movie that I’ve spliced together. Note: the bit rate is pushed up to 700 Kbps. We’re giving this one ★★★★★ (OK, who sees five red stars here and who sees something else?). Thanks go again to honorable son Eric for putting it on the Netflix queue!