Category: Cartooning

Toth’s Angel and Ghost

My first exposure to “comic book art” wasn’t in comics, but from the syndicated Space Angel cartoon series on TV.

Alex Toth (pronounced with “toe”) was the artist behind Space Angel. Toth hired Doug Wildey to help produce the series, and Wildey in turn hired Toth to help him with Hanna-Barbera’s Jonny Quest. After Quest, Toth designed H-B’s less ambitious animated series, Space Ghost.

I loved this stuff when I was a kid, and I still love it. Space Angel had a 6-page promotion in the children’s magazine Jack and Jill.

I borrowed those scans from a Facebook post by author Ken Quattro, who wrote Invisible Men, a history of Black comic book creators.

https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Men-Artists-Golden-Comics/dp/1684055865

The U-Files

The 90’s! The decade of The X-Files and the infamous alien autopsy.

Lovely Rena, a member of the monster-fighting GUTS team, encounters a grey alien in an episode of Ultraman Tiga.

Like the 2005 return of Doctor Who after fifteen years, Ultraman returned to TV in 1996 after a 15-year absence. As with Who, each new Ultraman occupies a different body.

With a partial exception during Ultraman Ace, women had played secondary roles. They mostly handled communications at the command center, like Lieutenant Uhura.

Rena in Ultraman Tiga was a featured character. Her presence was obviously intended to attract teenage boys to the series.

This next scene leaves no doubt the studio knew the effect that Rena would have on their target demographic.

Rena was played by Takami Yoshimoto, who is now 51. Takami was literally born into the Ultra family, as her father, Susumu Kurobe, was the first Ultraman in the original 1966 series.

Takami’s popularity quickly extended beyond Ultraman. The LaserDisc store I frequented throughout the 90’s had Japanese “girl watching” videos for rent, similar to this one with Takami.

Click here to see the safest “boudoir” photo of Takami I can share. It is nonetheless NSFW unless you’re working from home.

Takami with her father, November, 2020.

Cartoon Fodder

A while ago I said Scott Adams and Robert Crumb didn’t have anything in common other than their respective problems with political correctness. Yesterday, that seemed to change a bit, with Adams introducing an autobiographical element to Dilbert.

Dilbert, October 22, 2022

I’ve been contemplating a post about “quiet quitting.” Don’t know yet if I’ll get around to writing it.