Category: Cartooning
MAD With Greed
Some time back I offered a bit of background behind the face of MAD Magazine’s mascot, Alfred E. Newman. The image of ‘The Kid’ had been around, in one form or another, long before it came to rest in MAD. Recently, while watching a reconstruction of Erich von Stroheim’s epic film Greed, from 1924, I happened to notice this.
Eric Simpson
Eric has been Simpsonized! Here he is, visiting the school he would have attended if he lived in Springfield.
Girl-God Raises the Yamato
An episode of the previously-blogged anime Kamichu took us rather by surprise. Girl-god Yurie’s spirit form travels to the bottom of the Pacific ocean to raise the spirit of the Japanese battleship Yamato, for an elderly man who left the crew before the ship’s sinking in 1945. I’ve spliced a few scenes together.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/JUL07/KamichuYamato.flv 425 240]
What surprised us was how the episode rejoices in the legend of the ship — the largest ever built — without political overtones or, for that matter, ever mentioning WWII. The PBS program NOVA has a good section about the Yamato on its Web site. The old man in the cartoon who rhapsodizes about sailing on the Yamato says he was born in 1920, so either he’s supposed to be well into his 80’s, or the show takes place some time ago.
Indiana Jones and the Comic-Con
If you follow Mark Evanier’s NewsFromME site, you can’t miss the fact that he’s at the San Diego Comic-Con. The cable TV station G4 had a show from the con, and I was hoping Evanier would be featured, but I didn’t see him. They did, however, have this…
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/JUL07/ComicCon.flv 400 300]
Mort Walker’s The Best of Times
Here’s something I didn’t know. For the past year cartoonist Mort Walker (or, more likely, his son) has been publishing a magazine of cartoons, ads, and household hints, called The Best of Times. The formatting of the page at that link is a bit messed up, but clicking on the pictures works to bring up PDF copies of the issues.
When Walker isn’t in Florida he lives in Wilton, Connecticut, next to Norwalk, where I grew up. In fact, I used to ride my bike through Wilton, on my way to buy comic books. My two regular stops were in the same shopping center — a stationary store, and a drug store. Click the picture to see a map of my bike route. I made that trip many, many times between the spring of 1966 and the fall of 1968, weather permitting. Two miles exactly. I don’t believe Hillcrest was there 40 years ago. If it had been I probably wouldn’t have taken it anyway, as I preferred to avoid Route 7, which was a very busy and fast stretch of road. When I was older, living in Massachusetts, it was painful to realize that in Fairfield County I had been surrounded by many of the cartoonists and illustrators who I idolized.