Writer Mark Evanier, whose biography of Jack Kirby is imminent, is a gastric bypass surgery success story. But what did overweight, compulsive eaters do in the stone age?
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Category: Cartooning
Eric’s Anime Pick — Mushi-Shi
Eric says that Mushi-Shi is a relatively obscure title. Indeed, it took a week for a copy to arrive in Massachusetts from a Netflix distribution center in California.
Like Kino’s Journey, Mushi-Shi is about a wanderer, with a series of mostly self-contained stories. But unlike Kino, the character Ginko isn’t exploring for its own sake, but rather he’s a healer-for-hire who exorcises parasitic creatures called Mushi.
Caution: This video depicts what is known to comic book fans as an “injury to eye motif,” and it’s yucky and gunky!
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Do Robots Dream Of Electric Mothers?
The granddaddy of anime is Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, a TV show that held much fascination for me in childhood. Partially a mixture of Frankenstein and Pinocchio, Astro Boy was often whimsical to the point of being surreal. Here’s Astro wishing he had a mother, in a scene seemingly inspired by Salvador Dali.
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Dali himself did dally in film, as seen in this scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound.
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That eerie sound is a Theremin, also heard prominently in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend. A staple of horror and science fiction films, the Theremin was famously used by Brian Wilson in “Good Vibrations.”
Popeye Comes Out Of The Can
At last! The Popeye DVD set I talked about last April is out. Mike Dobbs, an expert on the Fleischer brothers animation studio, has a review. My birthday is coming up in a few weeks, and this set is what I’ve told my wife I want.
Is This Cartoon Offensive?
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.
